Assets in AAA games?

hey what's up i'm jason and i'm a game developer today i want to talk to you about assets and middleware in game development and i want to dispel some myths some things that people think or questions that really people come to me with all the time about whether or not they can use these assets whether people use these in real games in aaa games like hey when you worked at triple a studios do you use these same kind of things that we were talking about on these youtube videos and that i see in the asset store and other places so today that's what i'm going to be discussing i'm going to go over my experience with assets and middleware and aaa development and in indie development i want to give a little bit of advice about um well what i would recommend you do it in those different situations and i'll talk probably a little bit about some of the assets that i've used in the past and how i've seen that go so i want to get started by just saying make sure that you hit the like button subscribe and share this video because it really does help it makes a big difference and leaving a comment down below helps as well if you hate this kind of content just hit the dislike button and leave a comment i guess but you're probably not going to dislike it so just go ahead and hit the thumbs up button and then we'll get started so do we use assets in aaa game development that's one of the first things that i want to talk about because it's something that i think comes up a lot and people see things like the asset store and they go oh yeah that's just beginner stuff that's uh you know indie stuff or that's something smaller that bigger companies aren't going to use and to a degree they're a little bit right and in the bigger industries or in the bigger companies when we use assets it's generally not really called assets they're not from things like the asset store they're usually bigger things that are branded as middleware and if you just do a little search for middleware online you'll find all kinds of different things that pop up some of the most popular ones though are video playing middleware things that allow you to play different video types that you couldn't play normally and do it easily like you'll see that for old school videos or games used to do this all the time for the video intros or the video clips like the uh cut scenes and stuff it would have middleware that would play those another really popular one is speed tree so most games that i've worked on in the aaa industry use speed tree to render their trees it's something that's been really easy to integrate with unreal in the past and it's pretty easy to do in unity as well but it gives you like fast varied trees that look good and work well and the reason that companies use these things the reason we use things like speed tree or some of the ai systems or the physics systems that exist a lot of those are really middleware systems as well the reason that we use those in aaa games is because they're not really the core part of our game they're not the thing that we're building we're building some other type of game and we happen to need trees trees aren't the core of our game in fact most games trees aren't the core of their game which is probably why speed tree is one of the most popular middleware things because everybody kind of needs trees if they got outdoor environments but nobody really wants to build a whole giant tree system it's a waste of time but remember it's not only trees it's also things like physics systems ai systems that was a big one when i was at sony we used a well one of the teams used a third party ai system that was i remember a really big deal back in the day i think they've all shut down since then since the whole company got bought and split up and everything but you get the idea middleware is a big thing it's used by almost every game company in some degree i would say probably just about every game company there might be one or two out there that aren't but in general it's something that most companies are going to use to solve problems and it's essentially larger scale assets slightly more expensive with a bigger contract a bigger deal maybe not all the time anymore because things are getting a little bit more accessible but that's generally the way it was nowadays though things are a lot more accessible a lot of the middleware that you want to grab is now bundled into a much tighter package that you would on in a unity context at least call an asset or something that would be an asset pack on the asset store and if you're an indie developer these assets can really really save your life they can make it so that building a project isn't well a lifelong endeavor it's something that's realistic and reasonable and easier to accomplish in your time frame that doesn't mean that assets are going to obviously solve all of your problems so talk a bit about that but they do make it much much quicker to get to the core of your game you got to remember whenever you're building a game there's like one thing that's the core piece of your game like the main loop of your game and you really want to focus on that and anything that you can do to speed up the development or outsource or kind of offset the other stuff that you don't necessarily need to focus on that is going to make a big difference to get stuff done faster and it could also be for a big portion of your game though or a key part of your game i can think of a couple examples just in vr development alone that i've done so one of the games that we did was mighty monster mayhem it was this building breaking rampage game where you climb around and just punch buildings and tear them apart it was fun multiplayer not super popular but it did use a very popular asset from the asset store in fact if you go look at the assets on the asset store i think it shows up as the first one there rayfire for unity which is a building breaking asset that just allows you to redefine well not i think not just buildings but just about anything predefined breaking structures and then put the objects together and then make it so you can easily break them in game and have good performance and this worked except in vr for a vr game that was multiplayer so these kinds of things wouldn't have been possible to build without some sort of an asset like that or at least if we had built it it would have taken dramatically longer it wouldn't have been as good and it would have been um yeah it probably just wouldn't have happened we would have probably looked at it and like okay we could build something but building a whole braking system is going to take longer than building the game it's probably not worth it we'll move on to something else but with assets it becomes suddenly possible to build something like that out in just a couple of months and speaking of vr i'm thinking back to blade shield that michael built and using one of the slicing assets that made it so we could slice robots in half really cool which is another just big speed improvement i can think of a lot of different assets in fact if you look at just the top assets on the unity asset store under the tools section if you're sorted by popularity you'll find a whole bunch of extremely useful assets at least in the unity context things like rayfire that i talked about earlier the a-star pathfinding pro which was kind of the best pathfinding system until very recently i think that right now it's kind of up in the air between that and the unity navmesh system but for the longest time a star was like the only good option to use dungeon architect for building out giant games or giant dungeons automatically and having them actually look cool i've loved that asset for as long as it's been around i think the shapes one for generating cool vector shapes there's a lot i can just scroll through and there's all kinds of different very useful things that you can use what i usually recommend though is not to just go grab some asset and throw it into your game instead look for problems that you're trying to solve and when you need to solve the problem do a little bit of a search look online look at the asset store look at blog posts and other things and find out who's already solved that problem how they solved it and if maybe that solute solution that they've already done and provided is available as an asset that'll just get the job done if you need to build out like a giant dungeon you need to generate a lot of dungeons don't go build your own system for it i mean you can if that's really what you want to do but i would recommend spending a couple dollars you know spend the i don't know what it's at now it's not on sale but when it goes back on sale by dungeon architect or one of the other assets like that to automatically generate stuff for you save yourself the time and actually build your game so you can get your game done get it finished and release it so easy to get distracted and just keep building out assets or keep building out little side things like a random tree generator you don't need to do this we need to focus on the fun focus on the game and just get it done so that's all i really wanted to talk about today i just wanted to let everybody know that using assets is completely fine almost every game that you play is going to have some level of assets some third-party middleware in it i'd say probably every game that you play is going to at the very least they're going to be using somebody else's engine that's already been built for them and i say most of the time you're going to find that if you decompile the game or look through the source there's some level of stuff that they've pulled in from other developers to get the job done to get the game released and get it out there and this is going to be even more so in the better games because they've got a lot more work to do anyway i'm going to shut up about this now i just want to say thanks for watching make sure that you hit the like button subscribe and if you have favorite assets or just thoughts on this middleware stuff drop a comment down below i'm kind of curious to see if everybody thinks i'm crazy or if they all love using assets and they've all seen the same kind of situation in their aaa development and indie development um or not you know maybe i'm nuts i don't know we'll see you later all right thanks again and bye

Channel: Jason Weimann

Views: 22,980

Keywords: game dev, game development, unity, unity 3d, unity3d, game engine, asset, unreal, gamedev, unity assets, indie game, unity or unreal engine, unity vs ue4, unity technologies, aaa game development, unity 2019 assets, brackeys, dani, bts, game, 2021, games, quill18, game devblog, jason weimann, unity tips, unity save game, unity free asset, free assets, unity asset bundles, unity best free assets, asset store, unity3d college, code monkey, unity tutorial, textmesh pro

Id: lKzfpPuTQS8

Length: 9min 22sec (562 seconds)

Published: Sun May 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sharma_pratik]

Seems like we have Jason here. Is it really you? The unity dumbledore?

[u/TheGaijin1987]

Its him! The lord himself is on reddit! I love your videos and always recommend them!