I've just seen his stuff shared among designers and non-designers alike a lot as normative

It's thoughtful, but also really easy to just use as a justification for your own weak design skills

There's that in spades in the industry

True, but it always feel like a lot of other industries have more...checks on that

Or at least damage mitigation

More cheaply failed?

That's the sort of thing I mean

I think it's more to do with it being art vs. directly useful

I have lots of friends in software stuff where they can narrow down what's working and what's not pretty easily

"Fun" is...a lot fuzzier

If you're in that market, anyway; I'm not sure what your average F2P mobile game optimizes for is "fun"

Yeah, but that has known methods that are _relatively_ cheap to investigate

e.g. A/B testing

IMO games are just too expensive to produce

And that will have to change sooner or later

At least for the AAA open-world stuff

No, genuinely expensive

There's a lot of content that you might think is semi-automated

And it often is, but just...minimally

I think the rule of thumb is that about half the budget goes to marketing

But that's also because when you try to do less you sink

(broadly speaking)

Graphics itself isn't expensive per se

High-res texture and models, and the tech to render them efficiently, are pretty well-known

It's just too much is done manually

Although that's changing some, e.g. textures are often built with Substance these days

Which procedurally generates PBR-grade textures

Animations are still really manual

As is modeling

I think you could do a lot more than is currently done

A lot of the animator's/modeler's time is not really spent on the unique flavor

It's mostly the rote work

Motion Detection = motion capture?

Mo-cap also has a lot of manual effort

Capture quality is usually too shitty, so a high-level animator will usually spend quite a bit of time cleaning them up to be useful

Yeah, my impression is the motivation is more the quality over the cost

I've seen some animators crank out really nice stuff fairly quickly, though

Yeah, there are a lot of...interesting incentives around that

For example

The suits holding the purse?

Usually not players

Normally they watch someone else play

So visuals go a long way to persuading them to keep paying the studio

Also, budgets could likely not go down by as much as half

Maybe 20%

But TBH I'm not that familiar with a particular breakdown

@tritrium Is this the vertex streaming stuff or the traditional skinned way?

I'd quibble with the breakdown past visuals, but to there it sounds about right

Well, it's also not all "visuals"

A lot of animation is intimately tied to gameplay

Though in practice cinematics are still disproportionately expensive

I think people don't know how to react to demos anymore

That's been replaced by early access, TBH

I don't disagree, but it is a rock and a hard place

If they don't sell they can't be made

Some studios do that

Sunset Overdrive came about that way, but Spider-Man did not

Typically, yes

It's the "30 seconds of fun"

People sometimes forget the part where you have to duplicate that for 20 hours

TBH, I'd say part of the problem is that studios _don't_ really do that anymore

Not the AAA guys, anyway

The talk there is usually about "set pieces"

Engagement is a huge thing nowdays

Partly because of the huge budgets

My ordeal is that I honestly like high-end graphics and big worlds

Hence, my mission is to make that stuff cheaper

I think part of it is that we're right on the edge of the uncanny valley

Like, if you took your high-end renderer and animations systems and stuff

And used it to do less

Things would actually look worse than if you had a shittier renderer or animation system

I think smaller studios usually don't get it either, though

They either want to make Uncharted or whatever their favorite NES game was

Most of the small handful of small studios I _do_ know that are trying something else tend to be full of expat veterans from some large studio

And that sometimes has associated baggage

I _am_ a big fan of Dark Souls

It's never clear what exactly they spend money on

More DkS for me!

Dirty secret: that's every enemy in video games

Yeah, they're not that scripted

You have to learn its weaknesses relative to your build

And how you deal with a particular move on the boss can vary a lot on your gear and spec

For some, it's better to dodge

For others, it's better to take the damage

For still others, maybe you dodge in a particular direction

You also only have to repeat when you're doing badly

If you're doing well against a new boss, you're likely figuring out how it works

I think it was generally thought of as a satisfactory tide-over

You'd probably have ot restrict that to RPGs

I have fond memories of e.g. Metroid Prime bosses

But the necessary principles there are really different

Enemy design generally

Most enemies are always designed with deliberate spaces for them to be vulnerable to the player

You can also do the inverse

Attack until it's dangerous

This is the only place I can vent and get any sympathy

This appeared in my FB today from an old high-school friend

```Like, I guarantee you so many largely-not-shitty people are willing to write off that NPC bullshit as "brah it's just a joke."
No, it itsn't a fucking joke. It's an insidious idea couched in GaMeR lingo to appear innocuous and normalize the idea that anyone who gives a shit for lones than a brief moment is an idiot.

Just because something seems absurd at a glance doesn't mean it's a joke. These people seriously believe that people who support progressive ideas are sub-human - don't let them convince you otherwise```

How do people get to the place where they honestly believe that the NPC meme is an insidious plot to murder progressives?

I'd honestly like to know the mechanics involved