A quiet few weeks for us here in Ruffian Bunker Mk 2. A lot has been going on but it’s mostly manifested itself in a lot of studious work by the troops culminating in handing off our July 1st milestone. If you’ve any knowledge of gamedev you may as well go and read something else as this is pretty basic stuff

What’s a milestone I hear you ask, well A milestone is a pre-agreed chunk of work that needs to be completed in a certain amount of time. The whole of Crackdown 2 is split into a number of sequential milestones each of which is around 6 weeks long and at the end each 6 week period the latest build goes to MS to be signed off as complete.

How long a milestones is is pretty tricky to get right, if they’re too close together the work delivering the milestone materials ends up taking up time you could be working on the game. It’s like digging up some potatoes every 10 minutes to see if they’re grown yet. Too far apart and you run the risk of the game going too far off track to get back in line, sort of similar to what happened on the Titanic For CD2 our milestones are roughly 6 weeks apart and that’s working out pretty good for so far.

During milestone week we make a big archive of the latest build and clean up and any outstanding issues that would stop you playing the game. There’s a big pre-agreed list of things that need to have been done and we check everything carefully to make sure it’s all complete. We also flag any work we’ve done that’s outside of the milestone deliverable list.

As you can imagine pulling everything together for delivery is a bit of a slog and once we’ve handed it off the work only begins for the guys at MGS have a lot of work to do. There’s a fair few people involved, 45 of us Ruffians and nearly as much again at various outsourcers. On top of that there’s a pretty big team at Microsoft as well and it’s at milestone sign off we work the most closely with particularly on milestone week. Here they are:

John Noonan heads up MS’s test, he knows Crackdown really well having working on CD#1 and him and his team in Seattle go through pre-agreed checklist called a MAT test that his guys can work through with the build . The MAT test is the central document for signing off if the milestone is done or not from a functional point of view so it’s something all of our guys play close attention to while working towards dropping the milestone.

Tim Dean is our Art director at MS who we’ve worked closely with from the project’s outset to define the look and feel for CD #2. He’s fresh off the all conquering juggernaut of success that is Gears Of War. Working with Tim we’ve created a pretty solid plan for all visual aspects of the project and Tim gives an eye over the milestone deliverables to and provides feedback on how we’re tracking to those goals.

Kieran Connell heads up a tech team in MGS Europe. He’s ex-Rare and been in games yonks. Among other things he’s been helping us with our online plans, we’ve got some great features planned but it meant some close interaction on a technical level with many parts of the vast Microsoft Empire. Kieran’s been a great help on this front and as well as that has also got a few great coders onto the project to provide a helping hand. Kieran also signs off the milestone from a technical point of view.

Eric Simonich is our design contact. He’s new to CD and even getting to grips with the first game in it’s entirety is a mountain to climb in itself it’s one he’s scaled consummate ease. Our design is pretty set right now but as with the other disciplines progress in the build needs to be checked against out plan. Eric has been at MS for while and previously worked on the excellent Mass Effect.

Roger Carpenter: Rog is our Producer. All of the stuff detailed above doesn’t happen by accident, it’s the end product of a lot of planning and management and Rog is MS’s guy on the production management front. Rog works with our managers to make sure we’re delivering on time and to quality. Part of the delivery for the milestone are the latest set of plans for all subsequent milestones. Rog signs these off and the milestone overall.

And last but certainly not least is Toby Heap. He’s the biz dev guy and was a key part part of the effort to get the game up and running last year. When there’s something to do with the contract or general business relationship to be chatted about he’s the go to guy. And the reason he’s so important for milestone sign off is he tells MS accounts to send us some money. Which is always helpful.

If you’re involved in game dev this is all pretty basic stuff but for most people who aren’t it can often be a surprise just how many people are involved in making these games. It’s not immediately obvious when leaping through the rooftops of Pacific City that as well as being excellently entertained you’re actually playing with a pretty heavyweight piece of computer software that has as much in common with something like Excel as it does with being fun.