Game Development Caution

Hello everyone, it's me Tim, today I want to talk about something that, for lack of a better phrase, I will call

caution

in

game

development

before starting and tell you three different stories, they are a little different, but I will tell them later. What am I thinking about when we did Fallout towards the end, when we were really trying to get it out? We had two whiteboards, one whiteboard had a list of features or content that weren't finished yet and really needed to be included. and the other board had a list of what the 10 most egregious mistakes were and next to each person, next to each of these on these two different boards, it listed the person who was assigned.

We did it on a whiteboard like this so people could come in the morning and look at it because this Jira or Confluence is old or something, they could come in and look at the whiteboard and say, oh, I see something I need to jump into worked well. . I don't think I've heard any complaints. About that, people liked to get things out of it if they saw something. I was like I was in it today. Try to do exactly the same 10 years later in Carabina. People overwhelmingly said no, don't do that. I'll leave it if you do that.

I see my name on that board, I'll leave it and I said well, what happens if we don't put people's names next to it? I'll still leave it, people will know it's me, story two, when we're creating the outside worlds I wanted to put in. This is probably the end of year two, so the combat AI is still a year away, so I asked for a very simple combat aggro code to be added. That's how simple it was every time the NPC got shot, they would see if that person was on the list of someone who had shot them; if not they would add them to the list what they care about with the amount of damage they just took if they were already on the list they would just add the amount of damage they took each time they decide who to attack they attack the person on Top of the list, that's it, that's all I wanted.

Keep in mind the advantage of that basic AI that many can create. You can make changes later so that you have the one at the top of the list, if it is different than the person you are attacking, the damage must exceed the damage of the person attacking you by a certain amount before You can change the objectives. keep in mind the distance, you can consider if you can reach them, keep in mind if you have a ranged weapon, keep in mind everything that comes after, that's all I wanted. They put it in the scheduler's production queue and it came back with a four-week estimate.

Rejected saying the code I requested was too simple. I wrote it before. It would take around 45 minutes. Basically, there is already a callback when you get hit. That's when you look to put them on the list and there's a callback. There is a call when. you want to choose a target, that's when you look at the list and see which one you want to attack. That's it, the programmer they signed came to me and told me I need four weeks and I asked him why he explains to me what he needs. what I'm going to do and he's like you don't understand and I was like I coded this three times walk me through this and he didn't leave he left angry the lead programmer came back and started yelling at me saying what if he says that he needs four weeks he needs four weeks and I said, "Then I'll do it." I'll do it before lunch and he said no because no one, so people will have to support his code. "Well, let me explain." I'm going to explain what I want and tell me why this has taken four weeks.

He looked at what I wrote, which was about 10 lines of pseudocode on a whiteboard, and said, I'll be back. He came back about an hour. later and I said how about two weeks and I said do I have any options here? Well, two weeks. Story three. Leonard and I talk about features all the time, whether it's dialogue, system mechanics, or story setup. We get very involved in it. Voices may be raised. We jump out of our chairs to draw things on the whiteboards, we walk back and forth. I know I mentioned this before, but Anthony Davis showed up at our door and said, "Stop yelling, everyone's getting nervous, it's like mom." and dad yell at each other I still don't know who he met with mom, but we explain to him that it's just us talking, we're not angry, but we're trying to figure out exactly what to do and we're getting into it, so what?

Do these three stories have anything to do with each other? I'm starting to see in the industry. I shouldn't say that starting in the last decade, the last quarter of my career, I'm starting to see this increase in what I can only call

development

.

caution

a lot of caution filler estimates uh time estimates of wanting to go and check with a lot of people to see if something is okay ask if we should do this I'm not sure we have a meeting often people would want to have a meeting to discuss something and those They were the same people who would say we have too many meetings.

I can't do any work now. Caution can be a really good thing if it leads to fewer mistakes, less stress. I also understand the fact that because the

game

s cost Plus, now your people are approaching it with this sense of caution because not only are you going to be out of a little bit of money, you're going to be out of a lot of money if this game doesn't do well. in what worries you. However, for me the games can also be much worse because of caution and everyone who is cautious denies that they think that no, we are going to reduce the mistakes we are in.

Before increasing work-life balance, people are less stressed and I. I'm true, but you're also taking a lot less risk in a game than in a lot of games I think it gives them less charm and yeah, even the games that have Jank have a lot of charm, my games have had Jank, uh, I know people speaks. about Jank and other games, you know things where the AI ​​acts strangely in certain circumstances or the NPCs say strange things or do strange things, it can be charming, but things have changed and I know that games have gone from being a expression of an idea of ​​a similar work of art by a particular person or group of people into a corporate money-seeking instrument and I understand that there is a lot of money invested in this in some way, although I would say that they always were, always the did you come up with the idea that you know I hope it sells a lot we make money but now the designs are being driven by this that's why we have microtransactions that's why we have pre-orders that's why we have what we're starting to see lately where are the games if you pay a little more you can play it a few days or even a week before, now you can't always blame the publishers or developers for this, if people didn't pay for it they wouldn't do it, it's like spam if everyone I stopped replying to spam tomorrow, it would go away, but because a small percentage do it, it's there for everyone to see, but I'm not really talking about the money-driven part.

I'm talking about how caution is weakening ideas, that's why I want to double down on this, I've always thought that the indie space is much richer in ideas, probably not in money, certainly not in money, but they are much richer in ideas because they take less, are less cautious and take much more risk. unfortunately what I see then is um aaa diving into indie games for features and ideas. By the way, it's not just publishers and developers that I see all this caution with. I've seen a huge increase in caution in games journalism, it's become the norm. no one, and no journalist wants, is at risk of being put in an embargo situation where they are not given an early access code so they can't write their reviews before other people, they are worried about not being invited to events press or you know. junkets I think they are called that and many of them have been much more cautious in what they say.

I really miss the reviews. I'll name a couple like Scorpio in the 80s and 90s on Desklock in the 90s and early 2000s because those two people, those two reviewers said what they thought, if you release a game, they assure you for all the things that were wrong in him, but then they praise you for everything that's good now it's like we really like this, but they I don't want to like to really duplicate it because it might be something that people don't like, so let's say a journalist likes it. love the diversity in the game, it might do well for you.

I'm not going to say that too much because I don't want to seem complacent and also some people scream when you talk about it, so I see a lot of the passion fading away in games journalism and they're really just trying to find what kind of review I can do. I write what generates the most clicks and I guess this worries me because I do see this everywhere, I do see it in editors and developers, and now new people entering the industry no longer have this passion, so now You know what the moral of all this is.

I want to tell people to just go and make it whatever you want, you don't need a committee to approve it, you can always go back and change it or if you do something and it turns out it's not that way. good at all and unsalvageable, throw it away, but that rapid iteration to get to a really good idea is much better than just being so cautious that you basically sneak up on a very mundane game that shows no kind of passion in its development people can say people can say so I started with stories let me finish with those three stories and how they were resolved so I didn't even try to do the Whiteboard solution when I made our worlds what I did was I created my own My own page Confluence was called like I was Tim Kaine's top 10 or something.

I was in my Confluence space and I wrote here are the top 10 things I saw once this week and there were some producers looking at that page all the time. was great about this solution, no one could come and complain to me because it was in my Confluence space, my own personal but public Confluence space. I'd also like to point out that anyone can go to Jira at any time and say what the Top 10 Bugs above are and who they're assigned to, so we already had that whiteboard virtually, but in some ways it was nice that it didn't draw attention to it. for the combat aggression code.

I think I decided on two weeks and I think it was achieved. done faster than that great I got it I don't think I asked for anything after that I didn't go and ask for anything specifically because I realized that they were seeing me as some kind of ogre when I knew something could be done faster and there was no solution, so years ago I started thinking, oh, this is becoming a problem. Same thing with Leonard, without yelling at each other, we keep doing it, we're like it's our office, we close the door, we're not angry. each other, but this is the way we do things.

Keep in mind that people know that some people don't like it. We won't do things like that with you and let me tell you, I think there were people who felt like they missed each other. about not being a part of those conversations, some people would come in, uh, Charlie, I had his office right next door and he was the lead designer of the outside worlds and sometimes he would come in and join other people who didn't do that. I missed and I think you missed some interesting, active and really fun conversations about game development, but that's how things go so I'm not sure I have a great solution other than telling people and reminding them to be passionate , but I just want to talk about this because it kind of relates to bigger teams and longer development times, bigger budgets, just all this caution in game development that's increasing in the industry, so I just took it out of the blue. chest.