![]() ![]() Late paychecks were the norm - sometimes only a day or two late, sometimes as much as two weeks. ![]() While all this was going on, Blue Planet was in the throes of severe financial problems. The development team put in 70, 80, even 100 hour weeks, sometimes 30-35 hours at a time, trying to make the game playable and keep Henk happy. Henk, the Lead Designer and the Lead Developer had meeting after meeting, argument after argument, and THQ got more and more nervous as Christmas approached and the game was largely unplayable. One programmer spent almost 100% of his time for 4-5 months working on nothing but the Mino AI engine, and effectively all of his work was thrown out of the final product. He insisted on redesigning the clean and simple multiplayer UI in favor of a complex, confusing interface that took three times as long to develop and debug. The compromises for playability were thrown out. With six months left until Christmas, Henk insisted on totally revamping the design of the game. Needless to say, this was overambitious at best for a title that was expected to be on the shelves in less than a year. He also wanted a "Mino city" which provided online gameplay, buddy lists, and a tournament/ranking system. Henk's vision was for each world to be comprised of dozens or hundreds of Minos that interacted intelligently with the player and each other, constructed the world as your gameplay progressed, and generally gave a feeling of life to each world. ![]() If you've played TW, the Mino is the little cube that sits in the lower left corner of your screen and watches the board while you play. Henk saw this game as a platform for the "Mino" characters. Upon hearing about the direction development was taking, he freaked out. Detailed designs began to take shape, development began, compromises were made, and the project began to look like it could actually be done on time.įour months later, Henk called for a team meeting to get an update on development progress. While designing the tool and working on the gameplay itself, Henk (the "Master Game Designer" if you read the TW credits) left the bulk of the rest of the work to the Lead Designer and Lead Developer. This tool allowed the designers to create Tetris-style games using a simple GUI-driven Mac application. Then he disappeared, to "handle business" and work with an outside contractor who was developing a Tetris design tool. No design document, no functional specification, only a stack of drawings and a few scribbled notes in the margins. When we first began development, Henk provided a set of hand-drawn story boards to work from. That being said, I think Henk also has a massive ego and is blissfully ignorant of the realities of game development, and I think these were the main factors in the train wreck that was Tetris Worlds. It is his baby, it made him a mint, and he really cares about keeping the game alive and fun. As you all know, Christmas is king in this business, and we were under tremendous pressure from THQ to get two of these (PC/PS2) on the shelf by Christmas 2001, with the xbox and GC versions to follow close behind.įirst of all, I think Henk Rogers loves Tetris. When the project started, it was extremely ambitious: four platforms (PC/PS2/X/GC) in 11 months. I was a member of the Tetris Worlds development team. Admittedly this is a dead thread (last post in September I think), but I wanted to shed some light on what really happened and why video game development (even something as seemingly simple as Tetris) is incredibly difficult these days. I always wondered if any of the former Blue Planeteers would post the story of BPS and Tetris Worlds. I came back to see if the main fatbabies site was still essentially dead (yes) and found out that the forums are still kicking a bit. ![]()
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