Bungie’s leadership says they didn’t know that it happened, and I believe them. In a big studio like Bungie, there are literally hundreds of developers creating and modifying assets dozens of times on a daily basis. There is no way for any human to aud…
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What’s the craziest “temporary” solution that you’ve seen in a recent shipped game?
One game that went into Early Access a little while back had the most ghetto multiplayer setup I’ve ever seen in a game released to the public for money. In order to play multiplayer, the host game would generate a URL and then the host would have to p…
Hi, Dev! Light question. For betas and early access games, how come many have to wipe player saves with each version update but, others do not? How come updates for 1.0 games never do this? Are there any common reasons or is it case by case? Thanks!
The general rule for engagement here is that after players pay for the game, we can’t ever take something in game away from them unless there was cheating or exploiting involved (and even then, we almost always do a rollback instead of a reset). Early …
How do game developers decide what scale of numbers their system will use, I.E. how large the “base” numbers are? For example, in MTG a 15/15 creature is a world ending menace while in Yu Gi Oh a 300/200 creature, Skull Servant, is noted on the card’s flavor text to be individually weak. What are the advantage of using large numbers versus small ones and vice versa?
The size of the number affects how things feel to the player. When it comes to system design, what really matters is how many hits it takes to defeat an opponent. However, humans also have feelings associated with big and small numbers relative to the …
Why do temporary solutions end up being so foundational in a lot of games?
It has to do with how software engineering works. Whenever we build a system, that system doesn’t typically exist in a vacuum — temporary or not, it exists to handle some particular task or solve some problem. A temporary solution might not handle that…
How simple is it for a developer/publisher company to sell a game IP to another company?
It can be as simple or as complicated as they want it to be. Most of the time the IP is leased to somebody else within a limited capacity of some kind (e.g. for a certain duration, with certain restrictions, etc.) and then rights are returned to the ow…
How true is the saying “there is more permanent then a temporary solution” in the context of game developement?
Once, one of my coworkers printed out «temporary» hacks in our codebase and taped them to his body to be his Halloween costume. I have a t-shirt printed with the «temporary» hacks in the code base. The name «Grey Wardens» from Dragon Age was a temporar…
I’m currently developing a 2D Metroidvania game, and I’d like to hear your thoughts: What are the key elements that make a Metroidvania fun to play and challenging in a satisfying way? I’m especially interested in how to balance exploration, progression, and difficulty without frustrating the player.
This is a good question. The core element here that drives everything in a metroidvania is the intersection between the abilities the player gets and the level design. Everything a player does in a platformer follows three sequential steps:The player s…
Do people ever resubmit old design tests? Like if someone makes it past that stage the first time but doesn’t get the job, and then the job opens up again later down the line.
There’s nothing stopping a candidate from doing this, but I’ve never done this before myself. Just because I happened to be «good enough» last time doesn’t mean that the criteria or the competition for the position have remained the same. I know I cert…
Do you think we’re headed for another American Industry crash out like 1983, or has the digital age changed what was a product of physical media? Is the industry turbulence largely on the back end, or is it also rippling to consumers?
There won’t be another industry crash like 1983, mostly because most people don’t really understand what actually happened in 1983. 1983 wasn’t an industry crash, it was an Atari crash because there were too many low-quality games for Atari and the mar…