The Making of Warcraft, Part 2 | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Warcraft, Part 2

codeofhonor.com

213 pointsmcfunley14 comments

Game development is about trade-offs — great games don’t have to do everything, they have to do a limited number of things well.

Might as well go and remove the game qualifier from that statement, and its still true.

Even as someone who isn't particularly interested in game dev, this series is fascinating and I eagerly await more.

Indeed, Antoine de Saint-Exupery said it best: "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

Unfortunately, as developers, we're always at odds with the reverse tendency, expressed by Zawinski's Law: "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can."

One of the the last part about Warcraft's bright color palette is very fascinating. Especially the insight that you have to consider the actual environment that many of your users will be in.

I would argue, the bright color palette served the visual design of the warcraft games very well --all the way up to the mega-blockbuster, World of Warcraft.

I thought about this a while back, and the colour palette used was basically the reason I preferred the Red Alert series over the Tiberium universe series of Command & Conquer. The games were otherwise very similar.

I thought it was pretty interesting as well because I have always thought that game players played in the dark, the only light being their computer or TV.

If you look at the big LAN party conventions, or LAN parties in general, they're always hosted with the lights off.

Definitely the artistic equivalent of "eating your own dogfood".

Here's the discussion of the first part if you missed it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4292598

I like these ALOT. No best practices, or you should do this better. It is about making something you love and get the code to production. I look forward to more of these.

If you enjoy these blog posts, you might want to check out 'Masters of Doom' by David Kushner. It's about John Carmack & Romero and id Software's early years (The Johns' childhoods through to Quake 3). Like these blog posts, it's more of a story of the early id team and games than anything else.

Similarly, The Making of Prince of Persia is a great read: http://jordanmechner.com/old-journals/

Also available as an ebook: http://jordanmechner.com/ebook/

No time to read this now but I'll definitely get to it later. The first part (http://www.codeofhonor.com/blog/the-making-of-warcraft-part-...) was a treat to read, I wish there were more stories like this around.

These articles are great, thanks OP.

What color is the dragon?

Every color.

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