Just watched the walkthrough trailer, and while the theme and setting is great, I cant help but to be completely bored by the looks of the level. Its super standard, gray, desaturated, there is no lighting and so on. It could have just as well been a level from Killzone, Gears Of Wars, Resistance, and 300 other desatured war torn post apocalypse games.
That really killed my interest.
I love it!
And it even has color in these dark desaturated days.
I almost solely do art in most projects. I am the middle man between both sides since I am familiar with what both sides need and like to see. That is what a level designer should be imo, someone who bridges the gap and retains the overview of an environment.
As the industry grows older and expands more (more places to work near your house!), it will become less of a problem.
It has to, or else this industry cannot move forward.
And I know plenty of devs with families.
That would be really awesome, but good luck trying.
Another problem with level designer stuff is that the industry has no clue what a level designer is, you got dozens of different types of lds... It is more difficult to find common ground for all of them like this.
Just look at the division between the three big historic groups of LDs: Unreal/Quake/HL. There is absolutely no interaction between the groups.
You can say the same for other professions within game dev no? I mean where are all the animators.. Just to name one.
Most professionals dont participate on forums and in communities, 9-5 attitude, which is a shame imo, also for their own good of developping a broader understanding and view of their specific activity.
To my experience there are two types of pro devs: the mod/community dude(tte), and the "I accidently rolled into this job and didn't knew there was such thing as a community and I don't know how a forum works" dude(tte).
My point being, we got into this industry through modding, so it is logical for us to be very involved online and on forums, that is not the case for those who got into the industry through other ways.
I only played the level just now. It is really nice, great job!
I really like the atmosphere and feeling of the place, and the attention to detail. Awesome.
What I liked less whas the overal look, it is a bit too monotome. I think it would benefit from raising the brightness and radius of some of the small yellow lamps to create more of a bright-dark composition in lighting, by having the areas near lamps be considerable brighter. It might also help to bump up sunlight brightness to raise the contrast more. The problem is that there are large parts in the level that are just lit by ambientlight and look all the same.
And yes the storm is too dark, but an awesome idea.
If you fix that you got a real winner.
Yes some things are hard to predict and must be redone BUT there is a difference. For example HL2 grav gun at the end of the game: did you really needed to test that first before you can figure out "oh jeez, maybe its more fun if we introduce the more revolutionary aspects of the gameplay earlier on in the game, since few people play a game until the end". Thats not rocket science to figure out, you dont even need to test that, but these kind of mistakes happen _ALL_ the time.
Also, yes brand new gameplay elements may be difficult to design and implement, so for example for HL2, they prolly didnt had a clear idea in the beginning how the gameplay would be influenced by this grav gun, which is normal, but cant you make some low poly maps first then? And focus on finishing the other more standards levels first while the experimental levels are further redesigned? So you dont have to redo an entire level later on, but just the low poly mockup...
The fact that new gameplay elements are difficult to predict is no excuse for redoing half a game. You got low poly testlevels to test things out in.
And actually I have seen a lot of studios who did wish to lose ends in a multi mil dollar project. Look past the bigger studios who usually do have their things going pretty okish, and look at the smaller studios who often, for example because of the lack of experience, mess things up quicker... Exceptions aside of course.
The fact that this is a young industry, and a rapidly expanding industry isnt helping. I sometimes feel that lots of people are still stuck in the mindset of a few years ago, when things were easier to redo, and less costly, and havent fully realized yet that the old more random design approach is starting to become really expensive... It is slowly improving though.
I think everyone knows how gut-wrenching it is to work on some aspect of your design (be it a level, an application or a texture set etc.) only to realise that it's just not the right way to do it, or that you have figured out a much better way to go about it.
Then why did you already started on producing it? What happened to the research stage? Maybe it wasn't your fault and should your superiors and more experienced colleagues have guided you through the process better? Maybe you needed to have more meetings to discuss the challenging parts of the thing to make? All in all, this is something that can be avoided for about 95 percent of everything that is made.
Yes. Very fucked up.
Im not. They should have figured out that you need to introduce such a cool game early on in the game BEFORE they started production!
It is called planning and thinking ahead.
This is exactly why this industry burns so much money.
I read that they just weren't happy with how it was so remade pretty much 90% of it.
And that is exactly what Steppenwolf said. Fucked up. Their initial vision of the game must have been wrong if they had redo 90 percent of it.
No. Wait until youre in this industry for a few years. There is a difference between carefully thinking things over and redesigning parts, and redesigning half the game every year because you did a horrible job at it the first time.
If there would be more communication so every department gets what it wants right from the start, with more experienced developers who think ahead A LOT, the unneccy redoing thing can be reduced a lot.
Redoing half a game IS NOT a symbol of quality. It means you did an awfull job the first time around, thats the opposite!
Yes, I have similar experiences with running projects without any real interaction from non developers (read managers), and usually it works out well. It depends largely on the team of developers though, how well they know each other and if they are all share a similar view, but it could work really well.
So that brings us back to my first question: Do you really need 50 milion to make a game and pay a 100 managers and all kinds of similar people? Do you really need 50 milion because your tools are so unoptimized that it takes a month to do even the simplest task?
Seriously, games cost too much. The whole process of creating a game is still too unoptimized and a lot of manhours go lost in a project by constantly redesigning and redoing things, thats the reason why a lot of games take so long and therefore cost so much, not because they were so terrible complex to create.
HL2 is not your standard game. Also was it really neccy for the game to take 6 years? If they would have handled development differently, wouldn't they have been able to make the exact same game in half the time? Hence my whole point, what the heck do they need this much money for?
How do other industries handle 40-50 year olds? I dont think the games industry will handle that all too differently from the other industries.
Six years is way more than the average dev cycle takes. Six years also means to me that the studio behind the project had problems developing the product, as for 99 percent of all games there is no need at all to spend 6 years on it.
Try three for a big game.
And we earn more than 2500 on avg.
Killzone 2 is a lot more than 20 mil, they started on it well before 2007..
I think most games blow through way too much money. Do you REALLY need 50 mil to make a game? GOW is a nice example, super succesfull game made with just 10 mil.
IMO studios waste a lot of money on random and unneccy stuff.
A private forum only for those who are in the industry?
Might divide things up too much tho, but could be nice.
I agree that these 36 pages are a bit unneccy, but if you do prune them, I would keep the thread open to new replies, and just strips those replies off every now and then.
Its nice to have a chat with people who just got a new job, if it were to become a very static list no one would notice any chances, and you wouldnt feel very involved.
Why do you want to prune it?
If you know exactly what to do, 8 minutes:P
But it should take half an hour the first time.
And yes we will continue. We expanded with two character artists, so the new version should be a whole lot bigger. There will also be arrow turrets, water, big boulders, and so on in the next version. And more blood and scary things like dead monkeys:)
The contest runs until tomorrow so we had to release. There is a small bug with the ball sometimes messing up your collision, and the menu is very simple. Other then that it's quite polished. It's not a beta or rushed release.
I made the design, all art, and the entire level minus the scripting, which RenderMonkey did, in 1.5 month part time work. The whole mod was done by just three people.
The screenshots are slightly outdated, but the differences are really minor. The lamps arent as simple anymore in the final version for example.
