Posts by Skjalg

Quote from Dejavo

I for one appreciate d3ads contribution here. It might or might not be the side I take (i srsly dunno) but only hearing the echo chamber of you and your buddies same bias is poision. It's like those political facebook posts where everyone with the same opinion jumps on the band wagon and congratulate each other for having the right and moral opinion.

This! There's always two sides to a story. Personally I don't think the police is to blame, or the protesters. I think the blame lies at the top to let this slide so far out of control.

I played it for a couple of hours, but it didn't hold my attention for long. First blizzard game I've put down after that amount of time

I think I'm getting jaded...

How long did you spend on that blorange?

I did not recognize any of these characters. Am I supposed to?

Quote from Taylor

A lot of companies strip down to a core team once a game is out. It's why I've not seen another full-time position since I first entered the industry 7 years ago - everyone is on contracts now so you can get rid of them at the end of the project and avoid scary headlines.

Also, here's something fun: https://twitter.com/visteps/status/436100945668096000

Edit: Clarity

Yeah I know, and I don't think its healthy for the company, workers or the industry as a whole that big studios keep doing this.

We need to be smarter and hire less or scope down projects if the current team cant handle the work load.

If you manage to lie your way into a big contract that you cant fulfill with your current work force then you've literally fucked a bunch of employees over in the future because at some point you need to cut back because you probably wont land another big project at the end of your current one. And neither does your work force (probably) want to work on yet another big game that was a grind to finish.

I think most people makes this mistake. Its very easy when you're small to think that if you just hire some more people you'll get games done faster. But it is up to us to learn from these mistakes now and always argue against mass hirings. Especially when you finally land a publisher and gets some million dollars to create the game. Just try to hire slowly, and if you have to hire someone fresh out of school then only one at a time.

The mass firing/hiring is happening again and again and it only brings pain and misery to the people you eventually end up firing. I don't think it is possible to name a single big studio anymore that hasn't fired at least a dozen people once or twice. Growing too quickly too fast is just bad practice. Hell, even Blizzard had to let loads of people go at some point because their WoW team just got too bloated (mostly QA/localization/moderators etc). And I bet that the old timer devs at Blizzard are the ones behind Hearthstone. They probably ended up needing to create their own little team within blizzard in order to create Hearthstone. I mean, they didn't even bother involving the engine team and went with Unity3d.

I think this is a change that we are bound to see happen more in the industry as we shift from large 100+ sized teams into more manageable 15-30 sized teams. There's three reasons why I think this.

1. Upper Management/Money people are slowly starting to realize that 15-30 really great individuals will accomplish so much more on their own than 15-30 great people who has to manage another 100+. Simply because they reach the good decisions faster and don't waste time prototyping or implementing bad ideas. And on top of that now they don't have to waste time reverting the mess that unskilled laborers usually cause.
2. With a small team you don't need managers. The moment you go above 25 people you suddenly need managers, and then a manager to manage the managers and all of a sudden you have a hierarchy. I think it was Peter Molyneux who said something like this in a video interview when talking about 22Cans and Godus.
3. This is basically the structure that Valve is built upon. Valve is basically lots of small teams that work under the same name and share some common goals. This goes back to my first point, but I read somewhere that there's close to a 1000 employees at Riot these days (who created League of Legends), whereas theres 40~50 people working on Dota 2 at valve. And right now it seems like Valve is pushing out 2x the content that Riot does. Why? Because once you're in a meeting with 12 other designers you're not gonna get shit done. Every idea will be put down by someone in that room.
4. I know I said only three reasons, but here's a fourth smaller one that happened close to home. After Funcom shipped the Secret World (and Age of Conan for that matter) they fired almost all employees. And instead of waiting to be picked up again a lot of those people have now started their own indie companies in and around Oslo. There's literally hundreds of indies in Norway right now. And there's some amazing games that are being made. Two of which were kickstartered. (Dreamfall and Among the sleep) Before Age of Conan was released it was probably closer to 5. At some point there was over 200 people working on Age of Conan. It was in development for 5-6 years. When it released it had voice acting up until level 10 and quests up until level 40. And 2 dungeons with bosses at level 60. Everyone was asking themselves what happened, but I think it's fairly obvious. Throwing money at unskilled laborers wont get the job done. Creating a game is not like working in a factory, even though theres a lot of menial labor involved. I believe that 25-30 experienced people would have made Age of Conan hell of a lot better in half the time for about 1/10th of the cost.

Even though the games industry is still young, there are a lot of developers who are not anymore and have been there from the start. They remember how fast things were done back when they had small teams.

But this is not just happening in the games industry. Huge corporations are falling left and right because start ups with 5-25 people come up with better ideas than them. Lets use Android as an example. The first version was developed by a very small team (before they got bought by google). At the same time Nokia was developing its own operating system for phones called Symbian but everyone hated it. Why? Probably because hundreds of people worked on it instead of a small elite group of like minded individuals with a shared goal.

Quote from Hourences

A long and in-depth interview with me can be found on onlysp.com about the gameplay and vision of Solus, with lots of new info on what the game is about: http://www.onlysp.com/solus-unreal-e…sive-interview/

Also here is a quick in-game shot showing our PDA pocket computer that acts as our hud (ignore the huge crosshair dot). Gameplay wise the game is working out fine, we got most functonality fully working now. When the time is right I will release a gameplay video.

[Blocked Image: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2300830/solus_ingame03.jpg]

Here's an idea. Let someone from mapcore (Like Jord) play the game live on twitch for 5-10 minutes and let that be your game play video. I always think its less cool when I watch a game designer play the game in a "cinematic" way. The way HE intends us to play (watching the right stuff, always know where to go etc). I am always more interested in watching someone with no previous experience playing a game to see what its actually like.

I'm still using an age old quad core processor.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=in…2.40ghz&id=1038

And its getting a tad slow, but still runs dota 2 / titanfall / bf4 pretty good so I'm happy

Quote from blackdog

A question: why not unreal engine? It runs on mobile too and visually annihilates unity…

I'm not 100% sure on this, but I believe the licensing costs for unreal to be a bit steeper than the unity one... (factoring in, of course, that dear esther is selling millions instead of merely hundred copies)

This reminds me of Dear Esther. I think its great that there are more of these games where you can enjoy a more calm exploratory experience

Quote from SpronyvanJohnson

Just finished the last book. It ended which such an cliffhanger that I spent 2 hours online looking at different theories regarding what happened. If anyone here has read them all (the books) I would sure like to talk possible theories.

I really like the subreddit over at http://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf for theory discussion. They really dig deep sometimes, but its still fun

Dear Esther moving to Unity:

http://www.littlelostpoly.co.uk/dear-esther-and-unity/

I cant really understand why, even with the explanation there...

edit; my mind had actually skipped over a section there. And it makes things a lot clearer

Quote

The final straw came in September last year, after what should what was promised to be a fairly straightforward PS3 port. Started in May, with the PS4 still far on the horizon and with a projected development time of only 2-3 months, it seemed like a safe goal to reach. We were excited to see how Dear Esther would be received by a new branch of gamers, but unfortunately we hit issues early on. First, having to license yet more middleware for Source, and then obtaining the additional PS3 source code for the Engine. This was all happening around the time of the departures at Valve, which unfortunately included our main contact for all things Engine related, and subsequently we spent weeks trying to find someone else who could point us in the right direction. This had a cascade effect on the whole project leading to months of delays, coupled with the contractor’s inexperience with the engine, communication problems, and then finally the PS4 release date announcement, we decided it was time to pull the plug, at significant cost to us.

Signed up, and then notified my coworkers about the link to sign up and one of them had worked with the guys before and provided me with a key. Downloading now

Quote from Mazy

http://terrycavanaghgames.com/maverickbird/

Pretty damn good, actually~

Only have one small criticism though, the flash to white when you died hurt my eyes so bad I couldn't play it for long.

Well, back to topic.

I particularly enjoyed the talk about Economies

as well as the one about user generated content

And I've watched the one about evolution of games (boring) and the one about Unity (some interesting facts about unity, but I knew most from before).

Quote from KoKo5oVaR

o-m-g, gabe looks absolutely t-i-r-e-d it's like if his face cries please i need a break from these damn videogames, i'm completely asphyxiating under the pressure and the piles of money

Yeah I agree. Maybe he was sick? I hope he starts working out and eating healthy soon so that he can continue being awesome many more years.

I thought it looked like a mix between titanfall and hidden tbh. And I like it. This is most likely going to be played a lot on late night lan parties

My first complaints would be that the lighting looks a little bland. I suck at lighting myself so I cant really provide any useful feedback though. The ground is also very flat and seems to have dirt in weird areas (instead of in common pathways like it should).

How exactly did he manipulate the app store?

Not that I want to do the same.. *cough*