RedGage

Borderlands 2

Tonight I was able to go to the Postmortem for Gearbox's Borderlands 2 held at Microsoft's Dallas Office in Irving, TX with head speaker Matt Charles – Producer at Gearbox Software. Per PixelProspector.com, in the gaming world a postmortem is when the developers or producers of a game analyze their final game product, and take time to reflect back on things that went on during the creation of the game. This reflection usually leads to talk of what went right, and what went wrong in the creation of that game. Matt Charles' talk pretty much covered that.

Here are a few highlights:

Being a producer for the game Matt Charles was responsible for different aspects of the game such as it being shipped on time, staying within budget, level of quality, etc. This can be tricky since it also means that he had to help to maintain the focus on the mission of the game, establish goals, and anticipate problems that may appear throughout the game creation process.

With almost any game project, the project in and of itself tends to take on the personality of the producer, and so with Borderlands 2 it was important to maintain a single point of authority and responsibility – make a great game that people would grow to know and love. This was not an easy task, but much of the day to day headaches were easy to deal with because Matt had such great people to work with, and he learned that the best way to manage them was to just get out of their way, and don't try to change people (causes more problems than it solves).

Critical Review Analysis

Being able to create a schedule that would help the Borderland 2's team to hit their 2 ½ year release date projection would require focusing on what was important, and getting rid of things that were not...

Vehicles? Improve

Arenas? Cut

In the final decisions it was determined that improving the vehicles needed to be a priority while the arenas needed to be cut (they didn't test well with the general gaming audience). The secret behind creating a high level schedule that would work was creating the main schedule, and then breaking down the bigger pieces into smalller parts. The milestone goals were created right before the alpha version was created. And while progress remained steady throughout the process, the monumental accomplishments didn't occur until almost the end of the project. The final successes hinged on getting stuff in front of the right people, and dealing with bugs that appeared in the last stages of the programming of the game.

Part 2 (coming soon)