Welcome to Harder Than You Think, a series about things that seem fairly easy to an outsider but can rapidly spiral into extremely complicated or expensive behaviors. Today, we’ll discuss swimming — that thing you do when you get into water that isn’…
Thank you for freely sharing your expertise with the public! When a game is not performant or seems to have trickling support on release, some online users will speculate that “the publishers don’t care now that the shareholders have their money.” This seems counterintuitive to me. I’d anticipate that releasing a poor product — even if it led to a short-term windfall — would be terrible long-term business management. We gamers can be quick to impugn motives, but is there any truth to that?
The answer is “sometimes”. Generally speaking, no one plans or wants to release a poor product, nor is anyone pleased that a poor product is released. However, when you already know that the product is going to be a dud, it makes sense to try to minimi…
I’m one of those starry eyed idiots that wants to make an impossibly ambitious game with no experience, money, or team. But I have Unity, inspiration from upcoming games like The Big Catch and Lightspeed Lina, and a powerful computer. Dev, I have no clue how to begin. Help… :)
Let’s take a dive into the archive for your answer today.[How do you come up with the core gameplay for a game?] (Spoiler: It’s in the verbs)[What is the basic level of competence you need to reach before trying to work on a game with a team?] (Spoiler…
How do *you* feel about the Activision-Microsoft merger?
Mergers and acquisitions are normal in business. Over the course of my career, I’ve seen several large industry publishers merge or acquire other publishers, and dozens of independent studios get purchased by publishers.Sega merged with Sammy Corp. in …
For promotional videos like the 10-minute gameplay video of Tears of the Kingdom, how much of that is always constant in that specific build of the game? The video is prerecorded, but I still feel like there would be a lot of staged things to show off what they want to, while reducing the risk of any pitfalls.
We stage things like this all the time, both for public-facing gameplay videos and for internal demo videos. This is because the purpose is to showcase the gameplay systems in a timely fashion. We usually don’t have a lot of time with our audiences. No…
You’ve worked on PC game mods before you became a developer in the major industry as an actual job. But that does make me wonder. Is there a chance those mods, and others that are publicly available online, may see legal attention, even if no money is involved? Like maybe they have copyrighted music or artwork, or other IP themed content like some Half-Life mods have for instance?
Yes. Legally speaking, it actually doesn’t matter whether you make money or not, copyright infringement is still copyright infringement even if the infringer doesn’t make a dime off of it. The owner of the IP is within their rights to choose what is an…
Mark Darrah is back on Dragon Age as a consultant. What use does a consultant have on the team that doesn’t involve sensitivity feedback (i.e., that seems low-key sexist, racist, etc)?
I think you may misunderstand the point of a consultant. Generally, a consultant is an expert in some field that a company hires so they can get questions answered. Sometimes that expertise is in things like sensitivity feedback or diversity/equity/inc…
I often see game dev jobs receive 100 to 200+ applications on Linkedin. Is that the same for your studio? By your estimation, what’s the general percentage of applicants who are at least decent/ worthy of an interview? Would the earlier birds have more advantage?
The number of applications we get is usually inversely proportional to the experience level needed for the position. Entry-level positions get huge numbers, while super experienced roles get very few. The type of role also varies a lot — QA and design …
Follow up to your answers about investors. How does the chain of command work between studios, publishers, and investors? Can investors overrule the decisions that the publishers make for the studios or vice versa? Publishers fund the studios development but investors own stock in the studios so how does it all work out? Who has the highest say?
Generally, the direct investors have the highest say in what the company does. An investor is a legally-recognized thing that can own something or parts of something. An investor can be a person like you or me that owns shares in some company, or it ca…
Why do I constantly pick the actual critical path forward when I’m trying to explore the area fully?
Level designers utilize lot of subtle tricks to draw players in a particular direction or to a particular place, and the majority of their work in this situation is usually pushing players toward the critical path. This is usually a combination of elem…
