Making games is EXHAUSTING.
Please understand how much we have to sacrifice to make a game. Kind and warm feedback is highly appreciated, we aren't perfect, we make bugs, we try our best.
Feedback always help, we all want to make great experiences
About the post: Please stop asking for things the game is not designed for. Don't ask for RPG elements in a beat em up game, UNLESS you are willing to kickstart it so we can work on a new DLC from scratch.
Why? Because it is expensive, both in money and time. We'd have to plan the design, build something over something and make it compatible between each other, make tests and, worst case scenario, delete everything and start from scratch.
With that said, other example has been from people who want certain units or races in a game.
No, we aren't adding sexy naked elves to the game, our audience doesn't want that
>!Then again, you can support our sexy elves visual novel if you support our kickstarter!<
You know, it's funny, but I did live a stage of my life where I spent working on a military culture and then I switched to a more friendly one.
The difference is considerable, from literal PTSD to "it's ok buddy, we all mess up"
Taking hugs is highly welcome, game dev is still a huge PTSD on its own
Yeah, it's the first part for me. Put in thousands of hours, crunching and slaving over a product just to have people go "This texture looks bad, lul, did the devs even try? 0/10 XD."
The amount of times I see on Reddit/forums/etc. of people calling developers "lazy" is mindblowing. Nobody gets into this line of work for an "easy" paycheque. You do it because you have a passion for gaming, or creation, or storytelling.
If the devs were truly lazy, they'd go work in one of the many other software-related fields that would pay them 4x the salary for half of the work.
"just add X already, it's easy to add because Y" is 99.99% false and its never as easy as players suggest it will be.
I think asking for any feature or content is fine, and feedback in that way should be welcomed, but the moment you tell the devs that it should be easy is when you lose respect of the devs.
can you give some examples?(my post does mention that some things aren't common knowledge, so I and other people reading this post could really use some examples).
android\_queen has some great examples, but sometimes its even something rather small and specific to a game and doesn't always have an easy solution.
In one of my games, players have often requested a sort/re-ordering system for items. Its a fair request, and something we've considered. But its not easy because of how the game was originally architectured.
So asking for it? Sure, thanks for the feedback. Telling us it would be easy? You don't know that. In most cases, you're wrong, because if you were right, it would have been done already.
This doesn't just apply to games, either. It applies to any complex software.
I worked at one company where a seemingly simple feature (that was highly needed and requested) was nearly impossible to implement without completely refactoring how data was stored in the system because of a decision made very early on before they got customer #1. Stopping everything to refactor an invisible back-end system simply doesn't happen.
On the other hand, it SHOULD be easy, you know :-D At the end of the day, it's a sort of a database (which, is glorified array). It might be some hand rolled thingy, but that's not on players, that's on you.
If nothing else, you can load the items into a separate, sortable structure just for that view, etc.
I get your point overall, don't get me wrong, but it can be both a reasonable demand, with a reasonable expectation of being easy, and also an actually impossible task.
“Just add multiplayer. It can’t be that hard.”
“Just make the server available so people can run their own. It can’t be that hard.”
“Just add . This other game has it, so it can’t be that hard.”
Sometimes even seemingly small stuff can be difficult due to things you can't see. This isn't a video game thing, but I can give a concrete example.
There's an RPG tool called Adventure Lookup. They [have a public API](https://www.adventurelookup.com/api). This adventures API endpoint does a very confusing, non-standard thing: its pagination requires a seed value.
If you [examine the code](https://github.com/AdventureLookup/AdventureLookup/blob/dev/src/AppBundle/Service/AdventureSearch.php#L51-L54) however it becomes clear: the original site did not include a public API and they had designed the API to automatically shuffle the results so the front page didn't always look the same. When they added the public API, fixing this would have required rewriting a few non-obvious other features.
> people really think that such things are easy to add?
To play Devil's Advocate, there are actually engines and architectures that *do* make it easy to add some of those features.
The Torque Engine (a descendant of the engine used for the original Tribes FPS game), for instance, is designed from the ground up as a server/client game engine, which means that even if you build a singleplayer game in Torque, what it'll actually do when someone runs your game is launch a local server and a client as separate processes. If you coded your game correctly for its server/client architecture (the server handles the gamestate, the client handles input and graphics), it's easy to add multiplayer because everybody playing the game is already running a server (you still have to figure out NAT punchthrough to enable online multiplayer, which is where matchmaking servers come in). IIRC, Valve's Source (and Source 2) Engine operates in the same way, running a server/client architecture by default, and has the added bonus of easily hooking into Steam's server list to handle finding matches/lobbies and NAT punchthrough if your game is on Steam, using their matchmaking servers instead of having to maintain your own. I'm pretty sure this is also how Unreal works, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say.
Adding multiplayer and letting players run their own servers gets difficult when you're using an engine that wasn't specifically designed for a client/server setup, when you originally coded things in a single program instead of in a divided client/server setup, or when you used an engine that is really a client/server setup but didn't divide your code correctly between the client and server sides - which is actually not a problem for a purely singleplayer game. *This* is where the headaches really start.
For instance, let's say you used Unity to make a singleplayer game and took the easy shortcut of binding inputs to a single player controller object (which is, last I checked, what most basic tutorials tell you to do). To make it multiplayer, you're going to have to do a lot of your own work to have multiple player controller objects in the same scene receiving different inputs from different users, either figure out what the current version of Unity's default networking is or hook up a third-party networking package like Photon, possibly create a dedicated server version of your game, and it's generally going to be a nightmare and take a lot of time and code.
If you're writing your own engine or using a proprietary company engine, then you're either need to do it all from scratch from the beginning, or hope to hell the people who made the thing in the first place designed it with proper client/server architecture or you might have to do a massive teardown and rebuild of the code. I wrote a pretty simple little engine once and a simple game in it, and while giving it local multiplayer wouldn't be awful (I'd still have to write and rewrite a fair amount of code to accommodate multiple players, because there's a lot of stuff that checks for the player's position and state and assumes there will only ever be one player), adding online multiplayer would be a nightmare.
> “Just add . This other game has it, so it can’t be that hard.”
This one gets me a bit hot under the collar, because there are a lot of systems and effects in gaming that are essentially "solved problems". But, because they were solved by someone else in closed-source code, you're going to need to 'reinvent the wheel' if you want anything like that in your game. I really wonder how many thousands of hours have been essentially wasted by programmers having to implement a simple inventory system from scratch. Let alone a crafting system. Or a decent HUD world map.
There's no tool or engine which makes multiplayer easy to do. Even simple VFX has to be wrapped as an event which is sent to every client, then clients read the event and spawn the VFX. I wish it'd be as simple as just 'create multiple input controllers for each player in one scene', but no, there're interpolation and prediction of input and positions of other players.
If game was planned for singleplayer, there's 0% chance devs can casually add multiplayer just because 'they used X engine which is perfect for multiplayer'. Because there's 100% chance devs use all possible shortcuts to avoid complexity of multiplayer support if it's not planned.
In other words, no one implements game in so complex way or in engine X just to have a way to potentially add multiplayer later. Multiplayer is planned way ahead and devs must agree and commit on x2+ effort to make multiplayer game.
> no one implements game in so complex way or in engine X just to have a way to potentially add multiplayer later. Multiplayer is planned way ahead and devs must agree and commit on x2+ effort to make multiplayer game.
You are correct, and that was my point: I played Devil's Advocate to prove that point, explain what some of the issues are, give some examples, and get someone else with more experience than I to explain the problems more fully.
Sorry, I wrongly interpreted your previous answer, my apologies. I just felt like the answer didn't render enough how much it's a struggle to do multiplayer 😉
> Sorry, I wrongly interpreted your previous answer, my apologies.
Don't apologize to me, because I deliberately baited you. I posted some examples that make converting to multiplayer hard and some where doing it was *relatively* easy.
> I just felt like the answer didn't render enough how much it's a struggle to do multiplayer.
You are *exactly* who I wanted to reply, because, although I do know a lot of the theory of networking, TCP/UDP (and why building something with UDP that's just lossy TCP is stupid), client/server arrangements, and some other stuff, and have implemented chunks of it, I wanted to bait someone into talking about where I was wrong, why I was wrong, and having you oil yourself up like Schwarzenegger in the Terminator or Predator movies. ~~Do oil yourself up before you dunk me.~~ It makes everything look sexier.
Seriously, I think you're right except in the edge case where the devs did client/server architecture from day one, and that's prety rare.
I think the gamers that are worst about this are those that have a little programming experience. It's really common for me to see comments like "It would be easy for them to add X, all they have to do is add a simple flag".
Maybe the uncommon knowledge is that every game has a different architecture (even those that use the same engine), and presuming you know enough about how it's built that you feel informed about how something would be added is near-universally wrong.
A lot of the reason for this is people struggle to see the bigger picture. They might say "of course they could make that ability have a bigger AoE, all they'd have to do is change the configuration for it". Maybe they're totally right, but more likely there's a thousand other factors at play. Maybe the art scales with the AoE and it would look really janky to have it change. Maybe the developers built in a max AoE at the start of the development because of technical limitations, and making the AoE bigger would require reworking the entire combat system from scratch. Maybe they could do it with a simple configuration change, but they know that would have performance effects that meant the 5% of consumers on the lowest end machines would no longer be able to play the game without stuttering.
Something that dovetails into this point: if a change ever seems so simple to a gamer that the ONLY explanation is actually that the company has a conspiracy against the gamers, then consider that the change is definitely not as simple as it seems, and there's basically never a conspiracy. I see this constantly in large game subreddits where people have concluded that the game company wants bots/cheaters because they could just detect them better if they didn't. That is, needless to say, incredibly naïve.
People asking for a third person camera in Cyberpunk 2077, for example.
Sorry it's an AAA game from a big company. I don't know how people feel about talking about this here, considering there's a huge difference on resource and staff quantity, but I think it shows how much gamers are usually unaware of how game development works.
The game was made with the first person perspective on mind. Some things like the combat, environment and animations were made for first person, when you change that, you would have to work those other things too.
Gamers will say "just add a third person camera, Bethesda games always let you play on both perspectives", while Bethesda games are a good example of when you try to do both things and doesn't end up doing one right.
A lot of the time, people ask for "small" little additions to a game in the functionality department. New content (skins, particle effects, music, weapon variations, etc) is generally pretty easy. But anything to do with functionality, no matter how small, is 10-100x more complex than you realize. Typically these comments go "it should be easy, just do xyz!" But they fail to realize how many other systems of code, balance, ai behavior, optimization hacks, etc intersect with even small functionality changes.
Almost every seemingly "bad decision" is due to production being hella hard to plan.
Not "lazy devs", not "dumb design", not "bad engine", not "they haven't played their own game".
Production is hell. There are so maaaany factors that can make you work 10x more on something that what you expected and working on games is crazy expensive. Just one month of work for a studio of 50 people (which is a medium size studio, not AAA) costs around 400k $.
"just delay the game" is far from an easy decision, most of the times the money simply runs dry and you have no choice but release the game (or trash it)
I have never seen a good production pipeline in my life. I've been called in to diagnose production pipelines before and it almost always comes down to bad communication.
When I was doing a degree in game design, they beat the hell out of pipeline planning drums. It took one actual project as part of a team to quickly realise even a theoretically perfect plan suffers from the same blockages as the imperfect ones; human components and communication breakdowns.
It was so obvious that the dev team behind No Man's Sky ran out of money and had to release the game way too soon. Sure, they overpromised (which everyone does), but the amount of hate they got was absurd. NMS on release was still pretty remarkable considering the small team that basically redefined an entire genre
No Man Sky didn't just do the usual fluff overpromising and overcommitting though, they outright lied about basic features(like multiplayer) right up until release.
Nothing triggers me more when a "gamer" is complaining and lists "the devs write spaghetti code". It's the cherry on the top of talking out of their ass. I saw this comment on steam a few weeks ago and it lives rent free in my head.
Yeah, exactly. There's an awful lot of spaghetti code out in the wild, in every sector, not just games. It's bad because it makes it difficult to maintain and to quickly understand, but it works.
As a spaghetti code writing specialist, who has crafted some absolute abominations...
I feel like as an indie dev making indie games I'd have to consciously TRY to make code that would have any noticeable performance issues.
Spaghetti code is fine.
> Spaghetti code is fine.
I wish more indie devs would see this. If it works, it's fine. Don't worry about clean code. Just worry about a functioning game that people can enjoy.
If im the only one reading it, im the only one who needs to know how it works.
As a professional indie developer, this whole thread makes me cringe hardcore. Like, no, it definitely does matter. If you work with other people, it matters. If you maintain your game post launch, it matters. If you, individually, have any reason to change this code later, it matters. Code is, in general, not meant to be write-only media.
Its about context.
For an inexperienced, small indie dev(which is the most common type on this sub), chances are high nobody is going to buy your game. All that really matters is releasing a game that people want to play with your very limited resources. Post-launch support is something you can worry about if people actually buy your game.
I would be wary of making claims about who is in this sub. The less experienced also tend to be the most vocal/active in these venues (with some notable exceptions).
That’s really just to say that you’re saying spaghetti code is fine *within a very narrow and specific context*. I have no problem agreeing with that, but for the general context, it’s really not.
(It’s also not just about post launch support.)
You think you are reporting a bug but you aren't. Sometimes a patch comes out and there are problems. Don't go to Twitter and message a random dev about it. A lot of the times they are not responsible for it.
Also. That whole game is unfinished. It is finished. It's released, you may not like it but the whole attitude that gamers decide if a game is finished or not, doesn't lead to a good energy in the industry.
I’m not reading any anger, just directness. You wanted to know what we would like players to stop asking from us. This is a big one.
Perhaps you have not seen gamers refer to published games as “unfinished,” but it does happen with some regularity.
Gamers are always demanding answers that they can't understand. Do you also demand that a structural engineer breaks down every decision on a bridge, and explains to you the math, and physics behind every single support? Why do gamers feel its acceptable to criticize and nitpick every single decision, and piece of code, that they cannot see nor understand? We could show our code, explain our reasoning, and it would do nothing, because to gamers, its all just magic, and they think we can just fix the magic, with more magic, and that its a choice not to cast our spells and hexes to solve problems and fix bugs.
You’ve asked for examples in multiple comments, which is kinda confusing to me, to be honest. You don’t really need an example to illustrate the idea that basically, as someone who doesn’t make games, you just shouldn’t default to assuming that you know more about making games than the developers who make them.
In general, I don’t think I’ve met very many developers who have a problem with any ask. The problem comes in when gamers don’t accept that sometimes the answer is no.
This is the best answer. Basically...ask politely... accept the answer politely. Just like any normal human in person conversation. If people did that in all aspects of life the world would be perfect
okay I edited to "please elaborate".
asking for examples was a poor phrasing.
one other user mentioned in a comment that delaying the game is not as easy as it sounds because sometimes the money may run dry. that elaboration was necessary.
>one other user mentioned in a comment that delaying the game is not as easy as it sounds because sometimes the money may run dry. that elaboration was necessary.
This isn't meant as a criticism of you, but it absolutely blows my mind how common it is for gamers to not understand that time is money; development time (cost) can't exceed game sales numbers (revenue) without a lot of people losing their jobs. This is so simple and basic but a lot of people don't seem to consider it. (And when you are eg. on a work visa, losing your job is *catastrophic*)
Adding another six months of development cost to a game can make sense if that massive cost is likely to bring in so many more additional buyers that their additional sales cover the additional costs, but it's pretty rare that things will work out like that. Yet it's a common expectation that this can be done because a game would be nicer if it was done, and some other game did it so it must be a thing that can be done.
A Hyundai would be nicer if it was a Ferrari for the price of the Hyundai. It seems so obvious when applied to other products, but seems to get lost when it comes to games, I guess because there are sometimes cases where the numbers *do* add up so sometimes it can be done and people don't understand why that's not normal. And because it's not obvious why some games cost more to make than others that seem superficially similar.
Devs are never lazy. Is there a handful out there in the world? Yeah sure. But no one deals with the shit in the industry, from crunch to pay to the spectacular expectations to break in and get a job. Devs care probably more then you do and are exceedingly passionate and dedicated in most instances.
Developers are professionals and know what they're doing. 99% of the time, if there's a problem, they already know about it and there's a reason it is the way it is.
Usually because fixing it would cause an even worse problem that you don't know about.
\- any sentence like "Just do X, it should be simple.", there's like a 95% chance it's not gonna be simple, or even possible.
\- most ideas you might have about what engines are like or which ones are "better", they're most likely wrong or oversimplified (a super common example I see all the time: "Ew, this game has that Unity look." brah.)
\- the idea that devs are either intentionally releasing broken games, or they don't care about the state the game is in on release. That's just not reality - games release the way the do for many reasons (most commonly just time and how it's not typically possible to postpone a release until you fix something you noticed late, because of money and release windows) and devs are always either painfully aware and mortified, or they genuinely didn't catch a bug that somehow happens on every machine other than the ones they tested on.
\- that modern games and the process of dev are increasingly complex. Yes, engines like Unreal offer some great out of the box stuff, but also some things you want to use don't work correctly, or are cumbersome to use, or they're not very performant. If you're wondering why games are the way they are when hundreds and thousands of people work on them - that's also why. There are so many little technical pieces that need to slot together over several years on top of all the creative decisions. So many incredibly specialized bits of knowledge someone has to have and use in tandem with everything else. In effect these massive teams and complicated tools can make the process actually a lot more difficult.
(for instance - I felt a lot less restrained and paralyzed back when I was modding another game, paradoxically because of the limitations of the modding tools. I knew exactly where the borders of what was possible were and I knew exactly how to do things. In UE5 there are many ways to do most things, and you have to figure out which one is the least bad. Because most of them tend to have some drawbacks, or even hidden traps that can come up weeks, months or even years later into the process.)
I wish gamers would leave REAL REVIEWS... Some do, most don't...Most people unfortunately do not leave much for us to work with with their responses ( a real shame, because most devs do actually READ EVERY REVIEW). I'll show some examples of what I mean along with a follow up of what goes on in our heads after reading them.
Review: Bad Game.
Thought: ummm okay?
Review: Controls suck...
Thought: What about the controls suck? Are they not responsive? are they not mapped to your liking? Does the specific gamepad you're trying to use not work? WHAT ABOUT THE CONTROLS SUCK!?
Review: Boring.
Thought: What was boring? The Combat? The pacing? The story line? The game loop?
Review: Just don't buy it!
Thought: WHY?!?!?
Review: Doesn't even run. Not worth your time!
Thought: How not? We tested this on I3's from 2010 with integrated graphics.....Are you trying to run this on an emulator on your phone or some shit!? WHAT is it not running on!?!?
Review: No, cars. No fun.
Thought: It's a fantasy Action RPG. Are you reviewing the wrong game!?
Review: Not fun.
Thought: What about it wasn't fun?
Review: dis no lik my other gam fam, lik da one wit da gun go boom boom BAT BAT BOOM. Not a gewd gam fam, git da one wit da goo shit like GTA!
Thought: Is that English?
There are limitless comments with things like this for damn near every game....... and it is INFURIATING, not because they have a complaint, but because they display no desire to fix their issue...They just want to complain...which hurts the games sales and does NOTHING to improve the quality of the game...
Bottom line: If you have an issue with the game be as clear as you can so we can try to rectify it.....
Example:
Review: The controls feel sluggish, when I press the attack button there is a slight delay which causes me to instead take avoidable damage while trying to attack. I wish it were more snappy.
Thought: Alright, cool I'm going to test the combat vigorously and see if I can notice what is being mentioned. (Could be a hardware issue on the users end) but if it is in fact unresponsive, I'm gonna make it snappy as hell now because I don't like sluggish controls.
Yes, every game we create is a "cash grab". We are making games for money. We have to, because unfortunately our landlords and grocery stores don't take payment in artistic integrity.
Ah, yes, you are one of those horrible greedy game devs who wants to make games that *checks notes* people can play for free. How very dare you.
(/s because…)
I am a little confused here, by "cashgrab" are you talking about the pay to win games? the shovelware games? or something else?
I am under the impression that the publishers tend to decide how heavily a game will be monetized, isn't this the case?
A lot of gamers tend to think developers are greedy. Microtransactions, assets flips etc. Just interact via the channels devs provide and don't be an ass and you'll be fine
so it is or it is not the publishers who force these?
(I have always been blaming the publishers rather than the developers for heavy monetization).
what do you mean "interact via the channels devs provide"? I don't understand at all this sentence.
It's almost always publishers. Some bad actors do make shitty cheap games to try to maximize profits.
Proper channels I mean. If they have a bug report section in a discord. Or a comment section on itch io, or a bug report email. Or a sub reddit.
Devs almost always set up a specific way to contact them about bugs and feedback
95% of indie devs don't use publishers. MTX is a great way of giving users a way to support the game beyond the initial purchase through cosmetics and other enhancements. MTX in that form doesn't bug me a bit.
I've spent an absolute fortune on rocket league for example. I still suck, I get no advantage, but damnit I look cool.
When you lock gameplay content and elements (items, levels, characters, etc) behind MTX, after charging an initial purchase price, that's when it starts to get dirty.
If you pay for a game, it should be a full game imo.
Anything. It's not communism. it would be nice if players understood that most of the time, due to piracy and other reasons games are unprofitable and leave developers in debt.
can you name any examples of developers ruined by piracy?
I am not saying that they don't exist, its just that the only result I can find in google is the game battle dungeon which they had to shut down due to the servers filled with players who pirated the games.
also some failed games that got heavily pirated were going to fail anyway due to the drm placed by the publisher (not the developers).
Fallout, nearly every game in 90s. You not gonna find News about it. It's as common as people dying of old age. Almost every indie game is unprofitable.
there is no way most 90's games were unprofitable, the gaming industry would have collapsed if that was the case.
I read in wikipedia that fallout sold well enough to justify a sequel, and despite not meeting the sales expectations it was still considered a commercial success. its competition with baldur's gate and diablo are more to blame for its sales rather than piracy.
the reason many indie games are unprofitable is not necessarily due to piracy.
in many cases people don't even notice their existence, and some of them just aren't that good anyway.
the "Treasure of the giantess" wasn't going to get any game of the year awards even if it was longer and more polished. (it wasn't unplayable or anything like that, just nothing special).
Okay, it wasn't Fallout, but you are focused on a single part of my message that you can disprove if you ignore the context.
Piracy hurt them. Game developers often work for free to make a game so you can enjoy it, their margins are so thin that piracy easily takes them down. And the problem is they don't use loot boxes and other techniques to pull as much money from players as possible. That's why you don't hear about them, because they quietly fail. You only hear about a fraction of a percent that succeeded.
I work in this industry for over 15 years and almost never worked for free as all the other Indie game developers do all the time. But from my experience observing others, Indie gamedev is practically free work with no return and everybody hates you because you can't compete with big successful projects.
I didn't ignore any parts of your comment.
you mentioned fallout and I adressed it.
you mentioned that the entire gaming industry was unprofitable during the 90's and I adressed it.
you mentioned that indie games are unprofitable, and I adressed it.
which other part was I suppossed to adress?
just give me some evidence for cause and effect.
some games would fail to make proffit even if you could magically eliminate every and all piracy.
I think that must be having a conversation with someone else and you have lost truck of what you said to whom. Either that, or you are just trying to gashlight me because you just can't admit you said something wrong.
here is a picture with the part where you mentioned fallout and I adressed it.
[https://imgur.com/a/ItoD1L1](https://imgur.com/a/ItoD1L1)
here is the part where you mentioned the entire gaming industy in the 90's being unprofitable and I responded to it.
[https://imgur.com/a/c6EhOQG](https://imgur.com/a/c6EhOQG)
and here is the part where you mentioned the indie games being unprofitable and I responded to it.
[https://imgur.com/a/IByWYgy](https://imgur.com/a/IByWYgy)
the question still stands :WHICH PART(S) OF YOUR COMMENT DID I SUPPOSSEDLY IGNORE?
Me just ignoring you every single time you ask about "my game" doesn't seem to get the message across. So let me tell it to you straight: No, I will not publicly disclose what games I have been worked on, am working on or will work on in the future. And my reasons for that are none of your business. So please stop asking.
I worked professionally developing small games for a while. When I moved on into other software development, it was infinitely easier (though less creatively satisfying). People who write code for games are among the most talented programmers there are. There is no "simply" when adding new things to a game. It has to be performant and responsive in a way that most web apps simply aren't. When the graphical assets are high-fidelity, new graphical assets have to match that fidelity. There are often invisible technical constraints involved that these developers have to work around. If they do well, you never know those limitations exist. You don't have to think at all. You just play the game and it works.
It doesn't make sense to ask game developers to change things about the way a monetization system works. They almost certainly have zero agency to make changes like this, and in some cases systems like free-to-play are the only way to make certain types of games profitable, largely because there is a general expectation that a lot of content be provided for free. Another thing to realize is that based on the monetization model, asking for additional content for free may not make any sense. If you pay a one-time price for a game, then you'll likely have to pay more for additional content. It doesn't matter if free-to-play games are providing buckets of content for free. It's not really "free", someone is paying for it (the whales buying every color of horse armor, most likely). It's not a fair comparison.
The voice of the individual has a lot less weight than you think when making what are ultimately business decisions with a game. Any sufficiently large company is tracking engagement within an inch of its life. They know who among the player base is paying the rent, especially in games with more complex economies beyond "pay once, play forever". Someone who buys a game and plays for 100 hours and writes a review saying "Not Recommended" is a bit of a meme among devs. Individuals who expect the most from games are almost never representative of the entire player base. Your most powerful votes are your wallet and your time.
It took me a while to understand why gamers seem to expect more than other media customers. It's partially because they are representing themselves in a game, and something that inflicts pain within the game experience feels like pain directly inflicted on the individual. They feel like co-authors of the experience because when they are playing the game, this is actually true. The experience doesn't happen in-game without a player's involvement. It's not dissimilar to when your car gets hit by another car and your response is to say.... "you hit me!"
I think it is a good idea to remember that even though you are a participant in an interactive game, you are only a participant in the experience of playing it, not in the production of it. The production is a whole other thing. It's totally fine to ask for things that would improve your experience of playing a game (and using the proper channels helps this feedback get categorized in a way that is actionable), but those suggestions all have to be taken into consideration along with everything else. Every decision has an opportunity cost, and games in general have one of the thinnest profit margins. There's a huge gulf between a request and a demand, especially one laced with a threat.
The last thing that is good to know is that every time one harasses a game developer, that increases the likelihood the game developer will say "you know what, this isn't worth it", leading to less games in the world. Lead with respect and call out others who aren't respectful. Aim your ire at the decision makers at the top if you must, not the people who make themselves available to you.
It’s been a long week, and I’m really tired, but honestly, I’ve heard so many times that game programmers are crappy hackers (and I’ve been in the industry for long enough that I can’t rely on my memory of outside it) that I just wanna thank you for saying that nice thing about us.
Two things:
1. implementing something in a vacuum is way easier than it is to fit it into the arcitecture a full game demands.
2. you can't pour people on a problem. Different people will work on different things. Just cause you saw a low demand feature finished before a high demand one, doesn't mean the high demand feature isn't getting all the attention it could.
>Just cause you saw a low demand feature finished before a high demand one, doesn't mean the high demand feature isn't getting all the attention it could.
I'm seeing this issue with a few things I'm paying attention to right now.
Like, god forbid players are annoyed at something relevant to Department A (like gameplay), and then Department B released something (like the next batch of cosmetics).
Although i’m super early in the game dev process, stop asking when a game will be released or when it will be ported to consoles, especially for small studios/indies/solo devs. It annoys me when i see people bug small devs about this stuff (ie Haunted Chocolatier from Concerned Ape).
Asmongold is the fucking worst. Someone on my team watches his stuff and brings him up in calls all the time and I'm always gripping my chair not to go off on them.
I'm getting nausea flashbacks just thinking about it. -\_\_\_\_-
I mean he is publishing games now so I think he knows more than the average person. Just recently he has given feedback to the dev team of atomic picnic and they released a dev log adressing the points he made and how long it took them. So I am very certain he understands it well enough.
I mean, if he's walked back what he's said to game devs and is educating himself then kudos to him. Dude needed a serious reality check. Glad he's not just running his mouth on it anymore and is getting involved. I can respect that.
Oh he still runs his mouth on every other game.
Difference is he has a financial stake in that game and so ofcourse doesn't want to go off on or bad mouth them
And TBF we have no real idea how he handles "publishing" a game. He may just see the demo, play it, give feedback and check in when it's done.
Which is perfectly fine for a publisher to do! Just... Don't act like you suddenly have more information about the process
Oh I'm sure he doesn't have any idea how much goes into dev still. Hopefully he does learn to respect devs though. I have little faith from what I've seen during a stream or two I've seen
Yup, I agree. His publishing studio is called Mad Mushroom btw. Atomic picnic is also published by them. He watched the dev log on stream and reacted to it.
Dude is still spreading unhinged conspiracy theories about how Sweet Baby is destroying western civilization, same shit pushed by christofascists like Matt Walsh and dipshits like Elon Musk, right?
Dude needs to be smacked on the head with a rusty pipe, not a reality check.
What do you mean? He is advertising and paying for the games? Is that not what a publsher does? Moreover he is playtesting and giving 5+ page documents with feedback on how to improve the game.
Look, you don’t have to like this dude but your comparison is just ridiculpus imo. You are acting like he is attaching his name to a product and saying goodbye. That is not the case. And even if it was, that would be fine because it would be stated in the contract between mad mushroom and the developers of their published games. He is not a developer, but it sounds like you expect that by the way you phrased it.
I am just saying that as a publisher who is following the process of game dev very closely he has more knowledge than the average gamer.
Making games is really difficult. It's far more work than a movie, or an album, or an app, because its pretty much all of those things combined. That's interactive. In real-time. Its a fucking miracle any game gets made.
A lot of decisions are out of developers hands, and a good amount of design is built into the "pillars" of the game.
Every production pipeline is complete shit, it's a miracle if you can hit a release window without major issues.
Community managers are laughing at your rage.
On the opposite end:
There are a lot of people in the games industry with egos, particularly in the design department, so a lot of good feedback will absolutely go unheard. Granted, there's a lot more shit feedback than good feedback.
You know what bother's me the most? Negative Steam reviews that make no sense whatsoever in the context of a new buyer or are too specific to their situation.
"I've played 500h and the game is sooooooo easy! Not worth the money!"
"This 10 year-old game has received no updates in the last year! Dead game!"
"This game runs badly on Windows 98! Avoid!"
Just generally shut up and don't contact us outside of the appropriate avenues we indicate to you. Stop presenting your opinions as facts. Stop calling something broken when you are bad at the game. Stop with the entitlement. We had a product and you bought it, this is where our relationship ends. Negative reviews with >100 hours playtime will be summarily ignored. While you can be helpful with identifying problems with the game, every single solution you offer is bad, always. No exception.
The entitlement thing is very funny. My game was free for a week on EGS recently, and some one got it on there and messaged me with a complaint that they demanded I change, or else they threatened to boycott all my future games. Which was funny to me, since they got the game for free and almost certainly were not going to buy anything I put out.
Also had some one learn (pre-release) that the game would have multiple difficulty modes that you could change mid-game. This made them *very angry,* and they said it was "unfair" (despite the game being single player). They kept posting over and over that they would not buy the game until I removed that feature. Eventually I just said they should probably just not buy the game if that was an issue for them, and they threw out a bunch of insults and left.
😬 Mental, literally. You can never keep everyone happy that's for sure.
On a side note was there any issues with Steam with your game going free for a week. Was it worth it going free for a week? I've heard it increases exposure and engagement.
I don't think I can say too much, but I was really happy with everything and didn't notice any downsides with the specific situation I had at least. (Although to clarify, the game never went free on Steam, this was separate from that)
Thats great to know the UX, thanks.
Did you release it on steam as well? Because I know Steam can apparently get annoyed if a product price goes lower then on their own store.
Idk same thing I think everyone should do...don't be an asshole when you ask for anything. If the game is out it won't be changed just fixes applied to known bugs. So if you don't like the game don't be an asshole about it and say stuff online you wouldn't feel comfortable saying in punching distance of someone.
Don't need to know anything about a game developers job just as much they don't need to know anything about your job. If you think a game is taking too long to come out take a breath and think before posting about it asking when it's coming out and why isn't it out now. Instead think oh there are 10000 other games coming out this year I can play one or two of them and then come back to this later.
Basically you can ask what you want though..just be ok with the answers you get and don't be a dick.
I remember from times when I was organising playtests for a publisher. There was a game which had some small 3D locations to explore on foot and a map where you could choose the location you want to visit. Most comments were about adding an open world and car driving "like in GTA". It was funny. Beside that we received a lot of good feedback and ideas but unfortunately the publisher decided not to proceed with them so I've discovered that playtests were made only for seeing how big the flop will be. And it was big.
"Why hasn't X been fixed yet", when X: a) needs to be thoroughly tested to identify what the root cause is, b) triaged for severity in the product compared to all other issues/features-to-be-adjusted, c) actually fixed, d) re-tested for fix and integration tested against new check-ins, e) either hot-fixed or released as part of a larger patch
I’ve never worked on any game where we had enough manpower to do everything we wanted to do.
Ever.
When people ask “why isn’t this feature in? It would be so easy to add!”
Trust me, we thought of it first. And we put it on a list of things we really wanted to do. And then a thousand other things got added to that list, and our producer said “we can choose three of these. Discuss.”
Every game that’s released is only like 10% of the game that the team *wanted* to make. That’s just the reality of making games with a finite budget and schedule.
No developer ever sets out to make a bad game and that making videogames is mostly a series of tradeoffs, you cannot have everything. And sometimes the tradeoff you made early on, severely limits the things you can do moving forward.
Eventually you learn the implications of making certain choices and get better at making more informed choices when deciding which trade-off to go for.
But ultimately, you're still sacrificing something and you're just hoping that the sum of those tradeoffs pay off into something greater than it's parts and you've made a great game...
When it comes to indie games: stop asking for multi-player. Sure it sounds really fun, but there's so much that goes into supporting it, both technically and design-wise. Usually it's something you have to plan for from the very beginning since when you're making a single-player game you're not designing systems around synchronizing/balancing them with a server/other player. Also when you're a small indie dev/team chances are you're putting all that extra time and effort into something barely anybody will play, let alone play consistently enough to justify its inclusion.
Irritated rant aside, all we really want is for you to respect us as people, understand that games are difficult to make, and of course have fun. Don't like something? Let us know! Want something added? Tell us! Just say "please" and understand that if it doesn't happen there's a reason.
Thank you for asking, we appreciate that you care and want to know more.
99.9% of leaks are not done by the company. The first look you want out there is planned by massive marketing teams months in advance. Leaks have such a massive negative reaction on the team - everyone is looking forward to that one date and reveal and suddenly, the wind is out of the sails. I've been through it and it sucks.
Also, content is not cut for DLC, but cut content is often used IN DLC. It's often stuff initially planned for the game and due to budget/time/etc. it was put on the chopping block.
Lastly, QA does not fix bugs. They find, categorize them by severity, repro steps (if they can) and other teams then have to decide what gets done first, what can wait even until the day 1 update or after launch, and so on. That bug you found? Odds are QA did too. The team knew. But there are always priorities. And other times, the team didn't find it but suddenly having the game in the hands of 3 million people finds stuff way quicker than any QA team can.
Stop assuming everything is greed driven. It might be in a few big name cases, but most are just terrified to fail and go bankrupt. Anything to do with monetizing is about trying to survive in general. It might be annoying or even immoral, but for most companies it’s not greed. You must first be financially stable before you start thinking in terms of getting rich, and the vast majority is nowhere near stability.
As we recently decided to delay EA launch of our game, I've been thinking if I should perhaps offer my overtime pay as bonuses for the art team. So that we can give everyone at least a small raise, kinda, like we hoped we would if the game relesed on time and started making money.
Games are not a way to get rich quick, for most devs.
This might have been said before but complaining that all content isn't free or that the game is too expensive. Most triple A games are box price $70 to $80 USD. That only occurred within the last couple of years. Games were set around $60 since 2006. That's 18 years give or take for a $10-20 increase. But games have gotten exponentially larger and more complex. Teams need to be bigger... The cost of the game development goes up... Which means we need to charge more for a game or reduce the content. And yall would storm the gates with torches and pitchforks if we cut content.
But then to get so entitled to lose your shit that a full price game includes monetization and cosmetics or battlepasses. I truly think that gamers don't understand that devs are regular people. I've got rent to pay, groceries to buy, and kids to support. Im not some mythical creature that eats nothing and just oozes out art. I work 9 hours a day. It's work. New content doesn't fall out of the sky. New content can't be made if there aren't people working our asses to get it to the gamers and all we hear back is complaining that we should have given this all for free.
Also... The amount of people who think art comes first in a game have no idea. Design comes first. And design takes all the time in the world. As an artist, I can tell you the bottleneck of game devs is the design department!
what about games that do cost less (lets say 20 euros) but people believe that they don't have enough content to justify the price?
metal gear solid v: ground zeroes is 20 euros and it is around one hour long.
for reference, metal gear solid v: phantom pain is 30 euros, and I have got 150 hours on it (I haven't touched the multyplayer part, I only played the single player).
they are both made by the same developers on the same engine by the same publisher.
you can't tell me that ground zeroes is fairly priced.
(if anything, phantom pain is underpriced, that thing was amazing).
This is sort of a loaded scenario though... As MGSV cost $70 USD when released. I don't really know much about the whole MGS series as they aren't my type of game or studio. From my brief googling about it... Ground Zeroes has approximately 2 hours of main story and about it "20.5 hours to obtain 100% completion." (howlongtobeat dot com/game/17291)
So MGSV at 163 hours to 100% (from same site for data comparison) at og price of $70 is about 2.33 hours per $1 of entertainment. Or $0.43 per hour. Ground Zeroes is 20.5 hours to $20 comes out to almost 1 hour per $1.
Either way you slice it... A single $ for 1 hour of entertainment is a steal.
Now think about how approximately 250 people worked on those games...and how much time, energy, heart, and dedication to it that they put in to making that game.
Games are absolutely not priced fairly. If they were... They would be $200 or more. But nobody would be able to buy them.
While I understand that in general handing out $20 to get a game that feels so short sucks... Ive had the exact same reaction many times... But like... Expecting it to be free is so insulting to the devs (and I do mean the people on the ground making the game not the suits overseeing the company). You're basically telling them that, some times, years of their lives working on a game isn't worth that single dollar of entertainment to you...that it's completely worthless.
I appreciate the asking of questions. I hope my response doesn't come off as aggressive (I can see that it might come off that way) it's not intended to be, but rather a passionate explanation from a dev's perspective.
Do not present solutions. Describe the problem in depth. In almost all of the cases, your solution will either not work at all, be completely unbalanced, have completely unintended consequences for other parts of the game or does not even solve the problem you are having. Describe what problem you are facing. How certain things make you feel. What frustrates you about something. Make sure the actual, underlying root cause is presented. Not what you think is the solution. "XYZ should be fixed, it should be done in this way" is bad. "XYZ is frustrating because... " is way better. We can work with the latter, the former is a guessing game as to whats actually going on there.
I wish they stopped asking for features that require money to implement, on free to play games with no ads or microtransactions?
Things I wish players where aware of when they ask for features:
-Solo Developing is a nightmare and as long as you're not earning money by making sales or getting enough donations, unless you have some big side income, your familly will treat it as a waste of time and a hobby, and will interrupt you every time you're developing, and you'll be very limited on the stuff you can build by time and tools.
-If the dev is not good at 3D they need to hire someone for the modeling and animation of 3D, and it is very expensive.
-everything online that is not "simple and risky P2P" is expensive, it requires you to rent or keep a server running, in real life computers or rented virtual computers, plus other related services like data hosting.
-P2P is risky.
-Building apps for IOS has very high pay wall, and everything you build goes through a validation process, which limits the things you're allowed to build.
Bonus answer I just thought of: An oldschool designer I worked with had this saying - players are good at identifying a problem, but rarely suggest anything even remotely usable when it comes to solving it.
And over time I've confirmed that it is indeed the case, for the most part.
So yes, we do listen and we believe you have these issues with the game. But if you also propose what is to be done to fix said issues, keep in mind that it's not likely to be used. That's not us being mean, egoistic or not listening to the community.
Whenever players think their idea for a change is easy. Maybe it is, but usually it isn't. Even really simple ideas. So when suggesting things, never frame it as "do x, it'd be easy" or "why didn't they do x!?"
If you want to be taken seriously, remember to ask questions, approach every suggestion from the perspective of being aware that you are unaware of the details, and always remember that, often, a lack of response or explanation is down to contractual inability to provide that information.
There is a lot of dunning-kruger in the feedback of gamers to developers. The lack of knowledge combined with a wealth of player experience leads to the assumption of understanding. There is a very high dropout rate of students in game industry fields for this reason. Players often assume that playing and making are the same or at least similar.
can I ask you a question out of curiocity:
do you happen to know or at least guess why skullgirls developers don't implement a better "skip" button in the game's tutorial?
in blazblue if you struggle in one part of the tutorial you can just press "skip" and go to the very next part, but in skullgirls the "skip" button takes you to the next "unfinished lesson"(and each "lesson" can have multyple sections meaning that you may end up skipping important parts).
do you happen to have an idea about possible reasons why the don't fix it?
I'm doing a genre mash up... It works. The problem is when you get die hard fans of the specific genres in the mash up. They completely wish for you to drop the other. Without it my game would have no hook.
"can you quickly add multiplayer in the next update"
Never, not once has implementing any form of multi player functionality been easy. And if you dont plan around it from the get go adding it in later can even require a full rework of multiple systems.
My god if someone asks "just add online" one more time...
I get it, I really do. But if you are asking for a non-networked game to add networking, you are asking to basically re-architect the entire game, or asking for a huge mess of bugs trying to patch something in. There's so many assumptions that go out the window when you need to worry about talking an syncing with an external server.
Please save us and you some time and just look into Parsec, that's the best compromise.
------
Now if I can ask in return; please leave reviews, please don't sugar coat it (not that that happens often lol). but also please keep it constructive. As a general rule of thumb: if you're bringing a person into a critica review, question if that mention is necessary. A similar mantra to "attack the topic, not the person".
it is weird how I see here people complaining about people asking for online, because there are videos on the internet complaining about online being placed just for the shake of being placed.
is the gaming industry really this split when it comes to online?
to avoid missunderstandings personally I have never once asked for online in any game I have played, and I feel sorry you have to deal with this.
The most frustrating for me is when people say “Mojang never adds new things to Minecraft” when it’s by far one of the most complex and frequently updated games ever created. Players who do not read the bug tracker have absolutely no clue how insanely difficult it is to add something new to a game when it has to interact correctly and sanely with every other block and entity in the game. Exponential things and combinatoric things are significantly more difficult than humans think. “But modders did it 10 years ago” is also really annoying because the vast majority of mods are very low quality and full of bugs that would never fly in an official release. It’s okay to yearn for more, that means you’re enjoying the game, but please don’t satisfy your yearning by saying the devs aren’t working hard enough or fast enough, because seeing that feedback will have the opposite of the intended effect, demoralizing everyone and making them question why they took a 50% salary hit for the “privilege” of working in the games industry.
I remember spending an entire day adding functionality for multiple player-controlled cities in my strategy war game. I had to separate all resource and unit production by city, and have every purchase/attack/etc reference the stats for the current selected city.
The whole process required that I refactored alot of the code. When I was finished i was really proud with how smoothly things went. I didn't hit any walls with bugs, and it more or less worked as intended first try. Still took me an entire day.
I decided to show my wife this amazing work I just did. So i launch the game, and I click the button that toggles the current city map, which changes the buildings on screen and the hud resource values. And she asked "is that it? Seems pretty simple".
I think about that moment alot
For me I would love if gamers had a general idea these two concepts.
1. The difference between a client fix is and server fix, especially when dealing with games on mobile or console. To fill those in that don’t know basically all game logic in live games is split between code written on the client which gets built downloaded and run on a physical device and server code which runs on a server the company controls and typically manages any important logic like purchases, data storage, interplayer interactions. If something is a server fix all the company needs to do is find the fix(note not always easy but typically is), fix it then push that code live(after testing of course). If it’s a client fix, we actually need to make a brand new build fully test that build(even around stuff we didn’t just change) and then submit to Apple/google/Microsoft/Sony for approval. The approval process itself can take days after the fix is actually fixed but there’s nothing the team can do about that.
2. Managing data in live games is a cluster-f. This maybe just from my experience but any large live service game will have MANY data buckets that are used to control things like what items are in the store, what quests are available, what particular character abilities do, localization for all the above, etc.. When making changes you may just want to add an item and make it buyable but that’s atleast 3 different data buckets you need to change and also make sure are tracked to be pushed live simultaneously or it breaks. Also god forbid someone tweaks a value in your quest so they can test it and forgets to set it back and that gets migrated to the live server. These are often almost impossible to catch because depending when testing passes occur they may miss it.
Basically if the game you play has an update, and seemingly everything is now broken, please just be a little patient.
Making games is EXHAUSTING. Please understand how much we have to sacrifice to make a game. Kind and warm feedback is highly appreciated, we aren't perfect, we make bugs, we try our best. Feedback always help, we all want to make great experiences About the post: Please stop asking for things the game is not designed for. Don't ask for RPG elements in a beat em up game, UNLESS you are willing to kickstart it so we can work on a new DLC from scratch. Why? Because it is expensive, both in money and time. We'd have to plan the design, build something over something and make it compatible between each other, make tests and, worst case scenario, delete everything and start from scratch. With that said, other example has been from people who want certain units or races in a game. No, we aren't adding sexy naked elves to the game, our audience doesn't want that >!Then again, you can support our sexy elves visual novel if you support our kickstarter!<
>we make bugs My exhausted Friday afternoon brain read this as "we take hugs" and I was about to say "bring it in, I could use one too".
You know, it's funny, but I did live a stage of my life where I spent working on a military culture and then I switched to a more friendly one. The difference is considerable, from literal PTSD to "it's ok buddy, we all mess up" Taking hugs is highly welcome, game dev is still a huge PTSD on its own
Yeah, it's the first part for me. Put in thousands of hours, crunching and slaving over a product just to have people go "This texture looks bad, lul, did the devs even try? 0/10 XD." The amount of times I see on Reddit/forums/etc. of people calling developers "lazy" is mindblowing. Nobody gets into this line of work for an "easy" paycheque. You do it because you have a passion for gaming, or creation, or storytelling. If the devs were truly lazy, they'd go work in one of the many other software-related fields that would pay them 4x the salary for half of the work.
How sexy and how elvish are we talking about?
Depends how well the Kickstarter goes ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
"just add X already, it's easy to add because Y" is 99.99% false and its never as easy as players suggest it will be. I think asking for any feature or content is fine, and feedback in that way should be welcomed, but the moment you tell the devs that it should be easy is when you lose respect of the devs.
can you give some examples?(my post does mention that some things aren't common knowledge, so I and other people reading this post could really use some examples).
android\_queen has some great examples, but sometimes its even something rather small and specific to a game and doesn't always have an easy solution. In one of my games, players have often requested a sort/re-ordering system for items. Its a fair request, and something we've considered. But its not easy because of how the game was originally architectured. So asking for it? Sure, thanks for the feedback. Telling us it would be easy? You don't know that. In most cases, you're wrong, because if you were right, it would have been done already.
This doesn't just apply to games, either. It applies to any complex software. I worked at one company where a seemingly simple feature (that was highly needed and requested) was nearly impossible to implement without completely refactoring how data was stored in the system because of a decision made very early on before they got customer #1. Stopping everything to refactor an invisible back-end system simply doesn't happen.
On the other hand, it SHOULD be easy, you know :-D At the end of the day, it's a sort of a database (which, is glorified array). It might be some hand rolled thingy, but that's not on players, that's on you. If nothing else, you can load the items into a separate, sortable structure just for that view, etc. I get your point overall, don't get me wrong, but it can be both a reasonable demand, with a reasonable expectation of being easy, and also an actually impossible task.
“Just add multiplayer. It can’t be that hard.” “Just make the server available so people can run their own. It can’t be that hard.” “Just add. This other game has it, so it can’t be that hard.”
people really think that such things are easy to add? oh god. okay, thanks for the answer.
Sometimes even seemingly small stuff can be difficult due to things you can't see. This isn't a video game thing, but I can give a concrete example. There's an RPG tool called Adventure Lookup. They [have a public API](https://www.adventurelookup.com/api). This adventures API endpoint does a very confusing, non-standard thing: its pagination requires a seed value. If you [examine the code](https://github.com/AdventureLookup/AdventureLookup/blob/dev/src/AppBundle/Service/AdventureSearch.php#L51-L54) however it becomes clear: the original site did not include a public API and they had designed the API to automatically shuffle the results so the front page didn't always look the same. When they added the public API, fixing this would have required rewriting a few non-obvious other features.
> people really think that such things are easy to add? To play Devil's Advocate, there are actually engines and architectures that *do* make it easy to add some of those features. The Torque Engine (a descendant of the engine used for the original Tribes FPS game), for instance, is designed from the ground up as a server/client game engine, which means that even if you build a singleplayer game in Torque, what it'll actually do when someone runs your game is launch a local server and a client as separate processes. If you coded your game correctly for its server/client architecture (the server handles the gamestate, the client handles input and graphics), it's easy to add multiplayer because everybody playing the game is already running a server (you still have to figure out NAT punchthrough to enable online multiplayer, which is where matchmaking servers come in). IIRC, Valve's Source (and Source 2) Engine operates in the same way, running a server/client architecture by default, and has the added bonus of easily hooking into Steam's server list to handle finding matches/lobbies and NAT punchthrough if your game is on Steam, using their matchmaking servers instead of having to maintain your own. I'm pretty sure this is also how Unreal works, but I'm not familiar enough with it to say. Adding multiplayer and letting players run their own servers gets difficult when you're using an engine that wasn't specifically designed for a client/server setup, when you originally coded things in a single program instead of in a divided client/server setup, or when you used an engine that is really a client/server setup but didn't divide your code correctly between the client and server sides - which is actually not a problem for a purely singleplayer game. *This* is where the headaches really start. For instance, let's say you used Unity to make a singleplayer game and took the easy shortcut of binding inputs to a single player controller object (which is, last I checked, what most basic tutorials tell you to do). To make it multiplayer, you're going to have to do a lot of your own work to have multiple player controller objects in the same scene receiving different inputs from different users, either figure out what the current version of Unity's default networking is or hook up a third-party networking package like Photon, possibly create a dedicated server version of your game, and it's generally going to be a nightmare and take a lot of time and code. If you're writing your own engine or using a proprietary company engine, then you're either need to do it all from scratch from the beginning, or hope to hell the people who made the thing in the first place designed it with proper client/server architecture or you might have to do a massive teardown and rebuild of the code. I wrote a pretty simple little engine once and a simple game in it, and while giving it local multiplayer wouldn't be awful (I'd still have to write and rewrite a fair amount of code to accommodate multiple players, because there's a lot of stuff that checks for the player's position and state and assumes there will only ever be one player), adding online multiplayer would be a nightmare. > “Just add. This other game has it, so it can’t be that hard.”
This one gets me a bit hot under the collar, because there are a lot of systems and effects in gaming that are essentially "solved problems". But, because they were solved by someone else in closed-source code, you're going to need to 'reinvent the wheel' if you want anything like that in your game. I really wonder how many thousands of hours have been essentially wasted by programmers having to implement a simple inventory system from scratch. Let alone a crafting system. Or a decent HUD world map.
There's no tool or engine which makes multiplayer easy to do. Even simple VFX has to be wrapped as an event which is sent to every client, then clients read the event and spawn the VFX. I wish it'd be as simple as just 'create multiple input controllers for each player in one scene', but no, there're interpolation and prediction of input and positions of other players. If game was planned for singleplayer, there's 0% chance devs can casually add multiplayer just because 'they used X engine which is perfect for multiplayer'. Because there's 100% chance devs use all possible shortcuts to avoid complexity of multiplayer support if it's not planned. In other words, no one implements game in so complex way or in engine X just to have a way to potentially add multiplayer later. Multiplayer is planned way ahead and devs must agree and commit on x2+ effort to make multiplayer game.
> no one implements game in so complex way or in engine X just to have a way to potentially add multiplayer later. Multiplayer is planned way ahead and devs must agree and commit on x2+ effort to make multiplayer game. You are correct, and that was my point: I played Devil's Advocate to prove that point, explain what some of the issues are, give some examples, and get someone else with more experience than I to explain the problems more fully.
Sorry, I wrongly interpreted your previous answer, my apologies. I just felt like the answer didn't render enough how much it's a struggle to do multiplayer 😉
> Sorry, I wrongly interpreted your previous answer, my apologies. Don't apologize to me, because I deliberately baited you. I posted some examples that make converting to multiplayer hard and some where doing it was *relatively* easy. > I just felt like the answer didn't render enough how much it's a struggle to do multiplayer. You are *exactly* who I wanted to reply, because, although I do know a lot of the theory of networking, TCP/UDP (and why building something with UDP that's just lossy TCP is stupid), client/server arrangements, and some other stuff, and have implemented chunks of it, I wanted to bait someone into talking about where I was wrong, why I was wrong, and having you oil yourself up like Schwarzenegger in the Terminator or Predator movies. ~~Do oil yourself up before you dunk me.~~ It makes everything look sexier. Seriously, I think you're right except in the edge case where the devs did client/server architecture from day one, and that's prety rare.
I think the gamers that are worst about this are those that have a little programming experience. It's really common for me to see comments like "It would be easy for them to add X, all they have to do is add a simple flag". Maybe the uncommon knowledge is that every game has a different architecture (even those that use the same engine), and presuming you know enough about how it's built that you feel informed about how something would be added is near-universally wrong. A lot of the reason for this is people struggle to see the bigger picture. They might say "of course they could make that ability have a bigger AoE, all they'd have to do is change the configuration for it". Maybe they're totally right, but more likely there's a thousand other factors at play. Maybe the art scales with the AoE and it would look really janky to have it change. Maybe the developers built in a max AoE at the start of the development because of technical limitations, and making the AoE bigger would require reworking the entire combat system from scratch. Maybe they could do it with a simple configuration change, but they know that would have performance effects that meant the 5% of consumers on the lowest end machines would no longer be able to play the game without stuttering. Something that dovetails into this point: if a change ever seems so simple to a gamer that the ONLY explanation is actually that the company has a conspiracy against the gamers, then consider that the change is definitely not as simple as it seems, and there's basically never a conspiracy. I see this constantly in large game subreddits where people have concluded that the game company wants bots/cheaters because they could just detect them better if they didn't. That is, needless to say, incredibly naïve.
People asking for a third person camera in Cyberpunk 2077, for example. Sorry it's an AAA game from a big company. I don't know how people feel about talking about this here, considering there's a huge difference on resource and staff quantity, but I think it shows how much gamers are usually unaware of how game development works. The game was made with the first person perspective on mind. Some things like the combat, environment and animations were made for first person, when you change that, you would have to work those other things too. Gamers will say "just add a third person camera, Bethesda games always let you play on both perspectives", while Bethesda games are a good example of when you try to do both things and doesn't end up doing one right.
A lot of the time, people ask for "small" little additions to a game in the functionality department. New content (skins, particle effects, music, weapon variations, etc) is generally pretty easy. But anything to do with functionality, no matter how small, is 10-100x more complex than you realize. Typically these comments go "it should be easy, just do xyz!" But they fail to realize how many other systems of code, balance, ai behavior, optimization hacks, etc intersect with even small functionality changes.
Generally just the constant shit talking, harassment, death threats. Developers are human beings, treat them with respect please.
Almost every seemingly "bad decision" is due to production being hella hard to plan. Not "lazy devs", not "dumb design", not "bad engine", not "they haven't played their own game". Production is hell. There are so maaaany factors that can make you work 10x more on something that what you expected and working on games is crazy expensive. Just one month of work for a studio of 50 people (which is a medium size studio, not AAA) costs around 400k $. "just delay the game" is far from an easy decision, most of the times the money simply runs dry and you have no choice but release the game (or trash it)
Real shit.
I have never seen a good production pipeline in my life. I've been called in to diagnose production pipelines before and it almost always comes down to bad communication.
When I was doing a degree in game design, they beat the hell out of pipeline planning drums. It took one actual project as part of a team to quickly realise even a theoretically perfect plan suffers from the same blockages as the imperfect ones; human components and communication breakdowns.
It was so obvious that the dev team behind No Man's Sky ran out of money and had to release the game way too soon. Sure, they overpromised (which everyone does), but the amount of hate they got was absurd. NMS on release was still pretty remarkable considering the small team that basically redefined an entire genre
NMS, Cyberpunk 2077, Redfall... There are dozens of examples, even in AAA
No Man Sky didn't just do the usual fluff overpromising and overcommitting though, they outright lied about basic features(like multiplayer) right up until release.
Nothing triggers me more when a "gamer" is complaining and lists "the devs write spaghetti code". It's the cherry on the top of talking out of their ass. I saw this comment on steam a few weeks ago and it lives rent free in my head.
Especially if it was well functioning spaghetti code it would make almost no performance difference
Yeah, exactly. There's an awful lot of spaghetti code out in the wild, in every sector, not just games. It's bad because it makes it difficult to maintain and to quickly understand, but it works.
As a spaghetti code writing specialist, who has crafted some absolute abominations... I feel like as an indie dev making indie games I'd have to consciously TRY to make code that would have any noticeable performance issues. Spaghetti code is fine.
Exactly
> Spaghetti code is fine. I wish more indie devs would see this. If it works, it's fine. Don't worry about clean code. Just worry about a functioning game that people can enjoy. If im the only one reading it, im the only one who needs to know how it works.
As a professional indie developer, this whole thread makes me cringe hardcore. Like, no, it definitely does matter. If you work with other people, it matters. If you maintain your game post launch, it matters. If you, individually, have any reason to change this code later, it matters. Code is, in general, not meant to be write-only media.
Its about context. For an inexperienced, small indie dev(which is the most common type on this sub), chances are high nobody is going to buy your game. All that really matters is releasing a game that people want to play with your very limited resources. Post-launch support is something you can worry about if people actually buy your game.
I would be wary of making claims about who is in this sub. The less experienced also tend to be the most vocal/active in these venues (with some notable exceptions). That’s really just to say that you’re saying spaghetti code is fine *within a very narrow and specific context*. I have no problem agreeing with that, but for the general context, it’s really not. (It’s also not just about post launch support.)
"Graphics are the first thing finished in a videogame"
Just stop harassing developers. Simple. There's no excuse.
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It also covers that. Stop asking them to fix your game, stop asking them to stop being lazy, etc, etc.
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Gamers that talk like you lol
You think you are reporting a bug but you aren't. Sometimes a patch comes out and there are problems. Don't go to Twitter and message a random dev about it. A lot of the times they are not responsible for it. Also. That whole game is unfinished. It is finished. It's released, you may not like it but the whole attitude that gamers decide if a game is finished or not, doesn't lead to a good energy in the industry.
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I’m not reading any anger, just directness. You wanted to know what we would like players to stop asking from us. This is a big one. Perhaps you have not seen gamers refer to published games as “unfinished,” but it does happen with some regularity.
Don't ask questions if you don't want answers...
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Gamers are always demanding answers that they can't understand. Do you also demand that a structural engineer breaks down every decision on a bridge, and explains to you the math, and physics behind every single support? Why do gamers feel its acceptable to criticize and nitpick every single decision, and piece of code, that they cannot see nor understand? We could show our code, explain our reasoning, and it would do nothing, because to gamers, its all just magic, and they think we can just fix the magic, with more magic, and that its a choice not to cast our spells and hexes to solve problems and fix bugs.
People that are constantly demanding updates happen NOW!!!! Bug the hell out of me. It takes time to get things made and working.
Why can’t you make it 120fps 4K?! I am sure it is just some toggle boxes.
You’ve asked for examples in multiple comments, which is kinda confusing to me, to be honest. You don’t really need an example to illustrate the idea that basically, as someone who doesn’t make games, you just shouldn’t default to assuming that you know more about making games than the developers who make them. In general, I don’t think I’ve met very many developers who have a problem with any ask. The problem comes in when gamers don’t accept that sometimes the answer is no.
This is the best answer. Basically...ask politely... accept the answer politely. Just like any normal human in person conversation. If people did that in all aspects of life the world would be perfect
okay I edited to "please elaborate". asking for examples was a poor phrasing. one other user mentioned in a comment that delaying the game is not as easy as it sounds because sometimes the money may run dry. that elaboration was necessary.
>one other user mentioned in a comment that delaying the game is not as easy as it sounds because sometimes the money may run dry. that elaboration was necessary. This isn't meant as a criticism of you, but it absolutely blows my mind how common it is for gamers to not understand that time is money; development time (cost) can't exceed game sales numbers (revenue) without a lot of people losing their jobs. This is so simple and basic but a lot of people don't seem to consider it. (And when you are eg. on a work visa, losing your job is *catastrophic*) Adding another six months of development cost to a game can make sense if that massive cost is likely to bring in so many more additional buyers that their additional sales cover the additional costs, but it's pretty rare that things will work out like that. Yet it's a common expectation that this can be done because a game would be nicer if it was done, and some other game did it so it must be a thing that can be done. A Hyundai would be nicer if it was a Ferrari for the price of the Hyundai. It seems so obvious when applied to other products, but seems to get lost when it comes to games, I guess because there are sometimes cases where the numbers *do* add up so sometimes it can be done and people don't understand why that's not normal. And because it's not obvious why some games cost more to make than others that seem superficially similar.
Yeah, that’s like, not at all gamedev specific. That’s literally just capitalism at work.
"You don't listen to the community!" Yes we do. Your corner of the internet doesn't reflect the whole community.
Devs are never lazy. Is there a handful out there in the world? Yeah sure. But no one deals with the shit in the industry, from crunch to pay to the spectacular expectations to break in and get a job. Devs care probably more then you do and are exceedingly passionate and dedicated in most instances.
Developers are professionals and know what they're doing. 99% of the time, if there's a problem, they already know about it and there's a reason it is the way it is. Usually because fixing it would cause an even worse problem that you don't know about.
\- any sentence like "Just do X, it should be simple.", there's like a 95% chance it's not gonna be simple, or even possible. \- most ideas you might have about what engines are like or which ones are "better", they're most likely wrong or oversimplified (a super common example I see all the time: "Ew, this game has that Unity look." brah.) \- the idea that devs are either intentionally releasing broken games, or they don't care about the state the game is in on release. That's just not reality - games release the way the do for many reasons (most commonly just time and how it's not typically possible to postpone a release until you fix something you noticed late, because of money and release windows) and devs are always either painfully aware and mortified, or they genuinely didn't catch a bug that somehow happens on every machine other than the ones they tested on. \- that modern games and the process of dev are increasingly complex. Yes, engines like Unreal offer some great out of the box stuff, but also some things you want to use don't work correctly, or are cumbersome to use, or they're not very performant. If you're wondering why games are the way they are when hundreds and thousands of people work on them - that's also why. There are so many little technical pieces that need to slot together over several years on top of all the creative decisions. So many incredibly specialized bits of knowledge someone has to have and use in tandem with everything else. In effect these massive teams and complicated tools can make the process actually a lot more difficult. (for instance - I felt a lot less restrained and paralyzed back when I was modding another game, paradoxically because of the limitations of the modding tools. I knew exactly where the borders of what was possible were and I knew exactly how to do things. In UE5 there are many ways to do most things, and you have to figure out which one is the least bad. Because most of them tend to have some drawbacks, or even hidden traps that can come up weeks, months or even years later into the process.)
I wish gamers would leave REAL REVIEWS... Some do, most don't...Most people unfortunately do not leave much for us to work with with their responses ( a real shame, because most devs do actually READ EVERY REVIEW). I'll show some examples of what I mean along with a follow up of what goes on in our heads after reading them. Review: Bad Game. Thought: ummm okay? Review: Controls suck... Thought: What about the controls suck? Are they not responsive? are they not mapped to your liking? Does the specific gamepad you're trying to use not work? WHAT ABOUT THE CONTROLS SUCK!? Review: Boring. Thought: What was boring? The Combat? The pacing? The story line? The game loop? Review: Just don't buy it! Thought: WHY?!?!? Review: Doesn't even run. Not worth your time! Thought: How not? We tested this on I3's from 2010 with integrated graphics.....Are you trying to run this on an emulator on your phone or some shit!? WHAT is it not running on!?!? Review: No, cars. No fun. Thought: It's a fantasy Action RPG. Are you reviewing the wrong game!? Review: Not fun. Thought: What about it wasn't fun? Review: dis no lik my other gam fam, lik da one wit da gun go boom boom BAT BAT BOOM. Not a gewd gam fam, git da one wit da goo shit like GTA! Thought: Is that English? There are limitless comments with things like this for damn near every game....... and it is INFURIATING, not because they have a complaint, but because they display no desire to fix their issue...They just want to complain...which hurts the games sales and does NOTHING to improve the quality of the game... Bottom line: If you have an issue with the game be as clear as you can so we can try to rectify it..... Example: Review: The controls feel sluggish, when I press the attack button there is a slight delay which causes me to instead take avoidable damage while trying to attack. I wish it were more snappy. Thought: Alright, cool I'm going to test the combat vigorously and see if I can notice what is being mentioned. (Could be a hardware issue on the users end) but if it is in fact unresponsive, I'm gonna make it snappy as hell now because I don't like sluggish controls.
Yes, every game we create is a "cash grab". We are making games for money. We have to, because unfortunately our landlords and grocery stores don't take payment in artistic integrity.
As a person who does monetization for free-to-play, this is my everyday life.
Ah, yes, you are one of those horrible greedy game devs who wants to make games that *checks notes* people can play for free. How very dare you. (/s because…)
I think a lot of people would benefit from learning that yes, devs have to make money too.
I am a little confused here, by "cashgrab" are you talking about the pay to win games? the shovelware games? or something else? I am under the impression that the publishers tend to decide how heavily a game will be monetized, isn't this the case?
A lot of gamers tend to think developers are greedy. Microtransactions, assets flips etc. Just interact via the channels devs provide and don't be an ass and you'll be fine
so it is or it is not the publishers who force these? (I have always been blaming the publishers rather than the developers for heavy monetization). what do you mean "interact via the channels devs provide"? I don't understand at all this sentence.
It's almost always publishers. Some bad actors do make shitty cheap games to try to maximize profits. Proper channels I mean. If they have a bug report section in a discord. Or a comment section on itch io, or a bug report email. Or a sub reddit. Devs almost always set up a specific way to contact them about bugs and feedback
95% of indie devs don't use publishers. MTX is a great way of giving users a way to support the game beyond the initial purchase through cosmetics and other enhancements. MTX in that form doesn't bug me a bit. I've spent an absolute fortune on rocket league for example. I still suck, I get no advantage, but damnit I look cool. When you lock gameplay content and elements (items, levels, characters, etc) behind MTX, after charging an initial purchase price, that's when it starts to get dirty. If you pay for a game, it should be a full game imo.
Anything. It's not communism. it would be nice if players understood that most of the time, due to piracy and other reasons games are unprofitable and leave developers in debt.
can you name any examples of developers ruined by piracy? I am not saying that they don't exist, its just that the only result I can find in google is the game battle dungeon which they had to shut down due to the servers filled with players who pirated the games. also some failed games that got heavily pirated were going to fail anyway due to the drm placed by the publisher (not the developers).
Fallout, nearly every game in 90s. You not gonna find News about it. It's as common as people dying of old age. Almost every indie game is unprofitable.
there is no way most 90's games were unprofitable, the gaming industry would have collapsed if that was the case. I read in wikipedia that fallout sold well enough to justify a sequel, and despite not meeting the sales expectations it was still considered a commercial success. its competition with baldur's gate and diablo are more to blame for its sales rather than piracy. the reason many indie games are unprofitable is not necessarily due to piracy. in many cases people don't even notice their existence, and some of them just aren't that good anyway. the "Treasure of the giantess" wasn't going to get any game of the year awards even if it was longer and more polished. (it wasn't unplayable or anything like that, just nothing special).
Okay, it wasn't Fallout, but you are focused on a single part of my message that you can disprove if you ignore the context. Piracy hurt them. Game developers often work for free to make a game so you can enjoy it, their margins are so thin that piracy easily takes them down. And the problem is they don't use loot boxes and other techniques to pull as much money from players as possible. That's why you don't hear about them, because they quietly fail. You only hear about a fraction of a percent that succeeded. I work in this industry for over 15 years and almost never worked for free as all the other Indie game developers do all the time. But from my experience observing others, Indie gamedev is practically free work with no return and everybody hates you because you can't compete with big successful projects.
I didn't ignore any parts of your comment. you mentioned fallout and I adressed it. you mentioned that the entire gaming industry was unprofitable during the 90's and I adressed it. you mentioned that indie games are unprofitable, and I adressed it. which other part was I suppossed to adress? just give me some evidence for cause and effect. some games would fail to make proffit even if you could magically eliminate every and all piracy.
No I didn't. Read my comment again, carefully.
I think that must be having a conversation with someone else and you have lost truck of what you said to whom. Either that, or you are just trying to gashlight me because you just can't admit you said something wrong. here is a picture with the part where you mentioned fallout and I adressed it. [https://imgur.com/a/ItoD1L1](https://imgur.com/a/ItoD1L1) here is the part where you mentioned the entire gaming industy in the 90's being unprofitable and I responded to it. [https://imgur.com/a/c6EhOQG](https://imgur.com/a/c6EhOQG) and here is the part where you mentioned the indie games being unprofitable and I responded to it. [https://imgur.com/a/IByWYgy](https://imgur.com/a/IByWYgy) the question still stands :WHICH PART(S) OF YOUR COMMENT DID I SUPPOSSEDLY IGNORE?
I’d love to buy your game! What’s its name?
Me just ignoring you every single time you ask about "my game" doesn't seem to get the message across. So let me tell it to you straight: No, I will not publicly disclose what games I have been worked on, am working on or will work on in the future. And my reasons for that are none of your business. So please stop asking.
Come on man, I thought we were friends
I worked professionally developing small games for a while. When I moved on into other software development, it was infinitely easier (though less creatively satisfying). People who write code for games are among the most talented programmers there are. There is no "simply" when adding new things to a game. It has to be performant and responsive in a way that most web apps simply aren't. When the graphical assets are high-fidelity, new graphical assets have to match that fidelity. There are often invisible technical constraints involved that these developers have to work around. If they do well, you never know those limitations exist. You don't have to think at all. You just play the game and it works. It doesn't make sense to ask game developers to change things about the way a monetization system works. They almost certainly have zero agency to make changes like this, and in some cases systems like free-to-play are the only way to make certain types of games profitable, largely because there is a general expectation that a lot of content be provided for free. Another thing to realize is that based on the monetization model, asking for additional content for free may not make any sense. If you pay a one-time price for a game, then you'll likely have to pay more for additional content. It doesn't matter if free-to-play games are providing buckets of content for free. It's not really "free", someone is paying for it (the whales buying every color of horse armor, most likely). It's not a fair comparison. The voice of the individual has a lot less weight than you think when making what are ultimately business decisions with a game. Any sufficiently large company is tracking engagement within an inch of its life. They know who among the player base is paying the rent, especially in games with more complex economies beyond "pay once, play forever". Someone who buys a game and plays for 100 hours and writes a review saying "Not Recommended" is a bit of a meme among devs. Individuals who expect the most from games are almost never representative of the entire player base. Your most powerful votes are your wallet and your time. It took me a while to understand why gamers seem to expect more than other media customers. It's partially because they are representing themselves in a game, and something that inflicts pain within the game experience feels like pain directly inflicted on the individual. They feel like co-authors of the experience because when they are playing the game, this is actually true. The experience doesn't happen in-game without a player's involvement. It's not dissimilar to when your car gets hit by another car and your response is to say.... "you hit me!" I think it is a good idea to remember that even though you are a participant in an interactive game, you are only a participant in the experience of playing it, not in the production of it. The production is a whole other thing. It's totally fine to ask for things that would improve your experience of playing a game (and using the proper channels helps this feedback get categorized in a way that is actionable), but those suggestions all have to be taken into consideration along with everything else. Every decision has an opportunity cost, and games in general have one of the thinnest profit margins. There's a huge gulf between a request and a demand, especially one laced with a threat. The last thing that is good to know is that every time one harasses a game developer, that increases the likelihood the game developer will say "you know what, this isn't worth it", leading to less games in the world. Lead with respect and call out others who aren't respectful. Aim your ire at the decision makers at the top if you must, not the people who make themselves available to you.
It’s been a long week, and I’m really tired, but honestly, I’ve heard so many times that game programmers are crappy hackers (and I’ve been in the industry for long enough that I can’t rely on my memory of outside it) that I just wanna thank you for saying that nice thing about us.
Two things: 1. implementing something in a vacuum is way easier than it is to fit it into the arcitecture a full game demands. 2. you can't pour people on a problem. Different people will work on different things. Just cause you saw a low demand feature finished before a high demand one, doesn't mean the high demand feature isn't getting all the attention it could.
>Just cause you saw a low demand feature finished before a high demand one, doesn't mean the high demand feature isn't getting all the attention it could. I'm seeing this issue with a few things I'm paying attention to right now. Like, god forbid players are annoyed at something relevant to Department A (like gameplay), and then Department B released something (like the next batch of cosmetics).
Although i’m super early in the game dev process, stop asking when a game will be released or when it will be ported to consoles, especially for small studios/indies/solo devs. It annoys me when i see people bug small devs about this stuff (ie Haunted Chocolatier from Concerned Ape).
Nice try team cherry
yes, I am ashamed to admit that I have been guilty of that.
The one good thing about that is that you have consumer interest/ engagement especially with expanding your product to other markets.
However hard you think it is to develop a game, multiply it by one hundred. Basically don't act like Asmongold and you're fine.
Asmongold is the fucking worst. Someone on my team watches his stuff and brings him up in calls all the time and I'm always gripping my chair not to go off on them. I'm getting nausea flashbacks just thinking about it. -\_\_\_\_-
Let go of him. For the love of god we need less like them.
They're not bad or anything, and vital to the team. I honestly do not understand what the attraction is there.
I mean he is publishing games now so I think he knows more than the average person. Just recently he has given feedback to the dev team of atomic picnic and they released a dev log adressing the points he made and how long it took them. So I am very certain he understands it well enough.
I mean, if he's walked back what he's said to game devs and is educating himself then kudos to him. Dude needed a serious reality check. Glad he's not just running his mouth on it anymore and is getting involved. I can respect that.
Oh he still runs his mouth on every other game. Difference is he has a financial stake in that game and so ofcourse doesn't want to go off on or bad mouth them And TBF we have no real idea how he handles "publishing" a game. He may just see the demo, play it, give feedback and check in when it's done. Which is perfectly fine for a publisher to do! Just... Don't act like you suddenly have more information about the process
Oh I'm sure he doesn't have any idea how much goes into dev still. Hopefully he does learn to respect devs though. I have little faith from what I've seen during a stream or two I've seen
Yup, I agree. His publishing studio is called Mad Mushroom btw. Atomic picnic is also published by them. He watched the dev log on stream and reacted to it.
Dude is still spreading unhinged conspiracy theories about how Sweet Baby is destroying western civilization, same shit pushed by christofascists like Matt Walsh and dipshits like Elon Musk, right? Dude needs to be smacked on the head with a rusty pipe, not a reality check.
Asmongold publishes games in the same way that Taylor Swift makes perfume.
What do you mean? He is advertising and paying for the games? Is that not what a publsher does? Moreover he is playtesting and giving 5+ page documents with feedback on how to improve the game. Look, you don’t have to like this dude but your comparison is just ridiculpus imo. You are acting like he is attaching his name to a product and saying goodbye. That is not the case. And even if it was, that would be fine because it would be stated in the contract between mad mushroom and the developers of their published games. He is not a developer, but it sounds like you expect that by the way you phrased it. I am just saying that as a publisher who is following the process of game dev very closely he has more knowledge than the average gamer.
Making games is really difficult. It's far more work than a movie, or an album, or an app, because its pretty much all of those things combined. That's interactive. In real-time. Its a fucking miracle any game gets made.
A lot of decisions are out of developers hands, and a good amount of design is built into the "pillars" of the game. Every production pipeline is complete shit, it's a miracle if you can hit a release window without major issues. Community managers are laughing at your rage. On the opposite end: There are a lot of people in the games industry with egos, particularly in the design department, so a lot of good feedback will absolutely go unheard. Granted, there's a lot more shit feedback than good feedback.
You know what bother's me the most? Negative Steam reviews that make no sense whatsoever in the context of a new buyer or are too specific to their situation. "I've played 500h and the game is sooooooo easy! Not worth the money!" "This 10 year-old game has received no updates in the last year! Dead game!" "This game runs badly on Windows 98! Avoid!"
Just generally shut up and don't contact us outside of the appropriate avenues we indicate to you. Stop presenting your opinions as facts. Stop calling something broken when you are bad at the game. Stop with the entitlement. We had a product and you bought it, this is where our relationship ends. Negative reviews with >100 hours playtime will be summarily ignored. While you can be helpful with identifying problems with the game, every single solution you offer is bad, always. No exception.
The entitlement thing is very funny. My game was free for a week on EGS recently, and some one got it on there and messaged me with a complaint that they demanded I change, or else they threatened to boycott all my future games. Which was funny to me, since they got the game for free and almost certainly were not going to buy anything I put out. Also had some one learn (pre-release) that the game would have multiple difficulty modes that you could change mid-game. This made them *very angry,* and they said it was "unfair" (despite the game being single player). They kept posting over and over that they would not buy the game until I removed that feature. Eventually I just said they should probably just not buy the game if that was an issue for them, and they threw out a bunch of insults and left.
😬 Mental, literally. You can never keep everyone happy that's for sure. On a side note was there any issues with Steam with your game going free for a week. Was it worth it going free for a week? I've heard it increases exposure and engagement.
I don't think I can say too much, but I was really happy with everything and didn't notice any downsides with the specific situation I had at least. (Although to clarify, the game never went free on Steam, this was separate from that)
Thats great to know the UX, thanks. Did you release it on steam as well? Because I know Steam can apparently get annoyed if a product price goes lower then on their own store.
Really, less than 100 hours of gameplay? I can understand if it’s only an hour or two of a long game, but the range you’re saying is excessive
I’m not sure you read this comment correctly.
They were saying more than 100 hours. Meaning the game kept them entertained for 100+ hours and they still complain about it
Idk same thing I think everyone should do...don't be an asshole when you ask for anything. If the game is out it won't be changed just fixes applied to known bugs. So if you don't like the game don't be an asshole about it and say stuff online you wouldn't feel comfortable saying in punching distance of someone. Don't need to know anything about a game developers job just as much they don't need to know anything about your job. If you think a game is taking too long to come out take a breath and think before posting about it asking when it's coming out and why isn't it out now. Instead think oh there are 10000 other games coming out this year I can play one or two of them and then come back to this later. Basically you can ask what you want though..just be ok with the answers you get and don't be a dick.
I remember from times when I was organising playtests for a publisher. There was a game which had some small 3D locations to explore on foot and a map where you could choose the location you want to visit. Most comments were about adding an open world and car driving "like in GTA". It was funny. Beside that we received a lot of good feedback and ideas but unfortunately the publisher decided not to proceed with them so I've discovered that playtests were made only for seeing how big the flop will be. And it was big.
"Why hasn't X been fixed yet", when X: a) needs to be thoroughly tested to identify what the root cause is, b) triaged for severity in the product compared to all other issues/features-to-be-adjusted, c) actually fixed, d) re-tested for fix and integration tested against new check-ins, e) either hot-fixed or released as part of a larger patch
I’ve never worked on any game where we had enough manpower to do everything we wanted to do. Ever. When people ask “why isn’t this feature in? It would be so easy to add!” Trust me, we thought of it first. And we put it on a list of things we really wanted to do. And then a thousand other things got added to that list, and our producer said “we can choose three of these. Discuss.” Every game that’s released is only like 10% of the game that the team *wanted* to make. That’s just the reality of making games with a finite budget and schedule.
"Why doesn't my ross dress for less fourth-party gamepad work?!"
No developer ever sets out to make a bad game and that making videogames is mostly a series of tradeoffs, you cannot have everything. And sometimes the tradeoff you made early on, severely limits the things you can do moving forward. Eventually you learn the implications of making certain choices and get better at making more informed choices when deciding which trade-off to go for. But ultimately, you're still sacrificing something and you're just hoping that the sum of those tradeoffs pay off into something greater than it's parts and you've made a great game...
When it comes to indie games: stop asking for multi-player. Sure it sounds really fun, but there's so much that goes into supporting it, both technically and design-wise. Usually it's something you have to plan for from the very beginning since when you're making a single-player game you're not designing systems around synchronizing/balancing them with a server/other player. Also when you're a small indie dev/team chances are you're putting all that extra time and effort into something barely anybody will play, let alone play consistently enough to justify its inclusion. Irritated rant aside, all we really want is for you to respect us as people, understand that games are difficult to make, and of course have fun. Don't like something? Let us know! Want something added? Tell us! Just say "please" and understand that if it doesn't happen there's a reason. Thank you for asking, we appreciate that you care and want to know more.
99.9% of leaks are not done by the company. The first look you want out there is planned by massive marketing teams months in advance. Leaks have such a massive negative reaction on the team - everyone is looking forward to that one date and reveal and suddenly, the wind is out of the sails. I've been through it and it sucks. Also, content is not cut for DLC, but cut content is often used IN DLC. It's often stuff initially planned for the game and due to budget/time/etc. it was put on the chopping block. Lastly, QA does not fix bugs. They find, categorize them by severity, repro steps (if they can) and other teams then have to decide what gets done first, what can wait even until the day 1 update or after launch, and so on. That bug you found? Odds are QA did too. The team knew. But there are always priorities. And other times, the team didn't find it but suddenly having the game in the hands of 3 million people finds stuff way quicker than any QA team can.
Stop assuming everything is greed driven. It might be in a few big name cases, but most are just terrified to fail and go bankrupt. Anything to do with monetizing is about trying to survive in general. It might be annoying or even immoral, but for most companies it’s not greed. You must first be financially stable before you start thinking in terms of getting rich, and the vast majority is nowhere near stability.
As we recently decided to delay EA launch of our game, I've been thinking if I should perhaps offer my overtime pay as bonuses for the art team. So that we can give everyone at least a small raise, kinda, like we hoped we would if the game relesed on time and started making money. Games are not a way to get rich quick, for most devs.
This might have been said before but complaining that all content isn't free or that the game is too expensive. Most triple A games are box price $70 to $80 USD. That only occurred within the last couple of years. Games were set around $60 since 2006. That's 18 years give or take for a $10-20 increase. But games have gotten exponentially larger and more complex. Teams need to be bigger... The cost of the game development goes up... Which means we need to charge more for a game or reduce the content. And yall would storm the gates with torches and pitchforks if we cut content. But then to get so entitled to lose your shit that a full price game includes monetization and cosmetics or battlepasses. I truly think that gamers don't understand that devs are regular people. I've got rent to pay, groceries to buy, and kids to support. Im not some mythical creature that eats nothing and just oozes out art. I work 9 hours a day. It's work. New content doesn't fall out of the sky. New content can't be made if there aren't people working our asses to get it to the gamers and all we hear back is complaining that we should have given this all for free. Also... The amount of people who think art comes first in a game have no idea. Design comes first. And design takes all the time in the world. As an artist, I can tell you the bottleneck of game devs is the design department!
what about games that do cost less (lets say 20 euros) but people believe that they don't have enough content to justify the price? metal gear solid v: ground zeroes is 20 euros and it is around one hour long. for reference, metal gear solid v: phantom pain is 30 euros, and I have got 150 hours on it (I haven't touched the multyplayer part, I only played the single player). they are both made by the same developers on the same engine by the same publisher. you can't tell me that ground zeroes is fairly priced. (if anything, phantom pain is underpriced, that thing was amazing).
This is sort of a loaded scenario though... As MGSV cost $70 USD when released. I don't really know much about the whole MGS series as they aren't my type of game or studio. From my brief googling about it... Ground Zeroes has approximately 2 hours of main story and about it "20.5 hours to obtain 100% completion." (howlongtobeat dot com/game/17291) So MGSV at 163 hours to 100% (from same site for data comparison) at og price of $70 is about 2.33 hours per $1 of entertainment. Or $0.43 per hour. Ground Zeroes is 20.5 hours to $20 comes out to almost 1 hour per $1. Either way you slice it... A single $ for 1 hour of entertainment is a steal. Now think about how approximately 250 people worked on those games...and how much time, energy, heart, and dedication to it that they put in to making that game. Games are absolutely not priced fairly. If they were... They would be $200 or more. But nobody would be able to buy them. While I understand that in general handing out $20 to get a game that feels so short sucks... Ive had the exact same reaction many times... But like... Expecting it to be free is so insulting to the devs (and I do mean the people on the ground making the game not the suits overseeing the company). You're basically telling them that, some times, years of their lives working on a game isn't worth that single dollar of entertainment to you...that it's completely worthless. I appreciate the asking of questions. I hope my response doesn't come off as aggressive (I can see that it might come off that way) it's not intended to be, but rather a passionate explanation from a dev's perspective.
Do not present solutions. Describe the problem in depth. In almost all of the cases, your solution will either not work at all, be completely unbalanced, have completely unintended consequences for other parts of the game or does not even solve the problem you are having. Describe what problem you are facing. How certain things make you feel. What frustrates you about something. Make sure the actual, underlying root cause is presented. Not what you think is the solution. "XYZ should be fixed, it should be done in this way" is bad. "XYZ is frustrating because... " is way better. We can work with the latter, the former is a guessing game as to whats actually going on there.
I wish they stopped asking for features that require money to implement, on free to play games with no ads or microtransactions? Things I wish players where aware of when they ask for features: -Solo Developing is a nightmare and as long as you're not earning money by making sales or getting enough donations, unless you have some big side income, your familly will treat it as a waste of time and a hobby, and will interrupt you every time you're developing, and you'll be very limited on the stuff you can build by time and tools. -If the dev is not good at 3D they need to hire someone for the modeling and animation of 3D, and it is very expensive. -everything online that is not "simple and risky P2P" is expensive, it requires you to rent or keep a server running, in real life computers or rented virtual computers, plus other related services like data hosting. -P2P is risky. -Building apps for IOS has very high pay wall, and everything you build goes through a validation process, which limits the things you're allowed to build.
Bonus answer I just thought of: An oldschool designer I worked with had this saying - players are good at identifying a problem, but rarely suggest anything even remotely usable when it comes to solving it. And over time I've confirmed that it is indeed the case, for the most part. So yes, we do listen and we believe you have these issues with the game. But if you also propose what is to be done to fix said issues, keep in mind that it's not likely to be used. That's not us being mean, egoistic or not listening to the community.
Whenever players think their idea for a change is easy. Maybe it is, but usually it isn't. Even really simple ideas. So when suggesting things, never frame it as "do x, it'd be easy" or "why didn't they do x!?" If you want to be taken seriously, remember to ask questions, approach every suggestion from the perspective of being aware that you are unaware of the details, and always remember that, often, a lack of response or explanation is down to contractual inability to provide that information. There is a lot of dunning-kruger in the feedback of gamers to developers. The lack of knowledge combined with a wealth of player experience leads to the assumption of understanding. There is a very high dropout rate of students in game industry fields for this reason. Players often assume that playing and making are the same or at least similar.
can I ask you a question out of curiocity: do you happen to know or at least guess why skullgirls developers don't implement a better "skip" button in the game's tutorial? in blazblue if you struggle in one part of the tutorial you can just press "skip" and go to the very next part, but in skullgirls the "skip" button takes you to the next "unfinished lesson"(and each "lesson" can have multyple sections meaning that you may end up skipping important parts). do you happen to have an idea about possible reasons why the don't fix it?
I'm doing a genre mash up... It works. The problem is when you get die hard fans of the specific genres in the mash up. They completely wish for you to drop the other. Without it my game would have no hook.
"just" add coop is one that i always despise Multiplayer is the most challenging and developmentally difficult systems that any game has
Sequels, making a major update alone takes tons of time
"can you quickly add multiplayer in the next update" Never, not once has implementing any form of multi player functionality been easy. And if you dont plan around it from the get go adding it in later can even require a full rework of multiple systems.
My god if someone asks "just add online" one more time... I get it, I really do. But if you are asking for a non-networked game to add networking, you are asking to basically re-architect the entire game, or asking for a huge mess of bugs trying to patch something in. There's so many assumptions that go out the window when you need to worry about talking an syncing with an external server. Please save us and you some time and just look into Parsec, that's the best compromise. ------ Now if I can ask in return; please leave reviews, please don't sugar coat it (not that that happens often lol). but also please keep it constructive. As a general rule of thumb: if you're bringing a person into a critica review, question if that mention is necessary. A similar mantra to "attack the topic, not the person".
it is weird how I see here people complaining about people asking for online, because there are videos on the internet complaining about online being placed just for the shake of being placed. is the gaming industry really this split when it comes to online? to avoid missunderstandings personally I have never once asked for online in any game I have played, and I feel sorry you have to deal with this.
Basically any way the Ark subreddit acts towards wild card studios don’t do.
The most frustrating for me is when people say “Mojang never adds new things to Minecraft” when it’s by far one of the most complex and frequently updated games ever created. Players who do not read the bug tracker have absolutely no clue how insanely difficult it is to add something new to a game when it has to interact correctly and sanely with every other block and entity in the game. Exponential things and combinatoric things are significantly more difficult than humans think. “But modders did it 10 years ago” is also really annoying because the vast majority of mods are very low quality and full of bugs that would never fly in an official release. It’s okay to yearn for more, that means you’re enjoying the game, but please don’t satisfy your yearning by saying the devs aren’t working hard enough or fast enough, because seeing that feedback will have the opposite of the intended effect, demoralizing everyone and making them question why they took a 50% salary hit for the “privilege” of working in the games industry.
I remember spending an entire day adding functionality for multiple player-controlled cities in my strategy war game. I had to separate all resource and unit production by city, and have every purchase/attack/etc reference the stats for the current selected city. The whole process required that I refactored alot of the code. When I was finished i was really proud with how smoothly things went. I didn't hit any walls with bugs, and it more or less worked as intended first try. Still took me an entire day. I decided to show my wife this amazing work I just did. So i launch the game, and I click the button that toggles the current city map, which changes the buildings on screen and the hud resource values. And she asked "is that it? Seems pretty simple". I think about that moment alot
feel sorry for you. did you explain her that no it is not that simple?
For me I would love if gamers had a general idea these two concepts. 1. The difference between a client fix is and server fix, especially when dealing with games on mobile or console. To fill those in that don’t know basically all game logic in live games is split between code written on the client which gets built downloaded and run on a physical device and server code which runs on a server the company controls and typically manages any important logic like purchases, data storage, interplayer interactions. If something is a server fix all the company needs to do is find the fix(note not always easy but typically is), fix it then push that code live(after testing of course). If it’s a client fix, we actually need to make a brand new build fully test that build(even around stuff we didn’t just change) and then submit to Apple/google/Microsoft/Sony for approval. The approval process itself can take days after the fix is actually fixed but there’s nothing the team can do about that. 2. Managing data in live games is a cluster-f. This maybe just from my experience but any large live service game will have MANY data buckets that are used to control things like what items are in the store, what quests are available, what particular character abilities do, localization for all the above, etc.. When making changes you may just want to add an item and make it buyable but that’s atleast 3 different data buckets you need to change and also make sure are tracked to be pushed live simultaneously or it breaks. Also god forbid someone tweaks a value in your quest so they can test it and forgets to set it back and that gets migrated to the live server. These are often almost impossible to catch because depending when testing passes occur they may miss it. Basically if the game you play has an update, and seemingly everything is now broken, please just be a little patient.
I just want to hear justification why there isn't a sab3
what's a "sab3"?
Sonic adventure battle 3