I suspect you’re asking from a technical perspective, since the «business» answer is that the easiest game to translate is the one that stands to make a good profit, and the hardest game to adapt is the one that won’t sell. The number of active objects…
How to use AI to improve your in-game voice-overs
AI can help your studio in many ways; from coming up with ideas, writing placeholder scripts, and even helping market your game. So, where is the technology when it comes to voice-overs? Does it actually work? And how can you use it?
Game analytics 100: The retention curve
Retaining customers is paramount for game studios, as acquiring new customers involves significant costs. In “Game Analytics 100: The Retention Curve,” Russell Ovans from East Side Games delves into the critical aspect of customer retention in the gaming industry. What will you learn? Importance of retention: Customer retention is crucial for game studios, as acquiring new customers is expensive compared to retaining existing ones. Day-n retention: Measures the proportion of players returning to play a game n days after installation, providing insights into player engagement. Retention curve: Generalizes day-n retention by predicting player retention for any day after installation, derived from historical data. Key metrics: Includes day-n retention, average player duration, and lifetime value (LTV) to assess and optimize game performance. Tools: Utilizes statistical regression and data analysis tools like Excel and Tableau to analyze retention data and predict player…
Hello! I have a question about cutscenes. How does a decision get made about whether a cutscene can be skipped or not? I know some games have certain skipable cutscenes and others unskippable, and that in HD remakes of old games developers will sometimes add the ability to skip them. Do these decisions tend to be story-motivated or is there commonly a background mechanical reason to force a cutscene to play fully through?
Cinematics are mostly for storytelling purposes, but they also hid a very real secondary purpose — we would do a lot of game setup during cinematics, like streaming data off of a physical disc while the cinematic is playing so that we can load what com…
Especially with so many projects that were never announced probably getting canceled right now due to layoffs and studios dissolving, how risky would it be for devs to keep personal copies of their work/builds? I always thought NDAs were generally time limited, and at least that way the work wouldn’t be entirely lost for ever. Is that even something devs generally want?
There are certain things that studios and companies can ask us not to do but have a real hard time preventing, especially if the company is going through a death spiral process. Keeping a personal copy of stuff I worked on, especially in an age of remo…
How do the people working in marketing know how effective their marketing is?
There’s a whole field called Marketing Analytics that is dedicated to quantifying the results and context of marketing efforts. It is rare for companies to spend a large amount of money (e.g. on marketing budgets) without some means of measuring what t…
Game design tropes that don’t translate to VR
What are the top game design conventions that don’t currently translate well to VR? And what can you do to overcome these? Let’s break it down.
What do you do when you are at work but for whatever reason you have to wait to keep working (development breaking bug that is being fixed by other people, code compiling, waiting on person working on X thing you need so you can start work on Y, etc)
You’re talking about downtime. Whenever I have downtime I try to be productive if I can, but the type of downtime determines what I can do. There’s two main types of downtime — when my workstation is still usable and when it isn’t.If my workstation is …
You often talk about budget in your answers, so I was curious about something. Is it possible for the company to run out of budget before devs could complete the game as they initially planned, so that they have to wrap up all the pending storylines as best as they can even if incomplete? Talking specifically about massive story driven games with a lot of important characters having long storylines such as The Witcher 3, Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, the Mass Effect series, etc.
It has certainly happened in the past, though not necessarily specifically the narrative part of the game. Many games are pushed to launch without development being as far as they want it to be due to reasons like hitting their budgetary limit and need…
Does it take much work/money to edit cutscenes once finished? Like, you develop a cutscene but then you decide to change details like background, music, clothes, facial expressions of the characters or even add to the scene a character who originally wasn’t supposed to be there. How often does this happen?
The cost of making changes entirely depends on how expensive the individual changes are to make. That is generally dependent on how many people are needed to do the work to make those changes. Once upon a time, back when all cutscenes were pre-rendered…
