America’s Army began at the MOVES Institute, under Mike Zyda, at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

A major national study led the way for the creation of America’s Army. In 1997, the National Research Council reported in Modeling and Simulation — Linking Entertainment and Defense that commercial videogames, not government-sponsored modeling and simulation, were the main drivers in the development of networked virtual environments, both for hardware and software. It was time, the report indicated, for the Department of Defense and other organizations to examine networked entertainment for ideas and technologies. In response, the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, formed the MOVES Institute, under Mike Zyda, and it was there that America’s Army began.

The first decision in creating the game was to license a game engine, rather than develop one from scratch (which can take five years or more). The engine (and authoring-tool set) chosen was Unreal, by Epic (www.epicgames.com). The Unreal engine is preferred by many for large open spaces, whereas the Quake series of engines from ID are popular for more confined games that take place in a series of rooms or caves. The team budgeted about $300K for the cost of the engine (non-commercial usage can be much cheaper) and about a third of that for annual maintenance.

With a yearly development budget of around $2.5 million and operational costs of about $1.5 million, the team was funded at around $4 million per year, or around $8 million to produce the first release. In the first year the team grew from zero staff to around 26, and got space, workstations and computer graphics toolsets. According to Zyda, the most difficult part of creating America’s Army was building a cohesive game team. The military SOP for building simulators had been to basically hire a couple of dozen programmers and set them loose — if one of those programmers had taken an art course in college, that would have been an unexpected bonus. A team for a game, on the other hand, required arrows not readily available in the military quiver. The America’s Army team of 26 at the end consisted of four game programmers (capable of doing scripts and C++), with the remaining 22 being level designers and artists. Zyda found that the formal education of these designers and artists was of little help in hiring them — much more important were the demo reels and the recommendations of people that had already been hired. So standard Human Resources hiring practices had to be thrown out of the window.

Zyda had to find common ground for his production team who all had varying skills. The game CounterStrike was brought in as a design model to which they added Army values and training.

The leader of the group was the exec producer (also called the creative director). Although young (shy of 30), he was the father figure of the group. Under him were the lead programmer, the lead artist and the lead designer (for both the story and the game presentation). The EP’s job was to assure the team could master an efficient production pipeline that would get a game online within 24 months. Whiners were culled and replaced, and eventually the team started humming. Unfortunately, a major cultural clash was in the offing, between the game creation team and the military officers in charge of the project — who also formulated the training objectives. The differences in lifestyle were not subtle. According to Zyda, one group showed up at 0700 (7:00 am) in uniform. The other ambled in at around 11 in T-shirts and flip-flops. However, the first group left at 5:00 pm (precisely), while the second worked like madmen to midnight and beyond. This cultural clash was ameliorated with adept leadership, patience, insight, understanding — and by keeping the program manager away from the dev team.

Other problems also haunted the team. A proper mix of skills had to be found — the team had a character animator, for instance, but no character modeler, and no audio developer. Three game-industry veterans were hired that brought not only staffing experience, but knowledge of actually creating and shipping a product. The absence of a thorough design document also led to confusion between the team and the customer. As a solution, the game CounterStrike was used as a model that everyone could agree on, but with heavy emphasis on Army values and training. The final major hurdle the team faced was that the game was a runaway success. The 140 servers that were stood up on July 4, 2002, were quickly swamped by the half-million download requests on the first weekend. Servers were added, along with bug fixes and many new features. One of the new features was the option for a soldier in the game (whose status in the Army was verified) to put an Army star next to his name; this strengthened the camaraderie between the civilian and military gamers.