Yearly Archives: 2009

Greetings and salutations MAG fans! For today’s blog update, we’re sitting down with two key members of Zipper Interactive’s software team, Mike Nicolino and Nate Klee. But what is it that a software team does, and how did they make MAG’s 256-person gameplay possible? Read on to find out.

What is your official title and how long have you been at Zipper?

Mike Nicolino: I’m the Software Manager and I’ve been at Zipper for five years this January. Being a software manager is a funny way of saying that I read a lot of email and I go to a lot of meetings – and in-between all that, I do a lot of work with schedules, manage a lot of tasks, and interact with other departments like design, art and audio to prioritize everything.

Nate Klee: I’m Zipper’s Chief Software Architect, and I’ve been here since February of 2004 – so almost most six years now. For MAG, I was the lead programmer. I helped find efficient technical solutions with the engineers while working in conjunction with the design team. I also had to make sure that we’re building software that can handle change and can be used flexibly so that we can do as much with our code as possible.

Nate and Mike's next project? to build self-aware LEGO-based robots of themselves. Here are the prototypes.

How do you guys work together?

Nate Klee: Well Mike is primarily responsible for saying who will be working on what tasks, and he and I work together with design to come up with what those tasks will specifically involve, while also assigning timelines.

Give us a glimpse at what day in your life at Zipper is like.

Mike Nicolino: I’ll come in to the office, skim through my email to see if there are any critical issues that have popped up with builds that need our attention. Then I’ll touch base with all the different leads of various departments to see if they have any needs. I’ll meet with our QA [Quality Assurance] team to find out the current status of our game build and delve into our bug tracking software to make sure that everything is prioritized correctly. That’s what my days are like now, anyway – since we’re at the end of the project.

Near the beginning, my schedule was quite a bit different. Those days involved a lot of meetings with design, looking at the task schedules, looking at our “game feature” needs and evaluating whether or not we can work them into the title given our schedule, and I’d spend a lot of time in Scrum.

Video game developers use the word “Scrum” quite a lot when referring to building projects but the average fan typically doesn’t know what that means. In laymen’s terms could you explain exactly what Scrum is?

Mike Nicolino: Sure. Scrum is basically an agile development methodology. Really, what it is at a high level is that you start with a bucket of work for a customer — in our case, the customer is the design, art and audio teams — and you take that bucket and you prioritize all the tasks in it from top to bottom. Once you’ve done that, you have what’s called “sprints,” which are specific periods of time in which particular goals are supposed to be met. At the end of the sprint, you take an objective look at where you are in the project and readjust your needs accordingly before going onto the next sprint. This could mean removing or adding new tasks to the project altogether, or simply rearranging priorities. This process then continuously repeats until you’re done with the game.

It takes a lot of hard work to go from concept to a real, working game.

I actually prefer this method for game design as opposed to the older, more traditional design document route. The reason is because, when you’re developing software, it’s really difficult to predict over a long period exactly how things are going to work. But with Scrum, and our various sprints, we can adjust as needed. It’s a lot more effective.

Creating a video game can mean a lot of different things to different people depending on what team you’re on. Can you talk about what developing MAG means to you?

Mike Nicolino: Well, right off, I had to worry about the scale of the thing. That’s what was forefront in my mind during the whole development process. So while I could meet with the art or design team, for example, and say, “Yeah, that’s a great idea,” which their ideas often were, I also had to say, “Remember: there’s going to be 256 people in this game at the same time. So, we’re going to have to make sure that we can implement your idea correctly with that much going on, otherwise, we may have to make some adjustments.”

When you have the kind of scale that MAG has, you definitely have to be mindful of what your limits might be — especially with 256 shooting each other at the same time.

Nate Klee: Yeah, the whole role of engineering is to “build it.” We have to take this great design that our team has come up with and figure out a way to make it happen. Oftentimes, this can mean that we have to say, “You have a good idea there, but it could take us years to make it, how about we do it this way instead?” That can be a little bit of a wet blanket on design sometimes, but it is ultimately what allows us to get the game to work so that people can play it.

MAG is Zipper’s first PS3 game. What was it like to tackle something so huge in scale with all-new technology compared to your days working on PSP and PS2 software?

Mike Nicolino: From my point of view, it was easier in some ways. I started at Zipper by working on SOCOM 3, which was my first exposure to developing on Sony hardware. In that game, we were using an engine that had been around for awhile, and we had the task of basically finding ways of smoothly fitting new pieces into something that didn’t originally have them. And also, for me, coming from my background as a PC developer to the PS2 hardware, I just wasn’t used to it.

The PS3 gave the team a freedom they didn't have before.

The PS3 is a lot more flexible. It has a bunch of memory, it has a hard drive, and it’s a little more PC-like from a development standpoint, so I like that. You also have the fact that MAG has an engine we’re laying the groundwork on, so we could add things as we needed from the beginning. The hard thing about working on technology when you’re first putting it together, though, is that we’re talking about it before it’s a “game.” You can’t get the visual reaction from folks that you’d normally get later on in development because most people don’t know what they’re looking at yet. Sure, it’s cool to us because we’re looking at everything under the hood and getting all excited about where it’s heading, but it’s hard to show folks who aren’t in our department that we did something cool from the offset [laughs].

Nate Klee: I didn’t spend a whole lot of time developing on the PS2 to be honest, but I did do quite a bit of work on the PSP, and I enjoyed working on it a lot – it has a really great architecture. As Mike mentioned, for MAG on PS3 we were started over on a new code base. Building a new engine on new hardware is time consuming for sure, but the PS3 itself is very, very powerful and it takes a custom effort that asks you to think about things in all-new ways to best utilize it.

MAG supports an ambitious 256 players at once. How early in development did you know you could actually succeed with it?

Nate Klee: Early in the project, I was working on the networking to look for a way to make this work. With 256 players — which are eight times more than our previous and already-large-numbered PS2 games — that’s a daunting task. To figure it out, I spent time with research and development working in 2D applications and various technologies to come up with an experience that would work well. That was always the priority, and we had the networking puzzle solved well before we even had a game up and running, which is how we knew we’d be able to pull it off.

Mike Nicolino: It’s really “hat’s off” to Nate, who has been the driving force behind us being able to do this. I think it may come as a surprise to some people to know that we had the network tech working pretty early — much earlier than people suspect.

Nate Klee: Yeah, we had the tech up and running for quite awhile before we started development on the game itself. We didn’t have soldiers with guns then, they were just beach balls, but it worked.

Working MAG multiplayer started right here. Which one's SVER?

Mike Nicolino: Beach balls are a long way’s away from a game right? But like Nate said, it was working before the game was made. It actually made me chuckle a little bit when MAG was first announced last year [July 2008] and people were posting on forums asking, “How is Zipper going to get 256 players to work?” Knowing that we had already solved the networking problem early on, it was a pretty good feeling to have.

Nate Klee: After we had the technology working, the next task was transforming these beach balls into people and spending a lot of time on game performance. That’s why MAG only runs on the PS3 by the way – because the system’s SPUs are so powerful that they give us the technical capability to simultaneously run 256 players in the way we do.

Why is MAG such a big deal?

Mike Nicolino: It’s more players in a shooter than anyone has ever seen before! That does it for me easily.

Nate Klee: Because of its heavy focus on team. Most shooters out there are single-player oriented and how many people you can take out as individual. MAG is about team work and on a large scale.

Speaking of big deals, how do you top 256 players? Debuting with support for so many people at once is really impactful.

Nate Klee: We built a technology that can support a huge number of players — we picked 256 because of gameplay balance, how we divide squads up, etc. But with our infrastructure, we can increase the number of players to beyond even 256 if we wanted to. There are trade-offs that would have to be made, of course, but the technology supports even more players if the need was there.

Any parting words for folks who are still deciding on whether or not they should pick up MAG when it comes out in January?

Nate Klee: MAG’s scale is unprecedented and when people can finally play it in its finished form, they’ll realize it’s a shooting experience like they’ve never had before.

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