Two days ago an XBox 360 prototype (actually a beta devkit) died on me. I was definitely not pushing the limit. Certainly my office isn’t freezing cold.. however those things are to be expected with prototypes.
When I was working at Squaresoft, around the time when PS2 was announced, there was a rumor in the company that in the offices in Japan a PS2 prototype caught on fire 8) ..eheheh
Today I worked until about 9:30 PM.. there is definitely a lot of work to do and, most importantly, much of the work is of unknown nature. Basically new consoles always bring new things. This time around MS is really pushing the Live (online playing) feature. Every game has to have it. Although the documentation is all there, there is still quite a bit of work to do, to understand and implement everything. Making a game to run online is no joke. It’s surely very appealing to the player (and to MS, which can bill gamers 8), but the burden added to the developer is substantial.
So, while this generation of consoles is much easier to program on the graphics level (it’s either DirectX or OpenGL), these kind of added features are enough to keep the developer busy. It quite possibly may require an extra person to work on the whole network thing.. especially for the first kind of such titles.. where completely new code has to be written.
I’m also not quite sure how things work with the usual real-time game data communication. My experience is that lag and various Internet data transfer uncertainties can keep a developer pretty busy playing around with parameters and techniques to get the thing running reliably.
It’s not fun to have to deal with all these issues while on a schedule. It’s already too early to predict how much time it will all take. Once I’ll have a clearer idea.. is when I’ll have to start working until late in the evening..

Ummmmmmm !!!

Posted by Davide Pasca in work, Videogames