More importantly their ownership and interest in their work grows drastically, and the features become significantly more polished. The more content creators can iterate on their own, the more interesting the creations they develop. That's to say, the tools should be friendly enough that any designer can add/modify/delete content on their own (one could call this a data-driven approach to game making). The main philosophy is to enable our content creators to do their work without programmer intervention. Perhaps we didn't think this all the way through. The content creator data (the item placements, NPCs, etc) and the game generated data (pipeline logs, game telemetry, scheduling software, etc). We quickly realized that we needed a toolset that would scale smoothly as the game got bigger, find a good workflow for concurrent placement, and figure out how our content creators could iterate quickly. Over the course of the project about 20 people worked concurrently to create roughly 300 missions, 200 NPCs and about 18,000 items that fill the world.Īll of these entities needed to be designed, created, iterated and tested, and these are just the things that shipped in the final game (we didn't count the thousands of things that were left on the cutting room floor).
![dead rising 2 dead rising 2](https://media.moddb.com/images/members/1/414/413573/profile/H_G_C_21006_P3of4.png)
The Dead Rising 2 world is roughly a square kilometer in size. During the rest of this article we will discuss our toolsets and what worked well when populating our world. We needed a good toolset to allow our designers to effectively add new items to our world, find where they placed their items, and iterate on their work to provide a high quality experience for our fans. Add thousands of items, hundreds of NPCs, a few hundred quests, and it starts to become very difficult to keep a handle on where things are.
![dead rising 2 dead rising 2](http://www.justpushstart.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/12768330161343.jpg)
Building a large open world game is hard.