I just found this fun article and wanted to share it with other devs
It talks about how every single choice, animation, and game mechanic can affect the whole player experience and introduce a lot of game-breaking bugs.
Some of us maybe knew this already, or at least had an idea, but it’s still fun to get to know real-world examples that happened to big game studios.
Who is this for?
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For programmers to feel comfortable seeing others go through the same suffering or be alerted to what’s to come in their future if it didn’t already happen. Whatever your chosen genre/game, the journey won’t be easy.
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For all other devs to understand our suffering.
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For people looking to hire programmers.
A few quotes from the article: sorted by what I’ve liked the most.
Paul-Emile, lead FX/environment lead on Absolver and art director for Sifu talked about giving players the ability to jump, saying it was something the Absolver players kept asking for…and made the entire team laugh.
Game devs of all sizes and scopes respond to the question: “What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard to make?”
It turns out, a lot. A seemingly boring feature such as usable doors can be absolute hell for developers to put in their games for numerous reasons. Everything from physics to functionality, from AI to sound, comes into play while making a single door in a single video game work. And not just work, but work in such a way where the player never has to think about it. Building a working, forgettable door is an incredible game development undertaking.
“This is the kind of request that on the player side is sometimes naively worded as ‘just add that little feature’, while on the dev side it roughly means ‘make another game’.”
Did you find this useful/fun to read?
- Yes
- Both
- No
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