On 22/09/2012 09:43 PM, waggy wrote:
> My interest is primarily in videogame development, as this is currently my Plan
> B in case the engineering research thing doesn't work out. It's looking like
> there is a reasonable possibility I could put a small team together if, for
> example, our research grant funding dries up. A small team with limited funding
> obviously wouldn't be sufficient for AAA development, but I've been kicking
> around some game ideas that might appeal to casual gamers who are considering
> moving up to something a bit more intense than the typical hidden object and
> match-three games.

What I find interesting is this:

The original HalfLife was a AAA game. Valve licensed the Quake 2 engine 
from id Software, for God knows how much money, and then spent [I would 
imagine] a considerable amount of time modifying it. They then built an 
entire game running on it. A whole heap of time, money and energy went 
into that game.

HalfLife 2 was based on the Source engine, an even more radically 
modified version of the old Quake engine. HL2:EP1 and HL2:EP2 saw even 
more features added to this engine. It represents a couple of 
man-centuries of work, I would imagine. All three of these games are 
definitely AAA titles.

Black Mesa is not a AAA title. As far as I can tell, nobody even got 
paid. But unlike when Valve paid id Software a crapload of money to 
license their game engine, the people behind Black Mesa were able to use 
the very latest version of the Source engine *for free*. They also used 
a whole bunch of game assets from HL2, CSS and similar. They can only do 
this because the game is free, of course; if you wanted to /sell/ this 
game, you'd have to license the technology.

Now, I don't imagine that one person could throw together a game like 
Black Mesa in a week or two. This has clearly taken a lot of people a 
very long time to develop. But it's impressive that all this could be 
done by free collaboration, using AAA assets for which free use is 
permitted.

An interesting time for game development indeed!

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