Ask a professional Game Dev any development or design questions that bother you

[Lengualo]

Thanks so much for your quick and thoughtful response. This makes ton of sense and really answers what I'm thinking. If I may ask a follow up (it's ok if you can't answer): Are developers concerned if the side quests hurt their review scores or does the business aspect take over to such a degree that it's not worth thinking about?

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I'll chime in with some thoughts.

Side-quests are optional content that players can often have mixed engagement with at the best of times. High quality side-quests are expensive and the majority of players often "meh and move on" if they don't find some side content interesting.

The bar is seen as lower with side content and is more a problem when all of the side content is seen as poor rather than a particular mini-game or side-quest.

 

[player23]

Unsung heroes are testers and community managers. Testers and quality analysts usually are the lowest paid jobs and whenever people complain about issues in a game they usually unfairly blame QA ("how did QA not see this?" is a question I HATE). And community managers have to deal with shittons of toxic shit and honestly protect a lot of developers from having to deal with that.

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Thank you for the reply!

 

[Farlander]

Thanks for the thread. My question is in regards to how current gen versions of games are usually priced higher.

In PC games, changing resolution/framerate/visual settings is as easy as going into the options menu. Is developing on consoles that much harder to justify the increased price of current gen games?

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First, perhaps changing resolution/framerate/visual settings is easy from player perspective, but from dev perspective making and maintaining all those various options is a LOT of work (resolution in particular is very painful due to differences in aspect ratios).

Now, while console development doesn't really have to worry about some of PC-specific things, ultimately it IS more expensive. You can't make a console game without devkits - those cost money. PC is mostly digital nowadays, console still has a lot of retail manufactoring/shipping involved - all that costs money. Submissions that have to be verified also cost money. And that is without mentioning the money Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo take for each sale, one reason there's so many launchers on PC nowadays is that this allows many developers to either avoid that (Uplay, Origin) or get a cheaper fee (Epic).

In the end, a developer/publisher spends more on creating a console version of the game than the PC one, which is why console games are usually priced higher.

 

[Deleted member 81119]

This thread is amazing

 

[Weltall Zero]

Mine is an oddly specific question that you might not be able to answer, but I'll let it rip anyway.

Why do so many developers struggle with offering decent scanline/CRT filters for retro-style games or emulated releases? This is something that the emulation scene figured out decades ago, and there are dozens of excellent-looking shaders and filters readily available today that offer clean scaling and an authentic high-end CRT look. But in nearly all commercial game releases (indie or otherwise), if scanline or CRT visual options are included they look awful. They either don't scale evenly, or they're just a crude overlay of black lines, or they go too far in adding artificial noise to mimic a really bad composite connection on a shitty CRT. Even friggin' Nintendo themselves can't get it right with their NES and SNES NSO apps.

I just don't understand why this relatively simple and long-resolved design aspect seems to escape so many developers who decide to include such a visual option in their 2D games.

I'm genuinely seeking understanding here and not looking to put any developers down. It just strikes me as odd that you have such technically talented programmers and artists working on games that don't seem to mind or notice how bad these CRT filters tend to look in commercially released games 90% of the time.

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I wish to hear an answer for that too :D I never had the chance to talk to somebody who worked on that and a lack of a proper filter or color correction in GBA game collections at least bothers me to no end.

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I can at least try to answer this one: there isn't usually an easy, out-of-the-box solution (at least there isn't in Unity). My own experience is an endless loop of trying to code my own solution, disliking the result, looking online for solutions (e.g. pixel shaders), looking up filters in the asset store, realizing they're nothing like what you want, go to step one. I've spent many, many hours with it and eventually got my own solution to a point that I was satisfied with, but if it wasn't such a high priority for me I'd probably have said "fuck it" and leave the game without it.

My implementation is entirely homebrewn (including manually creating repeating scanlines overlay sprites for every resolution, plus a manually-coded Gaussian blur pixel shader). I have three settings: blur plus scanlines, blur only, and no filter (nearest neighbour). I also perform brightness correction so that the game looks about the same, color-wise, with or without scanlines. In this trailer there's parts with blur+scanlines and parts with scanline-less blur. I much prefer scanlines but I know a lot of people don't, plus the interaction between scanlines, zooming (which is used for emphasis in the trailer only) and video compression makes some of the scenes look a lot messier than in-game.

There's also an additional issue, which is that modern games are expected to run on any resolution and fill the whole screen. This is supported out of the box with Unity... as long as you're OK with not all pixels being the same, perfectly square size. Many high profile pixel art games (e.g. Enter the Gungeon) are content with having uneven pixels in some resolutions, but for a good CRT filter to work well, you need an even pixel size or the scanlines will become unaligned with the actual pixels.

 

[tokkun]

Why is it so annoying to exit out of games these days?

Open menu > Options > Return to Title > "It has been 5 seconds since your last save, are you sure you want to exit?" > sit through parade of logos > Press any button to continue attract screen > Exit Game > "Are you sure you want to exit?"

 

[Hoggle]

Mission objects staying on screen for 100% of the run time. Especially the useless ones in linear games like: "proceed to the police station" and that's sort of the only direction you can go.

Is this mandated by publishers? Because it seems so pointless and frustrates me no end when you can't disable it.

I just want to understand why this became such a common trend and why it's not something you could just bring up in the pause menu. And in linear games do play testers actually find these vague directions helpful?

 

[RedMercury]

Maybe a dumb question but during development how much of the foley work is done specific to a game versus how much is purchased from existing sound libraries and tweaked?

Also, do devs that are "higher-up" (not specifically QA testers) like say, a director ever play the game on it's hardest setting when it's done to see how feasible the game is to beat that way?

 

[GameDev]

Maybe a dumb question but during development how much of the foley work is done specific to a game versus how much is purchased from existing sound libraries and tweaked?

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Depends on the budget of the title and how much the people budgeting the title care about sound design. I was the "audio programming expert" (meaning I was the guy audio tasks were always dumped on) for a project and for the most part it was canned sound effects that they tried to make sound distinctive. It was a mobile title with a few dozen people working on it and the audio guy wasn't a full time employee, but a contractor. On another project, they didn't even bother hiring a dedicated audio guy but just had someone in QA who had experience with audio editing pull double duty. If there's a corner to cut, it will be cut.

Once you have teams in the neighborhood of 100+ you probably have the budget for dedicated sound teams, but audio is often not super high on the priority list. The first edition of the book Game Engine Programming actually made a joke about how much audio is neglected.

 

[Falk]

that largely depends on the *type* of game too. an example was brought up on trees and asset reuse and how it literally doesn't matter in most cases because a tree is a tree and a rock is a rock regardless of the type of game. foley generally implies those kinds of realistic sounds (as opposed, to, say, stylized UI sounds that carve an identity on their own, like Final Fantasy) and more often than not you can get great results editing and layering up library assets so they sound unique.

a foley space IS a great leg-up for a game though, since there's going to still be a ton of stuff that libraries just don't cover. doubly true for cutscenes and having specific timings for whatever action is being performed



tangential from original question, but i recall there was a GDC (i think) talk about audio implementation where the sound designer guy, deadpan, said "first you have to hope a programmer is assigned to audio, and secondly, that that person *zooms in on face* cares"

painful truth, lol

very specifically, audio DOES inadvertently get neglected or overlooked especially with less experienced teams. the unfortunate truth is you can't play with the screen off, but you totally can play with the sound off (and i'm not just talking about end-users)

it tends to be the most solo-flying problem spotting experience, since almost everyone working on a game is likely going to have the audio muted half a year into production, so while anyone and everyone might spot visual or gameplay-related glitches as a matter of course, ONLY the audio folks, or whoever gets specifically forcibly assigned to it ends up spotting any problems on that front.

in-progress audio and music can drive the rest of the team literally insane, lol

 

[Kiro]

Do devs after playing their game over and over to test out certain things ever get detached from reality and have trouble discerning whether the game is actually fun or not?

 

[Chaos2Frozen]

Why is it so annoying to exit out of games these days?

Open menu > Options > Return to Title > "It has been 5 seconds since your last save, are you sure you want to exit?" > sit through parade of logos > Press any button to continue attract screen > Exit Game > "Are you sure you want to exit?"

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...Who does that? Just press the home button or tab out.

 

[Thequietone]

This is mostly for 2d developers but what is the point of limited lives and then unlimited continues? Why am I still looking at a gameover screen counting down from 9 in the year 2022 when I just want to start the boss over again? If I wanted to quit I'd just hit the home button. It's annoying and a waste of my time.

 

[Deleted member 12009]

Do devs after playing their game over and over to test out certain things ever get detached from reality and have trouble discerning whether the game is actually fun or not?

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Absolutely. That's why it's so important to get playtesters.

 

[GameDev]

Do devs after playing their game over and over to test out certain things ever get detached from reality and have trouble discerning whether the game is actually fun or not?

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This should be easy to explain why devs become blind to their games flaws if you ever learned how to draw.

A common tip given to beginning artists is to periodically flip your drawing: https://bueskenart.com/art-looks-weird-when-flipped/

As you draw, you'll make subtle mistakes that accumulate over time. Problem is that your brain becomes accustomed to the mistakes and then becomes blind to them. I can work on a drawing for hours and not notice until the next day that the proportions are way off.

Flipping the drawing forces you to look at a drawing in a different way and can make the mistakes really obvious. Play testers do this perspective switching by pointing out things that are boring/unintuitive/etc that we don't notice anymore because we have habituated to the flaws.

 

[Mills]

Awesome thread OP, thank you for starting it. I'm sure all of the contributor's resolve will be tested by the sheer number of questions. I'm a software engineer who doesn't work on games. I'll keep it to one question...

Games seem to require many things to 'work' in some capacity to even understand if the game can even be 'fun', and if it is not (notwithstanding the difficulty of identifying what is fun and not fun), then you have to start tweaking things to figure out why. This may result in multiple passes of partial or complete redesign which is I imagine is very hard on morale for the individuals/teams who worked really hard to make something work and then you tell them shortly after to re-tool it in some other way. On the other end, trying to plan for every possible request that may come down after play-testing a build completes is going to explode the time it takes to implement anything that may be thrown away tomorrow.

Finally the question:

What effective strategies have you found for maintaining morale when a lot of hard work just doesn't pan out either in yourself or inspiring/maintaining morale for others you rely on? Is this just a reality that people who want to stay in the industry need to accept or go elsewhere?

 

[Son_of_Oden]

Read every single comment in the thread and just came in to say thanks for the time and effort every single one of you put into the answers!
Furthermore I want to thank you for all the hard (and not always fruitful) work you put up with every single day for one of my/our most loved hobbies, even though there is a lot of negativity in the media und so called "enthusiast" forums. I never understood the "lazy dev" rhetoric and even less the shitting on QA who are most of the time the last one in the pecking order but the first ones to get the blame (and everyone should know: if there was a problem within a game, QA probably found and reported it!)
So I hope you guys know that there are others out there that appreciate everything you do but get snuffed/muffled out within the negativity of a loud minority.

Keep up the good work!

 

[PJTierney]

Also, do devs that are "higher-up" (not specifically QA testers) like say, a director ever play the game on it's hardest setting when it's done to see how feasible the game is to beat that way?

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For DiRT Rally 2.0 we had 2 in-house "pro players" (one is also a professional rally driver) who would be the benchmark for AI difficulty.

100% AI difficulty is just a smidge under esports pace, so if these two guys (who are on the game design team) have to sweat a little to beat the AI, we know it's balanced well enough since the AI difficulty can scale down afterwards (you can set it between 0 and 100 in-game). DiRT Rally 2.0 is a game where we see quite a high propriety on of "high skill" players but the skill floor is just as important so that the game isn't out of reach of beginners.

Essentially, the top AI is very fast, but still beatable by very good players. Lower AI levels are scaled based off the 100% pace so that anyone can have fun.

 

[Falk]

big one specifically on this is actually devs getting so used to the game that the default difficulty setting is... way too hard, lol

 

[niaobx]

What I would add to machinaea's post about balance, and this actually applies not just to balancing but any feedback really, that there's also always a process of understanding the root cause behind feedback.

Ok, there SHOULD always be a process of understanding the root cause behind the feedback, because some people ignore this and it leads to problems.

In my experience, around 70% of the time what players say is the problem is not actually the problem, but rather a symptom/result of another problem, and finding THAT is what will actually fix experience for players.

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Curious if you have a specific example of this?

 

[Falk]

Curious if you have a specific example of this?

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relatively niche example from Satisfactory but the sentiment is exactly the same- a feature request from the end user is symptomatic of a related underlying fundamental problem- it's come up quite a few times w.r.t. Satisfactory that night time 'sucks' and is 'unfun'



edti: if curious, a larger context here is also that while the overall illumination was WIP and being tweaked, Update 5 added factory lights to the game, which was ANOTHER oft-requested feature but had severe technical limitations since in a 3D factory building game, since letting players put up dozens of lights (which had to cast reasonably believably on all player-made objects, i.e. not fixed locations) was going to tank performance very, VERY fast without a plethora of magic tricks under the hood, so I get the feeling CSS didn't want to say anything that might sound like committing to it in case the feature didn't pan out satisfactorily, pun not intended.

 

[niaobx]

relatively niche example from Satisfactory but the sentiment is exactly the same- a feature request from the end user is symptomatic of a related underlying fundamental problem- it's come up quite a few times w.r.t. Satisfactory that night time 'sucks' and is 'unfun'

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Not sure how that works exactly as I've never played it, would love to see these explanations more often but I guess that would mostly lead to more arguing with unsatisfied players and people still dismissing devs' point of view

 

[Falk]

there was an area in the game (even more unfortunately one of the four starting areas, lol) where night time was SO dark it was almost impossible to make anything out except the running lights on machines lol (these didn't emit any light, they just were blips on the screen)

the illumination was well and truly broke that patch

Not sure how that works exactly as I've never played it, would love to see these explanations more often but I guess that would mostly lead to more arguing with unsatisfied players and people still dismissing devs' point of view

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coffee stain has always been incredibly forthcoming on their direction with the game probably on the basis that 1) the game is in early access 2) the game is relatively niche (even if it's a juggernaut by genre standards) and 3) it's coffee stain, they made goat simulator and are completely OK taking the piss and fencing with people on the internet. this really wouldn't work with AAA titles, lol



as much as it doesn't exactly address the root problem of a toxic-ass gaming userbase, it's refreshing when community managers sometimes just play along with a hot take and people who absolutely want to shit on, say, EGS, completely miss the obvious joke and make themselves look like complete idiots

The latest game from the devs behind Goat Simulator, Satisfactory, has sold 9 copies on the Epic Games Store [UPDATE]

Satisfactory, the latest game from the developers behind Goat Simulator, was released exclusively on the Epic Games Store last month and it appears that it has not sold well. According to the developers, the game has sold 9 copies (after some refunds from buyers that were not satisfied with it)...

www.dsogaming.com

 

[KRT]

I've said this in another post, time pressure can lead to people not considering the TV/monitor difference.

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Is this why so many games lack the basic function of choosing what monitor the games display on? I feel like this is overlooked in almost every game and frankly its quite annoying having to change your main monitor in GPU driver settings instead of having that option built right into the game. I mean, surely devs work on multiple monitors in the studio so they must be aware of this.

 

[RedMercury]

For DiRT Rally 2.0 we had 2 in-house "pro players" (one is also a professional rally driver) who would be the benchmark for AI difficulty.

100% AI difficulty is just a smidge under esports pace, so if these two guys (who are on the game design team) have to sweat a little to beat the AI, we know it's balanced well enough since the AI difficulty can scale down afterwards (you can set it between 0 and 100 in-game).

Essentially, the top AI is very fast, but still beatable by very good players.

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Dude, you just answered something I have wondered since I was a kid haha, thank you

 

[tokkun]

...Who does that? Just press the home button or tab out.

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That is not an explanation for why the in-game method of quitting is so convoluted.

For instance, why do so many games first make you quit to the title screen, then exit the game as a separate step? Completely quitting out of a game is going to be a common thing users do, whereas wanting to go back to the title screen without quitting is rare.

It's a basic concept in UI design that you should optimize for the common user interactions. That is why this design choice seems strange. Nor would I expect the designers to intend for players to have to Alt-Tab out of the game and then externally kill it via the OS to quit.

 

[HeroShiroGyro]

As a music example, I know in Street Fighter V, the character F.A.N.G's theme doesn't quite loop correctly with the restart point being a measure off. That's been there for six years. I know how to move a loop point in a given audio program (again, that'd be about 30 seconds), but I have no experience with Unreal Engine, so maybe something there would go wrong. When they released the official soundtrack, the loop point was correct. But they never fixed it in the game itself.

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That would annoy me too. My guess would be a misplaced a loop marker or something was set wrong in the implementation. But you highlighted something else I can provide more insight on that is most likely the answer to WHY it's not fixed. Yes, if you knew exactly what the problem was, it would most likely take a relatively short amount of time ("30 seconds") to "fix". But it would realistically take a bit longer and $$$:

- audio dev gets a bug assigned to them about a music looping issue.
- dev looks to find the source of the issue. Could be the implementation, could be the asset, could be something else. This SHOULDN'T take entirely too long to do based on your example, but it WILL take longer than 30 seconds. And that's hoping that it is the integration/asset and not something unforeseen or not inherently obvious (like something in code causing the issue)
- dev makes the fix which in this example would be relatively quick like you mentioned. (assuming it is an errant loop marker or something)
- dev then needs to test this fix to make sure it works properly AND doesn't break ANYTHING (or at least they should XD)
- because the game is released already, submissions for fixes are most likely highly scrutinized in some way by the build team to ensure nothing gets more broken. This includes things like size of the change, impact to audio budget (memory, CPU), etc..
- if submission is approved, the audio dev updates the issue in whatever bug tracking solution their team uses (like JIRA) with their fix, then it is sent back to QA to test if the fix actually did fix the issue.
- This fix is then shuffled in to whatever patch is currently being worked on and will be included (at some point) in a patch that goes out for the game. An issue this small will not justify a singular patch on its own. As annoying as it may be, it really isn't high priority and does not justify the cost of deploying a patch across all platforms. Deploying patches costs money.

So even though the fix is "quick", the cost and actual man hours (gross I hate myself lol) put in to it can be deceiving. This process can vary from studio/publisher but more or less will go through something like this on a AAA title like SF. If this bug was caught by QA (I'd bet it was), it was most likely assigned a very low priority because it doesn't actually break anything/block progression. Some studios designate that only higher priority bugs can get fixed after content lock/release, meaning even after 6 years it will never get fixed because the cost/risk don't justify it. There are MANY other variables at almost every step I mentioned, but this is a general rundown.

Maybe a dumb question but during development how much of the foley work is done specific to a game versus how much is purchased from existing sound libraries and tweaked?

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Not a dumb question at all! Like someone else mentioned, this depends entirely on the budget/scope of the project, and specifically the audio budget. I have experience on big AAA games. I've even walked/engineered foley myself. In those games, the foley is almost entirely bespoke. Not every studio/publisher is fortunate enough to have foley recording spaces, so a lot of this work is outsourced to external vendors/partners. Depending on the scope of the game (cinematics, amount of in-game foley needed, source for sound designers, etc), it can actually be easier/faster ( = less money) to have unique foley walked for your game. It can take longer to have a designer try and cut foley in from libraries than to have a professional foley artist walk the foley and then get edited. Not to mention the quality is better 99.9% of the time (Not necessarily the quality of the assets themselves, but the quality of the performance and quality of detail, if that makes any sense)

Like was said though, budget/scope is the limiting factor here. A small title with limited amount of foley needed? Libraries are probably the way to go. Big title with hours of cinematics and lots of in-game foley needed? I'd go bespoke foley from a stage.

 

[Alexandros]

One thing that was largely missing from last-gen games was destructibility. Do you think current-gen games will bring that back because of the better hardware available or are the game design challenges too big?

 

[RedMercury]

Not a dumb question at all! Like someone else mentioned, this depends entirely on the budget/scope of the project, and specifically the audio budget. I have experience on big AAA games. I've even walked/engineered foley myself. In those games, the foley is almost entirely bespoke. Not every studio/publisher is fortunate enough to have foley recording spaces, so a lot of this work is outsourced to external vendors/partners. Depending on the scope of the game (cinematics, amount of in-game foley needed, source for sound designers, etc), it can actually be easier/faster ( = less money) to have unique foley walked for your game. It can take longer to have a designer try and cut foley in from libraries than to have a professional foley artist walk the foley and then get edited. Not to mention the quality is better 99.9% of the time (Not necessarily the quality of the assets themselves, but the quality of the performance and quality of detail, if that makes any sense)

Like was said though, budget/scope is the limiting factor here. A small title with limited amount of foley needed? Libraries are probably the way to go. Big title with hours of cinematics and lots of in-game foley needed? I'd go bespoke foley from a stage.

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I wish there was more focus on the sound work in video game "making of" documentaries, or it would be cool if GDC had a video on it. Soundtracks get attention but sound effects I feel like don't get much of a spotlight, unless it's like, gun sounds.

 

[Falk]

Not every studio/publisher is fortunate enough to have foley recording spaces, so a lot of this work is outsourced to external vendors/partners.

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tangentially i dont think there's a single studio or publisher that has their own ensemble recording facility except maybe sony, for obvious reasons lol

audio is such an outlier in terms of everything from technical requirements (not just software and OS but including physical considerations like soundproofing) to business expectations (see: music royalties, contracting VA, etc.) to scheduling (unfortunately STILL tends to encompass a later portion of a dev cycle) that it makes the most sense to outsource parts or all of it to an external party.

on the larger scale (like square enix) dedicated internal audio teams tend to shuffle across projects, or on the smaller scale audio people tend to also have other responsibilities. or, other way around, as mentioned someone in the team who 'happens to do audio' gets pressed into doing it, lol

I wish there was more focus on the sound work in video game "making of" documentaries, or it would be cool if GDC had a video on it. Soundtracks get attention but sound effects I feel like don't get much of a spotlight, unless it's like, gun sounds.

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yeah, i STILL honestly feel there's an undue amount of spotlight on composers when a game with good music but shitty sound otherwise is just going to sound shit regardless

 

[elenarie]

Maybe a dumb question but during development how much of the foley work is done specific to a game versus how much is purchased from existing sound libraries and tweaked?

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At DICE we usually record as much as it is humanly possible ourselves, as that adds flavour and uniqueness to every sound.

To demonstrate the extent that our audio department goes to, we went scouring the world to find real working airplanes from WW2 still with their original components, or as close to that as it was possible to find. Couldn't exactly find a functioning V1 rocket to explode, but we got something fairly similar.

For some older BF games, we had a team following the Swedish army as they were conducting training exercises in rural and urban areas.

For 2042, we went to an abandoned location in Poland which housed several different kinds of buildings, placed microphones at many, many places and exploded all sorts of grenades to in more details capture how explosive sound was propagating through such environments.

Obviously all of this depends on how much money you are willing to invest, and there is no shame in using pre existing sound banks.

 

[Falk]

At DICE we usually record as much as it is humanly possible ourselves, as that adds flavour and uniqueness to every sound.

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BF has always had incredible audio design- it's not easy to try to capture the insane dynamic range that firing weapons has (i mean, it actually literally damages hearing lol)

i actually DO have a question of my own- some games seemed... incredibly reverberant (BF3 comes to mind), which didn't quite match the setting, at least to me- it sounded more like it was taking place in the Grand Canyon rather than open terrain with some hills. was this an intentional thing?

definitely had a much closer audio-visual matchup in the urban environments

 

[Messofanego]

Thanking for clarifying. Folks seem to swing between humanising Dev studios or treating them as faceless corporations depending on what's happening.

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I don't see how developers would even like leakers or how leakers are about helping developers, no matter what size they are. I'm imagining if I was a leaker, I don't think I have particularly good moral cause for such practice. Just seems like rebellious fame chasing.

 

[PJTierney]

At DICE we usually record as much as it is humanly possible ourselves, as that adds flavour and uniqueness to every sound.

To demonstrate the extent that our audio department goes to, we went scouring the world to find real working airplanes from WW2 still with their original components, or as close to that as it was possible to find. Couldn't exactly find a functioning V1 rocket to explode, but we got something fairly similar.

For some older BF games, we had a team following the Swedish army as they were conducting training exercises in rural and urban areas.

For 2042, we went to an abandoned location in Poland which housed several different kinds of buildings, placed microphones at many, many places and exploded all sorts of grenades to in more details capture how explosive sound was propagating through such environments.

Obviously all of this depends on how much money you are willing to invest, and there is no shame in using pre existing sound banks.

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Same for us at Codemasters, especially when it comes to car sounds.

For F1 our audio director usually travels out to pre-season testing to get all sorts of stuff, like pass-bys of cars, ambient noise, pitlane guns etc. Sometimes we're lucky to even strap a mic to an F1 car that's running on the track.

For GRID and DiRT:




Chris told me the story once of how we got the Lancia Delta S4 (the Group B car) engine audio. A collector in the US had a car he could lend us, but he had to fly out to record it. I think some long, quiet road was closed off and after all the mics were strapped to the car, the driver was just whizzing up and down this road to get all the ranges needed.

I'm sure it's a lot of hard work, but flying around the world to get passenger rides in supercars and rally cars must be a cool job.

 

[AuthenticM]

Only partially, when it comes to games like Horizon. AAA games are HUGE, so the way it usually goes is that a couple of innovative/risky points are chosen, and the rest is fairly safe. If we take Horizon as an example, the innovation/big thing that was a risk there was fighting robot dinosaurs - that's what made it unique and interesting, and the rest relies on more traditional conventions to mitigate risks on those. It is unlikely this principle is going to change for big budgeted projects with the new generation.

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What about level design? The one thing that people have talked about is how SSDs being standard has now blown the doors wide open in regard to level design. Devs now have way more freedom to create levels that are denser than they have ever been, and to give players mechanics that allow them to navigate the levels way faster than ever before, all because of how data streaming is now lightning-fast compared to previous gens.

Could you give us your opinion on that?

I can't say I have ever seen an example of a block puzzle being used to hide loading (though wouldn't be surprised some exist), but did see lots of examples of needing something to change up the pace for a while but because there aren't enough elements/mechanics in place, block puzzle it is.

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The Last of Us 1 used not a literal block puzzle, but sequences where players had to swim with a wooden plank to carry Ellie across water because she couldn't swim. The behind-the-scenes reason for that was, from what I was told, because the game was loading the next area and its assets. Apparently, the remake is doing away with those sequences, maybe? It's what people have been saying, at least.

 

[Farlander]

What about level design? The one thing that people have talked about is how SSDs being standard has now blown the doors wide open in regard to level design. Devs now have way more freedom to create levels that are denser than they have ever been, and to give players mechanics that allow them to navigate the levels way faster than ever before, all because of how data streaming is now lightning-fast compared to previous gens.

Could you give us your opinion on that?

Click to shrink...

There certainly would be advancements in this area because developers won't have to resort to loading-based tricks they had to resort to before, BUT....

We sort of don't want to go into the "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" territory.

You CAN make players go insanely fast... but SHOULD you? How will the players actually be able to properly control such speeds?

You CAN add tons of objects on screen.... but nobody has removed the need for there to be clarity of what is actually there.

Etc. etc.

So I foresee a considerable evolution, but not a 'revolution', if that makes sense, because pacing, clarity, flow, understability are still a thing.

EDIT: Sorry, phone bugged out, finished my post now :D

 

[elenarie]

i actually DO have a question of my own- some games seemed... incredibly reverberant (BF3 comes to mind), which didn't quite match the setting, at least to me- it sounded more like it was taking place in the Grand Canyon rather than open terrain with some hills. was this an intentional thing?

Click to shrink...

I did not work on that project directly as that was before my time, but I imagine it came down to an audio direction choice. Likely the audio direction was that sounds in general should be grander, with more reverb, more punchy and explosive... if I remember how BF3 sounded, that is. Usually all of that is done with post processing and mixing after the recordings are captured.

 

[Lengualo]

One thing that was largely missing from last-gen games was destructibility. Do you think current-gen games will bring that back because of the better hardware available or are the game design challenges too big?

Click to shrink...

Do you mean props or the world itself (as in terrain and buildings)?

For props, its obviously more work to create destructable props and you have to consider respawning them. So the usual budgeting and timescale priorities come into it.

For terrain and the world, this depends on loads of things from engine capability, the work burden and also ludonarrative considerations.

We once had a developer who desperately wanted the world to be destructable for realism, including terrain, trees and buildings. He didn't seem to have much in the way of recognition for how this would affect the ludonarrative though, and just generally between that and storytelling and gameplay. He was getting very pushy about it and it caused a lot of conflict.

 

[Falk]

Usually all of that is done with post processing and mixing after the recordings are captured.

Click to shrink...

yeah, BF3 stood out in that it was INCREDIBLY crisp- i recall a statement that it was going for more of a 'documentary' sound whereas COD was 'big hollywood sound', but what really blew my mind was how much thought went into the real-time mixing- even with that documentary sound (for lack of a better term lol) it understood psychoacoustics and human limitation (i.e. one of the best practices in film dubbing is that people can only really ever pay attention to ~7 sounds at once at most, obviously much easier to achieve with linear media than an emergent/dynamic soundscape like in games) and did a lot of ducking so only the most important stuff came through. Whenever you took damage or an explosion went off, for example, all the other gunfire literal dropped out for a moment to highlight that sound, BUT at the same time voice lines cut through all of that.

it basically took a simulation of a chaotic war zone and presented what only was absolutely necessary to the player in terms of gameplay feedback and immersion/spectacle, and that's ON TOP of all the other stuff that was pretty revolutionary already for its time, like gunfire sounding different close vs at range (rather than just a volume difference) and all the occlusion stuff with LOS



(which is why I found the reverb thing so weird juxtaposed with all of that, lol)

 

[PinguThePenguin]

Thank you for hosting this thread! Such wonderful insight on the opposite side of the gaming screen we rarely see.

My question would be how do you decide on trivial information of character profiles. For example, determining one of many character's birthdays or bloodtypes, despite it having no bearing on the story or gameplay? Do you just throw a dart or roll on a random generator?

 

[Lengualo]

Thank you for hosting this thread! Such wonderful insight on the opposite side of the gaming screen we rarely see.

My question would be how do you decide on trivial information of character profiles. For example, determining one of many character's birthdays or bloodtypes, despite it having no bearing on the story or gameplay? Do you just throw a dart or roll on a random generator?

Click to shrink...

Bloodtypes are more a thing in Japanese games and has little to do with anything game dev related.

Its baked into Japanese culture; they believe that bloodtype informs personality type, and they consider it important even in real life. A uni friend who got a job working in Japan literally had a girl reject him after a couple of dates because he was the wrong bloodtype. Not saying that its common, but it can happen and many Japanese might presume more about you from bloodtype than we do from starsigns.

So publishing that information is pretty much standard across fictional works because there is a cultural belief behind it.

What informs the choice of bloodtype in fictional characrers will be based on characterisation and what they believe about bloodtypes. They'll typically match up.

Stuff like birthdates and star signs in western media, I feel are more like trivia for the curious and the character designers or writers will come up with that information organically through the creation process the same way they come up with anything. There isn't such a strong cultural emphasis on those traits.

Although, a writer might consider a characters star sign important in a similar way to Japanese people with bloodtypes.

 

[TinTuba47]

Why do a lot of games not offer customizable HUDs?

I find the artwork and worlds of modern games to be so beautiful, and a lot of games clutter the screen up with numbers, floating health bars, etc.

To me that stuff looks ugly and takes away from the artistry of the game. I know some people love that shit, and that's cool, but I've specifically not purchased games I was interested in because there was no option to remove floating health bars.

The worst part is that trailers for games 95% of the time show more HUD-free experiences, and it looks great. Then you buy the game and there are no UI options, which means there is literally no way to make the game look like it does in the trailer. I honestly think that's a super shitty business practice.

 

[Falk]

i can semi-field that one. i know a common take is "options are always good", but sometimes (very often, really) options cause more problems than they solve- end users typically see all the benefits of XYZ but rarely stop to think of the ABC problems which might crop up when having something included as an option. having information that absolutely needs to be conveyed by a player accidentally hidden by an option seems like it's trivial but can have quite severe impact on a game. there's just so many variables involved that having an intended design be "this info should always be presented to a player" helps narrow down use-case scenarios.

two tangentially related issues though (lol, kinda like the earlier conversation about a surface problem usually being related to a more fundamental problem) is whether there's a photo mode (or a simple on-off toggle for all HUD elements) to do a bunch of the stuff you're talking about (many games do have this) or, whether a UI is aesthetically pleasing or not, which is a different beast from whether you can modify elements of it. i don't think nearly as many people want to turn off the Persona 5 UI, for example, vs a game vomiting more numbers than a State of Decay mobile ad

(p.s. most games definitely would have something like this in-dev, because that's how you'd capture clean footage or screenshots for marketing purposes to begin with)

 

[Lycanthrope -R-]

That would annoy me too. My guess would be a misplaced a loop marker or something was set wrong in the implementation. But you highlighted something else I can provide more insight on that is most likely the answer to WHY it's not fixed. Yes, if you knew exactly what the problem was, it would most likely take a relatively short amount of time ("30 seconds") to "fix". But it would realistically take a bit longer and $$$:

- audio dev gets a bug assigned to them about a music looping issue.
- dev looks to find the source of the issue. Could be the implementation, could be the asset, could be something else. This SHOULDN'T take entirely too long to do based on your example, but it WILL take longer than 30 seconds. And that's hoping that it is the integration/asset and not something unforeseen or not inherently obvious (like something in code causing the issue)
- dev makes the fix which in this example would be relatively quick like you mentioned. (assuming it is an errant loop marker or something)
- dev then needs to test this fix to make sure it works properly AND doesn't break ANYTHING (or at least they should XD)
- because the game is released already, submissions for fixes are most likely highly scrutinized in some way by the build team to ensure nothing gets more broken. This includes things like size of the change, impact to audio budget (memory, CPU), etc..
- if submission is approved, the audio dev updates the issue in whatever bug tracking solution their team uses (like JIRA) with their fix, then it is sent back to QA to test if the fix actually did fix the issue.
- This fix is then shuffled in to whatever patch is currently being worked on and will be included (at some point) in a patch that goes out for the game. An issue this small will not justify a singular patch on its own. As annoying as it may be, it really isn't high priority and does not justify the cost of deploying a patch across all platforms. Deploying patches costs money.

So even though the fix is "quick", the cost and actual man hours (gross I hate myself lol) put in to it can be deceiving. This process can vary from studio/publisher but more or less will go through something like this on a AAA title like SF. If this bug was caught by QA (I'd bet it was), it was most likely assigned a very low priority because it doesn't actually break anything/block progression. Some studios designate that only higher priority bugs can get fixed after content lock/release, meaning even after 6 years it will never get fixed because the cost/risk don't justify it. There are MANY other variables at almost every step I mentioned, but this is a general rundown.

Click to shrink...

Thanks for taking the time. I realize that I maybe made it seem like I think anyone could just fix a small bug and send it into the game and it gets automatically uploaded from a server or something. That's my fault. I know that there's an approval process, etc. And I would never expect them to make a specific patch to fix a lone loop point or typo. With my two examples, I was just surprised that they never made the overall "to-do list" at some point (obviously not game-breaking priority) because they're pretty noticeable and a constant, as opposed to say a bug triggered by a random occurrence that may or may not happen during gameplay.

While on the SFV subject, two things that also come to mind in that vein is that Vega is missing the tattoo on his stomach in half of his costumes, and Ibuki's mask doesn't animate in half of hers. Like she has several animations, including her main win pose, where she'll move to take it off and it only works half the time. I know they see it. Everyone can see it. They ensured everyone could see something wrong, lol. So I thought maybe that would've placed it on a higher priority track.

It'd only be a bonus that something like that may not be very hard to diagnose/address.

 

[HeroShiroGyro]

Thanks for taking the time. I realize that I maybe made it seem like I think anyone could just fix a small bug and send it into the game and it gets automatically uploaded from a server or something. That's my fault. I know that there's an approval process, etc. And I would never expect them to make a specific patch to fix a lone loop point or typo. With my two examples, I was just surprised that they never made the overall "to-do list" at some point (obviously not game-breaking priority) because they're pretty noticeable and a constant, as opposed to say a bug triggered by a random occurrence that may or may not happen during gameplay.

Click to shrink...

I didn't get that from what you said, all good :)

I just wanted to explore why that stuff can take time or not get fixed at all.

 

[Farlander]

Curious if you have a specific example of this?

Click to shrink...

One of our goals for Trials Rising (for which I was the lead designer) was to increase the approachability of the game without making it any less relevant/enjoyable for hardcore players.

There was a number of things that we wanted to tackle, from tutorials to structure, but one of the big ones was to increase casual competition between friends in the middle of track leaderboards - we have noticed that those people rarely replay the maps, and competition happened mostly on the top more hardcore level - in the first top ~500-1000 of every track, while there were literally hundreds of thousands players more in each leaderboard.

We have identified what we saw as a blocker for more casual competition - the way leaderboard scores work. Trials has time and faults amount, and historically (how it happened in each Trials game for a decade prior), each leaderboard would first sort you by faults, and then within each fault number it would sort by time. This meant that for example if both players complete a track in 5 minutes, but one player has 1 fault and the other 2 - the difference between them on leaderboards can be literally tens of thousands of players, and that can look daunting on a mid/low-level.

So we decided to redo the system a bit in Trials Rising. We know that at the top leaderboard spaces everything that matters is to get as fast as possible to the finish with 0 faults. So to keep that aspect intact while ALSO making casual competition something more enticing, we made it so that all names in a track leaderboard are sorted by TIME, while each fault adds a time penalty (in the end after a bunch of testing we stopped at +5 seconds).

When Trials fans have learned about this, they were FURIOUS. They were saying how this would make it possible for people to cheese maps by failing at checkpoints to save time in certain spots (we tested beforehand, we knew it wasn't), they were saying how the top would suddenly be filled with imperfect rides because you can sacrifice a fault to get faster (we knew that it wouldn't), and a bunch of other criticisms that all essentially said 'you're ruining Trials'.

There were actually a bunch of people in the team who were like 'maybe we should change the scoring back' but I and some others pushed against that to stick to our guns. But. BUT. A lot of people in the community who were complaining the loudest about this change were who called themselves Ninja players - among the hardcore Trials community there's a smaller community of people who in Track Editor make EXCEPTIONALLY difficult tracks that require a LOT of particular skill and precision and timing, and because of how technical those tracks can be, what that part of community really values in competition is actually not time, but faults - for them somebody completing a track in 15 minutes with 0 faults IS indeed much better than someone completing the track in 5 minute with 1 fault. Due to the nature of Ninja tracks it wasn't as much about going as fast as possible, but about being as technically efficient as possible and people would sometimes spend a very long time preparing for the next jump. It was a totally different style of play in comparison to what we were doing for the usual Trials maps (for which we have adapted the new scoring system).

And mind you, none of them actually said that it will ruin Ninja map competition, but we saw that a lot of those very loudly complaining players were from the Ninja part of the community and realised that, yes, for Ninja maps this scoring literally doesn't make sense - it's not how those players play. So, what we did was the following - we have introduced a Ninja difficulty level (which also validated that part of the community), and returned the old system back for that difficulty level specifically, while all other difficulties that we use for 'normal' tracks kept the new scoring system.

Mind you, this actually DIDN'T stop people from proceeding to consistently complain about the new scoring system on forums and reddit for quite a while, BUT:
1. A 5 second penalty in Trials is a LOT, so just like in previous games, we saw that the top 500-1000 spots competition of leaderboards on each track was still based on the fastest 0-fault play, so the new system literally did NOT change anything there (as we expected) - and after about a year of the game's release, people would start coming around and saying that 'yeah you know this is actually fine and makes sense' (because at that point leaderboards would be more or less stable and everyone would see that indeed only the 0-fault people are on top competitive levels anyway - there's nobody at #1 spot with 1-2 faults - it's literally impossible)
2. What it did change from the get go is how competition works on a more mid-level, and we did notice an increase of less hardcore players replaying the tracks to increase their scores/compete with friends in the middle of the leaderboards - so the purpose of why we were making the new system worked.
3. And everybody from the Ninja community used the Ninja difficulty level and loved it.

So this is the case if we would just listen to our players and not implement the new scoring system we would fix/improve nothing, but by actually taking time to understand who the players complaining the loudest were we could pinpoint the exact nature of the problem.

 

[niaobx]

One of our goals for Trials Rising (for which I was the lead designer) was to increase the approachability of the game without making it any less relevant/enjoyable for hardcore players.

There was a number of things that we wanted to tackle, from tutorials to structure, but one of the big ones was to increase casual competition between friends in the middle of track leaderboards - we have noticed that those people rarely replay the maps, and competition happened mostly on the top more hardcore level - in the first top ~500-1000 of every track, while there were literally hundreds of thousands players more in each leaderboard.

We have identified what we saw as a blocker for more casual competition - the way leaderboard scores work. Trials has time and faults amount, and historically (how it happened in each Trials game for a decade prior), each leaderboard would first sort you by faults, and then within each fault number it would sort by time. This meant that for example if both players complete a track in 5 minutes, but one player has 1 fault and the other 2 - the difference between them on leaderboards can be literally tens of thousands of players, and that can look daunting on a mid/low-level.

So we decided to redo the system a bit in Trials Rising. We know that at the top leaderboard spaces everything that matters is to get as fast as possible to the finish with 0 faults. So to keep that aspect intact while ALSO making casual competition something more enticing, we made it so that all names in a track leaderboard are sorted by TIME, while each fault adds a time penalty (in the end after a bunch of testing we stopped at +5 seconds).

When Trials fans have learned about this, they were FURIOUS. They were saying how this would make it possible for people to cheese maps by failing at checkpoints to save time in certain spots (we tested beforehand, we knew it wasn't), they were saying how the top would suddenly be filled with imperfect rides because you can sacrifice a fault to get faster (we knew that it wouldn't), and a bunch of other criticisms that all essentially said 'you're ruining Trials'.

There were actually a bunch of people in the team who were like 'maybe we should change the scoring back' but I and some others pushed against that to stick to our guns. But. BUT. A lot of people in the community who were complaining the loudest about this change were who called themselves Ninja players - among the hardcore Trials community there's a smaller community of people who in Track Editor make EXCEPTIONALLY difficult tracks that require a LOT of particular skill and precision and timing, and because of how technical those tracks can be, what that part of community really values in competition is actually not time, but faults - for them somebody completing a track in 15 minutes with 0 faults IS indeed much better than someone completing the track in 5 minute with 1 fault. Due to the nature of Ninja tracks it wasn't as much about going as fast as possible, but about being as technically efficient as possible and people would sometimes spend a very long time preparing for the next jump. It was a totally different style of play in comparison to what we were doing for the usual Trials maps (for which we have adapted the new scoring system).

And mind you, none of them actually said that it will ruin Ninja map competition, but we saw that a lot of those very loudly complaining players were from the Ninja part of the community and realised that, yes, for Ninja maps this scoring literally doesn't make sense - it's not how those players play. So, what we did was the following - we have introduced a Ninja difficulty level (which also validated that part of the community), and returned the old system back for that difficulty level specifically, while all other difficulties that we use for 'normal' tracks kept the new scoring system.

Mind you, this actually DIDN'T stop people from proceeding to consistently complain about the new scoring system on forums and reddit for quite a while, BUT:
1. A 5 second penalty in Trials is a LOT, so just like in previous games, we saw that the top 500-1000 spots competition of leaderboards on each track was still based on the fastest 0-fault play, so the new system literally did NOT change anything there (as we expected) - and after about a year of the game's release, people would start coming around and saying that 'yeah you know this is actually fine and makes sense' (because at that point leaderboards would be more or less stable and everyone would see that indeed only the 0-fault people are on top competitive levels anyway - there's nobody at #1 spot with 1-2 faults - it's literally impossible)
2. What it did change from the get go is how competition works on a more mid-level, and we did notice an increase of less hardcore players replaying the tracks to increase their scores/compete with friends in the middle of the leaderboards - so the purpose of why we were making the new system worked.
3. And everybody from the Ninja community used the Ninja difficulty level and loved it.

So this is the case if we would just listen to our players and not implement the new scoring system we would fix/improve nothing, but by actually taking time to understand who the players complaining the loudest were we could pinpoint the exact nature of the problem.

Click to shrink...

Really interesting. Thank you for the detailed answer.

Follow-up question: I'm sure it differs for everybody, how do you deal with a situation like above - the data shows one thing, the team knows how people generally feel, but there is a loud part of the community that keeps on hammering the complaints. Is it really frustrating or are you able to kinda ignore it as you know that your approach is actually better for the bigger part of playerbase?

 

[SickNasty]

What is the most expensive part of a game's budget ? (without counting marketing)

Do the outsourcing is big part of that budget ?

Click to shrink...

I'm biased but of all the disciplines I'd say animation is the most expensive (and least appreciated but whatever) and cutscenes double or triple that budget further. It adds up because you're not just paying your staff anymore, you're paying for outside people and time on a mocap volume somewhere, which is NOT cheap, and for your data to be processed and delivered, and voice work, and everyone has a contract and etc etc. It adds up insanely quickly.

Notice how many very indie games are first person or go to extreme lengths to have as little animation as possible. It's very rare you can find something you need in an asset library like with the other disciplines, and doing it yourself is an entire skillset.

there's a rather popular saying, listen to player's problems but not player's solutions lol

Click to shrink...

I love this lol.

Why is it so annoying to exit out of games these days?

Open menu > Options > Return to Title > "It has been 5 seconds since your last save, are you sure you want to exit?" > sit through parade of logos > Press any button to continue attract screen > Exit Game > "Are you sure you want to exit?"

Click to shrink...

99% of people quit a game by going to the console home screen and closing it from there, so quitting via the menu has become essentially starting your play session over rather than leaving.

Mission objects staying on screen for 100% of the run time. Especially the useless ones in linear games like: "proceed to the police station" and that's sort of the only direction you can go.

Is this mandated by publishers? Because it seems so pointless and frustrates me no end when you can't disable it.

I just want to understand why this became such a common trend and why it's not something you could just bring up in the pause menu. And in linear games do play testers actually find these vague directions helpful?

Click to shrink...

You would be astonished by how quickly the average player forgets what they're supposed to be doing or where they're meant to be going. It's safer all round to leave it on the screen and hope they spot it rather than have them quit in frustration.

Is this just a reality that people who want to stay in the industry need to accept or go elsewhere?

Click to shrink...

Yes.

One thing that was largely missing from last-gen games was destructibility. Do you think current-gen games will bring that back because of the better hardware available or are the game design challenges too big?

Click to shrink...

Destructibility is something I feel has been sacrificed on the altar of bigger maps and massive games that can be re explored over and over. It's doable in a linear level, but if you make a game with linear levels these days everyone rags on you for being lazy and untalented and out of touch, so destruction is left behind. Think of the challenges in an open world where you can smash a building to little bits, then spend thirty hours on the other side of the map before coming back. How do you ensure the destruction is the same as it was? Saving the position of a million physics objects is not doable, remember filling a house in oblivion with lots of items and watching your console self destruct? Make the destruction a baked animation from Houdini, well, that's not dynamic at all is it, lazy devs, untalented, etc. What if the building was the only way to access collectable #87, is it unreachable now?
Jedi Fallen Order is a decent example, there's a whole bit on kashyyk you have to run through while a ship chases you blowing everything up... but it doesn't actually blow anything up because it's a metroidvania and you have to be able to do this again whenever you want.

So to answer you, both, but primarily design trends and challenges.

What about level design? The one thing that people have talked about is how SSDs being standard has now blown the doors wide open in regard to level design. Devs now have way more freedom to create levels that are denser than they have ever been, and to give players mechanics that allow them to navigate the levels way faster than ever before, all because of how data streaming is now lightning-fast compared to previous gens.

Could you give us your opinion on that?


The Last of Us 1 used not a literal block puzzle, but sequences where players had to swim with a wooden plank to carry Ellie across water because she couldn't swim. The behind-the-scenes reason for that was, from what I was told, because the game was loading the next area and its assets. Apparently, the remake is doing away with those sequences, maybe? It's what people have been saying, at least.

Click to shrink...

As someone else pointed out, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Equally, yes, the PS5 has an insanely whacked out SSD that can do anything instantly.... but almost every PS5 game is also coming to ps4 or pc, where the ps4 hard drive can't do that stuff, and pc hardware can be anything at all. You can design something with no seams whatsoever and someone plays it on some coal driven pc from 2011 and complains about loading times.
So currently there's really not much point in taking advantage of this feature.

 

[Alexandros]

Lengualo SickNasty Thank you for the replies!

 

[Combo]

Great thread! I hope I am not too late to ask my questions.

1, I have worked as a developer in the past but I was never asked to crunch and it baffles me how crunch can lead to a better product. When you work longer hours doesn't the quality of work go down and thus lead to poorer code and design decisions? Is it possible for devs to maintain high standards through crunch time or it is always detrimental to the work?

2, There has been a lot of news about abuse of staff in games development companies. How do these abusive people get into management roles and does their presence lead to poorer work being done? I.e. are they any good at their jobs or are they like the Steve Jobs type who just bully others into doing what they themselves are not good at?