|
Avalerion posted:On that note, what happened to cheats? A lot of new games don't really do them anymore, or if yes then it's just debug console commands. Cheats were *usually* meant to be debug commands in the first place, especially on console. Modern dev kits include toggles that let you enable or disable debug/cheat commands while testing, but early ones just didn't, so to get any extensive or repeatable testing on a game you'd need cheat codes. Some special ones got added in as easter eggs, sure, but in most cases they were tools. Modern games still need those tools, so that's generally the starting point for cheats, if they're present, and generally the easiest way to make them available to the player is to let them use the dev console.
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2017 07:37
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 07:55 |
|
|
As long as I don't play games that are in my own genre, it doesn't feel very work-like to do so. I've noticed I appreciate different things, and I am exceedingly good at guessing where collectibles will be, but aside from that it still feels just as fun to play as it did 15 years ago. I've also become an 'activist' buyer, often buying games that aren't necessarily my jam because I want to support their creators. On the other hand, I no longer have any interest in make-your-own-games like Minecraft, since it's literally what I do at work. I'm much more excited by the chance to play through someone else's vision now that I can execute my own. My team runs a 'mature' game in a 'mature' space, so there isn't really the R&D that would direct us to play competitors, but we as a company absolutely have teams play other games in a genre while they're hashing out a new project. Not only is it best practice to know what's out there, but it helps you have a cohesive language and a set of markers to compare your own game to. You can say "I want to have exciting player movement," or you can say "I want the fluid character movement from Horizon: Zero Dawn, but with jump jets also." One will get everyone to nod and agree and then go make their own thing that they think is exciting, and the other will give them a target to shoot for. And yeah, breadth of experience is good for everyone, but especially game designers. Just learn everything and it'll all apply someday...
|
|
#
¿
Nov 1, 2017 04:08
|
|
|
This is a circular argument again. EA is big enough to have no morals other than "return maximum value to shareholders." This is their only purpose. They will only change their practices if they are forced to do so by law or if their revenue falls significantly. As long as they are big enough to be able to hold their IP and hold exclusive licenses to other IPs (Madden, Fifa, Star Wars, Sims) they do not have to think of the consumer as anything but a source for revenue. So far consumers have done nothing but reward this outlook. If you honestly believe that consumer desires aren't driving increases in graphical fidelity, game complexity, length, size, and story, just imagine if the new Mario game reused most of the models from Galaxy, and some of the maps. It might have been an okay game. Maybe even really good. Maybe even profitable. But it wouldn't have made the impact that Odyssey did. Now imagine if GTA 6 were the story of three new protagonists, fully voiced, with all new music, cutscenes, missions, and stunts, but it took place in the same world/levels/geometry as GTA 5. That game would still probably take more than 2 years and $200 million to make. Would it make that back? Could they "get away" with doing that again for 7? If they made a smaller world that looked better, how much smaller would be acceptable? How much shorter could the game be? How much more repetition would you put up with in the soundtrack? Everyone gave Mass Effect: Andromeda crap for how bad it looked and how grindy it got. Imagine if they cut half the story, only had one option for the player character's gender, and they had to cut down on the number of planet biomes and enemy types. With such a drastically lowered budget, could it have made money then? While it's true that not every new game has to match DICE in graphical fidelity, there is a minimum standard for how a game looks and that minimum goes up constantly. It will always take more time to make a model that looks good compared to the competition three years from now than it does now, and the artist that can make that model deserves to make more money, too. Player bases aren't growing faster than those costs. If there are to be new games at the AAA level, they will have to make more than $60 per player. This isn't to say that loot boxes are inevitable or that EA is doing it right. EA never does anything right if they can help it. Games, and probably the rest of the world, would probably be better off without EA. But until they are punished for doing the wrong thing they will continue to do the wrongest thing that makes them the most amount of money, because that is why a publicly-owned corporation exists.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2017 08:30
|
|
|
Bushmaori posted:To Tricky Ed - I appreciate the great post, you obviously know more about the actual environment that I do, but it leaves me with another couple of questions. You frame this as if AAA game development has approached a sort of tipping point where traditional funding through sales alone can no longer keep up. Does this mean that the industry as a whole is approaching this problem? I know that there are still many AAA developers outside of the scumosphere who do not use these manipulative practices. Is the evolving nature of the industry meaning we are ripe for another crash or other such disaster among all AAA developers who strive to overpush the envelope? I think we are past the tipping point for big games, yes, in the same way that Hollywood hit the blockbuster wall in the early 2000s and would probably be facing the same issues right now if China hadn't saved them. They kept throwing more and more money into stars and explosions with the hopes that a single mega-hit could sustain the rest of their efforts all year, in the same way that studios are currently throwing in more and more features to drive engagement and thus create the next "it" game that dominates the landscape and monopolizes player attention for years. The publishers are absolutely to blame for this cycle, as they're generally the ones who push developers to promise more than they're comfortable with. They're the ones who look at market research and say "games with roguelike elements/crafting/team PvP/survival elements are outselling other games right now, so we need you to put that in." They also say "Hey, your project was late and over budget. You need to find a way to increase your revenue stream so you can maybe see some profit on it." Sure, developers can push back on this, but when you don't have the money to fund yourself you don't get to argue all that much. So sometimes they overextend and it pays off in the form of a hit (Horizon Zero Dawn) or sometimes they overextend and it... doesn't (LawBreakers, Mass Effect: Andromeda). I think there's definitely going to be another round of studio/publisher collapses and reorganization coming in the next few years. Visceral getting demolished is a sign. So is the reorganization that happened within Ubisoft. Both EA and Ubi are trying to scale globally, allowing their specialists to specialize further and hopefully gain efficiency by minimizing ramp-up and ramp-down cycles. Their hope is that their engine programmers will always be at work on their shared engine, their UI people will implement the same UI tech with different skins on every title, their environment artists can use a shared pool of assets to build for each title, etc. It might enable smaller teams to "punch above their weight" and make games that look like they cost more than they did, or it might make every game look and play the same since so much is being shared. Everyone's scrambling for something, though. Loot boxes are just today's fad.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2017 07:20
|
|
|
Yeah, ultimately any decision just comes down to 5-10 people in a room doing what they think is right. The difference is, of course, what factors in to "right." The bigger the company, the more likely they're leaning towards following a trend, minimizing risk, and maximizing profits, and the less likely they're considering fun or mechanics. Companies where they do both are rare.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2017 11:31
|
|
|
Chernabog posted:I left it somewhat vague just to hear different opinions but I guess I didn't make it clear enough. I wasn't thinking about bugs, but about odd gameplay/balance decisions that may not be apparent to the players. The designers balancing a game with lots of discrete abilities, such as a card game, have different priorities than the players. The Magic team often straight-up states "We don't want every card to be equally powerful. We intentionally make some that are weaker than others." Trying to make everything viable often leads to an arms race where by the time you've buffed up everything that was weak, the things that were strong are now average at best. Similarly, rushing to get fixes into a competitive game where the meta is constantly evolving is often a fool's errand. Maybe your change will expand the options available to players, or maybe it will expose another weakness and collapse the playspace even further. When you're running regular paid-entry tournaments the known but non-optimal situation is often seen as better than the unknown. Monetization and fun are often at odds. Designers usually try to balance this as best as they can, but ultimately they don't keep working unless the game makes money, so they'll often lean too hard on the money side despite their better judgement. Often the justification is that it's possible to relax monetization mechanics post launch but nearly impossible to add them in. There are as many different opinions on difficulty as there are players, and again it's "safer" to shade towards too difficult than too easy. As long as it's not artificially difficult due to obfuscation, controls, or inconsistencies, a hard game presents a challenge to the player, which is generally the point. A game that doesn't require you to explore its mechanics might as well not have any. Oh and also often people make mistakes or just plain don't have time or perspective to make better decisions. Tricky Ed fucked around with this message at 08:24 on Feb 7, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2018 08:15
|
|
|
happyhippy posted:Why do some games allow a smooth Alt+Tab so you can access whatever, but others throw a loving fit and won't load up or go fullscreen again? Also sometimes it's just because handling the interaction between an application and the OS is kind of tricky, and if you don't set up your game correctly from the beginning it's nigh impossible to add later. In the old days you'd lose some ungodly amount of 3D performance in Windows if you didn't lock your application to fullscreen, but that's not a problem with more recent DirectX releases.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2018 04:19
|
|
|
My commute is about 20 minutes from 'burb to 'burb by car. We're not part of a complex but there are a few restaurants within walking distance, a whole lot more within 10 minutes' drive, a delivery option, or in times of duress there are enough free snacks to cobble together a meal. Lots of people bring their lunches and while I should for health and financial reasons, I don't because I like seeing the outside of the office for a little bit every day. When I first moved out here to SoCal there were generic trucks where you could get an okay meal for $5 or so but everyone's trying to out-epic each other now. We used to have food trucks regularly but as meal prices passed those of the restaurants nearby and everyone started putting truffle oil on everything, people stopped buying their stuff so now we don't get them any more.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2018 07:42
|
|
|
Shaocaholica posted:My question is, are developers still working right up to the limit of consoles even if consoles end up going to 16GB/32GB? If there is a limit, a game will find it. Particularly since being efficient with memory has a cost in engineering time (and, to some extent, art) that isn't otherwise visible to the public, and being wasteful with memory is often a performance boost.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2020 09:33
|
|
|
As a designer with a little bit of programming education, I try to design for extendability and flexibility, but often that's at the expense of usability or performance if no one checks me. The times I've gotten exactly the system I put on paper have generally had worse outcomes than the times the programmers and I worked together to figure out what I actually meant. That doesn't mean I don't spend a lot of time thinking through my system design first, but we have fundamentally different thought processes and collaboration gets us to a better end result. Usually.
|
|
#
¿
May 4, 2020 17:41
|
|
|
I think a major problem in the industry is that QA is generally respected personally (as in devs know QA are people and relate to them as such) and profoundly disrespected structurally. It's hard to convince management to pay QA anywhere close to what they're worth, so it can't be a career, so the good people constantly have to move on. I was very fortunate to start in QA and jump up to design relatively quickly, and if I'd had student debt or a family to support or even a car payment I wouldn't have been able to afford to stay with the company long enough to do that. Underpaid entry-level work self-selects for privilege, and that keeps the industry homogeneous. Things continue to get better over time, but like all positive change it's slow and easy to jam up, especially if you've got anyone who loves to collect personal power to the exclusion of everything else. As for Twitch, in the best case it's everything you ever wanted from a blind tester. Facecam, thoughts, strategies, high points, pain points, bugs. But normally if I'm watching a stream of our game it's as background noise while I work in another tab.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2020 03:01
|
|
|
Yeah, it's been REALLY variable for us, but it feels like we're around 80-85% of our normal capacity right now. It helps that we're an established team and we're used to just doing our individual work without a lot of collaboration. Parents are hit a lot worse than people without family members to care for. Some people have run into infrastructural stuff like "we don't have separate places for people to work" and "our internet data is capped" but the company's been good about helping where they can. I wouldn't want to be in the commercial office building business right now. We're looking to aggressively downsize and transition to majority WFH and I can't imagine we're alone.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 28, 2020 07:46
|
|
|
mutata posted:I agree with Gearman. Learning how to learn tools is more important than learning some specific tool. Learning how to make Good Art is most important. This is true, and once an artist is looking at your portfolio your work will be what's judged and not your tools. However, your resume needs to get through HR before anyone looks at your portfolio, and if Max/Maya isn't on there it might never get seen by the art team. If possible I would recommend taking advantage of student licensing to get familiar with the Big Two, but do the bulk of your work in whatever is available. Being able to discuss the differences in the software packages will be a good thing in the interview as well. If this professor is able to use academic licensing to provide a semester of experience with Max or Maya (and introduce blender for personal use), I think that would be the best for career advancement.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 22, 2020 20:08
|
|
|
punk rebel ecks posted:I have two questions: Working as a game developer varies wildly in quality. It's nearly always worse for you if you're not white and male. Rockstar is worse than you've heard. EA is often better than you'd think. A lot of it depends on your team and your particular studio. The unfortunate truth is that the industry as a whole underpays and is pretty terrible at project planning, but for many of us the opportunity to work on something fun is worth the tradeoffs. I personally haven't ever had a job that I loved as much as this one, and probably won't again. I'm also working hard to not have to do it in my 50s. If you don't have a way to generate significant hype outside of Steam, you will almost definitely make negative money on a new game. You need marketing and luck to get your game in the hands of people who want to play it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 23, 2021 04:50
|
|
|
thebardyspoon posted:Still any advice would be very useful. Get thee to the negotiation thread. Your best practice will be to say "We can discuss that once we've determined whether I'm a good fit for the position and I can see total compensation" or something like that, but super duper read that thread.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 2, 2021 01:44
|
|
|
TooMuchAbstraction posted:
This is legitimate. If they won't provide a detailed plan for exactly what your money is paying for, don't sign. Can they show you examples of their campaigns for other studios, and what the results were? Can you contact those studios to see how they feel about the campaign now?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2021 18:49
|
|
|
The problem with each of those poorly-received games is one of expectations. Most of the times when this happens you start out with the idea of expanding your existing IP into a new market, which obviously means making something that appeals to a different group of people than the people who are currently fans of your IP. That ideal target market might include your current fans, but it necessarily will not be solely focused on that fan group. The trouble is that fans haaaaaate being told that they aren't the most important people in the world. This is something that game fans understand, but it is not something that marketers understand. Diablo Immortal shouldn't have been announced at Blizzcon, period. It's not targeted at Blizzcon people and will not be received well by them. It also won't really benefit from early hype, so it is really mystifying why they would choose that place and time to do it (unless they knew the project was going to go into shareholder reports and they'd lose the spotlight?). It's got the potential to be absolutely enormous but there's not a lot of overlap with the PC-centric crowd. When you have a convention of people who love the things you already make, you announce more of the same to them. It didn't help that the presenter didn't have any clue what to say or do when he got the response he did, which compounded the tonedeafness of the presentation. If they'd announced something for PC people before that, and then said "and we've also got a small team of people working on this phone game, which you also might like," it might not have been as hated. SimCity 2013 had a lot of poorly-received decisions made for it that absolutely came from upper management. It was the final nail in the Maxis coffin. However, all of that could have been fixed if they had released a game that worked like SimCity. I was a huge SimCity fan and the reason I didn't engage with SC5 wasn't the online stuff (I thought that was weird but they'd probably figure out a better way to do it eventually), it was because the simulation was broken in ways that broke the illusion of an inhabited city. They made something that looked right but played wrong, and that can't be fixed. Again, it's an easy thing to explain to someone who plays games but impossible to explain to someone without that context. I'll throw in another example, XCOM: the Bureau Declassified. It's an okay game, by all accounts. It tries some innovation and the story got jumbled a bit, but it's serviceable. The problem was that it got announced before the strategy game reboot from Firaxis was announced. Switch the order of those two announcements, and people are ecstatic. I'm sure the marketing people at 2k looked at the two projects and thought the Bureau showed better, which was probably true, but putting that out first into a void where no one but hardcore fans remembered the franchise was a mistake. The first reaction was "Dammit, the rights holders for XCOM obviously don't understand it, and they're just putting out a dumb shooter with the XCOM name attached, this can do nothing but suck, and I can only hope for the company's demise so the rights can go to someone else," when it could have been "Awesome, a new XCOM strategy game after 15 years! Made by a studio that makes and loves turn based games! Oh, and they're expanding the lore around it with this interesting little side thing, I guess, which I, the XCOM fan, can ignore since it isn't turn based!" Brand managers all want to develop transmedia franchises. Card games, board games, novels, TV shows, movies, whatever. In a lot of cases it's cheap/free for the rights holder to develop the side thing, putting the risk of development on the company who makes the thing, and the upside to that method is that if the thing hits you collect royalties, and if it doesn't you didn't really pay much to do it and it got your name into a new place. These are, incidentally, the same sort of people who think that unpaid internships are cool and good, and that exposure has value in itself. They're very likely to say "let's make a viral video." It's a very mass media approach and not one that actually applies to much of the world right now, but it fits what most people who sit on company boards expect so that's who gets listened to. Games are interactive and create a feeling of ownership that other media doesn't. Think about how most single player games are about you, the player, solving everything. It's super empowering! When a company that made a product like that tells you that you're not the most important person in the world, it feels like a betrayal. It's not something that's easy to understand if you haven't felt it. Ultimately that's why stuff like this happens and will continue to happen. Companies need to get better at managing expectations, and fans need to understand that companies are always going to want to cast a wider net.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2021 01:08
|
|
|
It's also absolutely true that my team has passed on prospects because they were clearly only seeking this job because the place they wanted to be wasn't hiring at their level. If you're applying at a studio, make sure to at least play a game they have and be able to say intelligent things about it, and try to talk more about the place you're applying to than the place you really want to work in your interview. We had multiple people who we told after the phone screener "Please download and play our game before your interview," and most of them didn't bother. Unsurprisingly none of those people got the job. We did hire people who weren't fans of our games, but they all at least played them and were able to discuss their experience outside of a framework of "this is how your game differed from the game I actually like."
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2021 04:26
|
|
|
VelociBacon posted:I always wondered about this because it seems like if you're hiring for xyz studio position you don't just want someone who LOVES one game you made 5 years ago. I get that often people hire from communities and stuff like that but generally I always thought candidates with excellent portfolios would be more strongly considered over someone with a weaker portfolio who just desperately wants to work at your shop. I guess what I didn't really communicate is that this is a method of differentiating between candidates who we think have the skills to do the job. If you're to the point where you're interviewing with the team, that's the assumption. The people who don't have relevant skills hopefully get filtered out before that point. The "one game you made 5 years ago" thing might actually be important if you're interviewing with a team of people that contributed heavily to that game. It might not, if the people who made it aren't there any more. Try to know who you're going to talk to and demonstrate that you "get" what they do and how you can contribute to the thing they're working on now. It's less about showing passion and more about showing that you're willing to put effort into integrating with the team, and you're excited to work with them. As for our team it's more that we work on a long-running complex game, and someone who understands the particulars of our game is easier to bring on board than someone who understands a competitor's game, and that person in turn is easier to bring on board than someone who doesn't have any experience in the genre. This is probably less pronounced with other games, or at studios that mainly do one-offs. What I'm saying is if you're a big fan of, e.g., Mario, but you're interviewing with the Sonic team, be able to talk about Sonic and what you like about that game, not only the things you like about Mario. If you're going to be working on a Sonic game, you need to demonstrate that you understand what makes a Sonic game appealing to the Sonic audience.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2021 12:42
|
|
|
Video games are maturing as an art form, and like every other form of art there will be cycles of iteration and innovation. Like every other art form, the more resources the artists need to produce their vision, the more that vision will be compromised by the people providing the resources. Like every other art form, there are examples of bad but successful art and good but unknown art. Like every other art form, media coverage is inequitable and biased. Like every other art form, most of what you're seeing right now isn't what you're going to remember fondly in 10 years. Video games have the supreme disadvantages of being platform dependent and generally locked behind many layers of rights, and that's only getting worse. It's already very difficult to play many of the foundational works in the genre, and it's going to get more so as technology continues to progress. Preservation efforts are important. As for what you can do? Enjoy the games you enjoy! Seek out the weird and wild, going beyond Steam or even Itch. Support the people trying to make it outside the system. Support archives and incubators, if you can. Maybe a game you love will be co-opted by Ubisoft and become the next big thing! Games may be maturing, but we're still young, and there's a lot of "out there" still to find.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2022 21:50
|
|
|
Absolutely. Good, thoughtful criticism of the company's products is usually a bonus, especially if you have a good solution to the issues you bring up, and even more especially if you can speculate about why it was made the way it was. After the initial screener interview, we have our candidates play a specific portion of a game and ask for feedback. The good ones pick up most of the problems we've identified internally and have some ideas about how to address them. The poor ones say "I didn't like it much" and have no more thoughts, or just don't do it at all. I could totally see a younger, more internet-poisoned me barging in to a game company and asking them why they made the new one suck so bad and completely torpedoing the whole thing, though. So, you know, tact.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2022 18:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 07:55 |
|
|
After a real crunch, I need 2 weeks of time off to function at all, and probably about a week of normal time at work per 2 weeks of stress before I'm back up to speed. Taking a more solid break of a month helps reduce that time, but that's tougher to do the smaller your team is.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2023 06:01
|
|