Knyte wrote:

Indy games are all the rage for some reason, so now everyone is shoveling it out as fast as they can. They really don't have to put much time or effort into making a game that looks 8 or 16 bit in this day and age. Anyone can do it, and do it fairly quickly. It really ticks me off on the PS Vita. I bought the world's most powerful handheld to play PS3 quality games, and 90% of what's coming out for it is indy crap. If it wasn't for the JRPGs and Remote Play feature, it would have no use to me.

There are a ton of indie games that kick ass compared to the yearly release of some new sports title, Call of Duty, Assassin Creed ect.

I think that it is the biggest problem in the industry today. Pushing out yearly iterations really lowers the quality of not just each game but the game's series in general. Often times these titles are pushed to retail even before the are even ready. See the recent backlash with Assassins Creed Unity and the Halo Collection.

It really comes down to the fact that publishers often times fuck the developers over. I have personal experience working in the video game industry as a producer with a publisher and with the indie scene. Both big dev studios and indie dev's face very different problems.

If you are Activision Blizzard/Ubisoft/Microsoft publishing a game you really don't develop the game you hire a dev to do it for you under strict time/money restrictions (referred to as the War of the World effect) that are often ridiculous. So if you want to to make this sort of title you need a team of 200 people (most of whom get laid off on the games release after working 15 hours a day 7 days a week for months or even years) and the publisher has total ownership of the product on each milestone and often throw monkey wrenches daily. Especially the Japanese, I say that out of personal experience in working on Metal Gear Solid 2 and with Panasonic/3D0. Square Enix put a company out of business in what would have been the first American made Final Fantasy title due to their required "policies" one of which is Square requiring them to fax source code to them daily. I mean really what the fuck...

As for my personal experience working with a major publisher I have work with Epic on Unreal with Legend as the dev which no longer exists largely due to that, Neverwinter Nights whom the publisher quite literally stole from the original creators in a bullshit law suit and many other titles most people probably have never even heard of.

One experiences in particular sticks out for me. I was sent to Helsinki to work with a developer called House Marquee on a title that was two years late upon my arrival. I was only supposed to be in Finland for a few months but ended up staying there for over a year. The publisher made some deal with the hotel that I was staying at for those few months that I was supposed to be there. However, they forgot to renegotiate that deal for the rest of the time I spent there. So when I checked out of the hotel something quite strange happened.

I request my bill from the hotel and they politely ask I wait because the manager of the hotel would personally like to talk with me. So this guy comes out and thanks me for being their best customer since the early 70s when a film crew for a James Bond movie had stayed there. My hotel bill was nearly 100,000 USD. That much for a single person working on the project not including my salary. The publisher never paid the developer for my stay or for hundreds of thousands of dollars the studio spent on AV/workstations as promised. It got quite messy...

On that same project about two weeks before we were supposed to go gold the CEO of the publisher showed up to check on the project to give some "input". The project was a snowboarding game and he wanted rabbits, deer and other animals on the slopes. So within two weeks the developer had to model, rig and animate this shit (not easy in that short amount of time). The models got made but there was no time to rig them properly so if you would collide with them going down the slope they would quite hilariously go static/freeze on impact and spin down the hill like a lawn gnome.

On top of all this he informed the studio that some of the marketing had been pulled from the game. This required all of the artists to create new textures to replace the art on all the billboards, snowboards, clothing ect. Then after the incredible amount of work that requires each map in the game took three days to re-render on the developers fastest workstation. The game had 17 map and two weeks to go out for release. This is the sort of shit AAA developers have to deal with all the time and it is only getting worse.

The industry is broken at the moment but there is hope through the indie/modding community and dare I say Kickstarter as crowdfunding takes the publisher out of the picture.

There are several Indie/Mods I have enjoyed more than AAA titles recently. Just off the top of my head:

DayZ
Battle Royal
Rogue Legacy
Wasteland 2
Shovel Night
Retro City Rampage
Cave Story
Limbo
Dwarf fortress
Vvvvvvvv
Minecraft
Terraria

And mad props to the the dude that made Cave Story. Guy spent five years of his free time on that game and did it all by himself.

In my opinion the future of the game industry is indie development and "free" to use engines like UDK 3 and 4, Unity and Cryengine. These engines allow new people to learn how to make games and I think that is incredibly important to the future of the industry. Now all we need is Autodesk to stop being assholes and change their business model so that it doesn't require 4,000 USD for a copy of Maya/3DSMax to make assets for these engines. Adobe too for the textures with Photoshop.

I am currently working with both UDK 4 and Unity a bit when not wasting my time playing other people's games...

P.S: For the record it is not as easy to make 2D games as you might think. Video cards are designed for 3D games not 2D. It requires a lot of workarounds and weird bugs.

Cattivo wrote:

Man, that was an interesting read Muppet, thanks.

Thanks, I have many many more industry related stories.

I'm not sure if you have ever seen the movie Grandma's Boy, a comedy about the industry and to be honest kinda of a shitty movie. =)

However that movie has nothing on some of the shit I have experienced in the game industry and some of these stories I'm not too proud of lol.

Some of those things:

Meeting Bill Gates at a vending machine and joking asking him if I could borrow a dollar.

Working with Cliffy B. Just well, the definition of douchbag...

Going to a private Microsfot E3 party with my coworkers, one of which lit a phone book on fire and then pissed on it to put it out and that same night another that wiped it out and pissed on my former boss (now whom is an executive at blizzard. For the record I know quite a few people that work on WoW and they are all crazy as shit. One of them basically invented the PS1 "Magic Gate" technology. One night while we were in Manchester he got high as shit on MDMA and decided to climb on top a bridge. The UK cops with their funny hats got called and I had to explain to them he was just rolling and personally climbed up the bridge to bring him down. I don't know how nobody went to jail that night.

Knowing several people that are now namesakes as NPCs in WoW. One of whom was a guy by the handle of Mudcrush Dirtfeet. I had known him since I was like twelve years old because he worked at the EB in Cupertino. Years later I would end up working with him. He was and is considered the highest experienced Everquest player and was a former doctorate before losing his life to that game and obesity (like talking 500 pounds, no joke). He was in the guild that Blizzard hired to basically create WoW. Five of those guild members are still pretty high on the food chain up at Blizzard, Mudcrush however was just a little too maladjusted but at least his guild mates named an NPC after him...

Going to "Club Pussy" with a bunch of European models with what I had called my Axis of evil friends in Estonia (one was from Iraq and was a fashion designer, one was from Somalia and the other a chick from Russia who was a spoiled little bitch and the daughter of a Russian Mafioso.
In my defense they were all really nice people, I only called them my Axis of Evil friends due to the GW Bush platitude.

The day the entire office got high on mushrooms (40 plus people), instead of the normal day which consisted of getting faded on pot before the breakfast truck came in the Apple or Symantec parking lot in a van and then again the same after lunch and dinner. We worked 12 plus hours a day and sometimes 24 hours or more. There was and is a lot of drug use in the industry. See adderall..

One random day my friend at work and cube mate went out it go smoke out on the patio and see my boss standing stiff against the door. We politely ask him to move so as to use the door. His response "Please! I wish people would stop fucking with me! I'm just trying to get some sleep but everyone is walking on the walls!". Turns out he was on acid and thought he was laying down on that door lol. Keep in mind this is management.

One dude I worked with getting charge with assault. His name was Red Dave, he was five foot nothing and a total sociopath. He assaulted a guy who had bought a car from another coworker when he came to ask about an issue with the car. Red Dave lost hard and started shit for no reason. Turns out that the car just needed an oil change and Red needed to go to jail.

I quickly learned that I had to procure certain equipment to survive in my office. Everyone was constantly assaulting each other with air soft guns. So randomly being ambushed by an automatic rifle replica air soft I had to by myself one for defense. Also, our normal means of traversing the office was Razor Scooters. Weird enough as that is you also need a foam LARP like foam lance as people Scooter jousted each other with said lances quite frequently.

Sorry lol, random post and was sort of meant to be a list of sorts but whatever.

=)

Preng wrote:

Probable Muppet wrote: Working with Cliffy B. Just well, the definition of douchbag... As someone who still plays Gears of War/is mildly familiar with Unreal Tournament, I'd love to hear some elaboration on this.

He is basically Bud Bundy with a massive ego, sorry lol, that's really the best way to explain it. He would come to work "blinged" out wearing a giant ass UT chain made of gold (i.e. wigger) and was just plain disrespectful to people. Although I believe he is a pretty talented developer he sort of rode the wave when working at Epic. He was highly ambitious and it obviously paid off for him but he succeeded by basically throwing people under the bus and ruthlessness.

Actually recently he seems to have calmed down a little bit and humbled up. He "quit" working for Epic but I find it hard to believe that is the real truth and I'm pretty sure that has more to do with Epic finally having enough of his ego/attitude.

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Also Knyte I totally agree with you about the Minecraft clones. However Minecraft itself is a clone of itself Notch having cloned it from another game (infiniminer). As Steve Jobs via Picasso famously quoted "Great artists steal". That definitely worked out for Notch recently selling his company to Microsoft for 5 billion dollars and spending part of that on a 2.1 million dollar home here in CA.

Knyte wrote:

And, Muppet said the magic two words... Neverwinter Nights. I think most of the old timers here know how much I adore the 1st one, and passionately hate the 2nd one. I would pick your brain for days, about every ounce of info, history, and trivia about NWN and the Aurora Engine if I could.

Neverwinter Nights was a nightmare to work on. The publisher I worked for acquired the license for all D&D media when they acquired Hasbro and used that to steal the game almost immediately after doing this. So when the game was in beta and a few months off from gold the developers had to deal with a bunch of bureaucratic nonsense that comes along with getting a new publisher while still attempting to release.

We would get daily versions of the game but for months couldn't even get them to run. The developer was so paranoid that they had crazy ass DRM in their betas. If you had any IDE installed or even Photoshop for fucks sake the installs would fail. It was a stupid and frustrating experience. It is a kick ass game but the publisher I was working with had nothing to do with its success.

Also Knyte as for your PS Vita. Have you tired Guacamelee, Dragons's Crown or Muramasa Rebirth? I don't know but it seems like these titles might be the type of games you enjoy.

I still to this day play my PSP/3DS/DS and other handlehelds much more than any console or PC titles. Well, I guess I go through phases. Nowadays the best Japanese titles and JRPGs are on these systems (wih the exception of Ni No Kuni on PS3 or Zenoblade Chronicles on Wii, awesome JRPGs).

Syd Lexia wrote:

Fun Fact: Ni No Kuni was originally a DS game. The DS version was never localized.

Dammit, that would be great if it got a release on the 3DS one day.

lordsathien wrote:

So Cliffy B is basically the Todd MacFarlane of the gaming world, got it. Muppet, is this the first NWN that involved all of that DRM and chicanery, or the second? I only just beat NWN's basic campaign last year (elven ranger/rogue), yet that game was what I bought with my first paycheck ever.

NWN 1 while technically it could be considered DRM it is more about the studios fear that people may be leaking info on the games they are making. Some are more paranoid than others.

Again the Japanese are infamous for this. I really don't want to sound racist I love their culture (also batshit insane) and their games but fuck...

When working with MGS2 everyone had to refer to the game by a number code name which lead to very strange and confusing meetings. Also we lived in what I can only describe as "tent cubes". And really tiny ones at that. You had a cloth draped over your cube so nobody could see who was working on what and were not allowed to talk to each other at all.

Fuck Hideo Kojima, he is a shitty video game designer IMO but that's a tangent...

Working at another Japanese publisher most halls had a carpet in the middle of them. Unless you were considered respectable (in this weird ranking system) you were not allowed to walk on said carpets and were relegated to hugging the wall walking to the side of it. You could also get in trouble just looking at certain people in the eye.

The Japanese are a strange bunch. For instance some people that work for Sony only due so as Sony fears that it is dishonorable to fire them. So a normal company would lay off but Sony puts them into a room were they eat candy bars, read newspapers and watch porn on the Internet 8 hours a day and receive a full salary. Fuck Sony, you have been losing money on pretty much everything but your games for years, Just fire these fuckers!

The-Excel wrote:

My favorite story about Japanese development culture is how Nintendo worked Retro Studios to the bone during the development of Metroid Prime, and when it was over the Retro guys were crying and Iwata and Miyamoto just laughed at them and called them pussies for only barely surviving a typical Japanese development cycle.

Retro Studios is a development studio engineered by Digipen via Nintendo, considered one of the best game design schools in the world. They were primally all students at that school when designing the original game. I recently talked with Digipen and was thinking about getting my MS there. Upon graduation you are pretty much guaranteed a job anywhere in the industry. The comp sci GRE is a a some of a bitch though...

Also, Nintendo and apparently the Japanese in general dislike the Metriod series. They say it's too grim dark Or whatever the fuck, the reason they handed it over to the U.S. They feel the same way about the recent Batman trilogy; lost in translation I guess.