For productivity reasons, we wanted each team member to have a “demanding customer” on the same cabal, someone who consumed that person’s work. Each cabal also included one engine programmer who would develop new technology required by the designs. We included both programmers and level designers because most design iteration occurred through changes to AI, game code, or levels. Larger cabals resulted in diluted design meetings and smaller ones risked a dearth of ideas. While developing Half-Life, we decided that this was the ideal size.

BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAINĮach cabal consisted of four or five people, half level designers and half programmers. As a result, we created three nearly independent design cabals, each responsible for designing and producing roughly one-third of the game, plus dedicated cabals for art, sound, and acting. The problem now was, given the much larger scale of the game and larger number of people working on the project, the Cabal Process itself became a bottleneck. To make matters worse, the resulting design relied on many game elements that were purely theoretical. Design work during the early phase of development progressed very slowly because we found it difficult to predict what kinds of designs our technology would enable once it was finished. During the technology push, an expanded version of the original Half-Life cabal met for months, attempting to create a complete design document similar to the first one. Acting, physics, AI, sound, rendering, and networking systems were all built from scratch. We nearly tripled the team size, and embarked on a huge technology push on all fronts. Half-Life 2 was a project with ambitious goals. This article discusses the revised Cabal Process used to make Half-Life 2. However, the greater scope of the sequel posed some problems for the Cabal Process, so we had to tweak it until it worked for us again. Needless to say, when design began on Half-Life 2, we had great interest in applying the same structure and principles to its development, too. While building Half-Life, which shipped in November 1998, Valve created a method of decentralized design called the Cabal Process (described in this article on Gamasutra), which used a small cabal of a few people from various disciplines to tackle the design. This article originally appeared in the November 2005 issue of Game Developer magazine.

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