Exclusive Fuel Developer Diary – Part 3

“As we near the end of this title, it has pretty much become ‘who can take on this’ or ‘who can take on that.’ ”

The production of a game is a long, involved process, and the folks at Firetoad Software are in the home stretch of a racing title called Fuel. Published by Dreamcatcher, Fuel will ship for both the PC and Xbox and may just have the high-speed action gamers are craving.

But Fuel is not your typical turn around the track. Slated to release at the start of May, players will have the opportunity to go off road, use an ATV or personal watercraft and hustle their way to the finish line at top speed! There are 10 characters to choose from, course from around the globe and the choice of more than 35 vehicles.

There are no rules in this all out frantic race. This is a no-holds-barred, free-for-all, action-packed game, with one goal - get to the finish line first! …and scoring points along the way would help!

So, what does it take to pull together such a varied title? In this exclusive developer diary, we get a look into the making of this title.

(For Part 1 of the diary, please see http://xbox.gamezone.com/news/01_25_06_02_13PM.htm; Part 2 may be found at http://pc.gamezone.com/news/02_08_06_11_02AM.htm)

The Final Push

In this, the third installment of our Developer Diaries for Fuel, I'll be talking about the final push of development and the effort that is required to get the game out the door.

First I will provide you with a little history. Firetoad Software is a small, startup studio composed of four main people, including myself. Over the years, we have grown to as many as 10 people, bringing on extra talent for modeling, texturing, animation, etc. The main reason I bring this up is to illustrate where we are coming from and to put things into perspective.

As a relative newcomer to the gaming industry (Fuel will be my first released title), many of the processes we have gone through while developing this game have simply been trial and error. We’ve encountered many challenges along the way and I'd even go so far as to say that the project lost its way on a few occasions but we always got ourselves back on track. That being said, here we are, with just over three months before we successfully ship our first Xbox title. I look back in awe at the amount of work it has taken to get Fuel this far, yet so much still needs to be done before we reach the elusive Gold Master build. I can now truly appreciate when people in the industry say that the last 10% of any game requires 90% of the work. It’s not so much the number of hours that the last 10% takes as it is the mental strength needed to endure the seemingly endless list of small tasks that remain to polish the game.

I think back to when Fuel was in full production mode and now realize how easy that time was. Everyone knew what they were working on. We all had our job titles nicely outlined and we were a pretty well-oiled machine. Over the last few months we have been wrapping up production and turning our focus to debugging the game and fixing problems. Now I find that the daily schedule has gone completely out the window and has been replaced by what seems like organized chaos.

Unlike a larger game studio, where an employee specializes in one particular area, every one of us at Firetoad has had to go outside of their own area of expertise and take on roles that may have not been in their original job description. As we near the end of this title, it has pretty much become “who can take on this” or “who can take on that.”

So we will stay on course and focused, follow the monthly task lists, and hope that, like in so many game post-mortems I have read, everything comes together at the last minute.

Chris Dunwald  
Art Lead/Designer
Firetoad Software

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