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Hyper Crab Tank posted:If it's one thing I'm pretty happy about is that no matter how much I gently caress some code up, it's not going to kill anyone. I'd go nuts working in a field like medical or aeronautics or something of that nature. As an epileptic who regularly gets hosed up by random webpages and video games;  Edit: I have such sights to show you: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3987999&pagenumber=1#post520079258 SerthVarnee fucked around with this message at 18:06 on Apr 19, 2022 |
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Apr 19, 2022 17:15
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:If it's one thing I'm pretty happy about is that no matter how much I gently caress some code up, it's not going to kill anyone. I'd go nuts working in a field like medical or aeronautics or something of that nature. Just to provide context I work in the medical field, now in clinical informatics but previously in critical care as a respiratory therapist, a position with a ton of decision making and one in which we do stuff like intubate people, resuscitate infants, etc. I don't think any of us feel a lot of the stress you're describing after working for a year or so. I'm more stressed now in my informatics position where I feel like half the time I'm not exactly sure what's expected of me, what I should be doing, who is responsible for what, etc. In clinical work if you gently caress up you (generally) see the result pretty quick (minor changes in condition that you can reverse very quickly and easily) and many/most of the decisions being made exist within a grey spectrum where the wrong choice isn't going to have significant consequences in 99% of cases. You can see this in the way that two clinicians will almost never arrive at exactly the same ventilator settings, or when ICU physicians change over weekly/biweekly they'll almost always change the care in some way of nearly every patient that's in there. I suspect there are similarities in software development/game design - there's no way that two people would end up with exactly the same code but the needs get met regardless. I've voiced this previously in here when the topic of "Important Jobs" has come up, but the only reason to live in the first place is to engage with things that you enjoy, mostly art, culture, family, etc in it's various forms, regardless of whether or not someone realizes that's what they're doing. I therefore think that the act of creating that kind of thing (maybe not families) is at least as 'important' as keeping someone alive. In short, you wouldn't go nuts working in healthcare with us, you'd find it uncomfortable how much of 'just the job' it becomes, if anything. I can't speak to aeronautics but the dev of Darkest Dungeon previously was on the cutting edge skunk works aeronautical engineering team at Lockheed Martin and went into games after, so that probably tells you something.
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Apr 22, 2022 17:47
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VelociBacon posted:the dev of Darkest Dungeon previously was on the cutting edge skunk works aeronautical engineering team at Lockheed Martin and went into games after, so that probably tells you something. "An eternity of futile struggle — a penance for my unspeakable transgressions."
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Apr 22, 2022 20:16
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"Curious is the plane-maker's art. Brought low, and driven into the mud."
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Apr 22, 2022 20:40
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VelociBacon posted:Just to provide context I work in the medical field, now in clinical informatics but previously in critical care as a respiratory therapist, a position with a ton of decision making and one in which we do stuff like intubate people, resuscitate infants, etc. I don't think any of us feel a lot of the stress you're describing after working for a year or so. I'm more stressed now in my informatics position where I feel like half the time I'm not exactly sure what's expected of me, what I should be doing, who is responsible for what, etc.
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Apr 29, 2022 16:07
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why would someone making a game abandon gold after they hit it. for example everyone loves sonic hedgehog's chao garden but they left that behind on the dreamcast. wouldnt that be an obvious thing to include for 'the new sonic hedgehog'?
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May 2, 2022 11:27
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rye on white posted:why would someone making a game abandon gold after they hit it. for example everyone loves sonic hedgehog's chao garden but they left that behind on the dreamcast. wouldnt that be an obvious thing to include for 'the new sonic hedgehog'? Cult followings don't necessarily make money. Companies follow the things that sell, not the things some group of fans says they like on the internet. This is also why EA will not make another Skate.
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May 2, 2022 14:49
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leper khan posted:Cult followings don't necessarily make money. Companies follow the things that sell, not the things some group of fans says they like on the internet. EA are currently making another Skate
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May 2, 2022 14:51
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I get the question -- basically, "you have this, why not include it in future games", but there's good reasons for it. The biggest is that you don't want to shackle yourself to having to keep this feature up-to-date and looking good in every new game you make. You can't just include it unaltered, because it'll look increasingly out of date next to the stuff you are changing. So it takes time and effort, and that's time and effort that isn't going to what the game is actually about. If this side feature is not increasing sales enough to warrant that effort, then it gets axed. Like, imagine if every single Sonic game had a new iteration on the first Sonic game's bonus stages, the ones with the rotating tileset and dreamlike backgrounds. Same core gameplay, just new layouts and graphics. Some people quite liked those bonus stages! But that doesn't mean it makes sense to include them in every future game. Instead they experimented, and continue to experiment, with other kinds of bonus stages, or maybe a game won't have bonus stages at all. A second issue is that game development is hard enough as it is without making it harder on yourself. Generally speaking, your devs will be working full-throat just to get the game out at all, and anything that isn't absolutely core to the experience gets axed or left until the end. And the Chao weren't random bonus content in the Sonic Adventure games; they were (seen as) core to the experience. Remember, those were Dreamcast launch titles; the Chao helped to sell the VMU in the Dreamcast controller. It was basically a mini gaming unit / memory card, and you could do various minigames with the Chao on it when the Dreamcast wasn't running. Kind of like how SNES launch titles often made conspicuous use of Mode 7, except it had to be something that was minigame-friendly, and they decided to make a pet raising sim.
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May 2, 2022 15:00
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leper khan posted:This is also why EA will not make another Skate. Mr Beens posted:EA are currently making another Skate This made me laugh real hard
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May 2, 2022 15:46
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There is probably an obvious answer to this but why do dead ragdolled bodies have no weight to them. It just seems so odd that the instant something massive or even human sized dies it suddenly becomes paper light and can be punted across a level. Is there concern a player could get stuck behind a corpse?
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May 14, 2022 20:38
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MasterBuilder posted:There is probably an obvious answer to this but why do dead ragdolled bodies have no weight to them. It just seems so odd that the instant something massive or even human sized dies it suddenly becomes paper light and can be punted across a level. Is there concern a player could get stuck behind a corpse? Physics stuff can have configurable collision, and players and ragdolls are usually configured to not collide with each other at all. Where things get bizarre is when you have thing like ragdolls being able to be pushed by things (like vehicles, doors, whatever) but don't physically block those things. Handling that without it exploding and launching the ragdoll into orbit is kind of a black art of trial-and-error and good-enough solutions, and one of the golden rules of game dev is that any physical object capable of being launched has been launched during development AT LEAST once.
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May 14, 2022 22:08
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It may help to get some insight into how the skeletons and rigs work. Generally speaking, you have a mesh with an armature on it, which determines the positions of arms, legs, eyes, etc. Move the armature, and the bits of the mesh attached to it also move. These armatures can get fantastically detailed if they need to be, or you can have extremely primitive ones, depending on your needs and your technological capabilities. On top of the armature, you have animations, which pose the armature so it can do things like walk, aim a weapon, jump, etc. The animations are made by hand, and tell the bones exactly what to do on each frame. I'm simplifying a lot here, of course. When you ragdoll, you throw the animation layer out the window, and instead have the bones follow simple rules (like gravity and not phasing through solid objects). These rules often do not cover: - whether bones can intersect with other bones, because resolving a self-intersecting armature that's also supposed to be obeying physics is really hard. - what kinds of range of motion each joint has (e.g. can a knee joint bend forwards?). You might have set these constraints up when doing your animations, but those are often made in a different system from your game, and thus the constraints may not get imported when the animations are. You're sure not going to bother recreating them in a different system just to make your ragdolls look better. - how much mass each limb has, and how much drag each joint imposes when forces are applied through it. You made all your animations by hand because you have a good artist's eye to replicate this stuff; teaching it to a computer is both hard and unnecessary. These are mostly solvable problems, but they're not ones that you're going to bother solving unless your game relies heavily on procedural animation (instead of the baked animations I described earlier). And even if you did solve them, there's no guarantee that they'd make your ragdolls look less goofy. If you accept that the ragdolls are going to be goofy no matter what you do, then there's a lot less of an incentive to try to make them better. It's potentially a lot of work, for a fairly minimal reward.
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May 15, 2022 05:02
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Another factor is also that realistically heavy ragdolls usually don't behave in a way that feels right. In most environments, a model can be controlled either by pre-rigged animation or by ragdolls, but not a combination of both. So with "heavy" ragdolls, the moment you switch from the former to the latter, the model will usually simply slump straight down into a heap. That tends to feel off to players, since usually people don't just fold together like that when they're hurt. They flinch away, they stumble and fall lengthwise, they throw out their arms for balance. By making the ragdoll lighter and/or exaggerating the impact forces involved, you end up with a result that, while still not realistic, still tends to feel a bit less wrong than the alternative. Plus it's usually just more viscerally fun to send people flying. Now, there are some other ways around that. IIRC Call of Duty does a hybrid thing where they have pre-rigged death animations that switch into ragdolls at a preset moment, which makes it feel more natural and also helps to hide the transition between animation and ragdoll. But of course that requires you to make a whole new set of animations by hand, and quite a lot of them to avoid overly frequent repeats. Another option is using procedural animations like GTA does, but that's usually overkill unless you either have more money than god or specifically build your entire game around them.
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May 15, 2022 11:32
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FYI modern games very often combine ragdoll with authored animation. This is called “motorization”
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May 15, 2022 12:39
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Thanks for all the answers.
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May 16, 2022 14:29
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I'm thinking of making a video game. What should a game design document look like and contain?
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May 16, 2022 23:33
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Design doc is whatever you want it to be. It's entirely about supporting you/your team in developing the game the way you develop games. Assuming you're a solo dev and this is your first real project I'd suggest basically no design doc. Just have a vague idea of what you want and start putting it together. You'd have no idea what anything takes to make so your designs are as likely to be a pain point as a help and there's nobody else to communicate with. Once you've developed a prototype or at least put together a bunch of standalone systems that cover what you want to do, then you can fill out the design doc if you like.
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May 16, 2022 23:55
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Would you (experienced devs) recommend doing a vertical slice type of approach for a small game with a few systems or work on it chronologically or?
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May 17, 2022 00:05
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MasterBuilder posted:There is probably an obvious answer to this but why do dead ragdolled bodies have no weight to them. It just seems so odd that the instant something massive or even human sized dies it suddenly becomes paper light and can be punted across a level. Is there concern a player could get stuck behind a corpse? What's an easy solution to stop that preventing progress? You punt away corpses like polystyrene. Another way to look at it is, what if your animation puts you inside something? That the next step shoves the player leg into an object. You can just have it clip. You can prevent the player moving forward and have them run on the spot or stop. You can move the other object out of the way. Or you can use collision or IK to generate some new transforms on the fly. These then lead to sub things like, what if that new generated animation blatantly wouldn't support the weight of the player? Should they stumble and fall? You can go down this rabbit hole for months, or you can just punt them out the way.
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May 17, 2022 00:07
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VelociBacon posted:Would you (experienced devs) recommend doing a vertical slice type of approach for a small game with a few systems or work on it chronologically or? If your goal is to finish a game, and especially if your goal is to sell a game, then you should focus on getting your core gameplay loop implemented ASAP. Vertical slice is the go-to, in other words. You want to see if your ideas are any good as soon as possible; there's no point spending effort on working on things like actual gameplay art, nice UIs, etc. if the game behind them sucks. Once you're happy with your systems and core gameplay, generally you want to make a piece of content from somewhere in the middle of the game. The advantage to this is that you can assume that by that point, the player already knows how to interact with the game, but also you aren't trying to do the fancy endgame stuff. Your goal at this point is to get practice with making fun content. Don't start out by making the early-game content, because that stuff is crucial for getting the player hooked, and it needs to be tutorializing them on how to play the game. That stuff's complicated, so put it off until you better understand how your game works.
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May 17, 2022 00:26
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There is no standard format for a design document, especially if you’re solo and no one else will ever see it. Just try to make it able to answer any question you might have while imagining a play session. What are all the things the player can do at any given moment? What counts as victory and loss? How is the player’s performance graded and acknowledged? How are the game’s discrete content elements organized or separated? What are the items in the main menu and what do they do? List things or categories of thing that can appear in the game and describe them well enough that you could understand them if you didn’t revisit them for a month. These are just suggestions but they’re things I’ve found helpful in the past.
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May 17, 2022 03:54
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VelociBacon posted:Would you (experienced devs) recommend doing a vertical slice type of approach for a small game with a few systems or work on it chronologically or? What do you want to do with it? Like, distinctly are you making this for yourself as a hobby, as a potential income stream, as a business you'd like to start, etc? This is not game dev advice insomuch as it's just planning advice: I tend to work backwards from my goals. I don't think that's necessarily aligned with making a creative output, so I'd try to work from both sides and see where you can get them to meet.
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May 17, 2022 05:11
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VelociBacon posted:Would you (experienced devs) recommend doing a vertical slice type of approach for a small game with a few systems or work on it chronologically or? I used to make a lot of small (educational) games and the game dev process always started with a core gameplay prototype that I would build upon. After that it would turn into more of a vertical slice thing but still prioritizing gameplay over everything else.
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May 17, 2022 05:23
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MJBuddy posted:What do you want to do with it? Chernabog posted:I used to make a lot of small (educational) games and the game dev process always started with a core gameplay prototype that I would build upon. After that it would turn into more of a vertical slice thing but still prioritizing gameplay over everything else. Thanks. I'm just learning and I'm not at the point where it's a good use of time to put things together that I'm trying to figure out individually. No concrete goals here, I just want to explore the space and do little projects that make me happy.
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May 17, 2022 05:45
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If it is something I'm working on for myself as a indie hobby project then I prioritize getting something on screen that I can interact with. I find that helps keep me motivated and focused on the project.
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May 17, 2022 13:47
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At the start, I wouldn’t bother creating a detailed design document. I make sure to write down my ideas somewhere, but game design is usually a very iterative process, and you’ll likely be changing things constantly trying to find the fun. It’s easy to come up with something that sounds good on paper, but kind of sucks when you actually try it out. Once you’ve done some prototyping and have a clearer idea of what you’re going to do, you can go more in depth on documenting it if that helps your process, though for small scale projects, I wouldn’t go overboard on it. Unless it’s actually helping you, documentation for its own sake isn’t really useful. As far as actually writing the documentation, for my personal stuff I don’t use any standard format, just wiki pages organized however makes sense at the time.
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May 17, 2022 17:39
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I will say that writing stuff down in general is helpful for thinking through projects, even if you don't do a formal design document. 100% of the time, the idea in your head is woefully incomplete, and sometimes it's even self-contradictory. Writing stuff down requires you to get more concrete with your thinking, without having to put in the much higher effort of implementing things. It can help you identify gaps and contradictions. In general, game design is a very "risky" process, meaning that there are a lot of ways that the process can go awry. The sooner you identify your major risks and compensate for or work around them, the better. You don't want to invest a lot of effort into a project, only to discover that it was fundamentally flawed from the start. This is, incidentally, one reason why "just copy an existing game and tweak it a bit" is such a winning strategy. There's vastly less risk when you're working from an existing, proven set of systems.
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May 17, 2022 18:08
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Writing down an outline can also help defend against "feature creep". Pick your scope, limit the features to something you think you can get done in a time frame that fits your funds, equipment, time and attention span. Write it down then stick with that outline and pencil down new feature ideas in a different file or notebook.
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May 17, 2022 18:19
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On the entire opposite side of the spectrum: if your goal is to just mess around and learn things, then figure out a vague idea of what you want to do and just go for it. You’ll regret it if you try to turn it into a finished product later, but if what you want to do is make a cool parkour system and don’t care about anything else then you can just make the parkour system and figure out the rest on the fly.
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May 17, 2022 20:49
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What is the state of the Job market in game development at the moment? Are employers finding it hard to fill jobs or are there 250 applicants for every role? Has it been effected by the "great resignation"?
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May 26, 2022 02:52
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:What is the state of the Job market in game development at the moment? Are employers finding it hard to fill jobs or are there 250 applicants for every role? Has it been effected by the "great resignation"? Competent Seniors are very hard to find. Mids are getting 50+ resumes per opening.
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May 26, 2022 04:32
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Hughlander posted:Competent Seniors are very hard to find. Mids are getting 50+ resumes per opening. Seconded
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May 26, 2022 06:01
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give me a loving job
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May 26, 2022 06:26
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I would blow Dane Cook posted:What is the state of the Job market in game development at the moment? Are employers finding it hard to fill jobs or are there 250 applicants for every role? Has it been effected by the "great resignation"? My group doesn't have new headcount this year. Though that's more of a function of product lifecycle and transitioning people to a new engine. My group didn't get hit by the resignation very hard. We've also transitioned to being remote; though now that the office in SF is back open I hear the chef and rest of the culinary team is very good. That Little Demon posted:give me a loving job What's your experience? We have some open roles somewhere in our backend group, what looks like an entry level ML role with our monetization team, a couple gameplay roles open on New Game, and some eng adjacent stuff like tech art and QA automation. We also have open roles for project managers, data analysts, etc.
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May 26, 2022 13:24
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Hughlander posted:Competent Seniors are very hard to find. Mids are getting 50+ resumes per opening. Are your rates competitive to other tech? Last job search I had to turn down some staff roles because they weren't competitive (less than 50% then-current comp). E: I know of a large number of people that have left games because they could double+ their compensation. I know of one who left a staff role that was almost competitive with other tech for a principal role for an absolutely staggering amount of money paid in cash. leper khan fucked around with this message at 13:39 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 13:34
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leper khan posted:My group doesn't have new headcount this year. Though that's more of a function of product lifecycle and transitioning people to a new engine. My group didn't get hit by the resignation very hard. We've also transitioned to being remote; though now that the office in SF is back open I hear the chef and rest of the culinary team is very good. any open positions for an ideas guy?
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May 26, 2022 16:16
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That Little Demon posted:any open positions for an ideas guy? Only if you have an Ivy League MBA and no relevant experience.
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May 26, 2022 18:16
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MJBuddy posted:Only if you have an Ivy League MBA and no relevant experience. go on...
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May 26, 2022 18:28
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MJBuddy posted:Only if you have an Ivy League MBA and no relevant experience. I once shifted the paradigm to an agile model while pivoting to disrupt novel sectors in the web 3.0 space
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May 26, 2022 18:57
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