I thought that might be the answer.
Iteration is absolutely vital, but there’s also an art to developing and iterating on your high level ideas without disrespecting your team. It should happen early, and it shouldn’t require you to fully build out everything for some part of the game before you know if it works.
The reporting indicates that Levine decides whole swaths of his games aren’t working and throws them out to build something different. If it was great for the team, they wouldn’t be complaining to reporters. It means they’re being misinformed about the goals of their work or the stage of the project they’re in, being told they’re making stuff for the final game when they’re actually helping Levine refine his ideas. Levine is also just changing his mind and doesn’t care what the impacts are:
Levine’s tastes occasionally changed after playing a hot indie release, such as the side-scrolling action game Dead Cells or the comic book-inspired shooter Void Bastards, and he insisted some features be overhauled to emulate those games.
Genius or not, that’s classic shitty management. Oh, also he apparently insults team members, blames them for failures, and berates them in front of the rest of the team.
At the end of the day, listen to the folks who work for him before you decide that his style of forcing them to work and rework and rework again is so great.
thanks for clarifying, I was not aware about his lack of management and social skills.
I highly recommend Press Reset if you’re interested in BTS material as it also touches upon the development of BioShock, BioShock 2 and BioShock Infinite.
Sweet, that’s plenty of time for me to completely forget it exists and then be totally surprised when it pops back up in a year or so.
I had linked to Levine talking about a zombie game called Division 9 they started to make in the SWAT era, then I decided it wasn’t that interesting :)
That’s OK, neither is Judas.
No one posted the trailer from yesterday? This forum is slippin’!
And yes, it’s a Bioshock with a funny name.
This comes to mind when I think of this game’s name.
On topic, I feel zero hype for anything Ken Levine works on now.
If they have Lady Gaga tunes in the game, I’m in day one.
Expect some news and details and such dropping tomorrow. Apparently they flew some game writers to Boston to play about 6 hours of Judas, and also Levine sat for some interviews and such.
Ohhh will be interested to see what they say!
Embargo was lifted
So a game about a woman in need of a washcloth?
Is there a TLDW…?
-Protagonist with amnesia
-Three factions you can make quest for/obtain exclusive information/ally/piss off B and C and if you ally with A
-First person shooting, plasmids on the other hand, turrets, hacking
-Procedural generation! level pieces that plug together and even apply different themes on top of it
-It also changes combat design depending how you play, if the game notices you play stealthily it will make combat encounters for stealth, or the game may notice you use a lot weapon X and a quest giver will give you a quest related to it.
-Roguelite. And there is another narrative that progresses in the place you play between deaths. I start to wonder if will have a bit of Prey Mooncrash on it…
Woah, I don’t know if I’m able to handle such innovation!