Game Design videos

[blackdog]

Recently the new GMTK Jam was held and here a selection of the best entries

 

[blackdog]

These videos came up on my homepage, quite interesting self-contained pills of videogame history and design.

The videos are not even very recent so dunno why I never found them before, but it’s quite the serie!

 

 

Full playlist

 

Edited December 26, 2019 by blackdog

[Minos]

4 hours ago, blackdog said:

These videos came up on my homepage, quite interesting self-contained pills of videogame history and design.

The videos are not even very recent so dunno why I never found them before, but it’s quite the serie!

 

 

Full playlist

 

Great series, especially the AvP one. Really made me think about how the average game is made these days. Due to the complexity of art creation, physics, and everything else, it seems that there's little room for exploration and happy accidents to happen along the way, like how it happened to them. I dream of the day (which I think is very near), when mid sized teams can make relevant and groundbreaking games again (and I mean games with actual gameplay, not interactive movies like Senua )

Probably the best channel for anything Unity (he always has up to date tutorials on the latest features and goes straight to the point)

https://www.youtube.com/user/Brackeys

I've been learning a lot about data oriented programming (as opposed to object oriented, the standard paradigm) and this shit is fascinating. It allows for much more optimized and reusable code. Unity is also transitioning from Object-oriented to data-oriented, and by the looks of it, this will probably be the new standard at some point.

The best advantage of making things this way, is that instead of referencing other gameobjects in your code, you reference data sets. For example, if you follow any Unity tutorial on how to make a Health bar HUD, they will hook up that system to a gameobject (usually a gamemanager), that has to always exist in the scene (singletons), and creates horribly interconnected code, that at some point becomes almost impossible to know what each object is doing.

He offers another solution, instead of hooking up gameobjects to one another, you simply dump the data you need to scriptable objects (data files), and then you can write behaviors that utilize that data. This way, your objects will not reference one another, but simply the same data set. This makes it much easier to create new objects and experiment with gameplay, since you can just use that existing data in creative ways.

If you are interested about this mindset, I really recommend this talk. Even though he uses Unity, these concepts can be adapted to any engine (I suppose).

It's a huge paradigm shift in how we make games, and the more I learn about it there more I believe it will unleash a new batch of highly creative and unique games, free from the tyranny of the old (and bad) ways that we have been making stuff  And as a trivia, we use a similar approach on Overwatch to organize our data:

And by transitioning to data oriented programming, you will be able to leverage all the insane performance from Unity's DOTS system:

https://unity.com/dots

 

[blackdog]

This has just been released

really curious to see if the rumors are real that GTA 6 might be set in London.

Also, am I the only one that would like to see a more stylised version of GTA? I love the promo illustrations they create, I think the game would look better with them characters.

[-HP-]

On 12/26/2019 at 6:17 PM, Minos said:

Great series, especially the AvP one. Really made me think about how the average game is made these days. Due to the complexity of art creation, physics, and everything else, it seems that there's little room for exploration and happy accidents to happen along the way, like how it happened to them. I dream of the day (which I think is very near), when mid sized teams can make relevant and groundbreaking games again (and I mean games with actual gameplay, not interactive movies like Senua )

This will, and has to happen eventually. Most likely in the next few years. AAA is becoming very bloated, and it's stalling.

Think of your 3 favourit video games of all time, I can almost guarantee you, that they were all made by a core team of 30 to 40 people. We need a return of "AA" games/studios, asap if this industry is to go anywhere.

[Radu]

 

[-HP-]

 

[blackdog]

Oh videogame dev ancient history, so interesting to hear about problems we don't really have anymore, like where data was stored on the CD to make it work as fast as possible*

*well I imagine the same might still happen for big games released on consoles, but you now always install them... last gen was the one that (at least in the beginning) was supposed to support no installation, kinda remember something being said by CliffyB regarding GoW 

[Mr.Yeah!]

I don't think this channel has been posted before

I had read the article about this level on mapcore and I love having insight from the designer himself

 

[blackdog]

Oh great reminder. I scrolled through their videos and I think I have in my too long “watch later” the COD video. Need to give a look, seems a serious channel to follow!

[-HP-]

 

Big fan of War Stories at Ars Technica, this one was great to watch too!

[blackdog]

Haven't listened to this yet, but i think there might be some Crash fans around. This is 2hrs long!!!