MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

the thing about development hell is that often there is no "the game as originally envisioned" to be pined for or found with "just a little more time"

a lot of times you end up in development hell because the core vision is vague, contradictory, keeps changing, has big holes in it. It's not that those games fell short of their original ideals so much as they were trying to build a brick house on a swamp

sometimes, if you're lucky, you firm it up in the right places and it stabilizes

other times it just sinks


mrhands
@mrhands

I just finished a three-year stint on a AAA game project that has been "in development" for at least six years. This client has now gone back to essentially pre-production. One of the things they're struggling with is carrying around a huuuuge amount of technical debt for games that never shipped.

We're talking things like an inventory system (built two games ago) that was never fit for purpose stacked on top of a backpack system (built three games ago) that was a colossal hack, which has to interact with "pockets" (built one game ago) for the player character to put their weapon in. Except that the inventory system is on an entirely different backend than the pocket system and doesn't replicate equipped weapons correctly, so the UI team (that's me!) has to assign a weapon picture directly to a player weapon slot based on their pocket index.

Throughout the project, I would poke the lasagne only to find it rotten all the way through. There was no "original vision" to RETVRN to. The vision was always inspired by whatever game was currently in vogue. As a UI programmer, I was constantly asked to display information to the player that simply did not exist. But because it was always for an "important demo," my team would have to fake the data themselves. This was a very bad idea (and I told them as such!!) because it meant that upper management would look at the game and see massive improvements while it was just another layer of load-bearing paint.


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

it's funny, i don't generally think of gamers as being particularly giving with benefit-of-the-doubt, but sometimes you hear them saying, of some cancelled project or a scrapped version of a rebooted project, "that sounds so cool! wish we could've played that!" and in some cases yes, truly, RIP; but in other cases i want to grab them by the lapels and stare into them with the bulging eyes of a panicked racehorse and say to them "there was never going to be a cool version of this. i know some of the ideas sound like they could have been cool, and that was part of the problem: it was a treasure chest mimic. it was not what it seemed. no good version of it could ever have been made. its contradictions and confusions were irreconcilable, and nearly killed the project / the team / the studio / a particular creative partnership. mourn it, sure, but don't wish for it, any more than you would wish to be impaled by a unicorn."
and then they back away going what the f was that guy's whole deal

unironically yes!

'dream games' are very often just laundry lists of stuff that "sounds cool", but little thought is given to how this mish-mash of ideas works together, or even if it'll work at all!

This was particularly prominent at the height of kickstarted games where you'd have newbie devs promising the most insane shit, like "dwarf fortress but with a first person dungeon crawling mode and dating sim elements", neglecting that any one of these things is difficult to get. 'right' (e.g. fun) in isolation.

(Dwarf fortress but not ascii was a really rich vein for EA games for a while, with varying degrees of success- from Towns, to Gnomoria to Prison Architect/Rimworld)

I mean. these game concepts are vastly easier to market than well polished efforts as they're naturally attention-grabby.

"A literally infinite version of elite except you can land and explore on the planets and make your own base minecraft style"

vs.

"It's a 2D platformer where you try to get to the end of the level without dying?"

when in reality you're dealing with Starforge vs Celeste.

Like, no shade to anyone trying this stuff in good faith, but it feels like the value of prototyping, planning and subtractive design (i.e. what you purposefully leave out) is massively understated

what really burns you out is you're doing so much work, but feel like you're not really moving forwards towards anything. everything gets really wasteful, like some random feature will get proposed and rather than being prototyped it's all hands on deck and final art because i guess we're in production now.

in reply to @mrhands's post:

This is why I constantly verbally grieve every single action a team I'm working with takes that doesn't move us towards a fundamental extensible architecture. It's not that hard, it's really really really not that hard, it's just people being lazy and directors demanding idiotic timelines and incoherent roadmaps that makes it hard. I was so spoiled with the first two teams I worked with where tech was king in service to design instead of rambling creative direction being king in service to nothing productive.