Game Dev

42 ESSENTIAL Game Dev Tips

One very accomplished developer, Paul Kilduff-Taylor (very successful developer behind Mode 7, Frozen Synapse (I loved it!), The Colonists, etc) has published an excellent post titled: "42 Essential Game Dev Tips That Are Immutably Correct and Must Never Be Disputed by Anyone Ever At Any Time!"

He starts off by saying how advice lists are fun even though "all advice cancels out" since many things are situational, but still it's fun to read these lists to see what might particularly connect with you personally.

There are some obvious ones like 26. Announce your game and launch your Steam page simultaneously and 27. Get your Steam tags right.

Some have some nuance like 11. No genre is ever dead or oversaturated; followed up by 12. Games in difficult categories need to be doing something truly exceptional; as well as 13. Learn the history of games; which then is followed by 14. Forget the history of games! Unpredictable novelty arises every year.

Some very good advice is how 5. A stupid idea that would make your friends laugh is often a great concept; and 9. Make the smallest viable prototype in each iteration

And some interesting ones like 18. Procedural generation is a stylistic choice not a cost-reduction methodology; as well as 15. Great games have been made by both amazing and terrible coders.

All in all a very interesting list, I do agree with most of it. Naturally a list like this doesn't leave much room for nuance or a deeper explanation, but for that thankfully there is a podcast. 

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Game Dev

Visualizing Complex Movement Rules

Game Design is a very tricky discipline, you need to come up with a set of mechanics and then individual rules to make those mechanics work to hopefully make a fun game. And if you're a game designer as part of a big studio then another big challenge is learning how to communicate those individual rules to whoever will implement them in the code.

Here is a really nice post from Game Designer Kyle Hong talking about how to visually design a Complex Movement System.

If you have a Wall Run mechanic, where should be player run on the wall? Right where they attached? Or should you move them up/down slightly? Or just disable Wall Running if the player hit a non-valid wall height? Those are all important questions you need to answer yourself to make a wall run mechanic.

What about a Sliding System? You need to handle the ground friction, adjust deceleration forces and constrain your player to a plane.

What about a Adaptive Landing System? For this you need to keep in mind the player falling velocity and decide which way they should land.

Tech

AI learns to speak Dolphin

Nowadays AI hype is through the roof and everything seems to have AI thrown at it for no good reason (AI washing machines?)

However AI can be a very powerful force in many areas, even things you might not have thought about. Google has been working on DolphinGemma which is a Large Language Model designed to help scientists study how dolphins communicate!

Dolphins are one of the smartest animals on earth, they recognize themselves in mirrors, they can use tools, maybe they also use words?

By feeding a massive library of sounds into an AI model they have trained it to find patterns, potential words. The model is also tiny allowing it to run locally on a Pixel phone.

And they're combining it with a speaker to produce made up dolphin sounds to hopefully teach them a shared language! Fun!

Gaming

Oblivion Remastered is coming!

It's been rumored for ages that Oblivion Remastered is in the works, and while it's not been officially announced, there are some leaks that were scrapped from the official website that seem to prove it is indeed real!

The original game was a mega hit, selling 10 million copies all the way back in 2006. It was a game that was a graphical powerhouse, it was used as a technical showpiece for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Now the game is being remastered/remade from the ground up. Based on the leaked images it has been drastically changed, so it's not just a simple port upscaling all the assets, a lot of things have drastically improved. Hopefully the voice acting remains, it was infamously using only a handful of voice actors for all the characters but that gave the game a certain charm.

One interesting thing about this story is there has been a community driven attempt at remaking Oblivion inside Skyrim, named Skyblivion. Now the question is what happens to that project since there is an official remaster. The mod devs have posted an official response where they hope "both projects can exist and thrive together", I hope so.