Reusing well-used content like maps tends to offend a particular slice of the more hardcore demographic. There were complaints about Sony’s devs reusing certain animations in God of War Ragnarok, about Guerilla Games reusing animations in Horizon Forbi…
Ask a Game Dev 2023-06-08 19:01:29
Welcome to your first major technical constraint. Most projects come across them eventually. Constraints require change of some kind, since they are obstacles in your path to project completion. As the main decision-maker on your project, you have a ch…
How much does critical success/rewards counter balance a game being finically unsuccessful?
We don’t consider results as a binary “successful” or “not successful” because that isn’t a useful metric. Instead, we have targets and our success or failure is measured by how far away from the targets we hit. Thus, there are very different decisions…
Follow up to the follow up on sunk cost, who has the ultimate authority to make the cut if the production lead decides something is sinking the game but the creative lead refuses to let the feature go?
The Executive Producer gets to overrule the Creative Director (and the Art Director and the Technical Director). The Executive Producer is the top decision-maker for the ultimate bearer of responsibility for the project. The people above her are those …
Could multiple poorly received releases in a row put a studio or franchise in danger? To use Bioware as an example, both Anthem and Andromeda were not very well received. In the event that the same thing happens with DA4 (knocks on wood), would that be enough for EA to determine a 5th installment (of ME or DA) is not worth the investment, despite their previous large scale successes in both franchises?
Repeated poorly received releases may (temporarily) put a franchise on ice, but such actions are rarely truly permanent. Killer Instinct, for example, launched in 1994, had a sequel in 1996, and then lay dormant until 2013. There were three Marathon ga…
Creating concept art for games, with genAI
While it may not excel at everything yet, AI’s prowess in concepting, storyboarding, and ideation has captured the industry’s attention. Join us as we delve into the realm of GenAI, exploring its ability to create stunning concept art and assets for games.
A follow-up to the sunk cost post. While easier said than done, how do you make the choice between cutting a feature (or features) you’ve sunk so much time into or just giving it more to complete it?
Determining scope is actually the main responsibility of the production team. It is up to the producers to look at the amount of work being done (e.g. tasks, bugs fixed, etc.) over time to calculate the team’s “development velocity” — the rate at which…
Cloudhead Games’ advice on jumping into the VR Market
In the next five years, almost a third of people will have a headset of some description, and there’ll be about 2.5 billion players. But how do you make the shift to this incredibly lucrative new area? We asked Cloudhead Games.
I’m wondering how I can best support a developer and franchise I love while also saving money on video games. I know I should buy within first 3 months, but where is best place to buy? Obviously directly from dev if offered, but those usually don’t have discounts. I believe purchasing from Steam is the same as purchasing from a retail store — they both take a big cut. What about GreenManGaming? They offer me discounts on brand new games but are developers getting a reasonable cut there?
If you want to optimize the amount of your purchase that goes to the developers, the best choice is probably the Epic Game Store. They take the smallest cut out of all of the platforms out there. Most platforms take a standard 30% cut of all revenue fo…
My Twitter is melting down over Tears of the Kingdom having a chain wrap around a wheel to lift a door open. Can you explain why senior programmers are calling this “black magic”?
Physics simulation starts off simple when you have simple situations, but each additional factor creates additional layers of complexity that the simulation might not handle all that well. Let me try to give you an example of such.Let’s go with a basic…
