Developers: What methods do you employ to reduce development time?

[Deleted member 17402]

Seeing a lot of threads lately and I'm growing more curious about the development process. Some things immediately come to my mind, such as the re-use of assets, but what other methods do y'all use to cut down development time significantly?

Considering that fewer games are being released by major studios than ever before because of how much longer they take to create, is there any method or technology on the horizon that will help facilitate the process more efficiently? Or is the process forever destined to take longer as years go on?

 

[Deleted member 2840]

Adderall

 

[Deleted member 17402]

Adderall

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Appreciate the candidness lol

 

[Palidoozy]

I'm an artist, so I can't speak for the whole of development, but at least some of art:

• Outsourcing. Outsourcing is a good temporary measure when you need more people to work on a product, but you don't want to hire a whole mess of people and then promptly lay them off when you don't need them anymore. On teams I've worked on, we actually had such a close relation with our outsourcing houses that a few of them were flown down to work in-office with us. We knew quite a few of them by name.
• Good product managers and development directors. Seriously, these are horribly unappreciated roles. Time tracking software helps notice problems ahead of time in the development process, and can allow PMs and DDs to swing around and adjust, or potentially cut things if they're not working out.
• Technology. It's a double-edged sword, because on one hand everyone's technology is getting better so more stuff is expected of games in general. On the other hand -- there's new tools every day that make development easier. Example on my current team: we needed a water shader. Usually that's stuff that'd be a pretty big investment from both engineers and tech artists... but we could just purchase one online, tweak it around, and get exactly what we need. If there's tools that make these sorts of things more accessible, then we artists can take on implementing this stuff instead of hassling engineers, and they can handle other tasks.
• Programs like early access. Early access (understandably) gets a bad rap sometimes, but it's great for getting games out the door sooner. It gets more people playing the game earlier, which is crucial for stuff like feedback, and it can provide income to a team so they can continue working on the title. At a big studio -- this means you can prove to execs "hey, this idea works, look!" At a small studio, this can often mean you get to keep the lights on.

I think making games is always going to be a process that will be lengthier than you imagine it'll be. Sometimes this can be a good thing -- a lengthier development time might mean employees aren't being forced to work crunch, which is fantastic.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Build tools. A good 75% of my time is spent making tools. Tools are an investment in future time. Tools let you create much more data quickly, more easily, with less chance for error.

 

[Xando]

Back when i was a coding i used to reuse a lot of my code and only change it where it was necessary.

 

[Deleted member 17402]

Build tools. A good 75% of my time is spent making tools. Tools are an investment in future time. Tools let you create much more data quickly, more easily, with less chance for error.

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What are some tools that have helped you most? Sorry for my ignorance but I would think that you could find any tool you'd need on the internet to save yourself some time, no?

I'm an artist, so I can't speak for the whole of development, but at least some of art:

• Outsourcing. Outsourcing is a good temporary measure when you need more people to work on a product, but you don't want to hire a whole mess of people and then promptly lay them off when you don't need them anymore. On teams I've worked on, we actually had such a close relation with our outsourcing houses that a few of them were flown down to work in-office with us. We knew quite a few of them by name.
• Good product managers and development directors. Seriously, these are horribly unappreciated roles. Time tracking software helps notice problems ahead of time in the development process, and can allow PMs and DDs to swing around and adjust, or potentially cut things if they're not working out.
• Technology. It's a double-edged sword, because on one hand everyone's technology is getting better so more stuff is expected of games in general. On the other hand -- there's new tools every day that make development easier. Example on my current team: we needed a water shader. Usually that's stuff that'd be a pretty big investment from both engineers and tech artists... but we could just purchase one online, tweak it around, and get exactly what we need. If there's tools that make these sorts of things more accessible, then we artists can take on implementing this stuff instead of hassling engineers, and they can handle other tasks.
• Programs like early access. Early access (understandably) gets a bad rap sometimes, but it's great for getting games out the door sooner. It gets more people playing the game earlier, which is crucial for stuff like feedback, and it can provide income to a team so they can continue working on the title. At a big studio -- this means you can prove to execs "hey, this idea works, look!" At a small studio, this can often mean you get to keep the lights on.

I think making games is always going to be a process that will be lengthier than you imagine it'll be. Sometimes this can be a good thing -- a lengthier development time might mean employees aren't being forced to work crunch, which is fantastic.

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I appreciate the time taken out to write this. With regard to outsourcing, do you limit the type of work you outsource? What kind of responsibilities do you assign outside help? I'm trying to get an idea of what someone who's outsourced to help you on a project would be doing. Would they be moving files around all day? Crunching numbers? Actually developing assets?

 

[Deleted member 12790]

What are some tools that have helped you most? Sorry for my ignorance but I would think that you could find any tool you'd need on the internet to save yourself some time, no?

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Very much mistaken, games are less like building a car on a ford plant where everything is broken up into massed produced pieces, and more like a factory producing, say, video game consoles. Every one will be entirely unique, most of the process of designing your game is coming up with custom specs to do what you want to do -- defining custom structures, frameworks, formats, etc. Take, for example, using my factory comparison, the plastic mold needed to make, say, using a real world example, The Atari jaguar. Those kinds of molds are made by machines (tools) who's only purpose is to build a mold to that exact, unique, shape and size. Those are called injection molds, they look like this:

This is a tool. This is a tool that is completely, 100% unique, when you're making this console, you don't just go on the internet and buy this, someone sat down and designed this, completely bespoke and from scratch. Video game software development is like this all over. Building tools is one of the most important things you can do, and they will usually be unique because there are an infinite amount of ways to define data, and each game, studio, even individual developer will be different. An enormous part of game development is building your tools.

 

[The Ummah]

This is a great thread idea! Thanks for the contributions so far! I'm hoping more devs could shine some light on this topic, if they are able to. This is interesting information to know as a fan of the process as a whole, just not the end result.

 

[in4m8ion_man]

What are some tools that have helped you most? Sorry for my ignorance but I would think that you could find any tool you'd need on the internet to save yourself some time, no?

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Even if you could find a tool online, at a studio you can't just simply use whatever you want. Everything goes through legal, whether its a export plugin for kicking models over to zbrush or a huge ui scaler. They can save time but have to be accounted for fully.

I appreciate the time taken out to write this. With regard to outsourcing, do you limit the type of work you outsource? What kind of responsibilities do you assign outside help? I'm trying to get an idea of what someone who's outsourced to help you on a project would be doing. Would they be moving files around all day? Crunching numbers? Actually developing assets?

Click to shrink...

In art we send time consuming and tedious work out, such as topology, uv set up, or levels of detail edits. Can be hard because ya never know what source you are gonna get and getting the same source can be hard if you have a long project, so someone is typically in charge of monitoring such output but it still free's up artists to create.

 

[elenarie]

Meeting culture. Hugely important that often gets overlooked. Shorter and focused meetings result in faster and more focused decision making.

- Don't schedule meetings that are 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Schedule meetings that are 25 minutes or 55 minutes, to allow people to get a break between meetings if they have to attend another one after yours.
- Prioritise 25 minutes meetings over 55 minutes meetings. Psychologically, people get to relax too much when they have too much time to spare. With less time, everyone must stick to the point of the meeting and not ramble about their life choices while everyone else is wasting time.

 

[in4m8ion_man]

Character artist so pretty specific but,

scanning and photogramatry can save a fair amount of time if money gets invested. Otherwise Marvelous designer can help to fast track, but end of the day not alot of shortcuts into making quality art, just time and skill.

Other than that its sorta the obvious, good planning and scheduling and not over scoping a department.

Can tell you want slows us down though;
-impulsive changes, over reactions to designs or sudden need for new art. while its our jobs to make it throws the machine off kilter by taking someone of their current work to do something that suddenly has gained 'importance'.

-'everything is important', it seems counter intuitive but this kinda thought leads to nothing being really important and wastes time insteada it being directed by the artists

-legal...god they slow us down so much, esspecially with realism, because something you probably didn't ever have to know or think about is everything is owned by someone. The tailoring of levi jeans are specific and unless you wanna pay them, you can't really emulate them. And i'm not talking about putting the logo, just the style and cut can be owned by different entities, its why you often see weirdly named guns in alot of games, cause you cant be too close to a brand or ya gotta pay.

most of these prolly apply to all the departments too though.

 

[JustinP]

Spend time building tools that save time later. All my experience is in the indie space.

edit: some examples

• wrote an automation that would let me N number of clients I wanted to test with (networked multiplayer), then it would build test-builds for the game (+ a server build), copy the client build N times, open them all, start server, and connect all the clients automatically with a single click
• I made a game with symmetrical levels, so I had a tool that would mirror the map. but the colors weren't symmetrical, so I made a tool that would take the color edits I made (using a tool I made to edit those colors) and build more optimized versions of the meshes that would end up being used at runtime
• my game had a custom animation system so I made tools to make authoring animations easier
• a tool to create and save color schemes for the player character
• a tool that would let me construct the player models using modular pieces (it was a mech), then save a more optimized version
• automated build pipelines so I can just commit code and a server pulls down the code, builds the game, uploads for testing, then notifies testers
• I've built feedback systems to make it easier for testers to report bugs etc from in the game
• have built several different level creation tools -- each game has its own features and gameplay elements and it often warrants building purpose-built level creation tools
• tools that help debug all sorts of things (performance, logging, code hierarchy, etc) -- visualizing things to help confirm code is behaving as you'd expect it to
• test environments and debug options that let you skip or bypass things so you can test what you want more quickly

As an indie dev, I thought a lot about how I could come up with an art style that looked interesting enough but wouldn't require a lot of time. Sometimes that meant I wrote custom lighting techniques. Sometimes that meant writing algorithms to place decorative props (didn't affect gameplay) instead of manually placing them around the level.

Generally, the more unique your game is, the less off-the-shelf tools you can use.

 

[Deleted member 8752]

Meeting culture. Hugely important that often gets overlooked. Shorter and focused meetings result in faster and more focused decision making.

- Don't schedule meetings that are 30 minutes or 60 minutes. Schedule meetings that are 25 minutes or 55 minutes, to allow people to get a break between meetings if they have to attend another one after yours.
- Prioritise 25 minutes meetings over 55 minutes meetings. Psychologically, people get to relax too much when they have too much time to spare. With less time, everyone must stick to the point of the meeting and not ramble about their life choices while everyone else is wasting time.

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Good advice for any profession honestly.

 

[Mexen]

Damn good thread OP

 

[Tokyo_Funk]

Changing to more efficient software and tools and learning why they are more efficient is key. I have moved from the Photoshop texturing workflow to Substance Painter and Substance Designer for a faster non-destructive workflow. Easily 4-6 times faster to do it this way. I have also moved on to Substance Alchemist for texture work as it allows lots of tweaks and texture blending tools that you just can't see in other tools.

 

[Harlequin]

I'm a one-person dev team so a lot of this is not going to apply to big AAA or even AA productions but:

-Forego sculpting almost completely. If I need more details than I can fit into the low-poly mesh, I'll try to create the necessary normal maps using Quixel NDo. Very rarely will I create a high-poly model. If I need really organic or highly detailed objects, I'll try to find free 3D scans online and build low-poly meshes off those.

-Use mostly premade/scanned texture maps, unless I need something really specific (in which case I'll usually still use premade stuff as a base).

-Use premade animations.

-Use DAZ for character creation and facial blend shapes (though, of course, I have to make hair and clothing from scratch and redo the skin materials).

-Since most of my environments are quite small/tight and self-contained, I can mostly forego worrying about LOD meshes.

-Use UE4's blueprint construction scripts. Whenever I know that I'll need variations of the same object (such as open and closed doors, candelabras with different numbers of lit candles, etc.), I'll set up a blueprint with a construction script that will take care of creating those variations for me. Much faster than manually rotating door meshes every time you place one.