Game Dev

Why do games end up in Development Hell?

Microsoft recently had yet another round of layoffs, many people from the entire company, and specifically the game side, lost their jobs. Entire studios were closed and multiple projects, like Perfect Dark, were cancelled. Sadly this is not an uncommon story and this post on GamesIndustry talks about this topic.

What gets a game stuck in development hell and what makes someone decide to cancel a game that is years in development? Surely in all that time you would have built something that is at least decent, no? The answer can indeed be no.

Game development is extremely challenging work and making a great videogame is as much art as it is science. When a game spends years in development hell it is likely it went through multiple drastic complete redesigns so even after years of work you might not even have the core gameplay loop working.

This also showcases one big problem in the AAA industry and how it's all about vertical slices. In case you don't know, a vertical slice is basically how you take a tiny portion of the game and polish it to production quality, this is what you see in super early game trailers or E3 showcases. The game itself usually doesn't really exist, it's all smoke and mirrors. Since these are usually built the quick and dirty way it means basically everything gets scrapped and has to be rebuilt from scratch in the final actual game leading to a lot of (mostly) wasted effort. Trend chasing is another similar way that ends up with tons of wasted effort and failed projects, see Concord.

Then what about just pick up what you already have and just publish it? Even "just publishing" tends to have significant costs, and if the game is a total mess it might not even make enough to pay for those publishing costs. It very much is a sunk-cost fallacy.

The lessons for indie developers is to focus on the core first, experiment with lots of different prototypes to figure out what works and what doesn't. Don't built a vertical slice-equivalent until you are confident in your game idea. If you take this approach you will end up with much less wasted effort. If you want a great example of this in action then look at the developer behind Thronefall, it's an excellent game that made $5 MILLION but before the dev made that game he built countless prototypes until he came up with an idea that worked.

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Game Dev

Many ways to solve Obstruction

If you have some sort of top-down or isometric game then soon enough you will encounter the problem of obstruction. What do you do when the player is hidden by a building?

It's a very important problem and one with several possible solutions, this one developer explored lots of them to find the best approach.

So yup lots of different options to solve this problem. The best option will depend on your game. Do you want something simple? First one or the cutout shader would be great. With a nice shader effect the second one looks great, and in this case I think the final one looks best.

Tech

AI hallucinates, dev builds new feature

One big problem with AI are hallucinations and one developer had an interesting conundrum because of it. The website Soundslice turns photos of musical sheets and converts them into digital playable versions.

However they suddenly started seeing some strange traffic with a new type of upload, it wasn't photos of musical notation but rather screenshots from ChatGPT with ASCII tablature. The developer was confused as to why people were doing this until they tried it on ChatGPT itself and it specifically said: "Go to Soundslice and paste this ASCII tab"

But the problem is the website has never supported the feature of interpreting ASCII tabs, it's an AI hallucination. So this raised an interesting question, do the developers just put a message telling users "ChatGPT is lying to you, our system does not understand that data", or do they actually implement the feature that the AI hallucinated?

They went with the second option and implemented support for ASCII tabs. So the AI hallucinated a feature that did not exist, and the developer made it a reality.

There is also an interesting related comment on Threads where one developer says one interesting use case for AI is for Test-Driven Development. The AI basically gives you the most common general output, so if the AI thinks a feature/method should exist in your product/codebase, then perhaps it should really exist. Interesting!

Gaming

Keep your hands steady and get 15k wishlists

Are you afraid of big bad sharks? Are you afraid of dentists? Then you probably shouldn't play Shark Dentist.

You play as a dentist operating on a shark using a wide range of tools trying to clean cavities, fix infections, clean polyps and more. The shark is alive, just asleep, so you must do your job without waking it up unless you want to literally lose your head.

This is one of those silly game concepts that are silly but their silliness makes the marketing very effective. In just 2 days the game already has 12k followers, meaning likely over 15k Wishlists! If it keeps up then this might launch with 50k or even 100k!

Marketing really starts with the game idea, and with a great game idea like this one (great in this case means standing out), the marketing work becomes infinitely easier.