When creating a game it is vital to do a lot of research. When making call of duty 4: modern warfare the production managers, animators, designers and more staff went to the middle east and watched actual soldiers practice warfare with tanks and makeshift towns. They did a lot of location research and saw for themselves exactly what the place they would base the game on looks like. While talking to the soldiers and watching them do training excercises they did both content and technical research, by watching how the men worked they were doing authenticity research like how do they talk, what would they do, what would they use and their tactics. Animators and writers took pictures and filmed them working and put their movements, gear, equipment, actions and communication into the game. This research by actually going out and watching first hand lets the game designers and animators make better AI (artificial intelligence) and realisitc and immersive animation and warfare.
Other games like call of duty 1 and 2 and brothers in arms have to do historical research to find out what the towns looked like, what the soldiers did and looked like, what the warfare was like. They must do a lot of research to make the game as historically accurate as possible.
Every company needs to focus on their organizational research, which includes:
- Defining their goals
The company must gather together and look at every idea they like and what they want to do with the game. They have to talk about the style of the game, the music they want, the gameplay.
- Defining their scope on the project
After deciding what they want in the game they must highlight the ideas that will make the final cut and scrap tons of ideas and keep making improvements on those ideas until they know exactly what they want so they can make a good game. The halo franchise often spends most of their time making storyboards that go off in hundred of directions for the games story until they find the right path, and every game usually makes hundreds of designs for player, AI and character models until they find the right design, especially in Halo 4. They have to think how expensive will it all be to make including marketing, staff and copyright materiel and if there are any cheaper options. The most important part is knowing what platform(s) the game will be on, for example most Halo games are Xbox and Xbox360 and Little big planet 1and 2 are PS3 only, whereas most games like modern warfare are on most consoles and PC. The company should decide how much of their funding they can put into marketing the game and how they should do it, most games are putting adverts online, some more successful companies are making live action and gameplay trailers for TV.
- How long it will take
After planning what they will have they will need to know how long the story will take to write, how long the scripting will take for linear and non linear gameplay, who they want to voice act and how long the script writing and audio recording will take for them and how long it will take to design the game levels and game maps for multiplayer. Games like the more recent Halo games also use body model capture so they can implement actual movements and facial recognition into the game, so they have to thing about how long this will take as well. They have look into how long game testing will take, where it will be tested?, who will be testing it?, how will the gameplay be altered? How long will marketing take? Looking at sonic the hedgehog, they designed the character in Japan and the American sega team changed the design of the game and the character which people, especially in America liked much better. They must plan how long it will take, often so they can make a better game and release it before their competition. Like the call of duty and battlefield franchises who go head to head and try to beat each others sales.
- What staff they need
When planning everything about the game the company have to think who can do what and how many people it will take to do specific tasks. They will need researchers, technicians, artists, writers, scripters, map creators, production managers, game testers, musicians, music composers and advertisers. Many bigger game companies like Bungie, 343 studios, Activision and Epic for example have staff ranging up to the hundreds.
- What skills are needed
The number of staff hired is also decided by the skills required to make the game. Many companies hire many people to do one task, like creating 3D character models, designing levels, making the music, motion capture actors, marketing and so on. It would be extremely difficult for only one or two people to do such huge tasks.
- The timescale
It's important to plan ahead and heave deadlines for certain parts of the game to be finished by certain dates so the game can be finished on time and released before their competition. The faster they finish the game the more time they have to polish it. The game Borderlands had a complete art re-design in the last few months before release and this change made the game so much more successful. The company should always keep their work organized and make sure they get tasks done in time.
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