Scaling an encounter to support different numbers of players is generally a question of resource allocation. If we have a small number of these encounters in the project, we can do most of this by hand and spend more effort on each one. World of Warcra…
Hi there! I am planning on making a jrpg style game, but was thinking of making fan games of other jrpgs to gain knowledge and experience, is it a good idea?
Yes, I think it is a good idea. It’s always a good idea to practice and level up your skills, and it’s important to remember that game development disciplines — design, programming, art, etc. — are skills. Because they are skills, practicing and earnin…
The time required to develop games has been getting longer and longer. Do you think there’s any solution to reduce this time, like some kind of technological innovation, for example?
Development times haven’t really gotten longer and longer, except in the outlier special cases (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls). What generally happens is that you see these games in the news that have had long incubation or troubled development …
When developing a live service game, is there a standard for how far into the future your team plans in terms of content like say a preseason and first season worth of content outlined. If there’s a story/plot attached to your game, is there a planned “ending” that you deviate from based on how successful the game is?
Most in-development live service games plan ahead for one year’s worth of post-launch content from the jump. Typically this is planned to follow a quarterly schedule, so that we have sufficient development time to build a sizable amount of new content …
Is classic game porting/remastering becoming its own specialization? What I mean is, of course it’s happening more these days, so/but is space growing to be someone who specializes in these projects? Or is it still niche enough that the small number of teams/staff who do it will continue to do it?
The answer here is «kind of». Here’s the main issue — game development is expensive. AAA studios are expensive and cost a lot to run, assigning a AAA studio a remake/port project is not really worth it when compared to the estimated return on investmen…
What would it take to have a resurgence of physical games (for PC mostly)? I recall multiple times of digital only games being taken away by companies and there being an uproar about it. But it was never enough to create change.
Honestly, there’s two major things that need to happen for physical media to be a bigger thing on PC. Think about things from a game publisher perspective and what kind of costs are associated with making physical media.First, retail stores take a 20% …
Why do you think MOBAs manage to remain so popular when losing a match can be such a long and arduous process?
MOBAs as a genre generally sustain themselves primarily because playing the game at lower skill levels allows players to feel ownership and powerful when they do well, but also provides them excuses from having to admit their own responsibility in thei…
How do you go about balancing appeal for mooks or the lowest importance NPCs?
The principles of appeal still apply, even when designing mooks. Good mook design has resulted in iconic franchise monsters! Here’s a few examples.Take a look at some of these iconic mook designs. Interesting shapes, exaggerating relevant features, and…
Related again to Concord: back in 2016, when Overwatch and Battleborn released simultaneously, I read somebody online say that Overwatch succeeded not because it was a better game, but because it had characters that teenagers were horny about. I know this was a joke, but is there any truth in that? I imagine the main target user of online shooters is mostly male, and in their teens (or ok with juvenile themes). Do games with characters that male teenagers are used to find sexy sell more?
«Sexy» is a subset of the twelfth principle of animation that’s applying here — «Appeal». «Appeal» generally means «visually interesting», which we can break down into different aspects. For things to be visually interesting, some things we want to con…
In a previous post you mentioned that “the cost of development for AAA fidelity games is mostly too high now to be profitable on their own”. And we have heard that it’s more expensive now to make games than ever before. But we also hear that profits from games are higher than ever before as well. How do those two statements go together? If profits from making games have gone up (with a bigger market, what I presume is DLC bringing in extra money) why are game prices still rising from 60 to 70 USD, for example?
We’re not seeing profits from games being higher than ever before. We’re seeing record profits from successful games and we’re seeing a bunch of unsuccessful games pull the profits down because those unsuccessful games cost just as much as the successf…
