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The development of DUNGEON SIEGE was about much more than the RPG you may have played by now. DUNGEON SIEGE was a Herculean effort by a small group of people who simultaneously started Gas Powered Games, built their first RPG, and made a hit game.
GAME STATS
PUBLISHER Microsoft
NUMBER OF FULL-TIME DEVELOPERS 27 at ship date
NUMBER OF CONTRACTORS 5
LENGTH OF DEVELOPMENT 3 years, 8 months
RELEASE DATE April 5 2002
PLATFORM PC
DEVELOPMENT SORTWARE USED MS Dev C++
3DS Max with Character Studio Visual SourceSafe CodeWright ICQ RAID (bug tracking) Photoshop Excel
DEVELOPMENT HARDWARE USED Ranged over course of development from 400-1000MHz CPUs with 128-512MB RAM
NOTABLE TECHNOLOGIES Bink Miles SmartHeap
PROJECT SIZE Approximately 800 000 lines of souce code for game editor and associated tools 60 000 lines of scripts 21 million total lines of GAS configuration files 8 500 textures 2 000 animations 2 600 object and actor meshes 3 700 terrain meshes Prior to his career as a prophet, Chris Taylor, Gas Powered Games' predsident and founder, was responsible for the creation of both the hit RTS game TOTAL ANNIHILATION, as well as Cavedog Entertainment, from which it came. For reasons that are now obscured by the mists of time, Chris was inspired to try his hand at something new, and Gas Powered Games was born. A number of us who worked with Chris in the past, primarily on TOTAL ANNILILATION, had similar passions, and it wasn't long before we found ourselves cozy once again in a closet office in Kirkland, Wash. We had just finished work on a successful RTS game, a genre we loved working on, but for a number of reasons we opted to try a different genre. We knew we were skilled enough to make another RTS, but the world was swimming in them at the time, so it seemed like a good opportunity to try something new. We all liked the fantasy aesthetic and there were very few good RPG games at that time, so somehow doing an RPG seemed like the natural choice.
We were starting completely from scratch. We had to find an office and buy phones, fax machines, desks, and all those little things most of us take for granted...