So, I have a story about the Skyrim Intro and how hard game development is.
That intro is famous now, but back then, it was just that one thing that we had to keep working and working on forever. I lost track of how many times I've seen that cart ride. Easily hundreds. (thread)
See the issue with that cart ride is that it's not just a cart on rails. That cart is physically simulated. Why you ask? Good question.
So anyways, this meant that all kinds of things would cause the cart to start to freak out and fly off the road.
Maybe the road was too bumpy. Maybe there was just a physics bug. Maybe somebody accidentally put a rock too close to the road. The cart had a path it wanted to follow, but that doesn't mean it was a path it COULD follow. Big difference. :)
Well one time, riding that cart yet again, the cart starts to shake violently and all of a sudden WHOOSH! The cart goes up into the sky like a rocket ship. Like WAY up there.
Something was telling that cart to just fuck right off and to get off that road. The thing is, it wasn't happening every time. Nobody knew what was going on at first.
So it turns out there was another bug where the bee in the game couldn't be picked up. So then some potions couldn't be made. That bug got fixed. Only the type of collision put on the bee didn't just let it get picked up. It also made it collide into things.
Meaning, that bee was an immovable force of nature if it ever happened to cross the path of the cart. The cart wanted to move down the road. The bee did not want to move. So up the cart goes!
So game development is hard. Every time you fix one thing, you might be breaking another. This is especially true about open world games. Yet, that interplay of all the systems is what ends up making them all super interesting.
I'm glad everyone is enjoying this story! It's always been one of my favorite stories.
If you're interested in more, go ahead and follow me. I'm working on an #UnrealEngine solo indie game now. It's an open world horror metal game. :)
It's just me, so it's Just Purkey Games.
โข โข โข
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I recently had someone ask me about my thought process behind city building and cluttering locations.๐บ๏ธ
I've built places for Skyrim/Fallout such as Diamond City๐ท, Little Lamplight๐ฏ๏ธ, Paradise Falls๐, Underworld๐, Crater๐ฐ๏ธ, etc. ๐โข๏ธ
So here's a little thread about it.๐งต
The way I build spaces is probably closest to acting or writing.โ๏ธ
I put myself in the shoes of whoever was in that space. If I lived here, where would I sleep?๐ด
Where would I keep my stuff?๐งฐ
Where would I eat?๐ฅช
What would I do for fun?โฝ๏ธ
All of those things inform where things are and how they look.๐
But more importantly, who were these people? What were they thinking? How are they different from every other person in the world?๐งโ๐คโ๐ง
A lot of people ask me why I left to be a solo indie dev after 14 years at Bethesda working on games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield.
There's a lot of reasons why, so I figured I'd do a little thread on it. ๐งต
Fallout 3, Skyrim and Fallout 4 all won a ton of GOTYs. Each time I made one of those games I tried my best to make it the best possible game it could be.
For instance, from Fallout 3->Skyrim->Fallout 4 I worked with people like @JoelBurgess to make levels far more unique.
So while some people would love to work on TES6 or Fallout 5, I made my best version of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I spent about a decade of my life on the Fallout franchise alone.
Can it be done better? Maybe. But I'd rather leave that up to someone else.
Why are there so many similar creatures in folklore all around the world?
They are all from a world outside our own, connecting places all over.
In The Axis Unseen, you can find and hunt these creatures from folklore. #wishlistwednesday
I'm making this game as a solo indie developer using Unreal Engine 5 after 14 years at Bethesda Game Studios where I worked on games like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76 and Starfield.
Game development is full of hacks and tricks to get things to work. A lot of people know about the "train ride that is actually a helmet" trick, but another one is the explosion of the mansion in Point Lookout.
It is a total hack and also the most confusing thing ever.(thread)
In Point Lookout, the mansion explodes, but we had no way to toggle distant things off. Distant buildings and trees were all just one static set.
So what to do? It needs to explode and go away and we can't have the mansion suddenly show up when you walk further away...
The only remotely similar tech was the explosion tech used for Megaton. For that you could see a distant nuke going off.
So what's the solution? Make the mansion ITSELF an "explosion". How does that make any sense you might be wondering... Well read on.