A blog post from Daniel Vavra of Warhorse Studios talks about AAA development.

CHECK YOUR PEOPLE

Filed in Developers' diary by Dan @ 3:08 pm UTC Mar 19, 2012

HOW TO MAKE CALL OF DUTY KILLER FOR LESS

So, how many people do you need to make a triple-A game? In the last century it was anywhere from one nerd, to “big” teams of 15 to 30 pizza-eating individuals in a garage. I remember my reaction, when I saw Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge for Atari ST, back in the days when games were made by two people – a programmer and the guy who did everything else – while Daley was done by a team of five and the graphics were completely digitized. My first thing thought was: “Oh boy, nobody needs artists anymore, the good old days are gone...”

Luckily, I was very wrong. At the time.

A few years later, during high school, I worked on an Eye of the Beholder like game. It was just me and two coders. Later we worked on an Elder Scrolls Arena clone. The programmer was 14 years old, and did awesome work on the engine side. Neither game was ever finished, we were just naive students with zero funding, working on them in our spare time, but even the big games were developed by just a few people in those days. Just look at the credits – Doom was developed by ten people, the first Elder Scrolls or Duke Nukem 3D by 15 developers and those were the biggest games.

These were the days I started in the games industry. I didn’t like the change from small garage teams to big professional software houses. But I didn’t have a clue just how wrong my definition of “big professional software house” was. If only I knew what was to come...

Later, I worked on a big open world multiplatform 3D game, one of the first of its kind. A huge project that combined several genres in one and had an insane amount of assets, game mechanisms and everything. We were making a racing game, adventure game, shooter and extremely long animated movie at the same time. We were developing all of the technology as we went along, the team members were around 21 years old on average. But we were still able to do it within a very reasonable budget and less than 30 core developers. These were the good old days.

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