I am finding games in general "less bad" the more I get working in Project Management

[Deleted member 12790]

Once, I had a friend over, and I wanted to explain to them what I was working on, so I started explaining how my "simple" 2D rendering module worked on my white board. This was the result of the conversation:

This is "basic."

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Games journalism was the worst. It's like acting. Only a few make it and the rest fall to obscurity, get paid dirt and are writing for an extremely entitled audience.

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"I play a lot of games, therefore I know how to make games."

Or, in other words:

 

[SolVanderlyn]

"I play a lot of games, therefore I know how to make games."

Or, in other words:

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I'm not sure if you're agreeing that the audience is entitled or saying games journalism isn't a real creative endeavor, lol

 

[sn00zer]

Not calling anyone out directly all you need to do to be a videogame playing expert is to play videogames. If I want to be a "FF7 expert" I just need to play all of the FF7 games, which is maybe a few weeks at most and the games are designed for me to win and have fun. Its not an education so to speak, its consumption while taking notes. To be a developer is literally years of education and experience. I think we got lost along the way when we started to listen to people who play a lot of games versus the people who actually make them as to why a game turned out the way it did.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I'm not sure if you're agreeing that the audience is entitled or saying games journalism isn't a real creative endeavor, lol

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not talking about games journalism as a creative endevor, or reviews, or whatever. I'm talking about those who write articles about how they could do better, games "journalists." There are some who make it big not because they write good stuff, but because they play into populist sentiments that "lazy devs" and "it's so simple to fix" and what not.

That dude Mike Matei has like tens of millions of followers on youtube, but his videos on games are usually sooooo fucking vapid. Meanwhile, something like Digital Foundry has a tiny fraction of the followers and views, but much more nuance and depth.

 

[elenarie]

I think we got lost along the way when we started to listen to people who play a lot of games versus the people who actually make them as to why a game turned out the way it did.

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Unfortunately, the people that make the games often times do not want to engage in discussions and education because it is just so... tiring... honestly.

There is a very straightforward lack of decency and trust when it comes to a random person believing something an expert in their field would say. Not much we say has any weight over someone that is popular. And there isn't much we can do about it either. That is reality, sadly.

 

[Shalashaska]

I know how hard it can be to get a single screen of a mobile app in a small team to go from concept to design to implementation, let alone do anything in the projects of the size of a AAA game.

Something like the last couple Assassin's Creed games are completely insane to me. Coordinating such a huge project with so many people involved and ending up with something that isn't a huge piece a shit is an incredible feat.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Unfortunately, the people that make the games often times do not want to engage in discussions and education because it is just so... tiring... honestly.

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I write a lot about how stuff works because I like to talk about it. It serves multiple purposes, not least of which to strengthen my own comprehension, as teaching someone something will reveal the holes in your own knowledge.

What I rarely talk about his how incredibly time consuming doing that is. Sometimes I'll spend, no joke, a week writing a topic or article or something because figuring out how to break it down is so complex.

While I'm doing my development, I keep a diary. It's not for anyone else but me, I do it because my memory is honestly terrible. I forget things quickly, even my own work. So my diary is a way for me to retrace my steps if I get lost. A map so I can remember what I've tried before, even if it didn't work. Keeping that diary, writing my own process, is without hyperbole, just as long as my dev work. Keeping that diary doubles my development load.

Breaking down what is going on into something people can follow takes a lot of time. People demand "transparency" and hate how "secretive" the game industry is. Well, talking to people to be "not secretive" is literally an entirely separate job.

I did a video with DF Retro on blast processing. The actual program took me like 1 day to write. The video itself took a month to produce. and when it was done, most of the comments were to the effect of "sounds like the guy is just reading from a script." Yeah, the script I wrote.

 

[Jedi2016]

I'm curious to know the opinion about crunch from the perspective of project management. In my opinion, it represents a failure of project management and a lack of proper planning up front. There should never be any last minute panic, and there should never be a case where you're understaffed for the amount of work that's needed. All that should be taken care of at the beginning.

One of the biggest projects I worked on, after receiving training on how to oversee one, saw a slow ramp up and a slow ramp down. The last few weeks were some of the most laid back of the entire project, because everything was done, we were all just wrapping up loose ends.

The closest to crunch we ever saw was only once, but was caused by last minute changes beyond our control, and we just brought more people on board to get it done. Everyone was busy, but no one worked late, not for a single day.

 

[-Tetsuo-]

I said it in the other thread, but Ubisoft has to have the best project managers in gaming.

 

[Firebricks]

I've been part of half a dozen major hardware projects and yeah this is hard. Shipping a thing and having it work is a minor miracle.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Can I just say I hate the term "asset flip"? Holy shit, what an awful, misused term. Not least of which, reusing assets are a good thing.

 

[Sems4arsenal]

That's why games take a lot of time, money, and talent.

Making a AAA game must be a nightmare. Imagine people settling on anything. Strong leadership is very much a requirement.

I'm a few months into a project management job, and yeah, it's a stressful job.

 

[sn00zer]

Can I just say I hate the term "asset flip"? Holy shit, what an awful, misused term. Not least of which, reusing assets are a good thing.

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I love when people tear down game assest to point out what is reused or what isnt. If you had to do that to even notice then the devs were successful. Similar with choice base games "If you replay it a few times you can see what matters and what doesnt". Yeah well I bet the magic trick absoluitely worked the first time, the way 99% of the audience will play it.
It's like peaking behind the current is a "haha GOTCHA!" moment as opposed to a "Wow they made some super smart decisions that made this trick work"

 

[Gifted]

I do recognize and appreciate that even a bad game can take a lot of time and effort to create but I don't find them less bad.

Some are bad, some are mediocre, some are good, some are great, some are the best I've ever played. However, working in various capacities from gas stations, to retail, to tech support and call centers, to project management, sales, and various roles in operations, management, and training I've companies and teams within companies where sometimes the largest ones operate better than the smallest and also where the opposite is true. I've seen the most mismanaged teams of all sizes.

While I agree it's extremely difficult and I likely couldn't personally coordinate things at that scale, some companies manage to do it well and others don't. There's obviously factors like budget and resources, some are just better and game development is no exception. It's a team effort and you're only as strong as your weakest link.

Some companies might have better project managers, better people in charge of marketing, better work life balance, better artists, better people in various roles throughout the development team, and a million other factors bit some are just better.

 

[ABIC]

I've worked in games my whole 12 years.

It's really not an easy field.

But I also have been in teams that are disastrously organized.

Like almost everything in life though, once you've been through it, you know it ain't easy. I do feel like while a subset of the gaming community continues to mature, the fact that the audience is almost always on the younger side and that it's an isolating activity, there's always going to be a non-small minority that is vocal, extreme and very insulated from reality. That toxicity will likely never end in gaming, but it may grow smaller as part of the overall gaming population as us 30-40 year olds get older and new kids are continually coming into it.

 

[elenarie]

Can I just say I hate the term "asset flip"? Holy shit, what an awful, misused term. Not least of which, reusing assets are a good thing.

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Of course it is! You would be stupid and insane to not reuse assets. That's how projects are kept to scope, how budgets are kept in control, how people's sanity is kept in place.

Let's take this as an example. The whole forest part of Endor was built with something like 12 to 16 actual assets (can't remember exactly now). Photogrammetry assets were used all across the space to create the feeling of dense forest. The map looks incredible, not because of the amount of assets used, but because of the talent of the design and art teams.

It would have been literally impossible to create this without massively reusing assets everywhere, both due to platform memory and performance budgets, project deadlines and scoping, actual real world both human and monetary cost, and so on.

Sadly, that's another thing that has gotten such a negative spotlight on it because some popular people online keep whining about it.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

What gets me the most about the term "lazy devs" is how presumptuous it is. Like someone can eyeball an end product that is the result of a massive pipeline of labor and say, "yup, the problem is the developer just didn't want to put in the effort." There are so many cogs in the machine that can result in a bad product, and I promise you it is very, very infrequently because someone just couldn't be bothered.

I always mentally replace "lazy devs" with 'heroin junky devs" because they're basically the same type of comment. "This game came out bad, because the developer was a heroin junky, he spent all his time doing heroin instead of working on the game." I'm sure some think that's ridiculous, how could anybody know that about someone they dont know? Well, there is just as much "proof" that the dev was being "lazy" as there is "proof" that they were wasting time shooting up. It's about as accurate, and ridiculous, as either claim.

of course, if someone went around blaming all the ills of development on developers being heroin junkies, they'd be rightly called an idiot. Yet some don't see the same problem with calling devs "lazy."

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Of course it is! You would be stupid and insane to not reuse assets. That's how projects are kept to scope, how budgets are kept in control, how people's sanity is kept in place.

Let's take this as an example. The whole forest part of Endor was built with something like 12 to 16 actual assets (can't remember exactly now). Photogrammetry assets were used all across the space to create the feeling of dense forest. The map looks incredible, not because of the amount of assets used, but because of the talent of the design and art teams.

It would have been literally impossible to create this without massively reusing assets everywhere, both due to platform memory and performance budgets, project deadlines and scoping, actual real world both human and monetary cost, and so on.

Sadly, that's another thing that has gotten such a negative spotlight on it because some popular people online keep whining about it.

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I literally can't spot the fault in that video, haha. What are people complaining about? That the trees use the same geometry mesh? Who cares, the lighting is all completely different. Do people REALLY care that every tree in the game is unique? In a game based on a film where all the enemies are indistinguishable by choice to "cheat" in editing? Who would even notice that stuff??

 

[elenarie]

I literally can't spot the fault in that video, haha. What are people complaining about? That the trees use the same geometry mesh? Who cares, the lighting is all completely different. Do people REALLY care that every tree in the game is unique? In a game based on a film where all the enemies are indistinguishable by choice to "cheat" in editing? Who would even notice that stuff??

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Nah, no complains in that specific example. Was just an example of how something like that would be impossible to create without reusing assets everywhere.

 

[entremet]

Do you guys think square has project managers

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of course.

square has issues with the creatives. The directors, not the PMs. The scope changes too much.

 

[sn00zer]

Of course it is! You would be stupid and insane to not reuse assets. That's how projects are kept to scope, how budgets are kept in control, how people's sanity is kept in place.

Let's take this as an example. The whole forest part of Endor was built with something like 12 to 16 actual assets (can't remember exactly now). Photogrammetry assets were used all across the space to create the feeling of dense forest. The map looks incredible, not because of the amount of assets used, but because of the talent of the design and art teams.

It would have been literally impossible to create this without massively reusing assets everywhere, both due to platform memory and performance budgets, project deadlines and scoping, actual real world both human and monetary cost, and so on.

Sadly, that's another thing that has gotten such a negative spotlight on it because some popular people online keep whining about it.

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Regarding this is there any public info on how gaming assets are shared between companies specifically regarding Star Wars? I imagine EA have a whole photogrammetry library of Star Wars assets, but does every dev need to make a new Darth Vader model or is there a shared library of sorts? I cant imagine every single Star Wars game needs to start from square one.

 

[blonded]

It annoys me when people think bigger teams automatically equal better more complex games. People dismiss the high quality of AC games because they have "loads of studios" working on them so of course they can make those games.

Getting different studios with hundreds of employees to deliver a singular vision competently is nothing short of a miracle.

 

[chainlinkspiral]

Behind the scenes media production is a helluva drug. As much as crunch culture is a tragedy for many people and their families and lives otherwise, the high of working on a passion project full time and then some should be appreciated at least once in a lifetime. And yeah, it's the job of management to always be looking at every aspect and deciding if it's worth the sacrifice. Art is a worthy endeavor.

 

[learning]

of course.

square has issues with the creatives. The directors, not the PMs. The scope changes too much.

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yeah

it must be insane being a PM there

i hope those employees get support etc

scope creep is real

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Nah, no complains in that specific example. Was just an example of how something like that would be impossible to create without reusing assets everywhere.

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along the same line, thinking about forests, relating to the concept of seeds, the stigma "procedural generation" got and the ire they threw at no man's sky. OMFG, picard face palm so hard. Like, I don't even know where to start with the problems I had with all that discourse. Especially when people would turn around and point to things which are also procedural generated as examples of not-procedural generated stuff.

Anything interactive, is likely programmatically generated. Anything programmatically generated, is procedurally generated. Procedural generation is a good thing, it's what enables vast, vast landscapes. When people would be like, "procedural generation removes auteurism..." fucking WRONG! Procedural generation is not just throwing things into a random number generator and walking away.

So, so frustrating.

What was even worst is the dummies who would then say things like, 'procedural generation is an instant non-buy for me" afterwards. Who would then bitch about how secretive everything is. Well, if people told you how the sausage was made, you'd learn how prevalent procedural generation is... which you'd then swear off, because you think it's a bad thing despite literally every game you've ever liked having used it! A little knowledge is dangerous sometimes.

 

[Graven]

Good for you.

We live in a world where people will throw around words like "trash" and "garbage'' for free. No sensibility whatsoever, specially in a medium where it's known for being very hard to create since it involves coding and programing.

 

[Andalusia]

I don't really agree OP as their are a numerous older games that required less "project management" and yet are of a substantially higher quality than some newer games.

 

[Deleted member 21411]

Movies, games, art that requires management and team efforts amaze me. And then you also think about game companies that make nitche products and things that experiment and idk it's what makes me love gaming

 

[Deleted member 12790]

another example: when people are like "Why don't all games use GGPO" and you try to explain to them the difference between deterministic situations and non-deterministic situations and you just get "lazy devs" responses.

 

[elenarie]

Regarding this is there any public info on how gaming assets are shared between companies specifically regarding Star Wars? I imagine EA have a whole photogrammetry library of Star Wars assets, but does every dev need to make a new Darth Vader model or is there a shared library of sorts? I cant imagine every single Star Wars game needs to start from square one.

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This goes for everything internally, everything can be shared. Animations, textures, meshes, visual scripts, code, backends, basically everything. It is up to each individual team to use what they want, or create something new entirely. That's so awesome about working with Frostbite, we all have full ownership of everything that happens with our pipeline and each of our contributions has the potential to improve someone else's game if they decide to integrate that contribution.

Small example, we used (not sure if we shipped with them) some snow shaders that were done for the frozen planet in Mass Effect Andromeda, in BFV. Some plants that were made for SWBF were updated for the Pacific content release for BFV, then later on from there updated again for one of the newer updates for SWBF2.

Being able to share and collaborate on things like that is very powerful and very valuable.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I remember when VR was still nothing but development kits, having the same circular conversations over, and over again regarding positional tracking. People would be like, "why does the DK2 lose positional tracking? That's been a solved problem for years!" and I'd explain that positional tracking was extremely difficult and largely hadn't been solved. And people would be like "uh, I have GPS in my car for like 10 years now" and I'd explain about sub-millimeter precision and how GPS can't discern orientation, only position. And they'd be like "bullshit, they can do positional tracking of hockey pucks in NHL games on TV broadcasts" and I'd explain about expected linear vectors and predictive curves, and how those are actually usually pretty wrong and how you need some sort of constant, two way communication. And it'd just go back to "what about GPS" all over again.

It was so fucking frustrating.

 

[sn00zer]

This goes for everything internally, everything can be shared. Animations, textures, meshes, visual scripts, code, backends, basically everything. It is up to each individual team to use what they want, or create something new entirely. That's so awesome about working with Frostbite, we all have full ownership of everything that happens with our pipeline and each of our contributions has the potential to improve someone else's game if they decide to integrate that contribution.

Small example, we used (not sure if we shipped with them) some snow shaders that were done for the frozen planet in Mass Effect Andromeda, in BFV. Some plants that were made for SWBF were updated for the Pacific content release for BFV, then later on from there updated again for one of the newer updates for SWBF2.

Being able to share and collaborate on things like that is very powerful and very valuable.

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Yeah but cant you just switch to Unreal?
I kid I kid.
Didnt realize there was so much cross pollination across games on the engine. Make sense. Very funny thinking that Fifa code could end up in Mass Effect or something.

 

[elenarie]

Yeah but cant you just switch to Unreal?

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Oh don't get me started on that stupid discussion. 😆

 

[Deleted member 12790]

This goes for everything internally, everything can be shared. Animations, textures, meshes, visual scripts, code, backends, basically everything. It is up to each individual team to use what they want, or create something new entirely. That's so awesome about working with Frostbite, we all have full ownership of everything that happens with our pipeline and each of our contributions has the potential to improve someone else's game if they decide to integrate that contribution.

Small example, we used (not sure if we shipped with them) some snow shaders that were done for the frozen planet in Mass Effect Andromeda, in BFV. Some plants that were made for SWBF were updated for the Pacific content release for BFV, then later on from there updated again for one of the newer updates for SWBF2.

Being able to share and collaborate on things like that is very powerful and very valuable.

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with the rise of post modernism, the prevalence of hip hop and house music and thus extensive sampling, you would think people would be more receptive to the notion that a palette need not be the most basic unit of color/art/etc to be useful. Andy Worhol explored this decades ago, you can take wholly formed ideas and objects, and remix them into unique art, purposefully. I once got into a very, very nasty conversation with a former Mortal Kombat II developer who started going off in my face about how Jeff Minter was a "fucking thief" because he used some pac-man sounds in TxK. I was saying, 'do you think he used those sounds because he couldn't come up with a unique sound effect, or do you think he used those sounds because they convey an idea that he wanted to bathe the aesthetic of the game in, using their cultural cachet?" and he was honestly arguing the former.

smh, and this was an artist!

Now, admittedly, I lean very, very hard into the idea of copyleft. But surely this can't be an alien concept in 2020.

 

[K' Dash]

Sure the devs lurking yesterday's thread felt amazing when people shat on their games for 100 pages because it was an Xbox presentation.

 

[elenarie]

What was even worst is the dummies who would then say things like, 'procedural generation is an instant non-buy for me" afterwards. Who would then bitch about how secretive everything is. Well, if people told you how the sausage was made, you'd learn how prevalent procedural generation is... which you'd then swear off, because you think it's a bad thing despite literally every game you've ever liked having used it! A little knowledge is dangerous sometimes.

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Oh, if they only knew that most of the terrains in their favourite games used procedural mesh scattering for the terrain, or procedural shader displacement, or procedural terrain geometry generation, or procedural vegetation placement, or procedural terrain painting, or procedural texture displacement and scattering for assets, or well, almost everything else. :D

 

[hannuraina]

I've been a (non-videogame) dev for most of my adult life. it definitely changes your perspective on videogames and the amount of effort put in to even the smallest changes/bug fixes

 

[sn00zer]

Oh don't get me started on that stupid discussion. 😆

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heh heh I must say it gives me a weird bit of happiness to toss that softball bait at a Frostbite dev. Thanks for playing along.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

Oh, if they only knew that most of the terrains in their favourite games used procedural mesh scattering for the terrain, or procedural shader displacement, or procedural terrain geometry generation, or procedural vegetation placement, or procedural terrain painting, or procedural texture displacement and scattering for assets, or well, almost everything else. :D

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"Fuck procedural generation, why not just use Machine Learning??"

 

[elenarie]

"Fuck procedural generation, why not just use Machine Learning??"

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I feel like this will become a new tagline eventually.

THIS GAME WAS MADE WITH THE POWER OF AI.

 

[Deleted member 16136]

Once, I had a friend over, and I wanted to explain to them what I was working on, so I started explaining how my "simple" 2D rendering module worked on my white board. This was the result of the conversation:

This is "basic."

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[Weltall Zero]

As a dev, you understand how hard it is to make a functional BAD game.

Its 10X harder to make a functional decent game lol.

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Being a software developer for a couple of decades, I always had an appreciation for how hard it must have been to make a game.

... or so I thought until I got into actual game development and realized I had undershot by like a factor of three. :/

 

[Dragoon]

There's a reason why people are paid big bucks to manage resources and people. Used to do that for awhile but then decided it's way too much stress.

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I WFH due to corona now, but I generally need to take 1 20 minute walk at work and go look at the window for a few mins 2-3 times a day. I don't work in the video game business, but shit gets completely insane in our team esp once you involve business, 5 different IT teams as well as different departments and then directors, outside sources, etc for projects.

I sometimes wonder when I get stressed and then think of my boss, whose got it noticeably worse.

 

[Turin]

I don't play a ton of games in general but I've always respected the labor that goes into making any video game and other pieces of media.

There's ways to try and like different pieces of media, even the "less good" ones, with the right mentality. Life's short and all.

 

[Deleted member 12790]

I feel like this will become a new tagline eventually.

THIS GAME WAS MADE WITH THE POWER OF AI.

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Maybe people should start using regular expressions to find the secret of great game design!

 

[Dragoon]

Saying that, some UI/UX decisions drive me crazy. Hunt Showdown for example has a bunch of bad design decisions I gloss over, since they're likely a small team and clearly were built to make PC games. But I get annoyed at games like FIFA which makes changes that don't make sense that were better before. Obviously this must be based on some sort of VOC, but you gotta be able to filter bad customer complaints. :D

Ex. Friendly games now after you're done, the game ends instead of stating the stats between the teams. Why would you change this? Or from 19 to 20, set pieces from the half way line doesn't allow you to switch to first person like before. So you're literally stuck winging it. The game is littered with things like this.


Still a great game and will be buying 21 day one. I regularly started using the rainbow on ranked matches to great success, it's pure bliss. First time I cared enough to record and upload several (unlisted) games on youtube so I can share it with my buddies.

 

[SolVanderlyn]

not talking about games journalism as a creative endevor, or reviews, or whatever. I'm talking about those who write articles about how they could do better, games "journalists." There are some who make it big not because they write good stuff, but because they play into populist sentiments that "lazy devs" and "it's so simple to fix" and what not.

That dude Mike Matei has like tens of millions of followers on youtube, but his videos on games are usually sooooo fucking vapid. Meanwhile, something like Digital Foundry has a tiny fraction of the followers and views, but much more nuance and depth.

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Ah, yeah, I totally get what you mean.

Unfortunately the type of work I liked to do, and the type of work I always wanted to do since falling in love with Nintendo Power as a kid, was editorials. The site I wrote for much favored simple, sensationalist articles and lists over anything of substance. It was extremely frustrating.

 

[Deleted member 13188]

I had the very same thought s while playing FF7R OP! I often wonder to myself "wow somebody had to model all of these little objects in a room or area that 97% of players probably won't spend 2 seconds in" in most AAA games actually.

It's important to remember tho that monumental effort and the highest quality craft is never guaranteed to make great art and sometimes the simplest ideas or presentations can have the most profound results; it's the wonder of culture and it's the reason why we all hate The Rise of Skywalker! /s

Sure the devs lurking yesterday's thread felt amazing when people shat on their games for 100 pages because it was an Xbox presentation.

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Lol there are so many layers to this statement... but it was still a bad move on MS part.

 

[Mechaplum]

I WFH due to corona now, but I generally need to take 1 20 minute walk at work and go look at the window for a few mins 2-3 times a day. I don't work in the video game business, but shit gets completely insane in our team esp once you involve business, 5 different IT teams as well as different departments and then directors, outside sources, etc for projects.

I sometimes wonder when I get stressed and then think of my boss, whose got it noticeably worse.

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Good project managers, or managers do well by compartmentalising stress. Still takes a toll especially when you have team members who are hard to handle. I used to run a start up and ended up with health problems. But knowing myself it's only time till I give it another try, only wiser this time.