Game Development Caution

hi everyone it's me Tim today I want to talk about something that for a lack of a better phrase I'm going to call game development caution before I start and tell you three different stories they're a little different but then I'll tell you what I'm thinking about when we made Fallout towards the end when we were really trying to get it out we had two white boards one white board had a list of features or content that weren't done yet that really needed to get in and the other whiteboard had a list of what the 10 most egregious bugs were and next to each person next to each one of these on these two different whiteboards were listed the person who was assigned to it we did it in a whiteboard like this so that people could come in the morning and look at it because this predated jira or Confluence or anything like that they could come in look at the Whiteboard and go oh I see something I need to jump on worked fine I don't think I heard any complaint about it people liked getting stuff off of that if they saw something I was like I'm on that today try doing the exact same thing 10 years later at carbine overwhelmingly people said no do not do that I will quit if you do that if I see my name on that whiteboard I will quit and I said well what if we don't put people's names next to it I'll still quit people will know it's me story two when we're making the outer worlds I wanted to put in this is probably a year end of year two so we're still a year away the combat AI wasn't really in yet so I asked for a very simple combat aggression code to be added it was this is how simple it was every time an NPC got shot they would see if that person was on the list of someone who'd shot them if they weren't they'd add them to the list which they matter with the amount of damage they just took if they were already on the list they'd just add the amount of damage they took whenever they're deciding who to attack they attack the person at the top of the list that's it that's all I wanted keep in mind the advantage of that basic AI you can make lots of changes later you can make them that it has the the one at the top of the list if it's different than the person you're attacking the damage has to exceed the damage of the person attacking You by a certain amount before your change targets you can take distance into account you can take whether you can reach them into account whether you have a ranged weapon into account all that comes later that's all I wanted uh it got put into the programmer production query queue and came back with an estimate of four weeks I pushed back saying the code I asked for was very simple I've written it before would take about 45 minutes it's basically there's already a callback when you get hit that's when you look to put them on the list and there's a callback there's a call when you want to pick a Target that's when you look at the list and see which one you want to attack that's it the programmer who got signed to came to me and said I need four weeks and I'm like why walk me through what you're going to do and he goes you don't understand and I was like I've coded this three times walk me through it and he wouldn't he left he left angry lead programmer came back started yelling at me saying if he says he needs four weeks he needs four weeks and I'm like then I will do it I'll have it done before lunch and he said no because no one then people will have to support your code I'm like well let me walk through I'm going to walk you through what I want and you tell me why this takes four weeks he looked at what I wrote which was about 10 lines of pseudo code on a whiteboard and he goes I'll come back he came back about an hour later and said what about two weeks and I said do I have any options here fine two weeks Story three Leonard and I talk about features all the time whether it's dialogues or system mechanics or story setting we get very into it our voices may be raised we're jumping out of our chairs to draw things on whiteboards we're pacing back and forth I know I've mentioned this before but Anthony Davis showed up at our door and said you you guys have to stop yelling everybody's getting nervous it's like Mom and Dad are yelling at each other still don't know who he met with Mom but we explained that just us talking we're not mad but we're trying to tease apart exactly what to do and we're getting into it so what do those three stories have to do with each other I'm starting to see in the industry I shouldn't say starting in the last decade the last quarter of my career I'm starting to see this rise of what I can only call development caution an abundance of caution of padding estimates uh time estimates of wanting to go around and check with a lot of people to see if something's okay asking should we do this I'm not sure let's have a meeting frequently people would want to have a meeting to discuss something and those were the very people who would say we have too many meetings I can't get any work done now caution can be a really good thing if it leads to less bugs less stress also I get the fact that because games cost more now your people are approaching it with this sense of caution because you're not just going to be out a little bit of money you're going to be out a lot of money if this game doesn't do well the thing that worries me though is games can also be a lot worse because of caution and everybody who's cautious kind of denies that they're like no it'll we're reducing bugs we're in Pre increasing life work balance people are less stressed and I'm like true but with but you're also taking a lot less risk in a game which in many games I think give them less charm and yeah even games that have Jank have a lot of charm my games have had Jank uh I know people talk about Jank and other games you know things where the AI acts in a bizarre way in certain circumstances or NPCs say weird things or do weird things it can be Charming but things have changed and I know games have gone from being an expression of an idea of an of like artwork from a particular person or group of people into a corporate driven money-seeking instrument and I get it there's a lot of money going into these in a way though I would argue they always were you always were making these with the idea that you know I hope it sells a lot we make money but now designs are being driven by this that's why we have microtransactions it's why we have pre-orders it's why we have what we're starting to see lately where games are if you pay a little more you can play it a few days or even a week early now you can't always get blame the the Publishers or the Developers for this if people didn't pay for it they wouldn't do it it's like spam if everybody stopped answering spam tomorrow it would go away but because a tiny percentage does it's there for everybody to see but so I'm not really talking about the money driven part I'm talking about how the caution is dampening down the ideas it's why I want to double down on this I've always thought the Indie space is a lot richer in ideas probably not money certainly not money but they're much richer in ideas because they take less they take they have less caution and take a lot more risk and unfortunately what I see then is um aaa's that dip 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 rise in caution in game journalism it's become the norm that no one what no journalist wants to risk getting into an embargo situation where they're not given a an early access code so they can't write their reviews earlier than other people they're worried about not being invited to press events or you know junkets I think they're called so a lot of them have gone a lot more cautious in what they say I really miss the reviews I'll name a couple like Scorpio in the 80s and 90s at desklock in the 90s and early 2000s because those two people those two reviewers said what they thought if you put out a game they secure you for all the things that were wrong with it but then they praise you for everything that's right with it now it's sort of like well we really like this but they don't want to like really double down on it because it may be something people don't like so like let's say a journalist loves the diversity in the game he may go well I'm not going to say that that much because I don't wanna come across as being pandering and also some people yell when you talk about that so I just see a lot of the passion drain out of game journalism and they're really just trying to go for what can what kind of review can I write that generates the most clicks and I guess this worries me because if I see this everywhere if I see this in Publishers and developers and now new people entering the industry they don't have this passion anymore so you know what's the moral of all this I've got I want to tell people just go and make it make what you want you don't need a committee to sign off on it you can always go back and change it or if you make something and it turns out not to be good at all and unsalvageable throw it away but that that rapid iteration to get to some really good idea is a lot better than just being so cautious that you basically creep up to a very mundane game that doesn't show any kind of passion in its development people can tell people can tell so I started with stories let me end with those three stories and how they kind of got resolved so I didn't even try to do the Whiteboard solution when I made our worlds what I did is I made my own Confluence page called like I was Tim kaine's top 10 or something it was in my Confluence space and I wrote here are the 10 biggest things I once looked at this week and there were a few producers who would look at that page all the time what was great about this solution nobody could come and complain to me about it because it was in my Confluence space my own personal but public Confluence space also I'd like to point out that anybody could go to jira at any time and say what are the 10 most High prior highly prioritized bugs and who are they assigned to so we already had that whiteboard virtually but somehow it was okay that it wasn't called attention to for the combat aggression code I think I settled on two weeks and I think it got done faster than that great I got it I don't think I asked for anything after that I didn't go and specifically ask for anything because I realized that I was being viewed as some sort of ogre when I knew something could be done faster and there was no solution to it which is why years ago I started thinking oh this is becoming a problem same thing with Leonard not yelling each other we just kept doing it we're like it's our office we shut the door we're not mad at each other but this is the way we get things done note noted that people know some people don't like it we won't get things done like that with you and let me tell you I think there were people who felt like they missed out on not being parts of those conversations some people would come over uh Charlie um had his office right next door and he would the lead designer on on outer worlds and he would come in sometimes and join in great other people didn't do that you missed out and I think you missed out on some really fun active engaging conversations about game development but that's the way things are going so I'm not sure I have a great solution other than telling people reminding people to be passionate but I just kind of want to talk about this because it kind of ties into bigger teams and longer development time bigger budgets just this whole game development caution that's rising up in the industry so there got that off my chest

Channel: Timothy Cain

Views: 272,305

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Id: LMVQ30c7TcA

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023