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Is this a safe space to complain about the gaming community? Mostly kidding, but as someone in both AAA and indie since '99 I do wish the public would let the actual game developers decide what's best for them, whether that's unionizing or asking for support or whatever. I've been in bad situations and great situations and there's a lot more to it than how many hours I work in a week. Internet lynch mobs should not be the default reaction to every issue. GC_ChrisReeves posted:Yeah, I wish it was just kids but I'm getting increasingly more convinced the issue of game dev working conditions is one of those subjects right now that attract the attention of the far right, gaters, russian sockpuppets, bots, trumpsters etc etc. Just another angle to sow division. Are you Chris Reeves from BioWare Austin? And for the record your sentiment here is spot on. Chewbot fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Nov 8, 2018 |
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Nov 8, 2018 06:12
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FourLeaf posted:It's a long video but I'm wondering what the experts in the thread think about it. It was also interesting to think about dialogue in games that are widely considered to have good writing, like Witcher 3, and compare it with his "Accept-Reject-Deflect" trinary. Oh hey, something I'm somewhat qualified to talk about; I wrote the Banner Saga and have worked at BioWare. I also know Jon Ingold! On the first Banner Saga we used Inklewriter (his branching dialogue program) and even had them develop some features for us. I coincidentally watched the video already. From the point of view of his talk, I think it's very well presented with some great ideas about structure and remembering to convey the intent of the story. I agree with his assessment that most game writing is "bad", but I don't think it's the developer's fault. It's not because the games industry is filled with amateurs compared to other industries. Game writing is a casualty of game development, to the point where most developers "give up" on good writing because it's extraordinarily hard, resource-intensive and only a small percentage of your audience even cares about it in the first place (for most games). In fact, it's a liability- if you don't try to make a good story, your audience shrugs and doesn't care and still has a good time. But god help you if you try to write a good story, because suddenly everyone becomes a literature professor. As some comments have already mentioned, the fact that tv or movies is a linear experience lets you precision-tune the pacing to your exact needs, and pacing is king. If the story beats are "off" by even a minute or two everything falls apart and feels wrong. Some directors can make exceptions that work, with extraordinary effort. Now take even the most simple gaming experience- maybe you're engaged in dialogue, then expected to walk to the next bit of dialogue. The player can ruin this in a million ways. They can get distracted by the environment, or side content, or just have to reload a couple times or engage in actual gameplay. Imagine a movie where the protagonist grinds mobs for literally 20 minutes between conversations, or a movie where you watch him drive his entire commute to work for 15 solid minutes while nothing happens. This is 90% of what makes up most games. There are other issues he doesn't have time to mention, beyond the actual quality of the writing. A movie is a passive experience- the viewer doesn't have to understand what is going on for it to end the right way. A lot of movies will even intentionally confuse the viewer. A game player needs constant motivation, they need direction, they need to always know what they're doing or so-help-me-god they will feel lost and blame the game. Presenting all this information to a player through dialogue is extremely unnatural. Take the Assassin's Creed example: the speaker has awkward, ham-fisted lines telling Kassandra where to go- twice- and at the end of the conversation the player is still probably thinking "wtf am I suppose to do?". We give them literal GPS so they don't get lost. In a movie, all the viewer has to do is try and keep up with the narrative, not direct the movie themselves. Additionally, what a character says in a game, and what they do, are completely at odds. To fill hundreds of hours of gameplay, the player performs an impossible series of tasks, from killing hundreds of people, or being essentially invincible to not needing food, shelter, sleep, entertainment or companionship. In an RPG we steal everything we can find and then have to pretend to care about an NPC being hanged for thievery. The player will naturally make decisions that are good for gameplay, even if they make no sense in the context of a story. Then, in conversation, the player has to pretend that their character is a real, relatable human being. How, exactly, do we expect good writing to erase this? These things sit poorly in the back of our minds, and we start to think the writing must be bad. Movies or books often give the viewer a wide breadth of things to think about : feelings, relationships, different aspects of life. Games usually funnel down into retreads of the same tiny number of plot points which accommodate gameplay. How many games stories are about either survival or duty (such as saving the world)? How many times can you be impressed by a story trying to tell you the same exact thing? Movies can offer an almost infinite spectrum of topics that make up good stories, games offer: survival or duty. Agency is its own entire can of worms I could write a whole book about. Being able to come up with a plan or goal on our own and then act on it is what makes us real people. In a movie, the protagonist has complete agency, to the point that the viewer themself often doesn't know what he intends to do. Their motivation does not have to match the viewer's motivations. In a game, if you tell someone to take on a role they'll inject themselves. Take something like Fallout 4, where the conceit is that your child was stolen from you, and you have to find out what happened to them. In a movie- perfectly reasonable premise. As a game, a prime example of bad writing; most players didn't come to Fallout to roleplay looking for a baby. And as this relates to agency- even in a sandbox game, we're constantly told what to do. We cannot come up with our own solution to find our son, we can only perform the series of tasks handed to us. Every moment that doesn't feel like our own decisions are playing out in believable ways comes across as bad writing. A narrative can only be hand-held so many times before it begins to feel subconsciously artificial. So on that topic, there's also the fact that gamers are coming at a game experience from so many different directions. In a movie, you have one option: just let it all wash over you. At the end, decide whether you enjoyed it or not. In a game, some players want to control the situation. Some will want to "play along" with the story. Some are just trying to figure out which choices will make the characters gently caress, some are spamming the "next" button to get back to the action. Good luck accommodating all these things- and believe me, the number of kind, lovely players who come into a game willing to experience the creator's vision is the minority at best. Most are trying to "win" the conversation, or bend the game to their will. Ingold's idea of giving players an accept/reject/deflect option isn't bad, and a lot of story-driven games do this (like old BioWare). But it also leads to a character who can feel bi-polar, because their responses from one conversation to the next can swing wildly, and this again leans into a subconscious feeling that the writers are at fault for bad writing. The alternative- giving the character a consistent personality or attitude- takes away player choice and will frustrate players who don't want to role-play that personality. See: LA Noire, in which I thought Cole was a wonderfully consistent protagonist, but which many players considered "terrible writing". Lastly, anyone who has made a game can tell you how hard it is to communicate even the most simple ideas in an interactive environment, much less complex ones. If a player is confused by something, it's bad writing. If your writing is so simple that everyone understands it, it's bad writing. In conclusion, when gamers say that games have "bad writing" what they're really saying (most of the time- this is a generalization) is that the game didn't meet their expectations. They wanted to do or say something they couldn't, they expected the game to respond in unreasonable and infinite ways, their character behaved in a way that they wouldn't, or they expected movie-level subtext and pacing from a medium that simply can't deliver it. All the things that we easily accept from a linear experience like movies, tv or books are brought into question in an interactive one. It's my opinion after doing this for nearly 20 years and having more experience with branching, interactive writing than most people on the planet, that game writing will never be as "good" as bespoke movies, tv or books. There is no secret-sauce combination of words that will somehow be more effective at delivering a written story than a non-interactive experience. However, games deliver an unique experience. If you can overlook the inherent flaws, and stop yourself from overthinking things, you get to be a part of the story. That non-passive experience can be a truly powerful and personal one, and occasionally a better one than anything a passive experience can provide. Thanks for taking the time to read my take on it, and hopefully I didn't come across as too arrogant! Chewbot fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 00:21
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ETPC posted:thanks for that answer, Chewbot! Banner Saga owns but i have to play it in short spurts or else i just want to cry from how desperate and miserable that world is and how much i just want the characters to live their lives No problem! I suppose of the games you mentioned (aside from maybe Doom) I suspect all these were designed story-first, which is pretty rare for most games. The usual procedure is to design the core mechanics or set pieces, then come up with a story to tie them together and that creates all kinds of compromise that the player can intrinsically feel. I think the reason prioritizing story is rare is because it isn't the best way to sell a game. You may or may not be surprised how little story matters to a large segment of gamers. But honestly, I'm not sure everyone would agree that all the examples you listed are considered "good writing" compared to the best of the best in other industries. It is very frustrating to me when something really skillfully done is dismissed as "bad writing" by some internet kid with a youtube channel (and I'm not talking about my game). wizzardstaff posted:Not at all; that was very insightful and interesting to read. The way you lay it all out makes so much sense that I wonder why it wasn't blindingly obvious to me in the first place. Thank you! It's only obvious to me because I think about it 7 days a week! Studio posted:
Hah, I was wondering if anyone still remembered that stuff! Can you believe it's been over 10 years since then? Geez. Discendo Vox posted:Great answer, Chewbot. Hypothetically, what about giving players a sort of accept/reject/deflect option at the very start of the narrative, determining the scope of narrative role and engagement? Give an option for the role-players, an option for the passive narrative accepters, an option for the conversation "winners" (perhaps, it'd be resource-intensive in this setup), and (gulp) an option for the next button hammerers? Yeah, funny you mention that, it's something we tried when prototyping Banner Saga and we found that it just confused players when you tell them their choice is going to set the tone for a convo. Maybe we could have done it better, but for the most part they didnt understand what choice they were even making, the same way that "Doubt" from LA Noire was so confusing. Plus the tone of a convo can and should change over its, and then players felt like maybe the made the wrong decision because they didnt have all the info when they had to make it. I do think games are doing about the best they can do, considering all the pitfalls that come with game dev. The "trapdoors" that Jon talks about in his presentation does a lot of the work of letting people skip stuff in a natural way. The real issue is that plugging a framework onto a conversation never feels natural. When you're talking in real life, you don't think about accept/reject/deflect after every sentence, you're usually just trying to keep the conversation flowing and not look like a weirdo. Moving targets and rework can be a very big problem in game dev and you end up resigned to some sub-par content because you just don't have time to do everything perfectly, which can be demoralizing for sure. I think most gamers believe that game devs and especially AAA game studios are like these professional, well-oiled machines. In reality, it's just an endless poo poo-storm of things breaking and people loving up and everyone trying to deal with the latest fire as well as they can. That's true of anyone working in a creative field. That is to say, they don't have the time or capacity to prepare for major changes suddenly appearing other than to do their best and work a lot. Movies and TV obviously have similar issues and you can usually tell when things were a mess in production. ninjewtsu posted:i always liked the way tactics ogre handled player interactivity in the narrative. there's a bunch of small dialogue options that can be "gamed" for optimal outcomes, but there's a couple Big Story Decisions that create 3ish branching paths through the story, all of which are roughly equal mechanically. so the player is more choosing what kind of story they want to see/what kind of person they want their main character to be, and i wish i knew of more games that took that kind of approach Yeah, setting the player's expectations early can help, i.e. telling the player HERE IS A BIG DECISION WHERE THE STORY SPLITS. It does still feel a little gamey and rely a lot on context. It works better in the context of playing something that really feels like you're playing a game than it does in the context of a modern, cinematic experience like AssCreed: Odyssey. It's kinda fallen out of fashion because nobody wants to create truly divergent content as content becomes more and more expensive to create. Flannelette posted:Thanks for the good write up Heh, probably true at least to a certain extent. Banner Saga unfortunately went the opposite direction where (in the interest of trying to make things believable) a lot of players felt like they could never make the right decision, and that made them feel dumb. But would the writing in the games you're referring to really hold up when compared to other industries, or is it just to make the player feel good about themselves? Movies, etc can tell stories without having to make the viewer feel good and smart. Wallet posted:Thanks for taking the time to write this! Your take is really interesting. Some of the difficulties you mention are exactly what I imagined they would be, but some of them are things I hadn't considered at all. The enforced pacing of TBS is probably the #1 reason any of what we've attempted works at all. If you weren't basically "on rails", the pacing wouldn't carry nearly the same weight that we were able to squeeze out of it. To make that happen, you've figured exactly right that we designed all the gameplay around the story, which is definitely NOT what most developers do. You have to be so confident that your story is going to carry the game that you're willing to potentially sacrifice the gameplay. We weren't as confident about our story as we were incredibly naive about how hard it would be, and also a fair bit of luck that it all kinda came together.  Oh dear me posted:Thanks very much for your interesting post! I'd also love to hear what dialogue writing program you use now / like best / wish existed. Thank you! We'd still be using Inklewriter, which is excellent, except that we eventually needed it to do things specific to our game, so we had to build our own. I wouldn't recommend our tool unless you're making a Banner Saga game. I'd definitely recommend Inklewriter! Chewbot fucked around with this message at 23:31 on Dec 4, 2018 |
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Dec 4, 2018 23:29
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This thread has been blessed by the Oregon Trail LP
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Arbitrary Number posted:I saw this article where game industry people talk about their favorite game of 2018, so I figured I'd ask goon devs for their opinions. There was some discussion upthread about how making games makes you see games differently, and I think it would be interesting to hear. Breath of the Wild was the best game of 2018 even though it came out in 2017.
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Dec 9, 2018 00:02
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tangy yet delightful posted:Thanks mutata, fingers crossed. Is it a good sign if I'm considering turning an old LP I was doing called "Carmen Sandiego Must Die" into a game project but changing the names since I can't get the license?
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Feb 7, 2019 17:03
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To preface: big companies are exploiting their employees, there is no doubt about that. They hire contract positions under the premise of full-time (with full intent to lay them off), because they know they can't get the numbers they need if they're honest about the temporary nature of the position. At the end of every major project there are enormous layoffs. This has always been the case. Every major company also expects their employees to work overtime without compensation, because they're "salaried" and get benefits like health insurance. I believe this needs better regulation, including painful "kill fees" for trying to lay off employees or mandatory overtime pay for exploiting their hours. As for unions, I have the strong opinion that anyone engaging in the conversation needs actual knowledge about how unions work, what services they provide, how it would impact day-to-day life, and the tradeoffs. I have a feeling most of the people discussing it have never experienced anything to do with unions. Me personally, I've worked with a fairly famous individual from a different industry who was absolutely f'd over by the bureaucracy of his union, and I saw the stress and turmoil he went through during that ordeal which involved public slander and lawsuits. Unions are extremely controlling toward their members, like HOAs on crack, and as a side-effect make getting anything done a laborious and tedious process. They're full of rules and regulations that outwardly appear as utter nonsense to try and protect certain jobs. In a lot of ways it's like installing anti-virus software that just replaces the virus as a nuisance itself. This doesnt mean it's as bad as the virus, but it's not as simple and clear-cut as people make it out to be. The games industry itself is such a complex series of moving parts, changes in direction and unpredictable work loads that I suspect unionizing would magnify that complexity to astronomical levels. I would need more information about a proposed game industry union before being able to decide whether it would even save jobs or wages, or whether it would just be tacking on massive burdens to its workers without doing much to alter the behavior of the employers. Frankly I can't agree with "Well, anything would be better than doing nothing!". That said, it's a brutal industry and I'll be the first to admit I've been pretty lucky. Just my two cents. Chewbot fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Feb 21, 2019 |
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Feb 20, 2019 23:10
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Two questions that I haven't been able to get answers to through my usual sources, thought I'd broaden my peer group: 1) Any thoughts on an engine that could handle large frame-by-frame animation sequences? Outside of Flash/Animate (god, it still lingers) I haven't really found any good 2D support from existing game engines. I don't really want to do puppeteering-style motion graphics, and most engines absolutely choke on a long series of large images. Surprisingly, most engines are terrible at just playing an embedded video, too. Unity's 2D support is half-baked at best and regarding Unreal, I had an actual UE developer tell me not to use Paper2D or Flipbook because it's being phased out. And a related followup: 2) Anybody have experience with Godot? I've checked out some tutorials and it looks pretty streamlined. The open-source foundation is a slight concern as someone who does not code and doesn't intend to learn. Allegedly they have a Visual Scripting interface similar to UE's Blueprints, but no idea if they're content developer friendly or how robust they are. I'll be investigating myself, but any first-hand experience to share is very welcome. Thanks!
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Mar 24, 2019 05:11
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j.peeba posted:I don’t have answers you are actually looking for but maybe I can offer some perspective since the question 1 might not be quite as humble as it appears on the surface... etc. Yup, aware of all this, mostly it just confirms that nobody is supporting this type of work flow. I've been using Spine which is a decent middleware solution between motion graphics and swapping out key sprites along the way, and also integrates with most major engines. It's kind of angled at mobile games but it seems capable of powering a fairly simple PC project. I'm doing something quite simple, I imagine almost any engine I've used in the past can handle it, just thought I'd ask around and see if anything supports the biggest technical hurdle I see at the moment. I don't think any do because nobody really cares about frame-by-frame anymore. So sad! Thanks for the reply. Pigmassacre posted:Well I dearly hope that's not completely true, given that they have promised to support it (even though they're not developing it actively). I didn't get the impression they intend to strip out those features but I can verify they don't plan to support it forever or continue developing the 2D tech which was added by "literally one guy who was passionate about it that doesn't work at Epic anymore". They're phasing out other stuff slowly to replace with newer versions: Cascade is also being phased out and replaced by Niagara, Matinee is being sunset and wrapped into Montage. I don't know exactly when all of this is going down, probably slowly over a long period. To clarify, his recommendations are based on our studio starting a completely new project with the current state of UE, I'm sure continuing to develop with existing UE tech is perfectly viable. Chewbot fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Mar 24, 2019 |
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Mar 24, 2019 19:52
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Yup, definitely looking further into Godot. So far, so good.Hyper Crab Tank posted:2D skeletal animation is a great way to reduce the amount of textures you need to get smooth animation and is used in a lot more than visual novels. It's what we've used in our games for a while now; Heist and Dig2 use rigid skeletal animation, Quest has vertex-blended skeletal animation, both with texture switches at appropriate times to do things like perspective or facial expressions or whatever. Will probably be going this direction using Spine. Nice to meet you, Dig 2 was the first game I bought on the Switch store! Played the rest as well, love em.
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Mar 26, 2019 17:22
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Unions again? My opinion is that there is not enough modern information or proposals being presented in a digestible way. Game industry needs accurate data on the pros, cons, the cost and steps needed to implement unionization, how it might roll out for actual people with boots on the ground, and the potential pitfalls or scenarios that other unions have experienced, which could be avoided. From the article: "I don’t work in video games, but as a journalist who writes about them..." No thanks. Name me one job where you think people outside your industry should make decisions for you. What game dev does not need: people who are casual observers (ie gaming public and blog writers) making public decrees on behalf of others, while not being affected themselves by the possible outcomes. Yeah, awareness is good, but you also have the very real chance of making life worse for the people you're trying to help. Just as a reminder: starting your own studio and going indie is harder work than being an employee in every way: hours, stress and lack of work/life balance. The chance of failure is higher than being laid off, and instead of a severance you get to burn your entire personal savings. The risk and rewards are both astronomically higher. Employees at game companies should be treated better, I'm still not convinced about unions until I see actual info and proposals. I think all of the above is not a popular take because it's not easy to understand or get excited about. Chewbot fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 00:19
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You know what? gently caress it, I wasted two hours writing a reply and deleted it. I don't need any of this coming back to bite me in the rear end, and it always does. I'll give you the tl:dr. I'm for unions! But show me a loving plan. Don't just parrot "unions are good" because you heard someone else say it. Chewbot fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 05:12
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