Interview with NinjaBee (3): Development challenges

NinjaBee: Working with early libraries and tools has been somewhat challenging, but Microsoft put a superhuman amount of effort into the development process and it got a lot better very quickly, to the point where it’s the best technical development experience I’ve ever had with a console system.

Later on, what became challenging is that the Live Arcade team has set the bar high in terms of quality and feature support. The Live-specific features are very appealing to me, but implementing them all was certainly not trivial.

The up-side for gamers is that any Live Arcade game you download should have a certain level of quality and feature support that you can expect across the board.

NinjaBee: As I mentioned earlier, we had to balance the pressure of creating a game small enough to download and store effectively with the goal of putting as much cool content into the game as possible.

This involved careful planning, compression, and unique game architecture, but we’re confident that the result is good – there’s a lot of stuff packed into this relatively small download.

NinjaBee: I personally find the Live-specific features to be some of the most compelling things about the Xbox 360, even over its raw power and graphics capability.

For example, achievements are very cool, gamerscore is cool, leaderboards are cool… This stuff is interesting and new and often appeals to us more than just the ability to make things prettier and fancier. But that’s me… always interested in the weird stuff…

We had a fun time with the 5.1-channel audio, as well, and we used the multiple processors in some interesting ways, such as doing very fast decompression of game data.

NinjaBee: Absolutely. I’ve developed for a dozen different console systems in my career, and this is the best experience I’ve ever had (after the initial problems I mentioned earlier).

I love console development, so I’m not complaining about the other systems – the N64 was something I personally really enjoyed, for instance. But working with Visual Studio, a tremendous set of debugging tools, decent (though early) documentation, and an extremely talented and dedicated support team at Microsoft – that’s hard to beat.