My current workstation (that I got earlier this year) is running a 7970x CPU, 256 gigs of RAM, and a GeForce RTX 4090. Most of my coworkers use a similar level of rig. The previous workstation I used for almost three years and was running a 3080, 128 g…
Все записи unity
Breakable objects and clutter with physics are fun to have around, and surely game environments would feel a bit empty without them. But how much is enough? Who decides, and what’s the thought behind it?
If you look at earlier 3D games, you’ll find that many of the environments are very sparse in terms of props placed about to create a sense of familiarity. As processing power and fidelity improved, so too were environment artists and level designers a…
I find the concept of simply showing you’re “passionate” about game development during the hiring process being thrown around a lot. As a hiring manager, how accurate is this actually?
There is more than one way to interpret the idea of being «passionate» about game development and each interpretation is important to understand for someone who hopes to find employment in the game industry. In my eyes, there’s two major interpretation…
I see people talking about how companies like Nintendo or Blizzard will conveniently have a new game announcement or news of some sort shortly following some negative development, like when a Melee tournament was shut down and then Sephiroth was announced to “Distract” people. I have a hard time believing a company will dedicate that many resources to just distract people from bad news, but is there any truth to that as a marketing technique?
Not to my knowledge, no. It takes months of planning, development, tuning, and testing in order to create a new character for a fighting game like that, let alone a whole new game announcement. The truth of the matter is that most publishers are consta…
Flip side to the budget issue. The stars align and things are going better than expected. The game is actually under budget/ahead of schedule than projected. In this case do developers keep things within the original scope or try to add more to take advantage of the additional budgetary leg room?
Absolutely we do. It’s super rare to deliver ahead of schedule and we actually don’t even want that — we want to be on time so that the marketing schedule goes to plan. Instead of finishing early and going on vacation, we usually take that additional t…
What do you do if your game is going over budget?
ALTIt depends on how far over budget we’re projected to go and how much budgeted dev time we’ve got left. If our [burn rate] is trending way too far over budget to feasibly make our release, the answer is usually «cancel the game». On rare occasions, w…
Is there any advice you could give about how to process being a developer on a game that’s been critically panned/considered disappointing? I’ve worked on such a project for a big franchise, and the creative decisions that caused the poor reception were never in my control to begin with. Despite this, I’ve found it difficult to keep emotional distance over how things turned out, as if somehow I could have given the right feedback or asked the right questions to change the outcome.
ALTThe problem here is that you’ve been emotionally wounded by this, likely because you put a lot of yourself into this game and it hurts to see the thing you worked so hard on fall short. In such situations, I find it comforting to acknowledge the goo…
New Hire Advice — Don’t Self-Crunch to Prove Yourself
askagamedev:
It’s Labor Day today, so I thought I would share a bit of “work wisdom” from a veteran. Even though I’ve been working on games for almost twenty years now (with time off for good behavior), whenever I start a new job I still feel the desi…
What is the benefit of mechanics that give the winning side advantages that help them win more, such as COD poweups?
ALTCOD’s Killstreak rewards are exciting, memorable, and (generally) difficult to obtain. They’re similar to, for example, randomly-determined critical hits that deal additional damage or dizzying your opponent in fighting games. Statistically speaking…
Is there anything fans could realistically do to get dormant game series rereleased or remade? Especially ones from small companies that have long been subsumed by larger ones. Is there any way for us to increase legitimate accessibility to the history of games?
It feels to me like you’re asking two different questions here:Is there a way for fans to signal to game publishers that they really want more games in a particular franchise?Is there a way to force an IP owner to grant public access to historic games?…