Scot Lane, Producer of "Virtual Pool 3 with Jeanette Lee", agrees, noting that the gaming industry has changed dramatically since the days of the independent developer. "Programmers wanting to get into game development should take business classes alongside their C++ classes. Programmers nowadays need to understand how the business side works. To just sit there in a black box and not know when the ship date is is ridiculous. Eight years ago, programmers didn't understand why things had to ship on time. Now people are starting to get it, and it's been a really big change in the industry, and it's going to have to keep changing."

Virtual Pool 3 is an impressive continuation of a well-established game title. Celeris' Virtual Pool in 1995 was very popular, and Virtual Pool 2 in 1997, although not as popular, was a big hit with Playstation. Virtual Pool Hall followed, but it was not the upgrade the public expected it to be, so it wasn't as well-accepted. "The challenge with Virtual Pool 3 was to let the public know we'd made major changes. There's an interface that pulls away from the 'Windows'-type interface to more of a gaming interface," says Lane. "The game has a new graphics engine that supports 3D acceleration, and there's a career mode -- you start in your garage with $50, and hustle your way across the pool tables to unlock another room in the house as you beat the big boss in each room and advance in your career. Online, we now have free support with GameSpy, so you can play people around the world."

Another factor not often encountered by independent developers is working with an actual human being who would be represented in the game. "Working with Jeanette Lee was very nice; she was consistently involved during the design phase. I've done other games with so-called 'licensee sponsors' and they were not all as responsive. Jeanette Lee called three times a week and came in for playtesting. In fact, as it turns out, when we were looking for her, her agent was looking for us -- she'd been wanting to work with Virtual Pool for years."

"Virtual Pool 3 with Jeanette Lee" will be available for PC at the end of October, but not after a lot of work from the Celeris team. "It's easier to develop games for platform rather than PC, because Direct X is a pain in the butt, online is much simpler," adds Lane. "Also, you're forced to a standard, everyone else knows what they have to do. If you do a Playstation title, everything is laid out in detail, you have to do this and you have to do it this way. On PCs, different companies have different standards and different ways they do stuff, and it's much more chaotic."

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