The first set of constraints are during development — the assets that are created. It won’t actually matter if the game can potentially display 4K, 8K, 16K, or 128K textures if there aren’t 4K, 8K, 16K, or 128K texture assets to load. Somebody actually…
Why don’t AAA studios take a turn at making smaller games every once in a while? I’d imagine with modern tools and techniques a team of “merely” a hundred or so people could make a game with the scope of something like a PS2 game in a few months to a year. It seems like the market between indies and massive ultra-budget titles underserved.
Publishers try this from time to time to varying degrees of success. Here are a few examples of some smaller budget games from AAA studios using modern tools and the like:Uncharted: The Lost LegacyFar Cry: Blood DragonLara Croft and the Guardian of Lig…
Raven Software successfully managed to unionize despite the ActiBlizz union busting efforts. What are your thoughts?
Raven QA has unionized and been recognized by the NLRB but their work is not yet done. They’ve won the election, which is a big step for sure, but one big challenge still remains — the actual bargaining. They need to negotiate a working contract with A…
What are your thoughts whenever a dev claims their idea was stolen by a studio/publisher?
More than once, I’ve been working at a studio that’s had an unannounced game with new gameplay fairly far along the development process only to see another very similar game with very similar gameplay get announced by another publisher. At least one of…
Hi Dev! Whats up with those loading screens where it’s a still screen for a while, then the loading bar appears and starts loading from the beginning. What has the game been doing before the bar appeared? Has it been working on anything or was it idle for some reason?
It’s always doing something. Consoles and PCs have finite memory available to hold data and assets. When the game transitions from one level to another, if there isn’t enough free memory to load the next level’s data and assets, it has to unload (some …
Sorry if you have been asked this before but I was watching a YouTube video on triple A games the other day and it got me thinking. Everything about triple A games keeps increasing over time, the budgets, the size of the games and development teams, the ambitions they have for their games etc. are we going to reach a point where it hits a ceiling and something has to change? What do you think that change would be and how long do you think before we might see those changes start to happen?
There is absolutely a ceiling on the size of a game and franchise. The natural ceiling for any tentpole blockbuster franchise is the relative size of the audience who is willing to buy into the game at that point in time. At some point, we’ll run out o…
On the topic of game engines, how are they developed. I’d usually a “we need a game engine for game idea X so we make something for that so we craft the engine around the needs of the game” or do developers make an engine they hope can be used for their games going forward and hope their current projects can fit into it? Also if game engines are built around an in development game, how is a game designed when the underlining engine is still a work in progress?
In real life, engines are extensive pieces of machinery built to make vehicles move. Whether it is a jet engine, a rocket engine, an 18 wheel truck engine, a train engine, a car engine, or a motorcycle engine, they all share the same basic purpose — to…
Is star citizen the end result you would get with any game if you give game developers unlimited time and money for their project?
Maybe not any game, but it is a pretty good example of what can happen without the kind of oversight that a publisher brings to the table. The Star Citizen development process sure seems like they’re going to keep on keeping on, at least until the mone…
Code Names and Secrecy
I had two related questions today on keeping things quiet in the industry, so I thought I would answer them together.
Devolver Digital left a comment under the “Return to Monkey Island” trailer saying, “You’ll have no idea how …
IN the future, will we see more big sutdios opting for “3rd party engines” or are we still gonna be looking at using mostly internal ones?
Developing game engines is expensive. It takes a lot of engineers a lot of time to build an engine and the tools to create content and assets for that engine. For a smaller studio that survives from game project contract to game project contract, the t…