FEATURES

Postmortem - Final Fantasy XII

The twelfth installment in Square Enix’s wildly popular series was developed in a fashion quite unlike the others. No one on the team had worked on a major Final Fantasy title before, and most had been accustomed to mid-sized projects, not massive ones. General manager of R&D Taku Murata focuses more on what went wrong in this ingenuous postmortem.

Programmers’ Roundtable

In this exclusive roundtable interview, five top technophiles discuss what’s right and wrong with game programming these days, from in-house procedures to multi-processor systems to code reuse.

The Code/Art Divide: How Technical Artists Bridge The Gap

Game studio Volition (The Punisher, Saints Row) makes a case for hiring a few technical artists, their value ranging from time savings to smoother in-house communication. As linchpins, technical artists keep programmers and artists bonded in their mutual cause, helping to ensure that each department gets what it needs from the other—and within reason according to the project’s schedule.

DEPARTMENTS/COLUMNS