Under Development

The Good
In the past I have hinted that the concept of a game simulating the process of game-design really appeals to me. Back when I was just starting out on this website I reviewed Game Dev Story, which in some ways shares similarities between the game I am reviewing today. Both of these two titles have you leading a team of game-designers with making lots of money as your main goal. This premise is very interesting to me and because Under Development promised to contain a lot more realism, I was really eager to start playing this game after first hearing about it almost a year ago.

The realism was not really a lie. Not only does this game contain studios, games and characters from the real world and is it (to some extent) historically accurate, but it also has you taking part in the so-called "office politics". You will have to answer to the CEO of your company, your team occasionally demands you to change something and sometimes influential people might knock on your door and demand that you sell them the rights to your game. The emphasis been on "demand", because you are very rarely in a position where you can be picky about stuff. Whether you like it or not, it is just a little deeper than Game Dev Story that sometimes seemed to play itself.

Another feature I really like is that you actually need to do something in order to make games. Instead of just watching your sprites go at it, you have to play short mini-games (snake, break-out and such) to make your project progress. After the mini-game your points will be transferred to progress and will be added to the aspect of game-design of your choice. Though it's just a small touch and there are only six mini-games to play, it just makes working on your latest game a lot more enjoyable.

I also like how you can see your game transform over time. As you increase the stats, it will slowly start to become more beautiful or complex. At first, your game will become Pong or Pitfall, but as you keep upgrading the stats, it will slowly become Spy vs Spy and other, more sophisticated games. I haven't played for long enough (yet) to see if this feature still makes sense after you got like ten in-game years behind you, but so far it's entertaining.

I love games that throw random events at you, those little obstacles that force you to adapt and change your tactics. It was part of the reason for why Left 4 Dead 2 is one of my all-time favorites and they are in this game too. Quite often when I thought my team was doing great and we would have the next game ready soon, a computer would crash, an ex-employee would run off with files or the system I was producing for would be cracked by pirates. There are a lot of these events and while sometimes annoying, it forces you to find a way around the issue, instead of repeating the same quick process over and over again.

Something that I really hated about Game Dev Story was that after like the 36th game, the database would start removing your oldest data to make place for the new. The reason for why this was annoying, was because its fun to look at your past efforts (just think about a photo-album). Once the records were starting to disappear, I soon found my entire database filled with random titles that were all successful and had high-production values, which was very boring to browse through. Under Development doesn't do this and I am thankful for that.

Because the game is open source, anybody is free to expand the game library and the music files. Simply by following the same naming pattern, the games and music will be loaded straight into the game and once there they can be activated and customized. I found this to be very nice because some of the 8-bit tunes were kind of annoying and thanks to this system, I could easily swap them for something else. I also added like twenty games that weren't present in the game database too.

The Bad
Okay, so on the website this game was advertised as "lovingly brought to life in photo-realistic 3D" and if there is one quote that doesn't apply here, it would be photo-realistic. It sounds like the description was made by some kind of marketing-blurb-generator because not only is this game NOT photo-realistic, but it's also animated. They don't even try to hide this, the very first thing you'll see after the character creation is dialogue between you and your CEO and when characters talk, there is just a black circle where their mouth should be. It just baffles me that, of all the good things that can be said about this game, they decided to market it as the one thing it isn't.

While I admire Mat Dickie for his great programming skills, I can clearly see that the good man is not a writer. The dialogue is not just bad, it's simply horrendous and insane. I had a lot of meetings and conversations with other characters in the game and never did any of the dialogue seem realistic. Most of the time it was just retarded to see business tycoons talk like a bunch of kids in a park. The worst part however is just how unreasonable characters are, initially they will approach you pretty professionally, but decline whatever option they need and they will suddenly turn into downright insulting. This even went so far that sometimes little independent developers were calling me a "loser" because I wouldn't sell a member of triple-a team. Well f*ck you too sir, I have enough money to buy your entire life.

While I did like the mini-games, there were just time when I force-closed the game because I made a mistake. The problem is that if you don't get enough points, your progress will go down and quite often I would start a game and instantly lose because of a slight mistake from my side. There is no retry, there are no extra lives, the mini-game just ends the second you lose your only ball (or whatever item you need for the game in question). Especially early on in the game, when you are really hurting for some cash, it would be very bad if you have to proceed to the next week without making a good bit of progress.

One random event that I simply couldn't stand was whenever employees would "take on a roll". This basically meant that of the six aspects of game-design, they would focus exclusively on one and refuse to do any of the others (unless you choose to spread the points across everything). This doesn't sound too bad, especially seeing as how they get a few extra points in the aspect of their choice, but when I pay a lot of money to bring in a 3D graphics artist, I don't want them to decide for themselves to suddenly become a sound-engineer (especially when their skill in sound-engineering is very low, which it almost always is).

One minor complaint is that the in-game database containing all the games you can create, doesn't have a search function. This likely won't bother most people because most won't even look into the database, but when I want add some new games, it would really help if I could check if they are already present in the database BEFORE I add them myself.

The only mini-game that I thought was really unfair, was the "crosshair" game. You only need your mouse and the goal is to click on the sprites that appear in the screen (except for the goombas). The trick however is that most of the sprites move. That alone would already be enough depth for this mini-game, but they really went all out here and also made it so that sprites can randomly disappear, some are insanely small and others are programmed to avoid the mouse (and you never know that until you already tried to shoot it). Most of the time, the game ends whenever the hell it feels like, as opposed to when you have run out of bullets too.

The Bottom Line
Aside from some minor complaints and the dialogue been terrible, there doesn't appear to be anything bad about Under Development. However, it is the problem with how easy it is to mess up (on mini-games) that almost kills this game. It took me an entire year to finally get somewhere in this game, I have installed it a total of six times and have had over 18 save-games. Now that I finally got somewhere, I must say that I really enjoy playing this game in short bursts, but you will only be able to enjoy it if you luck out or have a lot of time on your hands.

If Game Dev Story was too simple for you, then Under Development is sure to entertain you a lot more. It's the more detailed and mature of the two game-design simulations. Fans of open-source projects and supporters of the independent should also take a look at this project.