How I Saved the Gaming Industry 252
Jamie found a nifty blog entry where indie game designer Jeff Vogel writes about game engine and art re-use. He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade. It's an amusing little rant with thoughts that actually might apply to anyone working in engineering.
Story Graphics (Score:5, Insightful)
Here we have a game developer that noticed that good gameplay and good stroy > fancy technology. If only the major studios would come to the same conclusion :-(
Re:But You Can Be Like Activision! (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'd say this guy doesn't know anything about the realities of the business. At what point did he think that EA or Activision wanted to make enough money for anyone but the top Execs?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Kind of an Anecdote (Score:4, Insightful)
He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade.
So he's on the far end of the spectrum making it work. I guess if I where him I'd point out the (far opposite end of the spectrum) Duke Nukem Forever style of business where you couldn't settle on a damned engine if your company depended on it. But the truth is that there are plenty of in between companies among the big fish that are using the rehashed Unreal engine or some Flash game engine for a social game. They are probably closer to him than the "must rewrite everything" crowd. I'm impressed with this situation and profits but I'm not sold that this extreme is the best answer. Everyone has a happy medium where they feel most comfortable and big companies probably feel differently about rewriting pieces since they are expected to produce wildly new things with their large revenues. I certainly grow tired of the rehashed music game that seems to be the same damned thing to merely a different song every title.
Article Is Win (Score:5, Insightful)
Reminds me of the excellent Write Games, Not Engines [scientificninja.com].
A lot - and I speak from experience - of prospective games developers get so wrapped up in tweaking their engines that they never actually get around to writing one game, let alone a series. And that's why the Intartubes are littered with the sad corpses of hundreds of open source game engines, some of them rather good, in various states of disrepair and abandonment, and so few really outstanding open source games.
Aren't there plenty of engines used this way? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Quake engine is the canonical example, it's powered more first-person shooters than anything else. It's the basis of Source [wikipedia.org], fer chrissake, if you go back far enough into the past. And then let's not forget that there's probably more total conversions for Quake than for any other game, and with pretty amazing scope considering their QuakeC limitations... Battletech Quake and Quake Rally come to mind immediately... and wasn't there a jet fighter "sim"?
But then you have to think about the Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo series... While there are some major leaps here and there it's clear that we're not talking about total code abandonment except when quantum leaps in hardware technology are made. Platform games also spring into my head immediately; numerous platformers had sequels based on minor codebase revisions, especially Mega Man. For that matter, Super C didn't exactly appear to replace the code from Contra. And then we can bring up Metal Gear. Don't get me started on Madden or NHL or any other sports game.
Or in short, this is a very valid point, but it's SOP to reuse an engine and fiddle with it eternally. I know I'm not the only one who played through all the Quake mission packs.
Re:No one wants to be behind the times (Score:4, Insightful)
If they can get the storyline and gameplay right, create great immersion, reduce bugs, loadtime, need for 'farming,' etc, then I have absolutely no problem with buying games from that company.
Re:No one wants to be behind the times (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll take an ugly but fun game over a pretty but boring game any day. I like high-end graphics as much as the next guy, but not at the expense of gameplay.
I can imagine something looks better than it does...I can't imagine it's more fun to play than it is.
Im 100% behind this guy. Story IS king. (Score:3, Insightful)
this piece is quite in line with what i has been complaining of in my little rant about mass effect 2 last night in the journal item i posted to slashdot :
http://slashdot.org/journal/249254/Mass-Effect-2--Can-you-say-Eye-fck---Dumbed-down-?art_pos=1 [slashdot.org]
Mass effect, Me2 , Dragon Age : Origins are SO good in implementation, details and polish but SO weak in the MAIN story that, they really leave a sour taste for the buck in your mouth. Dragon age is, basically 'Hey ! A new blight has come. AGAIN. lets beat this blight and wait until the next time bioware needs to issue an expansion'. Whereas, all the side details, ie, background stories of characters, side quests, other events unrelated to main story are all good and galore.
Dragon Age also isnt helped at all by torturous, neverending, lengthy dungeons in which you kill enemy after enemy (Similar enemies) and then a brief respite until you get into the next dungeon sequence in which you will get bored.
Strategic Conquest (Score:3, Insightful)
Man, I sure miss Strategic Conquest and Crystal quest. So no I don't care if the graphics are old school. they remain awesomely engaging games. they just don't run on intel macs.
Re:It's a heavy burden, to save an entire industry (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's a heavy burden, to save an entire industry (Score:1, Insightful)
Let's say you were driving on a highway every day of your life and saw all the cars around you. Sure, they're all different in their own ways, but in the end, you come to the realization that they're pretty well all just four-wheeled devices that use some manner of fuel to propel their passengers down the road. Suddenly, it all seems so much the same. The four wheels, the driving, the road; at this point, you think to yourself that you'd like to see someone else do something different with transportation, just to break up the monotony.
Then, someone comes running up to you while you're driving and tries to sell you homeowner's insurance and a fishing license. That someone is BadAnalogyGuy.
Re:Interpreted languages (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:But You Can Be Like Activision! (Score:4, Insightful)
That's only after they worked for years putting in 80 hour weeks trying to make a rushed release date with the vague notion of promotion hanging over their heads.
According to the RPG Codex article ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... the defining method to determine if a game is an RPG or not is if game engine itself penalize someone by denying access to some game content. No joke:
"Where then does that leave the modern RPG? The game where making choices actually results in missing out on things? The game where you don't get to use the best axe because you're focussing on guns instead? While RPG becomes a modern marketing phrase to slap on titles in the hopes of selling additional units and some companies are making real efforts, the truth is, the core mechanics of the most successful RPGs released by the main-stream developers are becoming less and less RPG like."
Two more gems:
- Games that use the same game engine are not new games, with the implication that they are therefore not worth playing 'again'.
- the claim that any company that produces a game labeled as an RPG will go out of business in short order because of that decision.
I could do a point-by-point, but there's no ...erhm... point. I'd just ignore this posting if I were Jeff.
Re:It's a heavy burden, to save an entire industry (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's a heavy burden, to save an entire industry (Score:4, Insightful)
You know how after 3 or 4 six-packs you get in your car and think of doing something you would never even think of sober (like seeing if you can jump across the bridge that is out, 'cause you saw 'em do it many times on the Dukes of Hazzard), and you tell yourself "What the hell -- let's try it!" 'cause you have absolutely no common sense at all? Well, BadAnalogyGuy is a lot like that...
Except he's actually sitting in the passenger seat using a pretzel as a steering wheel so there's no harm. ;)
Re:No one wants to be behind the times (Score:4, Insightful)
Give me game play OVER pretty any day.
Of course, the issue is that different people have different expectations for gameplay. You obviously prefer the more realistic physics as part of the game. Others prefer for the game portions to be interesting, rather than realistic.
For example, racing simulators versus racing games. The sims (the hardcore stuff, like SimBin) often have very little game attached to them beyond 'here are cars and tracks, and all the physics and race rules to use them'. This appeals to your hardcore drivers who care more about lift-throttle oversteer and their tire temperature and pressure, but not to your typical 'gamer'. They want a career mode, the ability to purchase and install vehicle upgrades, and a compelling reason to race the tracks (beyond dropping a lap time by 0.005s). Both are gameplay, but very different types.
I guess what I'm saying is that unlike what you seem to be implying, realism != gameplay. Sure, we're seeing a lot of games which merge the two (you could say the first one was Asteroids), but just because an FPS is more realistic than TF2 or Quake doesn't mean it has better gameplay.
Re:It's not just games (Score:5, Insightful)
Na, The biggest problem with rewrites is that the people who want to do the rewriting are generally the ones least capable of doing it.
Fortunately for them, once they're getting near 'completion' another new technology comes along and they can say "we need to rewrite it in that now" resulting in a never-ending path of technology toys, dreams and thankfully, no actual work.