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…
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…
Do you have any insight as to why annual sports titles have not gone the Live Service model yet given the fact each year it is mostly minor tweaks and roster changes anyway?
I’ve actually worked on and shipped more than one annual sports title over my career and I want say for the record that the idea that annual sports titles are «mostly minor tweaks and roster changes» is absolutely and categorically false. Annual sports…
Addendum to cut content: people find remnants of cut content in game files often enough. So/but is there any even rough estimate you could give of cut content that’s dug up versus cut stuff that could never be found?
It’s really hard to say because every project is different. The kind of games that have the least cut content are annual sports titles — they have the most stringent schedules and know exactly what they are committing to with each annual cycle, so they…
Sent this ask a while ago but I think Tumblr ate it so here it is: In which stage of game development are relationships between characters decided? Asking this because I recently found an old Final Fantasy VII relationship chart and originally some characters were supposed to have completely different bonds compared to the ones they ended up having in the actual game. These seem to be quite important plot points, so I assume that final decisions should be made before creating cutscenes? Or you can change stuff later if devs come up with better ideas?
The importance of the narrative depends primarily on how important the narrative is to the game. For a game like Overwatch, where the core gameplay is team pvp, the narrative is a lot less important and things like relationships are generally prioritiz…
Why companies don’t record “Making Of” for games anymore?
A good rule of thumb when answering questions like «Why don’t companies do X anymore?» is to think about what X will cost them and what X will get them in return. The purpose of doing things is ostensibly to generate value — no one does X without a rea…
Does cut content exist for video games? Not material devs save for later use in dlcs or expansions, but content that was created and for some reason didn’t make it to the final product. Idk like, a boss battle was way too long so a portion of gameplay was cut off or some footage devs felt like removing from certain cutscenes.
Of course cut content exists. On the latest shipped game that I worked on, I was hired for and spent months working on a significant game mode that was eventually cut. Our game mode was playable with a full game loop but the higher-ups decided it wasn’…