Both. The vertical slice is a big milestone in a game’s development because it shows the entire game coming together in a cohesive play experience. It typically signals the end of preproduction and the transition to production — we’re no longer going t…
What goes into the vertical slice of an MMORPG? I feel that it would be hard to prototype when a lot of the game’s premise relies on quest progression, player-to-player interactivity, etc. It seems like something that cannot be communicated effectively until much later in development.
It’s good to remember what a vertical slice is — it’s a functioning version of all of the systems we plan on having in the game working together so that it is representative of the final game experience. MMORPGs tend to come with a lot of expected tabl…
Who (if anyone) picks up an auto error report when a game crashes? And does sending it (with screenshot or video) actually help?
That entirely depends on the team, the game, and the audience size. A 0.1% crash for a game with millions of players is still tens of thousands of crashes daily. Sending such reports generally helps (especially if you can add more context to what happe…
Are the reasons why dlcs don’t require or advertise other dlcs for their content to work or show up because of potential compromised sales, as well as being fare to all customers who buy them?
The most important rule for selling any product is «make it as easy as possible for your customer to buy your product». Putting in roadblocks like «you must own DLC A in order to use DLC B» might get a small number of people to buy DLC A (begrudgingly)…
Regarding your latest answer about optimizing games. Can you elaborate more on how the optimization gets to happen? Like ofcourse they do want to make their npcs look as good as they planned to so how do they optimize without reducing quality in general?
Optimization tends to be tailored to the specific tasks at hand. Programmers on large projects often build or use out-of-the-box tools called profilers that measure performance in specific areas of the code. Based on the profiler reports, the engineers…
These references are out of date so I hope you’ll bear with me. Why is it games like Watchdogs 2 can have a whole citty full of NPC’s each with mostly unique profiles and interactable (you can hack almost everyone, you can physically interact, etc). But something like Yandere simulator struggles with keeping a frame rate with not even 200 NPC’s. The models in Watchdogs 2 are also more hyper realistic so I don’t know if that means more framerate impaction?
What you’re seeing are the programming principles of optimization and scalability in effect. These two principles are more than the sum of their parts, they are multiplicative in their effectiveness (or lack thereof). Thus, if there’s a situation where…
Whose job is to pull separate systems together? For example, when the FPS player fires, an animation plays, an enemy is damaged and killed which gives experience triggering a level up, an ally barks plays, and the player automatically reloads, playing a different animation. Who brings all those different events together?
It’s usually the most senior engineers who bring all of this stuff together. They have a good understanding of how the various game systems work and how to build those systems to work within the way the program itself works. Every game system has three…
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On the topic of generative AI, what jobs are game companies looking to replace with it first? I imagine that concept art is going to be one the easiest things to replace and I harass some games are using AI to fill out voice over work ( AI is a major sticking point between game companies and the voice actor union right now), but what other jobs are at risk of being replaced?
Honestly, right now it’s actually rather difficult to replace entire jobs with generative AI. It’s much more of a situation where AI would be used to augment and fill in small knowledge gaps rather than replace contributions from individual developers….
What are your thoughts on reselling assets in games? Criticisms imply that, if you bought the assets in a previous game, any other game reusing them should be reused n the base game already or be brought in via free updates, so that nobody has to buy for the same thing again, otherwise it’s money predatory, greedy, and shady in every possible way. But how do you and other devs see this practice?
The argument tends to break down if you poke at it. A single purchasable asset is never atomic — the purchased item is comprised of many parts like the 3D model, the diffuse textures, normal map, occlusion map, any other materials, rigging, animations,…