Article Details the Magic of Privateer Development
Bob McDob has dug up a great article from The Magic of Interactive Entertainment, a guidebook to new media published in 1994. There's a wonderful section inside on the creation of Wing Commander Privateer. It goes into just the right amount of depth to give a cursory overview of what it was like to create a groundbreaking video game in the early 1990s at Origin. References to the hot new 486 computers, three months of marketing on a major title and 50,000 sales guaranteeing a sequel really help set the perspective. You can find the full article here.
The Development ProcessGame development at Origin Systems follows a fairly structured and organized approach. When a designer comes up with an idea for a game, the designer submits his idea to a review board. The review board evaluates the idea and decides whether or not it is worth investigating. If a game design is approved, the designer gets a software engineer (programmer) to help develop the idea further. What follows is a period of research and development where the designer and programmer work closely together to build the basic framework of the game.
After a period of time, the designer and programmer take their results back to the review board. At this point, if the game still looks like a winner, more funding is provided and a development timetable is set. Artists and more programmers begin working on the project. Programmers and designers work hand-in-hand to get the artwork and data merged together into a workable game.
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Gameplay Design
The main goals in the design of Privateer were to create a commerce trading system within the Wing Commander universe. Another goal was to provide a game with random missions that players could play over and over again. That freshness ensures the game never ends.
Some initial ideas never quite made it into the final game. One such idea involved player finances. The game initially enabled players to get loans from banks or other (less reputable) characters. In this scenario, you might run into debt, and be pursued by creditors or bounty hunters which were after the price on your head. Privateer took about a year and a half to make, and so during this period, many such ideas were dropped while others were developed and added to the game.
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Music and Sound Effects
Music and sound effects have become just as important to video games as they are to motion pictures. You would hardly expect to see a new feature film without a soundtrack and spoken dialog. Likewise, all computer games today have either a sound track, digital sound effects, or both.
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