obviously, only the final fantasy fans would want to read this, rest of you GO AWAY !
GDC 2007: The Long Development of Final Fantasy XII
70% of the team's resoures were dedicated to art alone.
By Garnett Lee, 03/08/2007
Three core members of the Final Fantasy XII team gave a postmortem of the game today at GDC. Taka Murat,a who supervised the game's development, led the discussion. He began with some stage setting by recalling some of the series' milestones, including that, in this, its twentieth anniversary year, Final Fantasy numbers some 28 titles, when you include its spin-offs (Final Fantasy Tactics, Chocobo titles, Crystal Chronicles, etc.). This background plays an important part in the development of every Final Fantasy title. As fans, we probably each hold our own idea of what makes the games special, but for the development team it boils down to three key components: innovation, quality, and volume (in terms of the size of the game). These three areas of focus end up at odds with one another throughout the development process. Designing new elements, for instance, creates new problems that must be solved, in order to achieve the quality ideal. The three are not equally weighted. Innovation holds top priority, and for FFXII, that innovation seamlessly blends together the battle and quest scenes in the game. This gave rise to many problems as they sought to keep the input-driven-command nature of RPGs accessible to its many fans, some of whom would not possess action game skills.
As a result, Final Fantasy games require a lengthy development process, and this presents the very real threat of being obsolete by the time it ships. To combat this the team allocates its resources with a heavy emphasis on art. From the chart being shown, the breakdown appeared to be roughly 70% devoted to art, 20% to game design, and only around 10% to engineering. The thinking follows that while the technology may change, by creating the very highest caliber art possible, it enables them to move forward with any advances on the fly.
The remainder of the talk burrowed into the in-house tools created to produce the game. Along with the standard commercial products every developer uses, they put together a suite of tools that allowed real-time display of their work outputted through the PS2 to the TV. In this way they always saw a true representation of what the final product would look like.
In closing, Murata indicated the learning experience in managing these issues gave them a great start on refining their process for the ever more sophisticated development pipeline required to make great PS3, 360, and PC games.
