I don’t really think that’s the right framing of the situation. I don’t think that focusing on a particular specialization necessarily means the complete game must be worse, it just means you need to think about the best kind of game that emphasizes th…
As a followup to the breadth vs depth post you made, how would a solo dev focus on one aspect that they are interested in?
The short answer is “practice”. Game development is not a talent that people have, it is a skill that people learn. People have different amounts of talent that may make a skill more easy or difficult to learn, but skill matters far more than talent do…
Ask a Game Dev 2023-06-30 19:02:10
If I’m hiring for a specific role (i.e. a permanent position), then I usually look for depth. If I’m looking for interns, I prefer breadth. Depending on what sort of job you’re looking for, you should tailor your resume accordingly. However, I get the …
Is your workplace/industry buzzing about (what companies would like us to call) “AI”? What’s the buzz, if so?
We’re not thinking about AI too much — it’s too far away on the horizon to seriously consider while we’re busy focusing on getting the game into alpha, beta, and doing our cert submission prep. Some of the more senior leadership have talked about it in…
On the topic of bits, I have heard that certain game uses different bit counts for maintaining different data of the game. How often decide which bit count (16/32/64 bits) goes to each data counter, and why don’t 64 bit games just use 64 bits for everything?
Some readers may not realize it, but you’re actually asking a math question here. A bit is a value that can be one of 2^1 = two different values — 0, or 1. Thus two bits can represent up to 2^2 = four different values — 00, 01, 10, and 11. Three bits c…
When a game has defense bonuses to specific enemies (+15 percent less damage from aliens), how does the game know the damage being dealt comes from them if they use the sane damage type as another group?
When we’re calculating combat math, we usually just aggregate all of the different damage mods together and apply them at some step along the damage calculation. This might be a large list from a bunch of different sources like the attacker’s talents, …
Ask a Game Dev 2023-06-26 19:02:13
My litmus test for whether an idea has merit has always been to ask myself “Can I make this happen by myself? If not, can I make it happen with a 1-3 people I know and can work with?” If the answer is “No”, then it’s probably time to toss the idea out …
Do developers get a head start to buy new consoles when they release them?
Not often in my experience. I’ve only ever had the chance to buy a console early once and that was a special dispensation from Nintendo to buy a Wii (at a discount) from them directly as thanks for being a developer on a launch title. Even then, produc…
On the topic of feedback, what do games do when they are receiving conflicting and mutually contradictory feedback? For example, group X says Z the game is too hard and complicated, while group Y is saying the game is too easy and not deep enough.
A lot of discussion and consideration goes into deciding what to do. The size of these groups makes a big difference in helping us put player opinions into context. For example, if group X is 40% of our player base and group Y is only 0.4%, chances are…
Do major AAA companies listen to the audience complaints, criticism, or do they just make their decisions based on whatever data they have ( what’s popular in other game, what are the new successful trends, etc) For example, blizzard and overwatch 2 or pokemon and their gimmick.
It really depends on what you mean by whether major AAA companies “listen to the audience complaints”. If you mean “those of us on the dev team are made aware of the fan concerns”, then the answer is absolutely yes. [We get a lot of feedback from a lot…