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Oni: Difference between revisions
→Development troubles: filling in the rest of the story
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However, unbeknownst to the public, development of Oni was troubled from the start. The team was young and inexperienced, and development suffered from a lack of direction. A great deal of code had been written, and assets created, without producing a playable game with a story. By mid-1999 it became clear to management back in Chicago that the game was not going to be ready by year-end, so Hardy LeBel was added to the team with the goal of bringing focus to the development efforts and producing a shippable product. | However, unbeknownst to the public, development of Oni was troubled from the start. The team was young and inexperienced, and development suffered from a lack of direction. A great deal of code had been written, and assets created, without producing a playable game with a story. By mid-1999 it became clear to management back in Chicago that the game was not going to be ready by year-end, so Hardy LeBel was added to the team with the goal of bringing focus to the development efforts and producing a shippable product. | ||
The second half of 1999 saw the replacement of the AI programmer and the departure of one of the level designers, followed by Brent Pease himself at the very end of the year (with his Project Lead title being passed to Michael Evans). LeBel and the team began honing the gameplay, shaping the final story, and figuring out what features or content would have to be dropped in order to ship the game before it was too late; Bungie was secretly suffering from serious money problems (see "Change of ownership" section below). In May of 2000, it was announced that multiplayer was being removed from the game due to latency issues and lack of time to create suitable arena levels for netplay. | The second half of 1999 saw the replacement of the AI programmer and the departure of one of the level designers, followed by Brent Pease himself at the very end of the year (with his Project Lead title being passed to Michael Evans). LeBel and the team began honing the gameplay, shaping the final story, and figuring out what features or content would have to be dropped in order to ship the game before it was too late; Bungie was secretly suffering from serious money problems (see "Change of ownership" section below). In May of 2000, it was announced that multiplayer was being removed from the game due to latency issues and lack of time to create suitable arena levels for netplay. In June of 2000, it was announced that Bungie had been acquired by Microsoft. | ||
This caused an upset among Bungie's fan base, which mostly consisted of Mac users. They considered Microsoft to be Apple's nemesis, and now the publisher of Windows had taken the most popular game developer from the Mac world and would be incorporating them into their headquarters in Redmond, Washington. However, the effect this had on Oni's development was dire; it meant that Bungie West needed to finish their work as soon as possible in order to join the rest of Bungie in Redmond. Suddenly a hard deadline had been put in place, somewhere before the end of 2000. In order to meet this deadline, the Bungie West staff worked massive overtime for several months. According to Hardy LeBel, "It was as bad a crunch as there has ever been in the video games industry."<ref>See CryMor Gaming's documentary [https://youtu.be/jbrPu15jjPs?t=960 Demon: The Untold Story of Bungie’s Forgotten Franchise], 16 minute mark.</ref> It was only due to this final push that a playable and enjoyable game was forged out of over two years of prior work. | |||
==Release== | ==Release== | ||