In “The Tactical Perspective:  A Best Practices Checklist” we discussed the process of migrating brands online, including a typical product development roadmap and timeline.  At a high level we covered the different phases of production as well as engaging an audience, building a brand, operations,  moderation and driving ROI.

Engage Expo was great to work with and has generously shared the recordings of the session:

Watch the video if you want to get into the debate.  It is a bit slow initially.  I was a bit evil and switched the tables on Isaac in the opening statements by framing the debate around MMO’s and then conceding his main points around casual games.  Issac recovered about halfway for some fun points.

Or you can read more….

With modern Game Engines like Unity3D and Pushbutton for Flash it is possible to create a small game with a talented programmer/designer and artist.  In fact for a small game this might be the perfect combination… if you can find someone who is that talented.

The problem with this approach is that it does not scale.  Not only is it hard to find programmers that are good at design (or designers that are good at programing), you also create a tug of war if everyone is convinced they are designing the game.   Too many cooks really do spoil the broth.

In a modern MMO the engineers must be extremely disciplined and focused on creating great content delivery systems.  An iterative process that focuses on testing and quality is critical.  Handing a scripting language to designers that do not share that focus will only frustrate everyone.

One debate that comes up in game development is the use of any language other than C/C++.  The C/C++ languages have been almost the exclusive language for game engines since its beginning.   While developers my also adopt scripting languages (many times to offload work to less technical game designers) the core that makes the engine do its magic is in C/C++.

With the advent of new technologies does this still make sense?

Microsoft has for some time been promoting an hier to the thrown in C# which is built on top of its .Net platform.  Why not C#?  I honestly like C# and believe that it is in many ways a step up that can help with productivity. C# has many of the advantages of Java without being as bloated.  It is more secure by nature and protects programmers from common mistakes.

That said, in some cases C# does not make business sense.  If you invest 10-20 million into a game, you expect the best return on that investment. The ability to release that game on multiple platforms (PS3, Wii as well as XBOX) can double your returns for small additional development time… if you program it in C or C++.

That may change.  One of our favorite small game engines Unity3D is scheduled to be release on other consoles.  When it does it will bring it’s version of the .Net runtime along with it.  Since the main engine is already in C++ it preforms significantly better than C# for most of the heavy lifting, leaving game logic to C# which is significantly faster than most scripting languages.

If your target is XNA or Unity3D then C# is the obvious choice.  To go beyond those use cases Microsoft will have to work to make the CLR a lot more open. Releasing the core of .Net under a BSD or MIT license (rather than the more restrictive GPL/LGPL for Mono) would allow developers to integrate C# on any platform and modify it to perform efficiently for their games.  Till that happens  (or Unity3D becomes a real competitor on all platforms)  console development will belong to C and C++.