A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

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.