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’…
You have talked at length at standard optimizations (LoD, not rendering things, deleting cars on a distant highway to avoid memory overflow, etc). What are the weirdest optimization strategies you have seen?
One of my favorites was detecting animated background characters on screen, skipping 80% of their animation updates, and instead interpolating between the animation frames during the missing frame updates. Since they were just auto-looping background c…
How is the process of learning In-house game engines once you get into an AAA studio? Do they immediately put you in production to learn as you go, or does it take some weeks before allocating you to a project?
The onboarding process is a little of everything you say. Whenever I start a new job, there’s the new hire administrative tasks I need to get done like signing paperwork and doing harassment/DEI/office safety training and there’s the actual «this is wh…
Game Dev Glossary: Prototype, Vertical Slice, First Playable, MVP, Demo
Someone on our discord brought up a good bit of nuance in response to the Vertical Slice talk — there’s a bunch of different terms for things that seem really similar. Each of the terms are the same basic concept — a demonstration of gameplay — b…
In regard to the vertical slice. Do studios work on/produce it to pitch a game or is it used as a milestone to reassure the money people that the game is progressing? (or both)?
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…
