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I have no desire to do it, I'm just curious: what does the writing process look like at a AAA shop? How does it compare to movies/tv?
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Sep 22, 2017 17:00
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theflyingorc posted:This is something that good designers recognize. Players are actually really good at telling you what sucks about your game, because they're experiencing it! There's very little reason for their opinions about what they don't like to be wrong. The good ol' "X-Y problem".
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Sep 26, 2017 16:38
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Mother posted:In television or movies, the script is what you’re doing. Things are changed even during shooting but the script is still the map. With game dev, in a lot of places, this is not the case – giant chunks of the writer counted on will be cut or changed as the reality of the development schedule settles in and the writer will be expected to “revise” lines and story to make sense of what they are given. ShinAli posted:The general plot writing comes in relatively early with adjustments made during the course of development, which varies in severity of the changes based on how important writing is to the game. I imagine for something like Uncharted its locked in pretty early, but DOOM had its final plot and writing come in really really hot during the last few months of production. Like just months before I remember the plot being something entirely different to what we have now. Very interesting and enlightening, thanks. I've been enjoying the Scriptnotes podcast, where two screenwriters talk shop, and was curious how video games fit into things. I figured it'd be close to how they've described TV writing, where the season's arcs for story and character are broadly scripted out, and but later episodes are being written written as earlier ones are filmed. And the answer seems to be (which, of course, I should have known) It Really Depends. Thanks again.
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Sep 27, 2017 13:09
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AnElegantPeacock posted:I've been a network guy for my entire professional career. I went network because I hate coding. I decided I would try and make a game in Unity during my days off instead of spending a small fortune at the bars every weekend. Turns out, I still hate coding. Making notes and designing the game in my notebook makes the hours fly by. Messing around in Blender is great. Making pixel art with this fancy digital tablet is endlessly entertaining. Unfortunately opening up visual studio makes me cringe. Any professional coders have any tips for making it over the hump between coding being a chore and coding being something natural? Is this something I'm just going to have to beat my head against until it clicks? I always tell my students that coding is like sculpting. (Or at least what I imagine sculpting to be.) There are some days where you're working on the arch of a nose or the detail of a finger, and truly feel like you're making great art, but then there's the days where you're just chopping away at a big stone block until it's in the vague shape of a dude giving a thumbs up so that you can get working on the "real" part. It can be laborious and dull, and you better not mess it up. (For me, that's anything involving a GUI  )The question I usually pose my students who are interested in pursuing programming (or advanced math): If you work on a really hard problem, one that leads you down the wrong path a few times, but you finally work out in the end, how do you feel afterwards? Do you get psyched up and pumped at finding the solution, in a way that makes it all feel worth it? Or do you get annoyed that this dumb problem took so long to solve and now all you have is this simple-looking answer? If your personality is closer to the former than the latter, then you'll enjoy a lot more of the work. You can become an expert either way, but it'll be a lot easier if you can learn to celebrate the hard-fought victories. The worst part about starting coding is that the beginning stuff can be bland. There's a lot to learn before you can start actually solving problems. And far, far too many introductions fall into a trap of either jumping straight to some magic code that gets things working (but you have no idea why) or going incredibly deep before producing any meaningful results (which can overwhelm with details). hey girl you up fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Oct 13, 2017 |
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Oct 13, 2017 18:20
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Downs Duck posted:I couldn't program my way out of a paper bag so that's one title I haven't considered before, thank you. I haven't played the first Borderlands, but otherwise I wouldn't call the loot "unbalanced". It's a FPS diablolike, so the random guns/grenades/armor/etc. there spawn just like any gear grinder, and just like any other gear grinder, you'll not care about a lot of them. The loot is definitely balanced, and that balance is on a continuum. It's worth noting that Legendary and Unique weapons are way weirder than Diablo/Path of Exile/the hour of torchlight I've played and some are definitely better than others. Especially given the oddities of the rarest weapons, if you're min-maxing, then yeah, it's probably "unbalanced" at a given rarity level, but I think the game has the balance the developers intended. Also, the Lascaux might be my favorite joke/gimmick/whatever in a video game, so if any of you did that: props.
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Jan 13, 2018 19:28
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:For games like Hearthstone, or indeed any game that has to cert to either the Apple Store or one of the console's, it's inordinately expensive to make frequent, small changes. Making the change is one thing, but then you need to QA that change and then cert the build. Hyper Crab Tank posted:Plus their patch cycle is horrendously slow due to wanting to have the game on phones, which consistently have awful patch mechanisms. edit: I suppose I heard horror stories back in the ps3/360 days, so things might have changed since then? hey girl you up fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Feb 9, 2018 |
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Feb 9, 2018 04:53
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From the outside looking in, it seems like any "frames per second" measurement other than 1/(largest frame draw time in a second) (i.e., minimum instantaneous framerate) is not a measurement useful to a viewer. If someone was driving on the highway, sat in stopped traffic for 15 minutes, and drove the remaining 60 miles in 45 minutes, no rational person would say, "You drove a solid 60 miles per hour, my dude, don't see what the issue is."
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Feb 12, 2018 20:03
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:Before I built tools, I was a hardware analyst, and benchmarking games was a really big part of what I did. Right, I get (almost) all of that. What I'm saying is when a game is reported/advertised as "30 FPS lock", this clearly means something different to consumers ("oh, 30 fps mean a new frame every 1/30th of a second; I shouldn't see any hitching") as opposed to stakeholders ("we will deliver 30 frames every second"). Canine Blues Arooo posted:The report generally would include actual frame rate over time as a line, several percentile points (5%, 10%, 25%, 90% was pretty normal), mean FPS, standard deviation, and then something to normalize the variance exhibited by the standard deviation when frame rates were higher or lower. A simple version would be 'SampleVariance = Mean / StdDv'.
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Feb 13, 2018 21:23
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Star Warrior X posted:In that case, is there no middle ground purpose for a union or guild? Nothing it can do that requires less collective power than the full ability to strike against a studio, to back up its collective negotiating stances? Does this truly need to be a one-step process, from nothing to full-blown every-studio-vs-a-union-rep contract negotiation all at once? 0: Employee is unhappy with something. It could be "the new printer was installed right next to my desk and it's too loud," it could be "I am being asked to do something that goes against my contract," or it could be "I am being asked to do something that does not explicitly go against my contract but I feel is unsafe/illegal." 1: Employee documents the issue and brings it up their boss within a reasonable time frame. They try to solve the problem informally. If it can be solved informally, great. (Sometimes optional, sometimes required, sometimes not a step, depending on contract/law.) 2: Employee and a union representative meet with the supervisor (and possibly others) to try to solve the issue and determine whether it is actually a proper grievance or not. The grievance is compared to past precedent, and people try to hash out a formal or informal resolution. (Whether an issue is a formal grievance or just a complaint will depend on your contract, but any safety issue, legal issue, or contractual issue would generally be covered.) 3: Possibly some internal appeals process. 4: Arbitration. Expensive and time-consuming. The overall goal is to resolve things before this point. There is generally a timeline for each step of the process, including the first report. Having a union rep involved helps ensure that not every employee need be an expert on the finest details of the contract and previous precedent, and it lets the union be the "bad guy" in place of the employee. It's not a one-sided thing, either. Reporting time limits, documentation, and forced arbitration also serve to protect the company, especially from boneheaded middle-management decisions. Also benefiting the company, the union has its reputation to look out for in the grievance procedure; they want management to pay attention when a grievance is filed. As a result, they will generally tell their employees, "Nope, you're in the wrong on this one. Management is completely allowed to limit you to two pads of post-its a day. We can go with you to try to work something out with the boss, but if she says no, we can't and won't do anything about it." If the issue is a particularly big one, it'll come up again at the next contract negotiation. hey girl you up fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Apr 9, 2019 |
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Apr 9, 2019 16:13
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edit: oh hi, new pageDreadCthulhu posted:Re: indie projects, was there a secret sauce behind some of my favorite teams such as Thatgamecompany and Supergiant games? All industry veterans? Did dozens of indie projects before striking gold? Magical confluence of all the right talent at the right time? leper khan posted:Survivor bias. Definitely survivor bias, but I think there's more than that. They didn't come from nowhere. For thatgamecompany, Jenova Chen's student projects were already very well-received. For Supergiant, the studio came from the Command and Conquer/Red Alert games. When they started their studios, they both probably already had some way to get at least a single look at their game from the media and from the console companies. And then they made good games on a (presumably) strict budget and timeline.
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Sep 21, 2019 15:53
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