I remember my father had installed Windows 3.10 (not 3.11) on our home pc (I must have been 6-7 at the time). I complained that it was just awkward to use compared to DOS and all games required you to reboot in DOS anyway. I didn't see the point with a graphical OS.
It's fuzzy, but I think it was because I was learning GB assembly while working on shaders in Houdini or something (I'm a tech artist). The two worlds collided in my head, saw that there's no native multiplication on the GB, and figured it'd be a fun problem.
I want to second this. I'm 38 and I used to do some debugging and reverse engineering during my university days (2006-2011). Since then I've mainly avoided looking at assembly since I mostly work in C++ systems or HLSL.
These last few months, however, I've had to spend a lot of time debugging via disassembly for my work. It felt really slow at first, but then it came back to me and now it's really natural again.
There's a lot of truth to that. I actually bought Disgaea 5 confident I would love it based on a review which did a really good job describing what the game is like, even though the reviewer didn't like it at all.
I also used to love Zero Punctuation even though I didn't agree with half of what he said. But I got a bit fed up with how smug Yahtzee is. He can be really funny, but also way too sure of his own brilliance.
This was a really weird ramble and I find myself disagreeing completely. As a lifelong gamer, it rings false because I've read many pieces of game critique and reviews which perfectly capture a game's soul. As a game developer, I just find the perspective confused.
I do think video games are art. And that good games can be transformative. But that certainly does not set them apart from any other kind of art. Besides, even if art is transformative and experiences are unique that does not make critique impossible. You can certainly talk about what it does, how, and why it affects you.
Freedom of choice is often limited enough to give a sense of agency while making most player experiences fairly predictable in all but the finer details. Even for games which give you vast freedom, the designers work hard to ensure most players understand the shape of the whole and encounter the most important beats.
I love that to obtain the Freedom ending you've got to give up agency entirely and obey the narrator; the ending even takes control over the character away from you. Perfect play on ludonarrative dissonance.
I had a discussion with my son son about recent (2015-2019) Need For Speed games I worked on. He asked why we didn't include keeping track of fuel and actually stopping to use the gas station like in real life (in game you just drive through and it repairs your car). And why don't repairs require you to leave the car for a few days and cost tons of money?
I told him it would be annoying rather than fun and negatively impact the pacing. It wouldn't work well in our specific games.
Actually, during development there are always so many interesting ideas which don't pan out because they wouldn't actually be fun. Some even get built then scrapped because it didn't work as well as one would think. That's the kind of thing you'll often see internet forums bring up framed like "why didn't the devs think of this?!"
One of the first games I remember seeing (I was maybe 7 years old) was Test Drive, I still remember it features gas stations as checkpoints: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/b03NIAoH2g4/hq720.jpg?
I’ve recently really gotten into playing Starfield by Bethesda and you can turn the difficulty up and down, they obviously put a lot of systems in that they decided most people would find annoying and not fun, so they kept it in but gated it in granular options menus that give you an exp bonus.
Like becoming dehydrated and malnourished if you don’t eat every half hour, which is pretty easy to manage, not being able to carry as much, turning damage up, and increasing afflictions so when you get hurt you have to go see a medic and can’t just cure them, although you can stabilize them.
While those ones are okay, and I’ve turned them on (like the weight being lower has a skill that you can add to mitigate, and items that make you stronger), there’s environmental afflictions on certain planets, but they didn’t put sufficient mitigations in the game to combat them. So a high air pressure planet or high solar radiation planet, even if you get a protective suit it gives you maybe two minutes of mitigation, not nearly enough time to do anything productive while walking on the planet, so if you crank the difficulty up those planets just become totally off limits, since there’s no way to “plan effectively and feel clever”, instead you just get burns and then come down with pneumonia and it’s not fun.
I think you could make it engaging, maybe by leaning harder into the robots automation and allowing them to do more tasks, or having diving style space suits for higher pressure environments.
Hey! Just wanted to say it's really cool to run across someone that worked on those games. NFS is one of my favorite franchises, and Payback was my favorite in the series. Good work!
Every time I hear someone likes a game I contributed to I feel quite happy. After all, giving joy and escapism to people who need it is why I always wanted to make games.
It really depends on the audience though. I personally way prefer more realistic simulation like games, for example BeamNG. NFS has a broad appeal and is fun to play but it doesn’t feel anything like driving a real car. No offence though, I grew up with NFS underground 2 and it largely inspired my love of modified cars!
Edit: as a kid my friends and I dreamed of the day car games would have realistic and dynamic crash physics and well BeamNG gets pretty close.
Right, which is why I wrote "It wouldn't work well in our specific games."
There's an obvious appeal to sim racing for those who want realism and My Summer Car for those who... Well, it's an interesting project which I respect, at least.
The thing to think about is always how well something fits in the specific game you are making. If it completely warps the focus and disrupts the intended moment to moment gameplay loop, then it probably isn't a good inclusion. But it might still be a great idea for another game. In some cases, and this happens often in early development, it can even mean that other game is what you should be making instead. But that rarely happens when working on a big established franchise.
I don't think the idea of realistic scale for video game locations is very attractive.
You can have vast worlds with huge procedurally generated towns. Daggerfall did this and to me it just felt like boring filler. As did its enormous landscapes.
You can have large towns dense with interesting hand crafted places and characters. Baldur's Gate itself from BG3 is a great example. I loved it, but it consumed 50 of the 100 hours I spent on my first playthrough. Almost two months of my daily playtime.
If you want a game where the great outdoors and dungeons are afforded a huge chunk of your time, towns need to be idealized. I love how Breath of the Wild did this. You get the sense of the place from the layout and architecture. But you can still visit the whole place and talk to everyone, without it being the main thing you do in the game. My imagination will scale the place as feels appropriate, without the need for a thousand houses I have no reason to enter.
I mainly want to learn even more about what I've already been working with. I want to deepen my understanding of the AGC API and finally take the time to teach myself Vulkan.
I have a few blog posts which have received only about ~250 upvotes across different communities, plus a GitHub project with just 30 stars.
Still, both of these were really interesting to my future colleagues (not the recruiter) who interviewed me in the last round of the interviews which landed me my current job. They had read them ahead of time and it really shaped the technical part of the interview.
Then came Windows 95 and my mind was blown.