A lot of things are dependent on experience of the programmer, like the quality and power of the engine, which gives us the ability to do things other games cannot. Take a look at the screenshot on
http://dualityzf.com/ and consider that every bullet you see is individually calculated against thousands of enemies, all at 60fps. Jason's experience gives us that.
But, development time has little to do with programmer experience. At least not in the way it is being discussed here. The things that have affected our development time include:
- unclear goals (
we are now implememting ideas that were originally planned in the third Duality release.)
- refactoring of code (
same point.)
- inexperience as a professional software developer (
same point; and recognize software development is different than software programming; this is our first "professional" mainstream software product; if by "programmer experience" you mean "software development experience", meeting deadlines and whatnot, then we are in agreement!)
- perfectionists (
don't read this the wrong way, as Duality ZF will not be perfect; but we tend to be very critical of our own work and refine it a lot.)
- side projects (
we are not completely doing doing this full time, though we try to do so in stretches.)
- lack of beta testers (
we have friends who help out, and we appreicate it a lot; but a full-time game-breaking beta tester would have helped more than you know; count 96 different ways to play the game, multiple that by a lot of difficulty modes, and try to imagine the amount of beta testing that is required; some "bugs" are well hidden; for example, some bugs only come out when there's shump experts playing along side of shmup newcomers.)
- tweaking (
i would like to copy and paste this about a thousands times, as this is the most dominating point against the development time = programmer experience idea. a lot of shmups leave you feeling nobody cared about the game being fun to play; we are happy to say we are not in that camp; we could write a whole article on the work that went into just our scoring system.)
- advanced engine (
jason has advanced our engine to handle some pretty ridiculous scenarios, and that type of optimization takes a lot of time; again, this is something a regular shmup does not bother with.)
- only two of us (
add all the details: marketing, websites, networking, etc. and if one of us is doing any of that, it's half our team gone. it took a week's work just to put a trailer together for the XNA Roundup podcast, not including researching expensive capture cards needed to record the footage.)
Keep in mine we are just two guys trying to make a game, for the first time!
Our main engine was coded within a week or two. I would have to ask Jason to verify this, but it was really quick. So programmer experience gave us a quick shmup engine. But that's only 5% of the work. We could have released what was originally "Duality 1" in about 3 or 4 months, but we wanted more. It is very hard as an artist to release work you know is below your abilities. And it is very hard to play your own game, and want more of it (like advanced shot patterns), and know other gamers want it, and release it without. How could we handle such criticism, when we are among the critics ourselves?
And Brass Wolf64 and others, don't take this as a shot against any of you, because we appreciate your support! The tweaking is just taking a long time to complete. Take it away, and the game would have been done in a month with nobody sitting here posting about it!
M Doucette / Xona Games
Duality ZF (
Dream Build Play Top 20)
