» Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:30 am Hi there. Game developer/project manager here working with 2 artists and 2 programmers using Unity.
I've recently sunk 3 weeks into Skyrim to complete nearly the entire game. From an amateur developer's point of view, I cannot imagine how anyone could coordinate such an effort to create so much lore and so many unique areas, and then subsequently test and debug it all within a span of 4 years. Yes, 4 years is a long time, but there are things that you just can't do even when provided with nearly infinite resources. Though, I'm aware that all of Bethesda's largest franchises are similar and that they probably follow the same production pipeline using different incarnations of the same engine.
As evident in Skyrim's dungeons, they all share a set of textures, objects and room designs. Yet they are all unique - the tombstones can be chipped off in a different manner; the stone bridges may form a different shape; the debris is always in a different shape and contains different sorts of dirt and junk. The style is consistent, but I'm not playing through copy & pasted content. The mazes and puzzles are always (slightly) different, and the characters and scripted events in there are not simply made without regard for the lore, exterior climate and questlines.
The best guess is that they probably outsourced the art that involves lesser degrees of creativity to countries with lower wages. But to actually create the blueprints, jot down all the specifications, and get them outsourced properly is an impressive management feat.
In Unity, we use the terrain tool to rapidly create maps. To a certain degree, we can 'paint' foliage so we can skip placing flowers down one by one, but there are things like cracked grounds and ceilings which we cannot make without building separate 3D assets. Does anyone have an insight to their art creation pipeline? Are they using some magic tool that I haven't heard of?
As for writing, everything is linked in Skyrim. The guard's speeches react to the player's equipment and completed quests. The quests are linked to NPCs in different places, which must take into account of the time of day, local politics, whether or not another quest has been completed, whether the area can be entered under all circumstances and thus be completed. The lore makes deep references to the skill disciplines. The point is, every person involved in the smallest design decisions seem to cross territories. How can 20+ people meet in a room and reach an agreement on every aspect of the game lore? Okay, so let's say it's set up in a hierarchy where the lead writer delegates freedoms to other writers, but let's say the lead assigns a writer to write quests for Thieves' Guild and another to write quests for Dark Brotherhood, how then is the two faction's relationship and attitude towards each other decided? Discussions like this can take forever to resolve. Can anyone enlighten me how the writing was coordinated?
