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Popping in to say I'll be hanging around to check for responses as well, I'm a 2D Artist at 4J Studios on Minecraft Console Edition in sunny Scotland and I've previously done some time as a mobile game artist.
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Sep 15, 2017 01:26
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Domus posted:Are there any games that come to mind that only industry people can appreciate? Like "Well the controls were clunky, the AI was stupid, the level design was terrible...but whoever did those doors knocked that poo poo out of the park!" I don't know if there are any games that only people in dev could appreciate, it's as you describe, we're often gamers much like yourself only we occasionally look at aspects of a game and go MOTHERFUCKER how did they do that!?? Before I worked in games I'd have had no way to know how the hell anyone did the art in Bastion but now I can see behind the curtain a bit, where assets are reused, where they start/end and how their editor must work for placing these assets on a grid. https://i.imgur.com/ojN1k4r.jpg Another one is looking at an Overwatch level and starting to notice where textures are tiled, how 3d meshes are broken down into modular sets that just let level artists place what they like, even looking at the OVerwatch characters and seeing the PBR shading at work on the materials and the intense application of raw animation fundamentals right from the classical school of 2d animation It also definitely gives you a lot of empathy for people in other dev situations, knowing that at XYZ studio besieged by angry redditors or are under pressure to deliver a GoTY, there are people doing their best and games aren't just crapped out of a corporate entity's rear end.
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Sep 15, 2017 19:48
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I woulda got away with it too had it not been for you blasted meddling kiiiiiiids buglord posted:What are your guys' experience with diversity in the workplace? But my experience is limited and I cannot speak for management-level people and how they might handle this. I have such a respect for those who go out of their way on this though. crusty posted:Why have all games since half life 2 been garbage?
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Sep 16, 2017 20:54
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theflyingorc posted:You actually want 8 year olds to be able to play your game - and you want his parents who have never played a video game before, too. This is a reason why we added a tutorial world and tutorials to Minecraft Console, a game which in earlier stages has needed players to use wikis to learn the game - and not everyone will do so before giving up. The more vocal gamers against tutorials are a minority, you tend not to hear from those who benefit from good tutorials. I'm a big believer in giving the player the information they need to get started and then build difficulty on top of that. There is no challenge in Dark Souls simply not explaining to you what stats or certain mechanics mean, that's just obfuscation and some players will check wikis and others won't. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 01:45 on Sep 18, 2017 |
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Sep 18, 2017 01:27
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mutata posted:Speaking of diversity, I absolutely think more guidance, training, consulting or hiring of people with outside professions like teaching or psychology would mostly be a great thing. God, yes. The more games are relying on real world skill specialties like architectural design, fashion design, writing for games, the more we need to start hiring ouside of game enthusiast circles. I keep raving about Marvelous Designer, but it's a perfect example of real world clothing and garment design knowledge being made applicable to games.
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Sep 18, 2017 13:53
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A.o.D. posted:Tl;Dr how come patch balance over functionality?? Bugs are generally more complicated to fix than balance patches and the update schedule can sometimes be set weeks in advance, sometimes a fix makes that lock-in date, sometimes not. Entirely possible for bugs and balance to be worked on at the same time.
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Sep 19, 2017 16:57
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Forer posted:So, I'm interested in getting in the gamedev field but I'm absolutely scared that crunch will eat me alive and I desperately want to avoid it. I'm interested in just junior design stuff but I have a LITTLE programming background and whatnot, and I know to keep filling out my portfolio with projects but, that crunch man, it just is so intimidating that I stop before I start. Is there anything to say to console me or is it just "YUP stay out if you hate crunch" I'm like five years in and managed near zero crunch so far, aside from oh crap we need to submit a thing definitely today can you stay back an hour or two? once in a while. I think it may help that I've only been a part of small studios? It is definitely possible to find a studio where upper management would rather push back schedule than grind the staff into the ground for extended periods. Thermal Anomaly posted:I'm a hobbyist game developer working for a startup, and I was wondering how small indie studios usually handle social media. Is it common for a small studio to handle social media themselves or do they contact or hire a social media manager? I've seen both! Whether hiring a media relations specialist or the CE/FO handling it - this can either be due to the low profile of the company and the relative low volume of social media work or that the stakes are high enough that a single misplaced tweet can make headlines so that responsibility may not be delegated. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Sep 19, 2017 |
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Sep 19, 2017 21:56
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I've posted this to y'all already but I think a good thing we can do as devs is be asked about all of the cool game tech stuff coming out that we might be able to shine some kind of light on, whether it's a sign of increasing complexity or some flash in the pan bullshit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo_FALeUc8c My first thought on this was more being impressed on the modelling end, I've no experience with face rigging but given performance capture that's been used for a while now, this kind of detail is pretty wild. The major and micro creases and subsurface detail that appear when an expression is pulled, all of that is pretty nutso. But again, I've no idea how much of this is raw concept and how much of this makes it into games 3-4 years down the line. I remember seeing the closeup character renders of BF3 characters and then playing the game like welp, you will never see that detail shooting the badmens or in the cinematic cutscenes so :p GeeCee fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Sep 20, 2017 |
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Sep 20, 2017 21:37
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Discendo Vox posted:How does the shift to longer-term DLC "seasons" or the "games as service" model Starbreeze touts, and other equivalents that aim for a long tail of activity and purchasing, effect the development cycle and project management? How do they effect quality of life and job security? There are still update deadlines to hit but it's definitely different being in a position of developing for an installed user-base than it is trying to make that initial push to gain a following or say, needing to hit the pre-christmas launch window that could make or break your company. I feel more secure right now for a number of reasons, but that is definitely one.
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Sep 21, 2017 00:29
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:What's the relationship like between people in the industry proper and people in games culture who don't make games - games journalists, streamers/let's players, pro players (for a competitive game), and so on and so on? At 4J, we've partied with some of the more famous console Minecraft youtubers like Stampylonghead, iballisticsquid, Sqaishey quack, Bigbst4tz2 and more. We've a good relationship going with them (they're all lovely people) but they're not given special NDA access or anything 
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Sep 21, 2017 14:06
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hey girl you up posted: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? Second hand info but lots of meetings, email conversations and conference calls, more still if you're deciding the direction of a game. And way more redrafting and tweaking. There's a big emphasis on keeping all of the leads and decision-makers on board with the writing, there is also the politics of writing for established franchises too, getting approvals from original IP holders and such, a lot of work there. Ofc there's more to writing in games than the main core plot/concept, everything from flavour text for items to minor NPC dialogue needs a writer's hand. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 02:49 on Sep 23, 2017 |
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Sep 23, 2017 02:38
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cubicle gangster posted:So here's a question for the game dev's - have you ever had co workers that still act like stereotypical gamers and feel games owe them something, despite working on them for a living? I imagine it's mostly limited to junior level, but is it ever a problem? I grew up a bunch that day.
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Sep 27, 2017 15:24
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The kind of microtransactions that get my goat are the ones that don't directly tie with a known purchase outcome - buying keys to unlock boxes and getting a random drop. Overwatch particularly. With some games you can either grind for random drops with the option to pay to buy the thing you want outright, but OW goes a step further and denies you that, giving you the choice of grinding or paying for more rolls of the dice. But then I'm not the money guy with the figures justifying the benefits of this kind of loot box monetisation, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or play games with it in.
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Sep 27, 2017 16:49
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theflyingorc posted:...very nearly everything in Overwatch can be gained by playing the game more? Very nearly everything currently available has a gold cost or comes from loot boxes. But my point is I can't just go "hey I want *that* Symmetra skin right now, it looks great I'd even throw you a couple of quid for that!" Instead the game would rather I either play the game for a long time, or game modes i can't stand hoping for that to drop or til I eventually accrue enough in-game credits to buy with that or use actual money to buy more loot boxes - more rolls of the dice It's great that you can get it without a single penny invested given enough time, but it's the randomness that gets me, gimme an honest storefront where i can get what i want rather than trying to grift time or the chance of more money on loot boxes out of me :L I reiterate that yeah, this is just a preference for me. I'm not saying it's all bad and should be burned down. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Sep 27, 2017 |
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Sep 27, 2017 20:20
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ninjewtsu posted:are there any games that you guys find particularly exemplary for your field? Like, if you're an artist, and were teaching a class on game art or something, what games would you want to have studied? Or what games are really interesting/solid from a design perspective? Guilty. Gear. Xrd. 3d is not averse to bending the rules to make a thing look good but Xrd took the traditional 3d art playbook and lit it the gently caress on fire. - The 2D hand-animated animators-intent look came before everything else, anything that looked too 3d/Next-gen was removed. - Frame rate of the characters artificially dropped and interpolation between frames removed to help push the 2d animated look - Characters are 100% flat textured (except v minor details). - Each character has their own light source and that lighting is adjusted BY HAND, on EVERY FRAME by tweaking vertex normals til the shadows fell over the character exactly as intended. - Meshes are contorted, squashed and stretched for maximum animation punchiness. Yeah those still frames of Overwatch's McCree being "broken" and exaggerated when he rolls? That's intended, old school animation principles at work. There's the whole GDC talk that Arc System Works gave on the subject here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E I think this talk is hugely important for 3D students as it's a great demonstration of the desired look demanding solutions, rather than doing what is taught and is normally considered industry standard. These guys put the desired look above everything else and worked their way there. There are few studios that can put out games that look like theirs right now. Also their Dragonball Z game looks siiiiiiiiick!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzqRyC9RQpw GeeCee fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Sep 28, 2017 |
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Sep 28, 2017 00:06
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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. A lot of the pull of cheats when I was a kid was either to derive enjoyment from games which were too hard for me (there were a lot in the 80s and 90s) or to mess around in games in ways that normally the game wouldn't allow within it's ruleset. Super Sonic in Sonic 2 was a cheat (you input a code) to make the game a different kind of playground where you were temporarily mostly invincible. IDDQD and similar in Doom is the same. That's still technically a legitimate form of play but the game hasn't been balanced or designed to accomodate that particular experience of exploring these levels in a completely threat-free way. Nowadays Minecraft has what would have been considered cheating back then: Creative Mode. You suspend the danger, give the player access to everything and they can fly. And that's basically it, there is a lot more awareness now among devs of allowing players different ways to enjoy a game that cheats aren't really that exciting or daring any more. MGS3, Bayonetta and some Platinum games even have super easy modes where you get an experience designed for players who would have major difficulty in normal play and would otherwise be the market for cheats. I totally think that daft bonus modes are a great thing to add to games, no gravity mode in a game reliant on physics, ragtime call of duty mode, but there's not that same need for cheats any more. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 18:55
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We get cute fanmail from kids every now and then 
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Oct 9, 2017 19:29
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Discendo Vox posted:I once considered calling into one of those orderup-type places and buying my favorite game's devteam a ton of pizza. I mean we do have a dominoes like 30 seconds walk from our door, it would arrive nice and hot if you were to lead by example and send us some of that doughy stuffed crust goodness for making your most favourite game ever. I'll have a Large Scrummy. 
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Oct 10, 2017 00:50
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Anil Dasharez0ne posted:I've been poking around the GDC Vault to try to learn more about what game developers actually deal with in making games, and so far it's been real fascinating stuff. Are there any talks that you guys would consider must-watches for a layperson trying to understand game development? My favourites are the GDC2015 Arc System Works talk about Guilty Gear that I linked earlier in the thread, the Feng Zhu one (which incidentally took place at exactly the same time slot) but honestly I've been to really very few talks I'd consider bad for the student/enthusiast. The grumpy seniors I know don't find them as useful though.
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Oct 10, 2017 01:07
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Overwatch inspires me visually as an artist, there's an upbeat colourful optimism to the artwork that is rare to see. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture is an incredible exercise in detailed worldbuilding. But Undertale helped bring me out of a particularly bad depressive episode and got me creating art again, that takes it for me. God I love that game.
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Oct 31, 2017 01:38
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Videogames do take up a big chunk of my free time, when I'm not doing other stuff with my life and working on personal art projects. I don't play Minecraft in my free time and there's never been pressure to research competition.
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Oct 31, 2017 21:10
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mutata posted:Hot Coffee was a turning point here. Easter Eggs and hidden stuff are much less interesting now since the whole industry watched a developer get taken to court and raked over the coals for unfinished content. God, this. Don't work your arse off to join the games industry just to piss it away because you wanted to put a poo poo meme in a secret corner of a game, it will be found, you will be found out. It's not worth it.
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Nov 2, 2017 20:54
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Mother posted:On the loot box / gambling / etc. topic from earlier (sorry I was off the grid for holiday) – Discendo Vox posted:I'm a payday 2 whale, ama. Chains is the best heister. Fight me if you disagree
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Nov 30, 2017 21:21
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LORD OF BOOTY posted:honestly, I wouldn't really consider Nier Automata an AAA game? like I honestly don't think that "AAA games" as we define them really exist in the Japanese industry, especially now that Konami's dead and Capcom is barely hanging on; the closest you get is stuff like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts, and those are massive weird outliers, not anywhere near the norm From the man who made Nier: Automata himself. Yoko Taro posted:“I think what’s happening at the moment in the Western video game industry is that there’s very much this polarization into the big triple-A games and also the indies, and there’s very little in the middle to fill that space. What’s happening is Japan is you’ve got a lot of games that maybe aim for triple-A but don’t quite make it there, and they actually come into that gap. So when these then go to Europe and America, they’re actually filling in that gap and they fit in really well in that niche market, and I think that’s why we’re seeing a lot of success with Japanese games at the moment.”
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Dec 8, 2017 02:56
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Yeah exactly. Valkyria Chronicles 4 if it turns out to be the return to VC1 greatness it is shaping up to be, not only will it rock my world completely, that's likely going to be a blockbuster in japan, unlikely it will that ever register on the scale of Call of Duty or an Assasin's Creed outside of japan but it will still do well. Plus success in a home market means a huge game for japan isn't company-crushing if it bombs in the US.
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Dec 8, 2017 18:48
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Bushmaori posted:So for my next question, forgive me if this has already been asked, I would like to know where you guys see the next generation of consoles going? I'm especially interested when it comes to the areas of mobility, like the Switch, backward compatibility (apparently easier now that nobody is using weird-rear end cell-processor technology?), and whether you see an increase in CPU power to aid in reaching a more common 60fps frame-rate. The next consoles will be powered by the A-HAB Engine™ which will give developers even more terafloopies in their games to dedicate to more elaborate sources of monetisation. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Dec 20, 2017 |
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Dec 20, 2017 02:19
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Chernabog posted:I also wonder how many gamers stick with games just for the sunken cost fallacy. Like they already put 20 hours into a game so they feel they must finish it. Or if the game has no ending like LoL or Hearthstone then it just becomes a loop. This hit me hard with single player open world games. The longer a story driven game pulls on, the more i tend to expect the payoff of the story to blow my face off and while there have been a few (jesus, Nier: Automata did), there have been plenty like farcry 3, farcry 4, mgs5, fallout 3 and 4 , skyrim, etc that just drag on way long and haven't a hope. I kept going in those games with that expectation and 
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Dec 30, 2017 21:57
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I suspect a lot of studios pulled in artists who were game artists first and concept artists second. More generalists and mixed roles at smaller studios, which were a lot more common in those days. So yeah, the one or two artists designing characters would be later modelling, rigging and animating them and those are hugely disparate skillsets.
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Jan 5, 2018 01:12
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hackbunny posted:and the rest were blatant amateurs (some haven't even improved since - yeah you Toby Gard, I've seen your Legend sketches). I've done some pretty lackluster work myself at the start of my career (programmer) and I wonder sometimes by what miracle they kept me. I've also explained that, as a fellow (former) amateur artist who could make passable art, I can tell when another artist doesn't quite clear the bar for "professional" Don't poo poo on other game professionals. Like, as a rule, just don't. You've not walked a mile in Gard's shoes, you don't know of what he contributed to Tomb Raider and the industry is a very small world.
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Jan 5, 2018 20:49
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Hey hackbunny, you PMed me instead of responding here, must have been a mistake. My point with that is that everyone talks to each other. Talk shite about one guy and there's a good chance someone knows them, it's a great way to filter oneself out of job apps. I offer that as advice, not a threat. Slagging on someone's work comes across as very unprofessional. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Jan 5, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 22:08
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Question I have for you. I just came out of my first time trying Oculus Medium and I have to wonder. Do any of y'all see VR tools entering some kind of professional Non-VR game artist workflow? Like how Wacom Cintiqs are in no way essential to game art creation in the least but are drat nice to use? GeeCee fucked around with this message at 00:02 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 5, 2018 23:39
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Whistling rear end in a top hat posted:That's true. I mostly meant for the era of games hackbunny was talking about. Nowadays physical releases are less of a thing and for the games that do make it to store shelves, the box art is depressingly homogeneous. I think that article is a bit unfair. There are enough games out there now that every variation in cover art has kinda been done a lot, especially with certain genres taking prevalence, plus it still has to communicate the game's purpose to the average casual gamer or non-gamer. To go minimalist is often for the games which can survive on brand name alone. Now mobile games icon art on the other hand...hard to go anywhere on app stores now without some clone of the clash of clans dude going AGHGHG at you. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jan 6, 2018 |
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Jan 6, 2018 23:25
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limaCAT posted:Second question: I can see graphics getting more complex but save for a few titles, AI or gameplay systems aren't scaling like graphics. I guess that in 2017 we could have had a game of The Sims with the same environmental density or complexity as Bioshock Infinite (or games like said Bioshock Infinite could have been better and more complex than System Shock). Why don't we get a new Ultima Underworld? Why is the industry relegating complexity to niche or kickstarted games? I think good game AI is hard to demonstrate and advertise nowadays, only the most interested of gamers are going to appreciate when it's done well. And with that, I suspect AI complexity has quietly been chugging along in it's own lane, you just don't hear about it the way like we did in the days before Oblivion (Full day AI cycles!) released. From purely a gamer's perspective, MGS5s AI is utterly superb yet it rarely gets much praise. Good AI may just be being taken for granted nowadays. As for gameplay, I suspect the conservative approach there is due to games being bigger investment risks than ever now and changing a previously winning formula without good reason might make the money-givers butts pucker a bit. So yeah, Indies have much more room to play about.
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Jan 7, 2018 19:49
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TearsOfPirates posted:Onto the question: What are the general UI design rules that make or break it? Also sans serif or serif? Comic sans and photoshop layer styles to emboss your buttons and give them top left drop shadows. and for the bad rules...
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Mar 2, 2018 21:49
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Genuine question. What is your commute like and what do you do on lunchbreaks? For myself, I can walk the whole eight minutes down the road into work no big deal as I live city centre, but how far out are you all commuting? Does this mean you have to stay in a more expensive city hub or is living further out in the burbs an option for you? As for lunches, we don't have any on-site catering and I'm lazy so more often than not I'm off getting lunch in the centre of dundee, coffee shop, baked potato, Boots sandwich, I could probably save a lot of money packing my lunches. But some of y'all work in these huge office campuses and often have on-site catering and food courts and stuff. Tell me about the not-work related aspects of your job.
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Apr 22, 2018 11:52
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Cocoa Crispies posted:We're talking about games, not portable dopamine stimulators. We are talking about games because mobile and f2p are games too, no matter what the r/gaming hivemind might suggest otherwise.
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Apr 26, 2018 01:51
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floofyscorp posted:I was asked to describe my game in 15 words or less yesterday and it was surprisingly challenging. So, fellow developers, how would you describe your current project in 15 words or less? "Ask your kids"  Virtual Lego. Punch Trees, Ride Pigs, Fight Beasties, Get Bling Armour, Get mad at the devs.
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Apr 26, 2018 11:35
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HolaMundo posted:
Yeah DLC and MTX are more of a thing now because of massively increased development costs, dev time, higher quality bar and static box prices over 40 years, so margins have been getting ever smaller. Extra Credits did a good rundown on this. https://youtu.be/VhWGQCzAtl8
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Apr 27, 2018 00:37
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One for the more longtime devs among you and more job-related. What kind of support can a newly hired dev expect in terms of moving support from major studios if you were moving internationally? I've only had to move from one end of the country to another so far and therefore had not much to worry about in terms of Visas, paperwork, sponsoring, finding accommodation for someone entirely new to the country, do they put you up somewhere? A stipend for temp accomodation? I imagine if you're senior and headhunted it would be a lot more than a regular application too. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Oct 14, 2018 |
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Oct 14, 2018 01:25
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Cocoa Crispies posted:It's hard to raise the price on a big-budget game sold in stores, so publishers tend to set prices that have worked for other games in the past. Complaints would get awful spicy and sales would drop off a cliff if those prices adjusted properly to like 90-100USD for a game for inflation alone let alone the adding the hugely increased cost of development nowadays. GeeCee fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Oct 20, 2018 |
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Oct 20, 2018 22:26
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