The "Chris Sawyer" Model

Paul.Power · Post by **Paul.Power** » Thu May 19, 2005 11:16 am

It's interesting to note, looking back at all those games on Lemon Amiga, how many of them were produced on what I'll call the "Chris Sawyer" model of game development: i.e., have as few people on the development team as possible (Sawyer seems to be pretty much the last of this breed).

Taking Jimmy White's Whirlwind Snooker (a very fun game, I had the PC version), for example, it seems that Archer Maclean was determined to do practically everything on his own, designing, programming, drawing, composing... There are less extreme examples, of course, but many old games had teams of less than five people on them.

This is of course often a good thing (as Sawyer points out in his introduction to Locomotion, "I think many game designs suffer from having too many people working on them, losing their individual character and becming games that look and play like so many others"), but it's interesting to see how so many games companies seem to have moved away from this way of doing things. All the big names behind the games we know and love seem to have been relegated either to roles as members of larger teams, or to "advisors".

Of course, larger teams typically lead to more polished titles (there are one or two really weird flaws in Locomotion), but do/did smaller teams make games more innovative, interesting and just plain fun?

Alex · Post by **Alex** » Thu May 19, 2005 12:45 pm

It's a pity that "bedroom coders" just cannot exist anymore. It just doesn't work in the industry (not to a large scale anyway). I mean hell, look at Worms - Andy anyone?

YouTube · Post by **Pooka** » Fri May 20, 2005 5:30 pm

That's probab;y why fan-games these days are so good.

Scarface · Post by **Scarface** » Sat May 21, 2005 1:00 am

Yeah sadly the days of when games where made with only a few people are over. Games are just too damn complicated now to be able to do it with just 5 people and you need a whole stampede of people now to build a game!

Paul.Power · Post by **Paul.Power** » Sat May 21, 2005 11:32 am

Unless of course your name is Chris Sawyer. But then, he takes an absolute age to bring out new games because his "team" is so small.

Scarface · Post by **Scarface** » Sun May 22, 2005 2:14 pm

It's gonna talk him even longer to make a game now then, due to the next generation of computers, and by that I mean 64-bit!

Alex · Post by **Alex** » Sun May 22, 2005 2:47 pm

Umm? Coding for 64-bit processors won't really take much longer than 32-bit - the only reason it will take longer is because a few things will have changed. It's not going to extend it by months or anything like that...

Post by **Squirminator2k** » Thu May 26, 2005 1:59 pm

May be interesting to note that Developers of Mobile Phone games do generally consist of smaller teams, just like the Old Days. While for the most part we seem to be getting ports of (or games based on) existing titles such as Lemmings, Worms, Tetris, Pac-Man, etc. there are occasional developments, such as some titles by MacroSpace and Rockpool Games, that are fully polished original titles.

An example of this is Worms Golf. While most 2D Golfing titles stick to a top-down or psuedo-3D view, Worms Golf uses the side-on view (from Worms, obviously) and it plays very well. While hardly 100% original, it is an interesting concept. Some Mobile games are actually better quality than the commercially released PC/Console games we seem to be saturated with.

K^2 · Post by **K^2** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 9:20 am

Alex wrote:It's a pity that "bedroom coders" just cannot exist anymore. It just doesn't work in the industry (not to a large scale anyway). I mean hell, look at Worms - Andy anyone?

Back in the day, to know how to write a game you just had to know how to take the input from the keyboard, make beeping noises on PC speaker, and slap 8 bit sprites onto the screen. Today, you need to understand vector algebra just to slap a lit triangle onto the screen. If you want to write a game all by yourself you need to know how to write physics simulations, including collision code, know how to do quick approximation for different lighting conditions, do particle effects, design the database, handle networking, work with memory allocation, understand a few dosens of different file structures, know how to work with the OS and how to use a few of the more common libraries for graphics, sounds, and networking, and then you need to know how to write optimized code for all of that. There are still people who can do all that, but these people are few, and every game dev company wants one of these people, so they tend to end up working for huge development companies instead of working on their own, unique games.

Run · Post by **Run** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 11:08 am

I'd suspect that smaller teams create games with fewer bugs because they all know the code and have consistent code. Then again it could be because the games are simpler...

I want to play RollerCoaster Tycoon now. Has anyone here managed to get it working on XP?

Post by **Squirminator2k** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 11:12 am

The original? Yes. I have it installed on this PC.

Run · Post by **Run** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 11:57 am

Wooo! I wasn't prepared for that - in thousands of people who haven't got it working I've only seen a few who have.

When I get home from uni and have my disk with me once more I shall have to contact you about this

Post by **Squirminator2k** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 11:58 am

Which version of XP are you running?

Run · Post by **Run** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 12:38 pm

Windows XP Home Edition version 2002

I'm not exactly sure what version my RCT is... but I did get it very shortly after it came out so it's probably original. I'm pretty sure it's a European version too. I shall find this all out when at home.

K^2 · Post by **K^2** » Sat Jun 04, 2005 7:07 pm

Just run it in compatibility mode. It should work. I am yet to see a game that won't run under the XP in compatibility mode or under DOS after booted from a floppy. Though, if you are running DOS, you better have a FAT 32 partition on your PC.

Run · Post by **Run** » Sun Jun 05, 2005 4:41 pm

You say that as though it works. I tried extensively to get it to work, with a variety of patches and crap, compatibility mode fiddling, all sorts.

When I get home, I need a thorough step-by-step guide, and then I'll try it off a reformatted PC (i plan to reformat soon anyway)

Post by **Squirminator2k** » Sun Jun 05, 2005 5:16 pm

I managed to get it to work by setting it to Win98/ME compatibility, and disabling Visual Themes. It works fine.

Paul.Power · Post by **Paul.Power** » Mon Jun 06, 2005 10:52 am

Run wrote:I'd suspect that smaller teams create games with fewer bugs because they all know the code and have consistent code. Then again it could be because the games are simpler...

I want to play RollerCoaster Tycoon now. Has anyone here managed to get it working on XP?

Locomotion has one glaring design fault though. By taking out the depots from Transport Tycoon (presumably to make vehicle deployment simpler), he's removed the ability to provide maintainance for vehicles. This means that vehicle reliability drops far more rapidly than in TT, and you find yourself replacing stuff every 6-8 game years rather than every 12-14 game years. This gets annoying very rapidly, particularly with my approach ("Tramways ROCK! Let's build absurd numbers of tramways!").

EDIT: Replaced "they've" with "he's". Paul, remember thread topic.

Post by **SupSuper** » Tue Jun 07, 2005 11:39 am

Paul.Power wrote:
Run wrote:I'd suspect that smaller teams create games with fewer bugs because they all know the code and have consistent code. Then again it could be because the games are simpler...

I want to play RollerCoaster Tycoon now. Has anyone here managed to get it working on XP?
Locomotion has one glaring design fault though. By taking out the depots from Transport Tycoon (presumably to make vehicle deployment simpler), they've removed the ability to provide maintainance for vehicles. This means that vehicle reliability drops far more rapidly than in TT, and you find yourself replacing stuff every 6-8 game years rather than every 12-14 game years. This gets annoying very rapidly, particularly with my approach ("Tramways ROCK! Let's build absurd numbers of tramways!").

yeah, it's ironic. in an attempt to make things easier, he did the exact opposite. i just got fed up with replacing and let them rot ("What do I care if my vehicles can't move through a square without breaking down? I'm a freaking billionaire!").

i also got annoyed how roads remained so limited, while rails can have all sorts of curves and junctions. roads need love too, you know.

Run · Post by **Run** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 1:32 pm

Squirminator2k wrote:I managed to get it to work by setting it to Win98/ME compatibility, and disabling Visual Themes. It works fine.

So far I've tried:

1/ Running both setup.exe and rct.exe under compatbility mode for Windows 95
2/ Running both setup.exe and rct.exe under compatbility mode for Windows 98/ME
3/ Running both setup.exe and rct.exe without any compatability mode

They all produce the same error when trying to run the game (see below) except that the blue Loading screen for RCT only appears with 1/ and 3/. So 98/ME compatbility mode looks promising in that it's the exception.

The error I get is the typical Microsoft "report this error" window, and it seems to be complaining about my "rct.ICD" file. Could it be that that is corrupt, or something? Windows calls it an "unknown application" and its size is 6,007,808 bytes.

There's supposed to be a patch somewhere on the internet for rct, though i never had success with it. Did you use that or simply use the original CD and nothing more?

Meanwhile, *cries*