Contents

Introduction The Production What Went Right What Went Wrong In the End

In the End…

Rainbow Six’s development cycle was a 21-month roller coaster ride. The project was too ambitious from the start, particularly with the undersized, inexperienced team with which we began. We survived major overhauls of the graphics, networking, and simulation software late in the development cycle, as well as two changes of engineering leads within six months. By all rights, the final product should have been a buggy, unplayable mess. The reason it’s not is that lots of very talented people put in lots of hard work.

I’m not going to say that Rainbow Six is the perfect game, but it is almost exactly the game that we originally set out to make back in 1996, both in look and game play. And the lessons that we’ve learned from the Rainbow Six production cycle have already been rolled into the next round of Red Storm products. Our current focus is on getting solid designs done up front and solid testing done on the back end — and on making great games, of course.

The Rainbow Six development team.

 

Rainbow Six Red Storm Entertainment Morrisville, N.C. (919) 460-1776 http://www.redstorm.com Release Date: August 1998 Intended Platform: Windows 95/98 Team Size: Sixteen full-time and six part time developers. Critical Development Hardware: 400 MHz Pentium II w/64 MB RAM and a 3D accelerator. Critical Development Software: Microsoft Visual C++, Sourcesafe, Hiprof, Boundschecker, and 3D Sutdio Max.

Brian Upton is the director of production design at Red Storm Entertainment. He as a Masters degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and spent ten years as a graphics programmer before making the jump to full- time game designer. He can be reached at brian.upton@redstorm.com.

________________________________________________________

[Back to] Introduction