Following on from previous discussion vis a vis #weekenderGames I need to stress that a good game is worth more than a long game.

A good long game is a great thing and deserves a good price, but the length of the narrative does not equate to price tag alone.
A short game that is brilliant deserves a good financial reward.

A short game with huge amounts of replay value is well worth the price tag of a sprawling epic.

What I am saying is push down your expectations of duration of the core playthrough, and allow shorter games.
If we shift the format to shorter play throughs, we can focus more on making an industry that is more stable, games that are more polished, and faster releases.
Give me good Batwoman game I can play through from origin to first villain.

Then give me an expansion for the next villain. And another. And another.

Let me buy new outfits, new voice modules... let me tailor the experiences. Include randomisation to keep things fresh
Let me enjoy and finish the game in a weekend, and allow the team to move onto the next thing. Allow for shorter experiences.

I am asking you to adjust your thinking to let everything be better... not more.

Drink a good fair trade coffee, rather than buying a cheap bulk tin.
We crunch to give you more, more, more... we need massive teams. They are harder to coordinate. We pad things out. We drop features. We sleep little.

Let us make smaller things of beauty. There is joy in those too.

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More from @delaneykingrox

31 Jul
Women who face abuse at work do so doubly. First the abuse and then when you call out the men who did it you are attacked for 'craving attention', 'seeking to profit', trying to cover your work failings.

Then you get a third whammy as men who witnessed it stay silent.
Either way you lose the job, the stability and the trust, and have to pay for therapy to heal the damage, and lawyers if you even dare to stand up for yourself legally.
Meanwhile the assholes keep their jobs, and get to enjoy a career.
Read 4 tweets
30 Jul
#Gamedevtips

One trick you can use in adding replayability to a game is to break up some parts of your level into discreet prefabs/blueprints that can be shuffled.
This can be as simple as switching a few corridors or rooms around, or just changing enemy or item placement but the effect is the same... players cannot rely on their memory of the layout, and can jolt them into being in the present, rather than playing by wrote.
Having parts of levels in prefab slabs help you test them separately.

You don't need many of these to create enough variety to cause this effect and it doesn't shake up the narrative.

You just... can't memorise a map.
Read 7 tweets
29 Jul
What sucks is all the devs who are currently being reminded over and over of the abuse we ourselves went through with the #blizzard situation coming to light on twitter.

Its important we share this stuff so everyone knows, and hopefully we can get real change. But triggering AF
The industry is full of this vile crap. And it has been devastating for many, many amazing people.
Been there. Done that. Got the scars. Got the PTSD. Got the NDAs. And not just from one company.
Read 4 tweets
29 Jul
Yunno, in theory, if all the employees of a *certain* company announced that they would form seperate little companies promising you a PC game in a year they passionately want to make and accepting, say, ten buck presales, sight unseen of whatever it was, would you buy a copy?
If a bunch of devs broke off because of abuse, I sure would pay ten bucks for whatever the fuck they make.
I mean... these people are good enough to be at *insert certain company* here. So I doubt whatever they did in that time would suck.
Read 5 tweets
28 Jul
Please support and normalize smaller games with less content.
If we normalise shorter games, the financial risk goes down for smaller teams. Crunch lessens and games become more polished.

I propose "weekender" games as a genre. A game that entertains you for one weekend.
If you take the amount of hours of fun you had and divide it by the man hours (I hate that term) to make it, you get an interesting stat.

How many games do you think really score high?
We enjoy a movie that takes 2 hours to watch. Why not games?

So, going forward I propose you ask Steam and Unreal playforms to supply the weekender tag.

Anyone whining about how short a game is, remind them it is how sweet it is, not the length.

Lets make fun experiences.
Read 9 tweets
28 Jul
#Gamedevtip if you have cameras clipping through objects (especially in VR) it can really break the immersion.
One trick you can try is making a double sided version of your shader that has a black inside.
For performance, switch materials on the closest LOD with the double sided version.
If you look in your shader editor there is often a node for face direction. In amplify it is FACE. It returns 1 for facing normals and -1 for facing away.

If you saturate this you get 1 or 0, which a lerp will accept. The inside face can therefore be made black.
Read 7 tweets

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