A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

I had been hired on as a gameplay programmer, and so that's what I focused on for the most part. Things seemed to be going pretty well - the game was largely in pre-production, a ton of great concept art and designs were being put together, we just had to focus on the 'X05 demo.

We went into balls-to-the-wall crunch to get the X05 demo out the door. The word from above was that this would be the first glimpse given to the wider press, and so we needed a vertical slice. After a month or two of weeks ranging from 60-80 hours, we delivered.

We ended up with a tech demo of Supes fighting Metallo within an arena bordered by buildings, which would be destroyed by Metallo's actions at scripted points during the fight. It went well. Then we found out it was only going to be shown privately, to limited journalists.

The potential of being able to show off what we'd busted our collective asses for was torn away from us at the last possible second. Worse was the decision made by the tech team after the demo: We're changing up our entire tech stack. Most everything will need a re-write.

In retrospect, I realize the validity of that technical decision, in light of what libraries would or wouldn't be delivered in a timely manner. Nonetheless, it's important to note that this was in early October 2005, and we were expected to ship in time for the movie.

That meant that we had to take what amounted to a vertical slice of the gameplay, and turn that into a full-on, shippable title within the span of 7 months: We were expected to hit Golden Master at the start of May 2006, to hit approval and go through manufacturing in time.

After a few months' reprieve around the holidays, tensions raised almost immediately. We were hiring on brand-new designers, brand-new programmers, and brand-new artists. Not only that, there was a social dynamic of designers being the experts, despite knowing nothing technical.

Brooks's Law entirely aside, the attitude that I personally experienced from the design team was vile. At one point I implemented a filtering system that allowed for defining which of Supes's powers would apply in which cases. As a newbie, I made it case-sensitive. Silly me.

This was rectified by another programmer more senior than me. When it came to copping the fallout, that programmer was nowhere to be found. "Why don't you make it work RIGHT before you make it work FAST?" came the snide e-mail from our designers.

This ended up being something of a harbinger for the overall design "strategy" for the game: A completely design-driven attitude, with programmers expected to be little more than obsequious, subservient go-fers toward the "real men" in the room.

Make no mistake, there were many great designs that were put forth, but which simply couldn't be delivered on due to the incredible time pressure that we were under. Indoor, more linear, levels. A volcano blowing its top, leading to a mass rescue mission.

At April's outset, even our design tool, "Zod", hadn't come fully online. Lua script was handled by hand. Metadata was written by hand. By this point we were crunching, again, 60-80 hours a week. At the end of April, Metropolois didn't even have a city with proper buildings.

None of us were under any illusion that we were ever going to hit that 0-bug, Golden Master date that was merely weeks in the future, in the state that the game was in. Yet we were urged, forced even, to crunch by our superiors. Two days before the GM date, a reprieve.

Management announced that they'd reached a deal with WBIE, and would be shifting the game's release date to coincide with the DVD release of the movie. We had an additional six months to finish the game. What was the design department's first reaction? Well.

You might expect that the sensible reaction would be, "Great! What can we salvage and make as polished as possible?" But remember, we were dealing with both newbie designers, and a design-fellating workflow. Instead, what was asked was, "Great! What new features can we put in?"

Inevitably, we wound up with 2-3 months of some strange semblance of normalcy, followd by another 2-3 months of crunch. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Somehow, we passed Microsoft TCRs in time. Somehow, we managed to outsource the PS2/Xbox ports.

It was a miserable slog for a miserable game. I forget which person it was who I followed, exactly, who pointed out that for every gem of a game made with crunch, the majority are just forgotten about, leaving the devs hollow. But that was how it was with Sub-Par Man Returns.