The Making of Dune II: The birth of the real-time strategy game
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> But, rather amazingly, Cryo’s Dune defies any knee-jerk prejudices that might be engendered by knowledge of Philippe Ulrich’s earlier or later output. While it’s every bit as unique a design concept as you might expect given its place of origin, in this case the concept works. For all that they spent the better part of three years at one another’s throats more often than not, Dune nevertheless wound up being a true meeting in the middle between the passionate digital artistes of Cryo and the more practical craftsmen in Virgin’s Anglosphere offices. For once, an exemplar of the French Touch has a depth worthy of its striking surface. Dune plays like a dispatch from an alternate reality in which Cryo cared as much about making good games in a design sense as they did about making beautiful and meaningful ones in an aesthetic and thematic sense — thus proving, should anyone have doubted it, that these things need not be mutually exclusive.
https://www.filfre.net/2018/11/controlling-the-spice-part-2-...
Here is a recent interview of him (in French): https://www.cnc.fr/jeu-video/actualites/philippe-ulrich---av...
Remi Herbulot invented the HERAD music system, which used features of the sound chip that no other sound system did. Remi operated on a godlike level of FM sound production, the only other person who even approached him was Robert Prince (Doom musician).
Stephane Picq wrote most of the Dune soundtrack as real electronic music then "backported" it to Remi's music system. Ulrich contributed one or two tracks.
http://www.vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Dune_(DOS)
You can hear the obvious similarity between Dune and Stephane's other music:
To this day, it is impressive to me what few people could achieve back then.
Being a big fan of Dune at the time, I had to go out and buy it as soon as I could.
I preferred it to Dune II by a long way, I felt it had much more of a story and atmosphere, and kept a lot of what I loved about the Dune universe.
Did you ever notice that there's an eye on the bottom of Cryo's Arrakis? https://thomas.fach-pedersen.net/dune/arrakis-eye.png :)
I still find myself listening to the soundtrack every now and then.
Well, except for:
* DosBOX [https://www.dosbox.com/]
* OpenDune [https://github.com/OpenDUNE/OpenDUNE]
* Dune Legacy [https://dunelegacy.sourceforge.net/website/]
* Dune Dynasty [https://dunedynasty.sourceforge.net/]
* Dune2 The Maker [https://dune2themaker.fundynamic.com/]
and possibly some other ways of playing it...
How to win:
- Two refineries minimum
And
- Maximize actions per minute destroy the AI
It's universal.
We may have different tastes, but I can't see how some games went through development, QA, management, etc. and no one said "This isn't much fun to play." Or even recognized that people weren't excited and smiling at the game!
How screwed up of an organization does one have to have for there to be that little feedback shared and listened to?
Further, defining fun as a KPI presents challenges of sociology, psychology, and philosophy: People are happy to exclaim "this is fun!" And then quit playing within a few minutes. Absent a very, very careful understanding of the belief structures that drive the combination of purchase and interest that makes someone a "fan", the metric degrades to raw "engagement", which leads to meetings where it is determined that the engagement metric should be boosted through the introduction of gambling-style addictive loops.
In other words: lots of people like playing good games. Almost nobody knows precisely why they like a game, and therefore they do not know how to make a game equivalent to what they like. What the industry does instead is to clone whatever worked last time and try to give it a twist or add a little more scope. Whatever formula worked for another game, everyone is going to try adding to theirs, whether or not it's sensible. Specific game teams manage to see farther and make exceptional work by dint of being able to frame the discussion appropriately, so that it brings in everyone's perspective. Without that, every meeting is just a discussion of deliverables. But in many, many cases, the team has to make the game twice to be able to sink their teeth into the problem. Hence the common thing of game sequels being much better than the first entry.
Everyone knew it was about to happen, but this was a multi-year product where everyone had been pointing out the issues more than early enough but management simply wouldn't hear it. Concerns about unrealistic scope, poor design, etc. were met with demands that we believe in the game and put our backs into it.
Even then, I did find myself enjoying the game and every now and then lost track of what I was supposed to be testing (as a software engineer testing my changes, not QA) and simply lose track of time playing the game.
The other variation I've experience is everything starts out great with a clear design and reasonable time line. Then a couple of years later, when you are almost done, some people start worrying that what you're making might be a bit too 'niche' and start adding some 'minor' changes to make the it appeal to a larger demographic.
You can tell a book isn't fun but you may not know how to make it better.
Or the game may just go in a different direction that you originally planned. I've read about authors complaining that their characters didn't develop how they initially wanted and you may think "How is that possible?" but the same can happen with games (or software or any product you design).
- Indie devs who need to skill up/budget up/work on it more
- big corp sweatshops that don't care because they're doing the micro-transaction whale hunting/gambling addiction angle.
Same with 'bad' movies. The people releasing the bad movies aren't oblivious to the fact that the movies turned out bad and not what they hoped it would be, but they're out of time, out of money and contractually obligated to get the thing out the door.
And a lot of good games suck until very close to the end where suddenly everything clicks and they become amazing. It's not really a very predictable process & at the end of the day you have to spend a lot of resources (time & money, some of it you're on the line for to publishers or investors) before you find out.
It can very easily be better financially (or at least less bad) for a studio to finish up a game they realized (possibly too late) isn't as good as they hoped than to just abandon it - you have contractual obligations, you get paid on milestones, and everyone still has to get a salary even if you decide to abandon the game.
Do studios not prototype games?
Maybe it's rose tinted glasses from a simpler time, with shorter development cycles, but almost all these famous game retrospectives seem to begin with "once we had the initial systems in playable form, before assets or polishing, it turned out the game was a lot of fun."
Not every game is fun in prototype form (think for example of SimCity or Civilization - you have to have a certain level of complexity before it's interesting) and other times something that seems fun for a few minutes in a prototype doesn't necessarily translate to a fun X hours game. Or you can find a fun core (matching gems in a match 3 game and causing a lot of cascades is fun!) but is not something that will on its own make a game commercially viable in 2022.
And sometimes you run out of time before finding a very promising prototype and have to get started anyway or you'll have people idlying (while getting paid & costing you money you may not have before you sign a publishing deal) so you just take a leap of faith on whatever seemed best among what you did find...
The cases in your quote are really the rare exceptions where everything went great but it doesn't go that way every single time.
And if you're a small company/startup without a lot of money you can't chance getting stuck without funding, so play with the cards you were dealt and try what you can...
I guess this was about the period that the computer gaming hobby started to separate into different genres where people started sticking to just one or two favourite genres.
I have never played Dune 2, but everybody played Counter-Strike and Half-Life.
Warcraft 3, Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament ware also common and popular.
But it's entirely possible that it's more a matter of age. It makes sense that when you're young, you try everything and when you get older, you stick with your favourites. Although some classics still break through genre barriers. Like Portal or Minecraft.
Where? I was a pretty active gamer at that time and not only never played it, but I don't even recall people really talking about it. I recall C&C being a much bigger deal for example.
I only had the chance to play it at a friends' house, and I remember me trying to just building turrets... all the way to the enemy base. And I won with that very silly strategy. You were not able to freely place buildings so that's why I just built a thin wall of turrets all the way, expanding the fingerprint of "my" base.
A: Dont play with B, his only strategy is "lots of planes" B: Yeah, because that generally avoids your "lots of tanks"
There was a later remake, Dune 2000, which I've never played. But it postdates both Command & Conquer and Red Alert, so maybe it's a bit better?
I realize why it was done: maximizing interactive graphics on the limited hardware of the day by shrinking the rendering region.
But good god, making core user interface elements that unusable is a fever dream only someone completely unfamiliar with time-motion studies or prior mainframe keyboard art could dream up.
They could have at least made it hands-on-keyboard and had a shrunken viewport.
* Didn't look like the original (new art!)
* Didn't play like the original (multi-select completely changes the tactics)
* Kept the originals level designs (mostly bad, because nobody knew how to do them well yet)
It's a souped-up Dune II that runs on Linux/Windows/Mac.
Uses original graphics and sound but has quality of life improvements like higher resolition, group select, map editor, network play, different AI engines/difficulties etc.
IMO the Dune2 AdLib soundtrack is one of the best demonstrations of the FM capabilities of the OPL chip.
Soundtrack here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WKBjmJCBHw
There was also a remake with a 4th house if I remember, Dune 2000? Or it brought out the sardaukars, I can't remember.
I think this game then menta spoke to you and you could click around his face and do funny stuff, if my memory serves me well.
Epic game and a trend setter.
Here's one on the Atari 800
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G5CEA_P9Hc
not denying that Dune II was the first "successful" RTS but that Atari 800 game runs in real time (it is not turn based), you select units and tell them what to do (go to X, fire at Y) etc using the joystick to move a cursor and shortcut keys to select units and groups.
One historian defines it as a game which:
> ...runs in real time, ... also one where players start with a largely blank slate, gather resources, and use them to build a variety of structures. These structures can in turn build military units who can carry out simple orders of the “attack there” or “defend this” stripe autonomously. The whole game plays on an accelerated time scale which yields bursts if not sustained plateaus of activity as frantic as any action game[1].
1: https://www.filfre.net/2018/12/controlling-the-spice-part-3-...
The switch to an early 3D engine made the game look and feel janky as hell, and you could tell from the lack of polish Westowood was in pain from the EA take over. Placing buildings, moving units across the map, path-finding, everything felt ... unfinished. The low-poly 3D models made everything look like textured cardboard boxes. Hell, even the UI and HUD elements were real time 3D rendered, but really low-poly and fugly. It seemed unnecessary, as if the game devs and designers had no experience yet how to make a 3D RTS game right, but the marketing guys told them everything must be full 3D because every cool game is 3D now. I much would have preferred they stuck with per-rendered 2.5D isometric graphics from the Red Alert 2 engine.
But the story, cut-scenes and missions had me captivated enough to spend too many hours in the game, that had my parents worried. Good times.
First part is about Dune the book and its author Franck Herbert, the second one about Dune 1, and the last one about Dune 2. Each article is well documented and describe in great details the technical, economic and artistic background of the people who made these three projects.