NWN Postmortem at Gamasutra

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(Originally posted by Mollusken)

An article with reflections to the development and release of Neverwinter Nights has been posted at Gamasutra. It's written by Scott Grieg, Ray Muzyka, James Ohlen, Trent Oster and Greg Zeschuk (all from BioWare), and here's an excerpt.

With the NWN team growing at the end to upwards of 75 people, communication of the goals of the project, and the day-to-day development decisions, became a critical necessity. We formed a tight communication network, with the leads in each area summarizing daily challenges, potential pitfalls, and areas of concern. Each significant code change required consultation with the various people responsible for the systems that would be touched - a fundamental change required a quick meeting between three to five people simply to make sure everyone who was affected would be aware of how the change would affect them. While this might superficially seem like an inefficient way to work, it did result in a number of benefits for the project and the team. First, the constant communication to achieve difficult goals brought the entire team together, and when difficult problems arose there were always a few knowledgeable people with a familiarity with the problem that could be consulted.

Read the whole article here.