Aug 4, 2025
How to make a Call Of Duty killer on a budget?
The official blog of Warhorse studios, created by the developers of the first Mafia, Hidden & Dangerous and UFO, publishes an interesting article about the effectiveness of modern game studios and the state of the industry as a whole.
How many people does it take to create a AAA game?? In the last century, this number has ranged from one nerd to "large" teams of 15-30 pizza lovers gathered in a garage. I remember my reaction when I saw Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge for the Atari ST, back in the days when games were made by two people – a programmer and someone else who did everything else, while Daley worked with a team of 5 people, and the graphics were entirely digitized. My first thought was: “God, no one needs artists anymore, their time is gone.”. »
Screenshot from Daley Thompson’s Olympic Challenge, a big-budget AAA blockbuster from 1988
Luckily I was wrong. Temporarily.
A few years later, while in high school, I worked with just two coders on the game an Eye of the Beholder. Later we worked on a clone of The Elder Scrolls Arena. Our 14 year old programmer did a fantastic job on the engine. Yes, we never finished the game, and we were penniless students, working in our free time on sheer enthusiasm, but big games in those days were developed by small teams. Look at the credits – Doom was made by 10 people, TES Arena and Duke Nukem 3D were created by 15 developers, and in those days these were huge games.
There were days when I took my first steps in the professional gaming industry. I didn’t like the change from a small garage to a large professional software company. But I had no real idea of what “large professional software companies” actually were. If only I had known what would happen later..
Then I worked on a large multi-platform 3D open world game, one of the first in its genre. A huge project that combines several genres into one, and all this with a gigantic number of scripts, in-game mechanisms and everything else. We made a racing simulator, an adventure game, a shooter and a movie on the engine at the same time. We used every technology we knew, even though the average age of the team was about 21 years old. However, we managed on a reasonable budget and only needed about 30 people. Those were the good old days..
THE WORLD HAS GONE CRAZY
Now the world has gone crazy. Any short linear shooter is developed by hundreds of developers and sometimes I have no idea what these people are doing. It doesn’t take $60 million and a team of 300 people to create a linear 5-hour shooter with 5 weapons, 10 levels, and long-mastered technology, right??
I know people who work on big https://mr-play-casino.co.uk/mobile-app/ franchises. When I ask them what they did, they answer me something like: “A minigun for the boss from the second level and soldiers in blue and red shorts.”. In just a few months of development! This is an example of the so-called “efficiency” of modern games. The worst thing is that these unfortunate three models can be made in two weeks.
Last year I received an offer from a very large publisher to work as a screenwriter for a large franchise. They asked me what I did in the past, I told them that I did game design, mission design, story design, wrote most of the dialogue, in addition I worked on some of the GUI and HUD. Of course, I noted that I worked in a team, but I did almost everything listed myself. There was silence and I heard a cough on the other end of the line: “Umm… We already have 30 people for this.”. You will be one of them, working alongside the Creative Director, Producer, Lead Designer, Lead Level Designer, and Head Writer.» F***. What are all these people and 20 screenwriters doing for a linear shooter?? The script for a two-hour film is 120 pages long. At the speed of 3 pages per day, I will write it in 2 months, in a year I will get 6 scripts. Why the hell does a game require a dozen writers for dialogue during the game (which is still crap)? After finishing what game did you say to yourself: “Damn, that was a good story”? Have we really come to the point where every person doing something useful needs to be assigned a manager?? In some companies, two artists sit next to each other and cannot directly discuss their work – they have to do this through a manager. WTF?
15 YEARS AGO
This is how games are made now and there are answers to my questions, why so much money and people are thrown into development. Yes, graphics and animation are becoming more complex and require more people to create them, and it all costs more money – but not that much. And yes, some games are really very large, so that they really require a hundred other developers to create them, but in most cases games are developed irrationally. When you had to model a box 15 years ago, it was just a box with a texture. Now the box consists of several thousand polygons and many large textures. 15 years ago there was no Google, ZBrush, digital cameras, CG videos, bump, 30-inch monitors and Cintiq tablets. When you needed the texture of a medieval wooden box, you got your ass off your chair, went to the city museum, bought a ticket, looked for the box you needed, photographed it on your analogue point-and-shoot camera, sent it to be developed, waited all day, or drew it with your mouse (yes, fucking, WITH A DAMN MOUSE!) in Photoshop 4. Today I will spend two minutes on Google searching for the beautiful medieval chests and textures I need. Think twice before you say that game development today is more difficult than it used to be.
One of the author’s early attempts to make a "Skyrim killer"
With design and history the situation is the same, if not simpler. When was the last time you played a game with the mechanics of Ultima 7, Ultima Underworld and Jagged Alliance 2? They didn’t require 30 writers, they had half an hour of cutscenes and an hour of dialogue during the game, which usually looked like this: “I need ammo… Argh!“In modern times, it would turn out that for each writer there would be three minutes of dialogue!
COLLECTIVE SOLUTIONS
The problem lies in the corporate structure of gaming companies, lack of personal responsibility, collective decision making and incompetence. In the film industry, a producer who knows about films looks at new scripts and if he likes something, he contacts the director, screenwriter, other key people and approaches the studio for money. If the studio liked the project, then they gave money and provided some creative freedom. There is a lot of risk involved and a lot of personal responsibility, but at the end of the day, the team works freely in an atmosphere of freedom, so there is a chance that something great will come out.
"Harry Potter" is a large and very expensive project, shot by one director, with a script written by one person and based on a book by one writer. Not a department of 50 people, some kind of board of executives sitting behind the screenwriter and telling him what to do and how to do it. If this were a game and not a film, then Rowling would not be able to retain her rights to the title. At the first opportunity they would have replaced her with someone more accommodating and undemanding, and the sequel would have turned out to be another crap.
THE AMAZING STORY OF LEADERS STEVE AND JOHN
This is what the gaming industry looks like:
One fine morning, the company’s shareholders woke up, turned on their TVs and saw a CNN report about Call of Duty being the best-selling crap in the world. They call the company’s CEO Steve, a former successful CEO of a shoe company, and ask him: “How is this possible, why don’t we have our own super-duper cool FPS franchise?”? You don’t want to go back to the shoe industry, Steve? And by the way, what is FPS anyway??Steve angrily hangs up and calls the main manager: – Hey John, by next year we should create a Call Of Duty killer. So that people buy it… I don’t know… Do something, quickly. I give you 300 million dollars, that will be enough. How could anything go wrong with such a budget??John, who has never played games since he stated that he must avoid them in order to make good decisions, asks his assistant, who is the only one in the building that has any knowledge of games: – Hey Bill, we need to make a Call Of Duty killer, any ideas?? Bill has some ideas, he knows some people who have done FPS (unsuccessfully) so he starts negotiations.At the same time, John decides to play the game they were going to “kill”. Another assistant installs the game on the PC and John starts going through the tutorial. – Crap! This game is so difficult that even a genius like me can’t do it! Why the hell can’t I kill anyone within 5 minutes?? Is this a shooter or not?? I bet if it had been simpler it could have sold several hundred million more copies… Damn, I’m a genius! Cool idea! Now, back to online poker… At the same time, Bill contacts one of the best FPS studios with the famous designer Tom to work on the game. They introduce her to John. During the presentation, he played Angry Birds all the time and at the end made a speech: “Great job guys, you put your whole soul into the project, but we need something special, and I know exactly what special we need.”. I was the producer of Lord of the Kings (not to be confused with Lord of the Rings! -my note.). It was some rare shit, but I told them what to do and they bought it like crazy. I remembered this. So let me tell you my big idea. Other games are too difficult. Our game is a shooter. We don’t need all this boring stuff like recharging. I want the game to be available to everyone, even my grandmother! I want my grandmother to have the opportunity to play the best shooter in the world!The team was shocked. Tom had a couple of questions, but John shut him up: “Dude, trust me.”. The guys who made Lord of the Kings also had objections, but I know what I’m doing. I feel it. And by the way, the game needs to be done in 11 months, by the end of the year. So act, we’re running out of time!"After the developers leave, John nervously says: – Listen, Bill, this Tom… I don’t like him, he’s really that good? – Yes, Boss, this is the best one we got, he also made BOOM, which sold 30 million copies. People love him… – That doesn’t make him special. Lord Of the Kings sold 40 million times and I also worked on a marble game… whatever it’s called? It sold about 30 million. My instinct tells me not to trust him. What happens if he screws up?? – But boss, his ideas are wonderful, you heard him yourself! – Yes, I heard… so-so… but we need someone who will make sure that he doesn’t screw up. We need someone watching his ass. Hire a producer. I have a friend at Pepsi, he was very tired of working there… but what about the plot?? – They have their own writer, twice nominated for BAFTA… – BAFTA of what? We can’t make a Call Of Duty killer with some fucking nerd! Get someone from Hollywood! No! Take two, it will be better. And I want to make sure that the shooter mechanics are perfect. We need a shooter leader. – Yes, boss. – Do you know what?? We have to look like we matter. Shareholders love it. Those idiots you found are really good? – Yes. – Okay, buy their studio. It will look cool. And the idiot who said that his ideas are better than mine should shut up for a while.
The result is obvious. You give an order to a person, but he is unable to take responsibility, you have to shift it onto the shoulders of other people, because it’s safer. It’s not any safer. This is actually a sentence. Most of the time these people will be at war with each other doing the same job and covering their asses. They are unlikely to do anything special or take risks. In addition, requirements will often change, since the Steves and Johns will constantly change their minds, as is always the case, destroying all previously made progress, and this is not beneficial. After a while, talented employees will leave, and all you will have is an empty shell of a once famous company and a huge plagiarism from other games. At the end, when the project falls apart, no one will be held personally responsible. They will claim that the failure was because “the market changed” or “the team wasn’t good enough.”. The team will be fired, but Steve and John will be safe. If for some unknown reason the project succeeds despite all the “brilliant ideas of Steve and John,” then both Steve and John will receive all the glory (Ferrari and blowjobs), and the team will be fired anyway.
FINALLY, A DEVELOPER’S DIARY
But, back to us, after all, here is the dev diary. I wrote all this so that you understand our philosophy. Games are indeed a little more complex than they used to be, but they’re expensive because they’re not made correctly.
You must have an open mind about the project, you must have reliable people in the right places, and most importantly, you must avoid idiots. The last one is the most difficult, but if everything is done correctly, you can create a good game with the necessary minimum of material and labor resources.
We are a small team. At the moment we have 19 people working for us who are preparing to create the project. We plan to double the number of employees and fully begin our project. But according to our plan, we will not keep extra people. We will make games not with brute force, but with the right decisions and proven design. One special forces soldier is better than one infantryman, who is cannon fodder. Yes, it’s not easy to assemble a special forces team. We have to make compromises. Some people I loved working with before are no longer with us, we have to rely on young, inexperienced, but talented guys, but this is life, and I believe that we can do something good!
This is our philosophy. I know it’s risky and that if we fail, the Steves and Johns will laugh at us. But I believe it’s worth a try.
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