The serious business of making games

This has been my experience as well. But you have to make sure the “get it done” person is in charge of the project in its final phase. Someone has to be the one to make tough decisions about what features to cut, and you can’t have that person and the creative person fighting for control at that critical time.

Probably what should happen is the creative person is in charge until the game goes into full production, at which time the “get it done” person takes over at the top. Creative is still involved, and should be playing the game all the time, but at some point you have to actually make the thing.

One great example of this is in film.

It is similar to how a director often hands off the process to an editor once the filming is done. Not all directors are good at this, but the Sally Menke / Quentin Tarantino collaboration comes to mind. I feel like she was able to polish off and finalize all of this films (before 2010) to perfection.

I have never directed, only written, but there comes a time with every script you write that you have to put the pen down and send it along to the editor or director.

This is key to most project management ideologies too, where only in early stage development can major changes be made/allowed, and once you move past certain stage gates, you cannot change certain major aspects. This is more true of industrial projects where real world assets and purchases come into place, but I think it makes sense to apply these principles to games dev too.

TLDR Ken needs an editor.

Any progress to report? I haven’t read any of these since 2019-2020’s revolving door of departing leadership citing “we’ll fix Anthem someday”

Two-thirds is a reminder to future humans that the pandemic was a different time. SWTOR expansion in Feb, work continues on Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, noted to be “a single-player experience that is built on choices that matter.” (Maybe the latter more specifically?)

A bonus to handing over the late stage work and trusting the team to execute, is the time and headspace to take all those exciting new ideas you wished you could’ve incorporated into the current project, and instead start planning your next one with them.

I liked this thread

It’s the typical thread to explain why NFTs aren’t freaking magic, but it also given a little neat example of why game development is hard.

I feel like this is at least partly a straw man, though given the nature of crypto maximalism I’m sure there are some people who believe/argue that that sort of interoperability will happen. Realistically, if there’s any prospect of “interoperability” outside of some kind of Robloxy metaverse or an explicitly experimental ecosystem, it’s not going to be interoperable code/assets, but mutually recognised entitlements to content. So your NFT doesn’t get yout he same skin/gun whatever in every game, but rather lets the different games know you’re entitled to a particular skin/gun, and then it’s up to each developer to implement it in their own engine with their own tools and code. Of course, this still runs into the same issues around incentives and IP and so on, to the extent I don’t think it will happen in any meaningful way (again, outside things like Roblox/Fortnite), but the stuff about physics/proprietary assets doesn’t really matter. It’s all going to be proprietary code anyway - only the entitlements system will need to be standardised.

And of course, blockchain technology doesn’t actually help bring this about in any way.

The proposed interoperability required to make NFT’s all cross application assets is funny… as a guy who works in modeling and simulation in the DoD space, I’ve dealt with similar such interoperability challenges for a long time… they are not real fun.

The idea of doing any such work so that some jackass crypto bro can make money is not something anyone is going to bother. You need to find a way for that to make the DEVELOPER rich, not some random lotto player on the internet.

That’s a BIG time acquisition. Wow. Zynga had been doing their own acquisitions and growth through the last few years.

Bethesda was $7.5B, let’s remember.

I for one am happy to see the continued market consolidation of the gaming industry, it spurs creativity.

Yep, Zynga’s series of studio acquisitions in the last 24-36 months made them a bigger player in the gaming space than Bethesda, by $5 billion or so.

Not arguing that this is full of problems, but most NFT contracts pay royalties to the creators with each secondary sale. The dev potentially could make 20% (or whatever they set) each time an NFT-bound asset is sold.

Steam has been doing that for artist workshop items that are resold (DOTA2, CSGO, etc) on the market for years iirc

No new capabilities.

E: Well, guess technically third party dealing with external payment (e.g. paypal or even crypto) outside the Steam market receives no cut for Valve or the artist, but crypto/NFT doesn’t entirely solve that issue since selling the entire wallet (thus not touching the blockchain contract or whatever) also cuts that out

Sure, the original NFT creator can get a cut, but there’s no equivalent incentive for the developer of a new game who’s considering putting a bunch of time into designing and testing support for interoperability with existing NFTs. They’d either be doing it in the hopes of generating new sales, or I suppose they could charge an import fee.

The example people cite of “buy the amazing magic sword in game X and then take it with you into game Y” seems like a total fantasy to me if you’re expecting any meaningful continuity of how the sword works across two totally different systems.

The only way I can see large-scale interoperability making any sort of sense as a game developer would be if you do something along the lines of the old Monster Rancher titles did with CDs. So build out a system where you have monsters (or items, or whatever) defined by a bunch of different stats/appearance/potential/rarity/etc. Then when someone pays to import their NFT, use it as a random seed to generate a new monster, and use the NFT to slap on the portrait and name, which don’t have any gameplay effects.

The idea that competing developers and publishers will work together to create some sort of robust transferrable ecosystem of in-game items is extremely far fetched. Maybe some indies will do it, but unless a major platform owner forces it, it’s already hard enough to just get games done.

I’m pretty sure I posted this somewhere on these forums but I can’t find it now.

Here’s a good 5 part writeup by Raph about how virtual worlds work, and why the concept of a metaverse and interoperable NFTs aren’t really feasible from a technical, systems, and artistic avenue:

My take on this, as somebody who dabbles with creating and collecting digital art NFTs and works in game development, is that there absolutely are ways that it could work, but that it’s too risky for a large company to want to dive in. I suspect we’ll see, at some point, an open source or indie project that comes up with an interesting and unique take on it. An NFT can store stats, metadata, data, point clouds, binary image data, etc. “on chain.” They can have metadata appended to them in additional transactions. Having something be transferrable between games might just mean that each game that wants to support it pulls on the data that’s stored in the NFT’s metadata and implements it in their own system. As for incentive structures to do that – no, they aren’t there yet. However, there are plenty of interoperability things that we use daily that have no apparent incentive structure. Why, for example, does Discourse support embedding Twitter links or YouTube videos instead of just showing a link? I don’t have an answer to how it will work or what that incentive structure would be, but I think it’s premature to say that it’s not possible.