While we still don’t know all that much about what’s going to be in Mass Effect: Andromeda, the development team has been fairly forthcoming about the process that has been taken in order to make the best game Bioware can make. Bioware’s Jos Hendriks recently took to Twitter to spell out just how difficult the process can be when starting from scratch. The process is especially hard when working within a big studio that has multiple team members all trying to get on the same page.
“Documentation is an important part of the process! Being able to articulate a design or feedback, or the way a mission works, is key. Additionally, writing out your designs for mechanics and missions helps form a concrete plan for building these things, too. And since most things in a game like Mass Effect get built by multiple people, maintaining a central vision through documentation helps. Example: Any mission I build has at least a writer, cinematic designer, artist, audio artist, level designer, QA analyst who work on it,” he said in a series of tweets.
Hendriks also talked about how hard it can be for a company when they have someone leave, as Bioware has recently seen, and then the replacement has to step in during the middle of the production process. “Imagine if you had to communicate your mission to all those people just verbally, and try to maintain the scope and vision that way. Now imagine one of the people working on it can no longer work on it, and someone else has to step in and take over. Documentation!”.
Mass Effect Andromeda doesn’t have an official release date, but it should be coming sometime early next year.