And the realism the units and effects

in about a week. It’s amazing how much these accelerators add to the smoothness of the ter-rain, the fluidity of camera movement, and the realism of the units and effects. These chips rock, and great on-site developer assistance made them easy to support.

issues. Since our public beta test caught most of

the bugs in the shipping product, nearly all our post-shipping efforts were directed towards

adding	user-requested	fea-
tures. We scoured the news-
groups, read email, and talked
to customers about their com-				that it was our game. We came
plaints. From these disparate				to work each day excited
sources, we compiled a list of
improvements for our 1.1

All major user complaints were addressed in the patch. We added support for Rendition and Voodoo Rush cards. We extended the camera’s maximum zoom for a better view of the battle-field. We made our easy difficulty levels even easier. And we improved the unit AI. By the time the early reviews came out, we’d already released a beta patch that addressed almost everything on the reviewers’ lists of MYTH’s failings.

5. Doing more with less

be shouldered by the remaining developers, who were already also responsible for level design. To alleviate the problem somewhat, we even found it necessary to ask our busy network administrator to aid in AI scripting and level design.

2. Scripting

time to get him up to speed.

Similarly, when we dropped

tively simple byte code inter-the end of the project, but it formations, net game rules,

was almost too late. While his and map behaviors. We

off steam with wild weekend

trips to Cancún, you won’t get code from tag files. A few sim-

work. early versions of the game

loaded, compiled, and ran

testers kept us excited and made us realize that we were left with a number of features to imple-

we really did have something special on our ment and no library of user-friendly interfaces