Jagged Alliance 2 by Darius Kazemi

Только на буржуйском. Там простой язык (даже для моего уровня), где недопонимал - на помощь приходила сила гуглтранслейта. Не уверен, что выкладывать будет правильно. Сам хотел оставить ссылку, но подумав, не стал. Хоть автор, судя по всему, зарабатывает не писательством и вообще вряд-ли ему что-то с этой книги перепадает.

Дело не в цене и тем более не в копирайщине.

Там вся книга интересная целиком, а цитаты без контекста не передают полностью мысль, порядок рассуждений. Ну вот, например, так в Madlab попал художник, который оформил почти всю игру:

Mohanned Mansour, Graphics/Artwork/Animation,JA1:
[When I applied to Madlab Software] I brought Ian my drawings and my paintings. I’d painted a few illustrations in a book and was using that to apply for jobs. Ian had a really good eye. He’s a programmer but he’s also an artist. He plays music. So he saw the potential, let’s just say, because I didn’t have anything on the computer to speak of at all. He gave me a diskette and said, “Here’s a program, install it on your brother’s computer and let’s see what you do.” At the time I was living in the basement of my parents’ home. I didn’t have a lot of expenses, and I still had a year to finish school. So I said, “I don’t want to get paid. I want to be a partner in this.” And because they didn’t have a big budget at the time, Ian said, “Yeah, sure! Here’s a crazy guy who doesn’t want to get paid, we’ll take him on.” So that’s how it got started. […] Mostly it was me doing all the tiles and animations and effects. The art was pretty much a one-man job, though Ian had a strong vision for the art direction.

А вот так программист Meduna:

In November of 1993, Currie moved from Montreal to Ottawa to be a Studio Director at Sir-tech Canada. The new development studio was not involved in making JA1, which was still a Madlab Software project with Currie at the helm. Technically Currie was working two jobs: one running Madlab and finishing JA1 for Sir-tech USA as an independent consultant, the other working with Linda Sirotek, the sister of Robert and Norman Sirotek, to build up a team at Sir-tech Canada to work on other titles. (A year later, Currie and Sirotek married, with Linda taking his last name. She is referred to as Linda Currie throughout the rest of this book.) jagged alliance 2 At this point, Currie took advantage of free office space at Sir-tech and used his own money to add a few new members to the Madlab team. One of those developers was designer/programmer Alex Meduna, a newcomer to the game industry who among many other tasks coded the game’s exceptionally devious artificial intelligence (AI). With the exception of Currie, most of the JA1 team was new to game development.
Alex Meduna, Programmer/Designer:
I was a gamer since I was a kid, and Sir-tech was my first job in the gaming industry. I studied programming but that was just a passion until I stumbled across a little ad in a local newspaper that Sir-tech was looking for programmers. I had played some Wizardry games, and was familiar with them, but I didn’t realize Sir-tech had opened a Canadian branch! I was in shock that it was the same company.

Рассуждения человека, который дизайнил тактику и баланс в JA2:

Chris Camfield. Programmer (JA2):
There was a difference between the fan culture and the developer culture. When Shaun and Ian and Alex made JA1, they didn’t know a lot about guns. That said, neither did I—just some things I’d read in books. I remember looking at the JA1 code and the way that the gun damage was defined was your basic gun did 10 damage, the next gun did 12, then 14, 16, 18, 20 and so on. […] Ian and Shaun were really approaching it more from the point of view of trying to translate the experience of an 80s action movie into computer game format. jagged alliance 2 I used a couple of pen-and-paper RPG books about different guns to make it more realistic: Palladium Books’ The Compendium of Contemporary Weapons [by Maryann Siembieda], and the other one was from R. Talsorian games, called Compendium of Modern Firearms [by Kevin Dockery]. Now that I think about it, there may have been numbers in there that listed rate of fire, cartridge type, and bullet grams. I think I tried initially to estimate the damage value of a gun based on the listed muzzle velocity of the gun and the weight of the bullet. [Compendium of Modern Firearms] also has all these different ranges of probabilities of hitting a target of a certain size or how wide the spread would be for bullets for a particular gun. That probably got factored into accuracy values. But those numbers still had to go through kind of a pass to make the progression better. But there were still fans who were like, “Everything the developers did was crap with regard to weapons, the numbers should be like this and I’m going to go in and make it all right!”

В книге еще есть меткая фраза, что-то типа - Jagged Alliance привлек внимание фанатов оружия, но игра была сделана людьми, которые в жизни не держали его в руках.

Цитата из кода игры:

In addition to all the code, this file contains an unusual passage, reproduced here in its entirety: a 500-word essay outlining the general philosophical approach to the strategic AI. It’s embedded in the code as a “comment”—yet comments are typically one or two lines long, and function only as written notes that go alongside code to help explain it to anyone who might have to decipher what it does. An essay-length comment is very rare, and usually reserved for design documents drawn up in a word processor rather than a code editor. To quote game designer Robert Yang’s response to the news of this essay: “What a goldmine. All I see in Half-Life 1 source code is ‘hack’ and ‘sorry.’” Here’s a description of how the strategic layer AI works, written by an unidentified member of the team.
STRATEGIC AI—UNDERLYING PHILOSOPHY
The most fundamental part of the strategic AI which takes from reality and gives to gameplay is the manner the queen attempts to take her towns back. [Managing] finances and owning mines are the most important ways to win the game. As the player takes more mines over, the queen will focus more on quality and defense. In the beginning of the game, she will focus more on offense than mid-game or end-game.
REALITY
The queen owns the entire country, and the player starts the game with a small lump of cash, enough to hire some mercenaries for about a week. In that week, the queen may not notice what is going on, and the player would believably take over one of the towns before she could feasibly react. As soon as her military was aware of the situation, she would likely proceed to send 300-400 troops to annihilate the opposition, and the game would be over relatively quickly. If the player was a prodigy, and managed to hold the town against such a major assault, he would probably lose in the long run being forced into a defensive position and running out of money quickly while the queen could continue to pump out the troops. On the other hand, if the player somehow managed to take over most of the mines, he would be able to casually walk over the queen eventually just from the sheer income allowing him to purchase several of the best mercs. That would have the effect of making the game impossibly difficult in the beginning of the game, and a joke at the end (this is very much like Master of Orion II on the more difficult settings).
GAMEPLAY
Because we want the game to be fun, we need to make the game easy in the beginning and harder at the end. In order to accomplish this, I feel that pure income shouldn’t be the factor for the queen, because she would likely crucify a would-be leader in his early days. So, in the beginning of the game, the forces would already be situated with the majority of forces being the administrators in the towns, and army troops and elites in the more important sectors. Restricting the queen’s offensive abilities using a distance penalty would mean that the furthest sectors from the queen’s palace would be much easier to defend because she would only be allowed to send x number of troops. As you get closer to the queen, she would be allowed to send larger forces to attack those towns in question. Also, to further increase the game’s difficulty as the campaign progresses in the player’s favor, we could also increase the quality of the queen’s troops based purely on the peek progress percentage. This is calculated using a formula that determines how well the player is doing by combining loyalty of towns owned, income generated, etc. So, in the beginning of the game, the quality is at the worst, but once you capture your first mines/towns, it permanently increases the queen’s quality rating, effectively bumping up the stakes. By the time you capture four or five mines, the queen is going to focus more (but not completely) on quality defense as she prepares for your final onslaught. This quality rating will augment the experience level, equipment rating, and/or attribute ratings of the queen’s troops. I would maintain a table of these enhancements based on the current quality rating hooking into the difficulty all along.

Linda Currie, Co-Designer:
On JA2 I was one of the members of the design team, and again reprised my JA1 role in doing all the levels. Which was interesting because I was also Producer and Lead Designer on Wizardry 8. So that was always a little fun to juggle, and I’m sure Ian had some amount of grey hair added to his head, “When are you going to get those levels done?” For JA1 we had an external editor that didn’t work in the game itself. It was cumbersome. For JA2 there was a proprietary editor. That certainly helped, although at the time we had development on the editor and creation of the maps happening simultaneously, which is a recipe for disaster in many cases. Every time there was a bug or a problem—well, some of them were quite devastating, where basically I can’t save and I’ve been working on this map for 45 minutes or whatever, and I’d be screaming across the office, “Heeeelp!” [laughs] And how the map world came together in JA1, I had this crazy project of taking screenshots, printing them out, and pasting them together. I had a wall size map of JA1 so I could manually line everything up [to make sure maps flowed from one to the next]. In JA2 the in-game editor made that a lot easier.

Ian Currie, Co-Designer:
TopWare’s producer, Frank Heukemes, was such a big fan of JA1 but never felt it was localized well. So they took it upon themselves to do a really good localization job. They did tons of promotion [getting at least 100,000 pre-orders], and it was the number one seller for six weeks in Germany. So that was definitely considered a success.

"Аватар" Франка в JA2 - бармен в Сан-Моне. Вот тут об этом можно прочитать - Jagged Alliance 2 Basis ( Ja2 )

Через три месяца после немецкой версии. Будь Sir-Tech немцами - понять можно, сначала у себя, потом у остальных. Но тут-то все наоборот. Да при этом они еще и сами до этого издавали игры - ситуация со всех сторон странная.

Ни разу не играл с немецкой озвучкой, надо как-нибудь попробовать. А чем так плоха английская?

Понятно. Мне наоборот очень понравилась английская. У Барри такой прикольный акцент "Они пытаются меня убить, но я ведь профессионал!" Или у Сдобы. Интересно, как в немецкой с ней выкрутились. Нашим вот пришлось Барри немного адаптировать)

Скинул ссылку в личку.