Particularly with our games, people get involved with the characters and the world. They're going to take their time with it pretty seriously, so we need to take it even more seriously to make it good.
What's funny is that by the time everyone plays the game - you know, we finish it, and then it takes a long time to make copies and ship it and get on the shelves - we probably haven't worked on it for a month, two months. So, we've already taken our break, and then we're on to the next thing.
Memory is a big one: our ability to use the memory and move things in and out efficiently - that affected what we were able to do more than anything.
Time makes a bigger difference: just making a game, shipping it, looking at what you did, how you did it, what you did well, what you didn't do well, and doing better.
I played everything, but the games that kept me up and night and tickled my fancy were the larger role-playing games like 'Ultima.'
The way we built 'Future Shock,' you have a height map and instanced 3-D objects rendering on top - that, believe it or not, is still how we build today. It's our basic paradigm for how to build a space.
