An excellent game, an excellent business philosophy

Posted on December 2nd, 2007 in CG Community, Working in CG by Marc Bourbonnais

Call of Duty 4 is an outstanding game. Here is an inspiring article by Michael Boon, lead artist at Infinity Ward about the creation of CoD4. It is quite refreshing to read a production article from the digital industry that does not boast huge overtime, impossible deadlines, high turnovers or complicated pipelines.

A few snippets:

We almost never have forced crunch - in fact I’ve worked one full Saturday plus a few scattered weekend hours in the entire six years I’ve been at Infinity Ward.

Having experienced employees means people know what to do (and what not to do) without being told….all our managers prefer to participate in the actual development rather than spending all their time making sure everyone is moving in the right direction.

From day one the art team was producing assets that were optimized well to work in our engine, naming them well, and setting them up properly so that they could be used in the game.

We’re aiming to build the same thing at our studio.

You can read the rest here at Next Generation. (Boy do I miss the original mag…)

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3 Responses to 'An excellent game, an excellent business philosophy'

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  1. Jona said,

    on 2007-12-03 at 10.54 am

    Interessant. Merci Marc

  2. Kris said,

    on 2007-12-03 at 1.13 pm

    Yeah, this was a great article. I’ve always enforced many of the same philosophies. I always kept everything off the shelf and easy and worked little or no overtime. I believe that good communication, management and organization will often yield good environments like this. Unfortunately, many production environments are riddled with confusing pipelines, no pipeline at all, poor production and management staff and very little care for organization.

  3. Chris Johnson said,

    on 2007-12-03 at 1.44 pm

    Great points Kris!

    That all being said Marc…as a young fledgling studio, maybe in an upcoming topic, you could discuss the steps your putting into place for your pipeline? It’s a big topic but would be interesting.

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