Dana Callista Lexa 🏳️‍⚧️

as i get further into my third decade in game development i get more and more sentimental. photos of old teams, people i'll never meet who poured their talents into something long ago, can really get me feelin' melancholy. share your favs, if you like.

given how much early game developers had to struggle for even a bit of public credit, it feels rare to see a team photo make it onto the back of an actual box. but that's what happened with Zarth, a PC-88 game from 1984 i hadn't heard of before today. good job getting some recognition, team Zarth, wherever the hell yall are today.

photo from this piece

at this point nearly all old photos of early 1980s Britsoft game devs are a pointer to the same emotional space in my brain, the final shot of Control with the smoke rising from the chimney, but every member of joy division was 16 years old, and their manager is some 42 year old furniture-salesman-turned-videogames-entrepreneur named Dennis who was exploiting them all horribly, and they were just kids having fun, packed 5 to an office and thinking nothing of working 20 hour days slinging Z80 assembly to get a sequel to Adventures Of Wobbly Wibbly In Thatcherland out in six weeks, and one of them died tragically, a few burnt out, some of them grew up and stayed in the business and are senior engineering directors at Sony now, and the rest drifted off to other worlds entirely. there, but for the grace of god and ~10 years and the width of the atlantic ocean, go i.

A perfect moment: the dawn of the golden age of adventure games, with the Secret of Monkey Island team packing up the game they'd just made in boxes and getting ready to send it into the world. Mostly, I gather, just hoping people would like it.

Of course, I wasn't there. I don't know what these people were worried about, stressing about. I don't know what specifically had been difficult about the project. Every story has a hundred other stories behind it that are never told, or only told many years later, or only if you're buying them a drink.

But it seems fair to say that this moment was the beginning of many things. That's what I personally want to focus on, as we grieve and say goodbye to Cohost: beginnings. In the moment, they just look like "yet more stuff happening, all the time". After enough time we can look back and say, "that there, was the beginning of something. and it was Good."

Right now though, who can say?

Thanks for everything, cohost. FWIW, I'm gonna keep posting (maybe, if I have somethin good to post), reading, liking, right up until Monday night.

hey can anyone help my friends out? They're a highly experienced team of programmers, concept artists, modellers, sound engineers, texture artists, mappers, cinematographers, designers, writers, and voice actors but what they're really lacking is a weird fuckhead with a poorly considered one-sentence idea that just mashes two things together

Haha, so this is a funny question to ask me in particular because I see this as a primarily AAA trend and I actually don't play that many AAA games, and especially the type of prestige-games that tend to feature this. But i guess FF16 does have them, so I'll try and reason it out.

IMO there's a few reasons these are a thing, but I'd guess that the primary reason is a fairly simple: Expensive games want the climax of a fight to happen in a cutscene so it can be flashy and under their full control, but developing an entire design/cinematic language that's cutscene compatible and still feels like 'gameplay' is fairly difficult, while making the player do timed button presses is fairly straightforward. And because almost every expensive game has expensive cutscenes, this cheap way of leveraging them to spice cutscenes up has proliferated.

So IMO it's popular in games because it's a very understood way to have a cutscene-heavy game that still feels "active", while requiring minimum interaction between the design and cinematics teams. In AAA, where complex intersection between art and gameplay generally has to be planned for WAY in advance (because it's expensive), this is something you can insert even late in dev without hurting your timeline too much. Which is to say: It's popular because it's safe.

Personally I've always been much more of a fan of doing important scenes in gameplay as much as possible, but that's something that takes a lot of design work and custom setup, and in AAA where everything is exponentially more expensive, I suspect that's a harder sell.

As far as accessibility features.. okay, so this kind of raises another question, right? What is it about QTEs that demands accessibility separate from the rest of the game? And the answer is usually "injecting strict timing elements and/or mashing into games that didn't otherwise have them". It's the juking of gameplay standards that's an issue here, imo, because if the game already required mashing during normal play it'd probably have an accessibility feature for that most likely. IMO the way I'd like to see this thing solved is more for designers to find way to integrate their existing gameplay principles into QTEs if they exist, because then players will already be set up with features that solve those issues. But since most QTE systems are just glued in regardless of the rest of the game, instead we end up needing bespoke accessibility options.

I think doing things this way is a waste, but it's cheap and I bet it shows well to CEOs who don't know how to play video games, soooo. I think accessibility re: these features is going to continue to be kind of crapshoot that's determined far more by whether the company in question typically does good accessibility features in their games or not. But I also don't have a lot of insight into the accessibility space so, you know, take my opinion with a grain of salt.

One final note: The one place I feel like I bafflingly do see this cropping up in indie is what I would call the "sudden rhythm game pivot", wherein a game with no realtime elements abruptly introduces mandatory rhythm minigames as an excuse to get some music montages in. Which TBH is one of my least favourite modern indie narrative game trends - and I'm saying that as a rhythm game fan. I kind of just hope indies do less of that in the future. Doing rhythm games well is very hard, because it requires a lot of more subtle design understanding of how to pace narrative elements and what "difficulty" means in this context (and I think it introduces a lot of problems trying to bridge the HUGE skill gap between very skilled rhythm game players and casual players who are just trying to play a story game). Doing it badly is a real drag on many players' experience. So IMO don't unless you really, really are gonna commit to it.

Anyway! That's what I got. Thanks for the ask - it's nice to have an excuse to ramble about gamedev stuff again, haha.

I once worked on a prototype for a rhythm-based brawling game (for a AA-ish sized studio), where the high-level idea was that the player would want to hit buttons in time to the music track playing.

So many of the variations on it just hit a wall because the level of difficulty that was the minimum to make me (and a few other folks) engaged at all was unplayably hard for a handful of folks on the other end of the rhythm-game-enjoyer spectrum. That gap is enormous and even letting players pick a difficulty level really wasn't enough to manage that.

We wound up with something in the ballpark of what Hi-Fi Rush would eventually do, though with a bigger focus on the enemies acting in time with the music (really, about half a beat behind so you'd want to time your defensive actions on the beat) and that played OK.

We then started working on a radically different kind of combat input system where instead of buttons being your various types of attack we assigned enemies and objects in the scene to buttons and it was about responding to the situation (so you got to watch your character play out all these cool fluid animations in time with the music even if you were only sometimes even acting on the beat)... and the the project got canned at the go/no go call to move it out of preproduction. Which was for the best, the timeline to hit the narrow ship window would have killed us.

I had a moan about XCOM 1 being prettier than XCOM 2 the other day and got some nice replies from the Art Director of both, Greg Foertsch.¹

Having replayed both again just lately, it's striking to me how much more interesting 1 is visually. It uses baked lighting (Unreal's Lightmass, first seen in Gears 2) and gets lovely results; 2 doesn't, and gets no indirect lighting.

XCOM 2 also has less of the nice cartoony style of 1, going for something closer to generically modern - lots of clean shiny surfaces with screenspace reflections (not part of UE3, so done custom for XCOM 2 or backported from UE4), very flat, very sparse. The best-looking areas (forests, etc) break the visual up with too much noise, which feels like an occasional bandaid on the lack of global illumination, which gives some amount of "free" variation to the scene on top of just being very pleasant.

My assumption is that 2 ditched static lighting in favour of more semi-procgen level assembly and swappable time of day and stuff, which you can still statically light, but with a lot of extra hassle. Personally, it's hard for me to see it as worth it without any other GI subbing in.

As I said on Twitter, though, I'll probably be in the minority in caring what this type of game looks like at all. Which is where Greg came in:

Greg Foertsch:

I appreciate that minority. The baked lighting in XCOM:EU served it well and along with a lot of familiar environments, really resonated with players. Your assessment of the games is correct. The design problems in X2 we were trying to tackle dictated some of the decisions that were made. XCOM:EU will always be my favorite of the two. Lots of good insights in your comments. I could talk about this stuff all day

And in response to someone else, about the dynamic lighting:

Correct. The addition of procedural levels and dynamic lighting together had a significant impact on my approach to the art direction

Greg seems cool, thanks Greg

1. (i like to document these sorts of twitter interactions on cohost now because i think cohost will actually tell me before it shuts off for good)