Real-Life Decision Making -- Solution
You take the game back to the drawing board and add the additional
car and two tracks.
You believe that adding an additional car and two tracks to Speedy Sam
will improve the game dramatically. When completed, the game will feature
a whopping 13 race cars and nine international tracks. No other computer race
car game will be able to compete with this!
Your design team slaves away on the changes. They're working morning, noon
and night for weeks, in order to get the game finished and ready to ship for
the Christmas season. You succeed, but the process has been exhausting, to
say the least.
Speedy Sam is a huge success, and sales skyrocket. It's the top-selling
game of the Christmas season. Your company couldn't be more pleased with the
sales, but management is a little upset with the high overtime bills your
team has submitted.
You have to wonder about how much difference the improvements made in the
overall success of the game.
This is a tough, real-life decision faced by computer game designers, says
Keith Dundas. He works for a computer game company.
Computer game designers have high standards for their games. They also
know software can always be improved. Because of this, designers frequently
want to add or change aspects of games that are almost completed.
"By tweaking this and refining that, our game designers can continuously
add [small] improvements or features to our games throughout the entire development
process," says Dundas. "However, at some point, we must freeze the development
of our games in order to bring them to market. Otherwise, it is conceivable
that the game could remain in development indefinitely, as technological improvements
are created or new programming or artistic solutions and techniques are found."