Physics simulation starts off simple when you have simple situations, but each additional factor creates additional layers of complexity that the simulation might not handle all that well. Let me try to give you an example of such. Let’s go with a basic physics problem - I am standing still and drop a ball I am holding in front of me. What should happen? The ball starts with a velocity of 0, gravity pulls it downward, and it falls over time. Creating a general equation to simulate this is not that difficult - it’s pretty basic physics. Now let’s add another layer of complexity. I’m still hol ..read more

Sunk cost affects us like it affects most humans. We’re loss-averse creatures and our brains abhor feeling like we’ve wasted resources. The problem then becomes throwing “good” resources after bad and trying to “get over the hump” when it is really just digging our own graves even deeper. One famous example is Mass Effect Andromeda. ME:A had a major problem with sunk cost - the game was originally intended to feature a procedural planet generator that could create a near-infinite number of planets to explore. The dev team spent a tremendous amount of resources building out such a system and e ..read more

I’ve probably learned enough lessons over the course of my career to write an entire book, and then some. In fact, thanks to your question I think I might try writing a series of “lessons learned” posts when the fancy strikes me. Today, I will answer both of your questions with the same lesson: Everybody - player, artist, designer, engineer, QA, musician, writer, director, producer, executive, publisher, marketer, brand manager, influencer, interviewer, whatever - has a different perspective and different needs. If you want their buy-in, you need to show them the value in what you’re proposin ..read more

This particular topic can be a real rabbit hole, but let’s try to keep it to the basics for today. At its core, a leveling system is a series of goals and rewards for the player. The player plays the game, reaches certain pre-determined requirements, and obtains discrete new rewards for doing so. Because this is a system that dispenses rewards to the player, it needs to meet a few criteria: 1. The rewards must be meaningful There has to be some sort of tangible benefit to rising in level - the authorization to use better equipment, a new power or more currency to buy/improve powers, etc. This ..read more

I did briefly work as a lead at one company due to the need. There are two major elements to being leader that I didn’t know until I had to do it myself. First - the lead dinglehopper doesn’t actually do all that much dinglehopping herself. However, the small amount of dinglehopping she does tends to be the mission-critical stuff, because the lead dinglehopper has the best understanding of the entire process. The vast majority of the actual dinglehopping work was done by my team. The few times I actually needed to step in and do things myself were for the really critical problems that require ..read more

I’ve seen things like that happen before. In my experience, production problems tend to appear when the producer in charge focuses too much on enforcing rules and procedure for its own sake. The procedures aren’t too different from how other teams work, the difference is the level of enforcement of those procedures - like a designer and engineer not being allowed to chat about an issue or work out solutions informally without having an official meeting called by a producer to discuss the problem. One team I worked with ran this way. This team was running a live MMOG and had very strict proced ..read more

Once upon a time, back in the ancient years of 2009 and 2010, Bungie was developing its final Halo game - Halo: Reach - with intentions to then go their own way. Microsoft created a new studio named 343 Industries to take over after the split from Bungie. 343 co-developed the Halo Legends animated series and worked with Bungie on Halo: Reach to learn the Halo development ropes, and then worked with Saber Interactive and Certain Affinity to develop Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary. Halo Anniversary (2011) was the first appearance of the classic graphics toggle feature. From what I’ve been told ..read more

Not all war stories are fun or amusing. This is a story about one of my forays into development hell. My employer assigned me to a small team that was building a new game out of an existing, though decommissioned, game base. The game had many constraints - minimal budget for new art assets and almost no tribal knowledge from the original team remained. Our essential marching orders were to build a new game out of old parts. The combination of constraints - small team, minimal budget, reusing an old game - essentially dictated some kind of system-based randomization-centric core gameplay in ord ..read more

Recommended Reading: [A Gamer’s Primer to Practically Dealing with Job Loss] Yes, I have been fired before. It is definitely different from being laid off. And yes, I do have advice for those who were fired, rather than laid off. Losing my job due to a layoff is much more generalized than being fired; it wasn’t something that I did to deserve losing my job and I was not the only person who was let go.  Being fired means that my job loss is because of something specific to me, that there was some thing(s) I either did or didn’t do that warranted my dismissal. While the direct effects of b ..read more

It’s probably the same reason that dissatisfied fans of other major franchises have difficulty transitioning to other similar games - the things they dislike about one game, while important to them, aren’t as important overall as all of the other things they do like. It is more comfortable for most players to play Pokemon (or Call of Duty, FIFA, GTA, or whatever major franchise) and complain than it is to actually step out of their comfort zone and play a competing game - especially if that competing indie game doesn’t have the breadth of features or production value of Pokemon. Industry lead ..read more