Dev.Diary#4 Data

Probably the largest challenge in developing a game like this, apart from everything else, is in the fact that we're grounding it in reality. To achieve this, we knew that just having a game design team wasn't going to be enough. We needed actual people who would be responsible with amassing, validating, and monitoring the database of the game, and to determine how that database evolved in time. For that, we created a completely dedicated team to Research.

The background of the team was diverse - we looked into economic, political and military experience as well as academic backgrounds. We also looked at political inclinations and life experiences. We wanted to have a dataset that would be as objective as possible. We also looked outside the gaming industry for pretty much all members of the team. We wanted to have a group that would be focused on the realism of the game outside of the gameplay considerations.

Even with such steps, the process has been far from smooth sailing. It turns out that the world is quite complex and translating that into binary concepts that the simulator would understand was quite a challenge. Numerous times, for internal laws, for the political landscape and mock-ups of government, we had to negotiate between realistic data and considerations of the game. One of the design prerequisites was that, even though the world is, by nature, unbalanced, we wanted to have some uniformity in gameplay. We couldn't, for instance, consider local concepts like the electoral college in the USA or the two tiers presidential elections in France. Such local realities, while adding to the realism of the game, would mean inconsistencies in gameplay considerations and game design. It's impossible now to determine the amount of time we had to go back to the drawing board because we had to either fit the data into the game, or the game into the data.

One of the things we started very early on with the research team was the weekly news overview. Each member of the team was given a region of the world to monitor, and each week we had a meeting when we talked about our region, and how the real-world elements could and would fit into the game. These sessions were meant to connect design and data, and to make sure we were designing something that could be expanded and would fit the news.

Of course, throughout the development, we had to adjust and cut back. The initial UI and presentation were very much like it was in SuperPower 2, and that was always very complex and old-fashioned. We didn't want to dumb down the game, but we also took the approach that "complex" doesn't have to rhyme with "complicated". Maybe we could have a complex game underneath, and still present it in such a way as to make it simpler. And, since the complex game was still running underneath, it could be expanded, by us and by the community, so that the hardcore fans could get more out of the engine.

The other consideration we had was maintenance. This huge amount of data that was referenced and catalogued, had to be maintained in time and as the considerations of the game changed. For this, we went through numerous different processes, from having a central DB of data that was fed through php tools to batch transforms of xls files, to now using SVN directly to maintain and order the data flow. Early tools took up to 8hrs to crunch all data! We're now down to about 20 minutes.

Data isn't just numbers and political parties. We also had to maintain huge maps of the world that is used much more intensely than for SuperPower 2. Some of you wondered why the game requests so much disc space. Well, we're using earth maps precise to a few hundred meters to know political terrain, weather, beach and borders, elevation, etc. All of that compressed and accessed in real time by the game to determine troop movement, annexation strategies, agricultural resource production, and other gameplay considerations. All of that takes space, of course, but also tremendous processing power. Modern computers are fast, but still limited when our goal is to refresh the screen every 1/30th of a second. Maintenance and reflection of all that data was a technological undertaking that we would prefer not doing again.

You might have read the Dev Diary about modding, so you know that on top of that, all that data is completely moddable, expandable, and accessible by the UI in a dynamic way. And gameplay equations are (mostly) scripted in data files that also have to be secure, fast, and realistic. These equations are the last steps that need to be undertaken by the research team - making sure that expected results are getting close to actual results, as much as possible.

In the end, all our efforts have also been on a collision course with the "Final Fantasy" effect on realism. For those who remember the movie, it was very realistic for the time, but maybe a little too realistic. Many studies concluded that the closer you got to realism, the more glaring the "imperfections" became, because you saw them more. Humans in "Toy Story" are almost as plastic as the toys for that reason - you can't compare it to the real thing. But when the character has emotions and realistic skin tones, you start to compare them with the real world. All imperfections become that much more glaringly obvious. In the same vein, if you played SuperPower 1, it was very simple at the time, so the realism "flaws" were more tolerated because it was clearly a simplified game. In SuperPower 3, we're getting closer and closer to the real thing, with the increase in computing power and our own expertise in developing these things. So, we hope that, for all our efforts, players will remember that it's just a game and that underneath, the simulator had to make simplified decisions, with simplified data, just to be able to "work" as a game.

Very early on in the project, we watched an episode of “Band of Brothers”, and talked about the fact that the characters, in this episode, were removing their helmets when they talked to one another. This is clearly not realistic - no soldier would have removed their helmets in a warzone. But we talked about the fact that, to make a TV show, the audience had to see who was talking to whom. The makers of the series had to sacrifice some of the realism because the media they were using demanded that they acknowledged the audience. Ever since, when we discussed the game, we asked ourselves, "Are we making an online encyclopedia or are we making “Band of Brothers”? ". Our goal is not to forget our medium; we're making a game, and we're making it for the gamers. You guys always win in the end!