Neverwinter Nights Postmortem at Gamasutra
Posted Monday, March 10, 2003 - 18:43 CET by Mollusken

Gamasutra have posted a long postmortem on the client and server in Neverwinter Nights. The article is written by programmers Scott Greig and Mike Brockington from BioWare, and here's an excerpt:

Neverwinter Nights was by far the largest project that BioWare has ever attempted. By the time in was completed almost everyone in the company had made contributions to it. At its peak, there were 25 programmers working on the project. This was a radical departure from Baldur's Gate, our largest project previously attempted, which only had 7 programmers. The fact that we had so many programmers on Neverwinter Nights was a direct result of the dual need for an unbelievably large feature set, and a relatively short development time of three and a half years. This is comparable to Baldur's Gate, which took us almost three years to the day to program.

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However, there is another issue when converting a pen-and-paper rule set to the computer. Not only do you have to adequately define, document and test what is being implemented, but you must describe the variances between that and the written rules. Our procedures were somewhat lacking in that regard: internal and external QA were reporting many bugs that were not bugs in NWN, and end users had different expectations based on reading the core rulebooks. Our technical design document, which the designers spent a lot of time writing, was not required reading for everyone who worked on NWN. And the programmers were no better than anyone else! One day, the designers got so frustrated they actually took away the core rulebooks from the programmers' desks to get us to read the document.

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