Game Dev

What Mechanic looks easy but is hard?

Making games is really interesting, and one interesting part of game development is how some tasks or mechanics sound super easy but when you try to implement them it suddenly becomes clear that it's actually quite hard. 

One fun example of this is the classic Door Problem. A door just opens right? But how does it open? Simple button press animation? Or drag and hold? How close does the player need to be? How fast does it open? Can NPCs open doors? Can the door be locked and unlocked? Etc.

There is one interesting discussion on Reddit talking about what mechanics look easy but are deceptively hard.

• Line of Sight: Technically it's just a raycast, but should it be just one? So it only detects a single point despite the player having a 3D shape? Do you only detect in front of the enemy? What about right behind it? What about if the player does some noise? What if they peek for just 1ms?

• Dialogue Trees: Technically it's just text that leads to other text, but then you add options, you add actions in between the text, you add multiple characters talking, and if you do all that through code it easily becomes a huge mess.

• Enemy AI: It's extremely easy to make the perfect AI. On a First Person Shooter you just make it instantly shoot the player without missing, but that's not fun. You hear a lot of comments from players "we want better AI" but when they say "better" they don't mean objectively perfect AI, instead what they really want is AI that is fun to play with, and achieving that is a massive challenge.

• Procedural Generation: Just generate some noise and that's it, technically it works, but it won't look good. In order to make it good you need to expand upon that a lot. You need multiple layers of noise, you need to define something like multiple biomes and rivers to make it look natural and make those biomes change from one to the other in a natural way.

• Movement: It's super basic to make a simple character controller, it takes 5 minutes to build one. But one that FEELS good? Now that's tough! There are games that live or die based on the quality of their character controller, and those games need tons of iteration to make the simple act of moving feel satisfying to play with.

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Game Dev

Battlefield 6 is using Godot!

This is some pretty unexpected interesting news! Battlefield 6 was recently revealed, and alongside the multiplayer reveal they showcased their new Portal system, this is where players can build their own maps and share them with the community. And guess what? Portal is actually using Godot! The way you build those custom maps is through a custom Godot build.

EA is a multi-billion dollar company, so the fact that they are using an engine that is open source and relatively tiny is a very important thing. I'm guessing they did a bunch of internal research and came to the conclusion they had two options:

1. Make a custom 3D editor completely from scratch.

2. Use something that already exists and build upon it.

Clearly they analyzed their options and went with option 2, they took Godot as a base and I'm guessing heavily modified it since the engine is open source. This way they didn't need to spend millions making a custom 3D editor, they just started from a solid base and built upon it.

This means potentially millions of people will be exposed to Godot, some of those might become regular users of the engine, some of those will contribute back into the engine, and the engine as a whole will likely get a huge boost. Nice!

Another nice thing would be if EA themselves would contribute code to the Godot project, or if they would simply sponsor it.

Tech

ChatGPT Study mode is your Personal Tutor

I believe one of the best use cases for AI is to help you learn. The fact that you can ask it specific questions that are unique to your particular scenario is an insanely helpful thing. You can get much more direct help as opposed to googling your specific question and being unable to find an exact answer.

But one problem with this approach is sometimes it just gives you the answer, then you have to manually ask it to explain the WHY behind the answer if you really want to learn.

ChatGPT has just introduced Study Mode which basically does that by default. If you ask it to help you with your homework it doesn't just give you the answer, it will guide you step-by-step and tell you how to reach the answer yourself. It even asks YOU for the answer to ensure you're actively engaging and not just blindly copy pasting. You can even ask it to quiz you on a topic and as you answer it tells you either right or wrong alongside an explanation.

This is absolutely excellent! I've long said how the way to truly learn is to APPLY what you're learning, you cannot just blindly watch tutorials, you need to DO something and write some code. That's partly why I focused hard on making the Interactive Exercises on my C# course, to help you learn by DOING.

Just go to ChatGPT, click on Tools and choose Study and Learn. I asked it to help me understand Hinge Joints in Unity 2D and it gave me a very good explanation!

Gaming

IGN Gaming Report

It's important to keep up to date with the state of the industry as a whole so reports like the recently released IGN Gaming Trends Report is quite useful.

It's probably no surprise that Mobile is huge, however what might be surprising (at least for people my age) is how 93% of Gen Alpha prefers playing on Mobile, and that preference is also growing for Millennials as well.

UGC (User Generated Content) is also massive! The two biggest games of all time are UGC factories, Roblox and Fortnite. Roblox currently has 25 MILLION CCUs! That's insane! And despite Fortnite being huge it only has comparatively a "small" number of CCU at 1.77M.

Games are also impacting the movie industry with the Minecraft movie being a hit, alongside the Five Nights at Freddy's movie and the Sonic and Mario movies.

Nostalgia is still very powerful but new IP can also still break out, Black Myth: Wukong was a big recent hit.

There's tons more interesting stats in the whole report, check it out!