/svidya/ - Strict /v/

Just wanted to let OP and the rest know that I published the Sonic Boom history to medium

https://medium.com/@vidyahistory/the-disaster-that-is-sonic-boom-ec263fc94d03

>mfw I had to create an account and couldn't come up with anything better than "Vidya History"

>mfw I had to create a fucking twatter account to do it

>mfw but not before I made a gmail account to get my twatter account!

So yeah, there's also a twatter account for @vidyahistory

Anyway, I can keep publishing stuff there and make it a "publication" (basically a magazine within the site) and invite other writers if any anons want to join

Woah. Didn't expect this surge of discussion. OP here. I suppose I'll speak up in the discussions ITT as best I can.

>>3174
(Not necessarily just responding to you but the whole are games art? discussion)

The definition I've always gone by is that art is a work dedicated to making the user feel something, experience an event, or to understand a message, or a combination of these things. Under this definition, games, to me anyways, are artforms. A bullet hell game makes you feel tension as the balls to the walls action forces the player into quick reactions and split second decisions. A game like Hitman, makes you experience the life of a would-be Hitman, an experience very few people would be able to relate to, but you roleplay as him effectively in a good hitman game. And games like Deus Ex or similar ones in their thematic genre tell tales of powers that be holding the world hostage through unorthodox power regimes. Feels, experiences, and messages can all be accurately conveyed through a game.

I realize that under a different definition of art, I would be wrong, but under mine I am able to easily categorize what is or isn't art in my eyes. I might also be biased as a creator on my part and not just solely a consumer of games like some of you.

>>3348
>I sense a lot of shitposting from OP's part. Shitposting taking into account he knows about sutff and isn't a newfag
Would love it if you could expand on that. I wouldn't consider it shitposting, I think you mean shitflinging? As in I'm being harsh and unkind to these developers? If that's what you meant I'd agree. In the industry, your work reflects directly upon your quality as a developer and this should be a stain that should never be downplayed for what it is. I'm being harsh upon a product and their producers upon principle, I reserve praise for those who deserve it and my hyper-critical hate for those who incur it.

>In regards to heavy iron
I wasn't very clear in that way because I didn't want to let my personal opinion get in the way so I tried to look at them objectively. And yes, this means putting aside my love for Spongebob: Battle for Bikini Bottom as one of my all time favorite Gamecube games among the others I love so much. They have a couple great games under their belt but are proportionally overshadowed by the uninspired shit they have been forced to put out, this is more objective, 2 games of 14 titles can be said to have had merit. This is enough for me to consider them not as great as you make them out to be.

>Also the art director of Crash isn't anything, the game was very charismatic in this sense
The game had artistic merit yes, but keep in mind we're just talking about the art director, the man who oversees the artistic decision and talent but does not necessarily implement all of that. For Crash bandicoot, the greatest artistic merit I see from the games is the environmental design, and the music. Both aspects that Bob Rafei isn't directly involved with, so I can't credit him for that greatness. He seems to have been in charge of character/monster designs, animation, and concept art which may or may not involve conceptualizing the environments but not implementing them.

>Luxoflux created fucking Vigilante 8 and True Crime, they also made trash like Star Wars Demolition but also made competent licensed stuff like that Transformers game (it was good stuff from an otherwise shitty movie series)
Again, I put aside my love for True Crime and looked at the proportions of the games they put out. More shit than gold. And judging them from a technical standpoint while Jeff Lander was involved, they weren't necessarily very good in functionality and neither did they make a splash with their programming.

>HI Games made the Ratchet & Clank PSP games, very good for what they are
Ports. If the greatest thing your company has done is make a port, then maybe you could say is that they have technical merit in porting a game from one system to another, but it has no bearing on their prowess as game designers as they relied on a different studio's work to release a product that was already amazing.

>And having people from Naughty Dog, the guys behind Jak and Crash always looks like a good thing
That was a decade ago anon, these are modern Naughty Dog devs. They've been acquired, have had hiring and firing sprees, that there is no clear way to say that the people who moved to BRB are the people who made Jak and Crash or the people responsible for the gameplay shitheaps of Uncharted.

>All respect to the investigation by OP but downplaying their history is insulting, both in terms of their work and in terms of joking and laughing at this, because it actually makes the picture and the laugh bigger, because you see….
You're right, it may have been coloured for dramatic effect, but I didn't have to stretch or alter the truth in any way to do so. And by that I stand.

>>3357
>>3359
>>3376
>But again, if OP wants autism back or the hole thing deleted I will do it
Two things.

If you could put into the article, "Written & compiled by an anonymous contributor, Edited by [you]".
I think I'm going to take these and make them into a video series on Youtube, and I plan on crediting all my sources in them so I think it's only fair that you credit me as an anonymous contributor. That way people on there can't yell at me for alleged plagiarism when I wrote and compiled the info.

And second, as for the tone policing here's what I have to say on the subject.
I'm not going to tell you whether or not to change the tone of your interpretation of my work, to make it more offensive or less offensive (although my personal taste would recommend the former before the latter). I think if I told you what to do with it, and change it in tone would be just the same kind of tone policing that SJWs and sensitives would tell you to do and I'm not that guy. What I'm trying to say is don't let yourself be bullied or be self-censored by the pressure these cultists put out, be independent. If you ultimately think a softer, more objective tone is needed to reach people who need to be spoonfed critical thought free of real emotion or conviction, then do it. If you're just doing it because you don't want to be attacked, I recommend you stand up for yourself and revel in the attack, it will just make bystanders see them for what they are and the work you published as all the more authentic.

>>3380
> The text wants to go straightfoward and even goes to kick a couple of rocks with "nobodies" "unoriginal" "["talented"]" and calling Naughty Dog a studio that felt from grace
My critical thoughts on them as a colleague and peer, not objective fact.

>>3390
You can see some of the pictures I put up of their pre-WiiU phase that had a more fleshed out and better looking world. The whole WiiU>Crysis3>Splitscreen tech deal kinda bugged them up and forced them to take out a lot of content and rework it so the game wouldn't run at 2FPS.

>>3392
>All in all nice thread other than dissing spengebab and the only good Scooby thing apart from the original series
Never dissing those games, just the many other piles of shit that outnumber them they've been forced to produce.

>>3395
>Our only hope to survive these mediocre times for an old hobbyist is to wait for another indie scene that actually is professional and can deliver quality products, that would also mean pay big bucks, not because they are indie means their games should be 3 dollars
And I hope to be part of that soon enough. Expect me and my team to do our best to make splashes in the time to come.

Anyways I think the GamerGate discussion is legitimate and should be allowed to continued.

>>3407
>>3183
>>3089
>>3121
Glad you guys like it. Gives me motivation fuel to continue. New piece tomorrow I think, unless my work and schoolwork catches up with me.

>>3747
Yeah, I just feel I can't personally call it journalism. What I'm doing here is just compiling information and putting it all together from publicly available sources. A journalist in my eyes, works to dig up information that wouldn't be so freely available, and it is these deposits of information that make them legitimate journalists.

>>3761
People have gotten better at weaponizing a rabid fanbase to defend and hype up a flop post-release, as well as engineering echo chambers to further defend the public opinion of their products. Social engineering has entered the market of vidya marketing, and we can see its effects when a blunder happens and company has enough resources to spend on minimizing damage. We'll see in time if this is an effective strategy, but I don't think it is as I've already started to see how it doesn't benefit a company in the long run.

Anyways tax season caught up with me so Part 3 tomorrow, VALVe time.

>>3085
PART 3: Half Life, Full Life consequences
Hope no one minds the lengths of which I'm quoting from a single source, looking for more as I go.
Now began the process of putting it all together, and having the content made for the game essentially come together.

(I'm having trouble finding the programming chair story of Half Life, if anyone can post it, I'd appreciate it. I could paraphrase but it wouldn't do it justice.)

Playtesting
> By the second month of the Cabal, we (the "swine") had enough of the game design to begin development on several areas. By the third month, we had enough put together to begin play testing.

>A play-test session consists of one outside volunteer (Sierra, our publisher, pulled play-testers from local people who had sent in product registration cards for other games) playing the game for two hours. Sitting immediately behind them would be one person from the Cabal session that worked on that area of the game, as well as the level designer who was currently the "primary" on the level being tested. Occasionally, this would also include an engineer if new AI needed to be tested.
A good method if I do say so myself but I have never gotten the luxury of trying it out so I can't speak for its effectiveness. I usually just have to send it out to people online and get feedback over a chat client.

>Other than starting the game for them and resetting it if it crashed, the observers from Valve were not allowed to say anything. They had to sit there quietly taking notes, and were not allowed to give any hints or suggestions. Nothing is quite so humbling as being forced to watch in silence as some poor play-tester stumbles around your level for 20 minutes, unable to figure out the "obvious" answer that you now realize is completely arbitrary and impossible to figure out.

>This was also a sure way to settle any design arguments. It became obvious that any personal opinion you had given really didn’t mean anything, at least not until the next play-test session. Just because you were sure something was going to be fun didn’t make it so; the play-testers could still show up and demonstrate just how wrong you really were.

>A typical two-hour play-test session would result in 100 or so "action items" — things that needed to be fixed, changed, added, or deleted from the game. The first 20 or 30 play-test sessions were absolutely critical for teaching us as a company what elements were fun and what elements were not. Over the course of the project we ended up doing more than 200 play-test sessions, about half of them with repeat players. The feedback from the sessions was worked back into the Cabal process, allowing us to preemptively remove designs that didn’t work well, as well as elaborate on designs that did.

Now this next bit in my mind was a bit of genius.

>Toward the middle of the project, once the major elements were in place and the game could be played most of the way through, it became mostly a matter of fine-tuning. To do this, we added basic instrumentation to the game, automatically recording the player’s position, health, weapons, time, and any major activities such as saving the game, dying, being hurt, solving a puzzle, fighting a monster, and so on. We then took the results from a number of sessions and graphed them together to find any areas where there were problems. These included areas where the player spent too long without any encounters (boring), too long with too much health (too easy), too long with too little health (too hard), all of which gave us a good idea as to where they were likely to die and which positions would be best for adding goodies.

>Another thing that helped with debugging was making the "save game" format compatible between the different versions of the engine. Since we automatically saved the game at regular intervals, if the play-testers crashed the game we would usually have something not too far from where they encountered the bug. Since these files would even work if the code base they were testing was several versions old, it made normally rare and hard to duplicate bugs relatively easy to find and fix. Our save game format allowed us to add data, delete data, add and delete code (we even supported function pointers) at will, without breaking anything. This also allowed us to make some fairly major changes after we shipped the game without interfering with any of our players’ hard-won saved games.

Great idea, and it certainly helped them later on.

Technological overdesigns

>Until the Cabal process got underway, technology was added to Half-Life freely. It was assumed that "if we build it, they will come," meaning that any new technology would just naturally find a creative use by the content creation folks. A prime example of this fallacy was our "beam" effect, basically a technique for doing highly tunable squiggly glowing lines between two points; stuff like lightning, lasers, and mysterious glowing beams of energy. It was added to the engine, the parameters were exposed, and an e-mail was sent out explaining it. The result was … nothing. After two months only one level designer had put it in a map. Engineering was baffled.

>During the Cabal process, we realized that although the level designers knew of the feature, they really had no clear idea of what it was for. The parameters were all very cryptic, and the wrong combinations would cause the beams to have very ugly-looking effects. There were no decent textures to apply to them, and setting them up was a bit of a mystery. It became very clear the technology itself was only a small part of the work and integration, training, and follow-through were absolutely necessary to make the technology useful to the game. Writing the code was typically less than half the problem.

Some of the pieces of tech implemented that I mentioned earlier also suffered from similar effects, but it seems they were able to find uses for them after all.

Group design

>Practically speaking, not everyone is suited for the kind of group design activity we performed in the Cabal, at least not initially. People with strong personalities, people with poor verbal skills, or people who just don’t like creating in a group setting shouldn’t be forced into it. We weighted our groups heavily toward people with a lot of group design experience, well ahead of game design experience. Even so, in the end almost everyone was in a Cabal of one sort or another, and as we got more comfortable with this process and started getting really good results it was easier to integrate the more reluctant members. For current projects, such as Team Fortress 2, the Cabal groups are made up of 12 or more people, and rarely fewer than eight. The meetings ended up being shorter, and they also ended up spreading ideas around a lot quicker, but I’m not sure I’d recommend that size of group initially.

>Just about everything in Half-Life was designed by a Cabal. This at first seemed to add a bit of overhead to everything, but it had the important characteristic of getting everyone involved in the creation process who were personally invested in the design. Once everyone becomes invested in the design as a whole, it stops being separate pieces owned by a single person and instead the entire game design becomes "ours."

>This "ours" idea extended to all levels. Almost every level in the game ended up being edited by at least three different level designers at some point in its development and some levels were touched by everyone. Though all the level designers were good at almost everything, each found they enjoyed some aspect of level design more than other aspects. One would do the geometry, one would do monster and AI placement, our texture artist would step in and do a texturing pass, and then one would finish up with a lighting pass, often switching roles when needed due to scheduling conflicts. This became critical toward the end of the project when people finished at different times. If a play-test session revealed something that needed to be changed, any available level designer could make the changes without the game getting bottlenecked by needing any specific individual.

>This idea also extended to all code, textures, models, animations, sounds, and so on. All were under source control and any individual was able to synch up to the sources and make whatever changes were necessary. With a little bit of self–control, this isn’t as random as it sounds. It had the added benefit in that it was fairly easy to get a daily record of exactly what was changed and by whom. We would then feed this information back into the play-test cycles, only testing what had changed, as well as helping project scheduling by being able to monitor the changes and get a pretty good estimate of the stability and completeness of any one component. This also allowed us to systematically add features throughout the process with minimal impact. Once the technical portion was completed, the engineer assigned to the feature was able to synch to all the source artwork and rebuild any and all files (models, textures, levels, and so on) affected by the change.

>>4973
PART 4: Finalizing the process
By this point (Sep 1997-Sep 1998) Sierra Software threatened VALVe to pull their funding, and at some points purposefully missed their paydays. Luckily Gabe and Mike had enough money to continue funding the development itself in these times. If not for this, Half Life may have been released prematurely under this corporate pressure, or worse yet, the game may have been canned in its entirety jeopardizing VALVe as a company.

Pics related bits of info are as follows
>Houndeyes were initially a friendly AI unit to work with the player but during playtesting they found that all players took a "shoot-first, ask questions later" approach, which resulted in the decision to make them hostile enemies instead
>This represents one of the many scenarios in which a player is shown a danger that wouldn't otherwise be obvious by having it play out before them
>Placing the player in a soldier-vs.-alien conflict helped reinforce the illusion of an active environment, and let Valve show off its combat AI with minimal risk to the player.
>The first incarnation of the game’s main character, now known affectionately as "Ivan the Space Biker."

All the little pieces

>Even with all emphasis on group activity, most of the major features of Half-Life still only happened through individual initiative. Everyone had different ideas as to what exactly the game should look like, or at least what features we just had to do. The Cabal process gave these ideas a place to be heard, and since it was accepted that design ideas can come from anyone, it gave people as much authority as they wanted to take. If the idea required someone other than the inventor to actually do the work, or if the idea had impact on other areas of the game, they would need to start a Cabal and try to convince the other key people involved that their idea was worth the effort. At the start of the project, this was pretty easy as most everyone wildly underestimated the total amount of work that needed to be done, but toward the middle and end of the project the more disruptive decisions tended to get harder and harder to push through. It also helped filter out all design changes except for the ones with the most player impact for the least development work.

>Through constant cycle of play-testing, feedback, review, and editing, the Cabal process was also key in removing portions of the game that didn’t meet the quality standards we wanted, regardless of the level of emotional attachment the specific creator may have had to the work. This was one of the more initially contentious aspects of the Cabal process, but perhaps one of the more important. By its very nature, the Cabal process avoided most of the personal conflicts inherent in other more hierarchical organizations. Since problems were identified in a relatively objective manner of play-testing, and since their solutions were arrived at by consensus or at least by an individual peer, then an authority that everyone could rebel against just didn’t exist.

>On a day-to-day basis, the level of detail supplied in even a 200-page design document is vague at best. It doesn’t answer the 1,001 specific details that each area requires, or the countless creative details that are part of everyday development. Any design document is really nothing more than a framework to work from and something to improve the likelihood that work from multiple people will fit together in a seamless fashion. It’s the Cabal process that helped spread around all the big picture ideas that didn’t make it into any document —things that are critical to the feel of the game, but too nebulous to put into words. It also helps maximize individual strengths and minimize individual weaknesses and sets up a framework that allows individuals to influence as much of the game as possible. In Half-Life, it was the rare area of the game that didn’t include the direct work of more than ten different people, usually all within the same frame.

>In order for highly hierarchical organizations to be effective, they require one person who understands everyone else’s work at least as well as the individuals doing the work, and other people who are willing to be subordinates yet are still good enough to actually implement the design. Given the complexity of most top game titles, this just isn’t practical — if you were good enough to do the job, why would you want to be a flunky? On the other hand, completely unstructured organizations suffer from lack of information and control — if everyone just does their own thing, the odds that it’ll all fit together in the end are somewhere around zero.

>At Valve, we’re very happy with the results of our Cabal process. Of course, we still suffer from being overly ambitious and having, at times, wildly unrealistic expectations, but these eventually get straightened out and the Cabal process is very good about coming up with the optimal compromise. Given how badly we failed initially, and how much the final game exceeded our individual expectations, even our most initially reluctant person is now a staunch supporter of the process.

Pro-tips:

>Include an expert from every functional area (programming, art, and so on). Arguing over an issue that no one at the meeting actually understands is a sure way to waste everyone’s time.
>Write down everything. Brainstorming is fine during the meetings, but unless it’s all written down, your best ideas will be forgotten within days. The goal is to end up with a document that captures as much as is reasonable about your game, and more importantly answers questions about what people need to work on.
>Not all ideas are good. These include yours. If you have a "great idea" that everyone thinks is stupid, don’t push it. The others will also have stupid ideas. If you’re pushy about yours, they’ll be pushy about theirs and you’re just going to get into an impasse. If the idea is really good, maybe it’s just in the wrong place. Bring it up later. You’re going to be designing about 30 hours of game play; if you really want it in it’ll probably fit somewhere else. Maybe they’ll like it next month.
>Only plan for technical things that either already work, or that you’re sure will work within a reasonable time before play testing. Don’t count on anything that won’t be ready until just before you ship. Yes, it’s fun to dream about cool technology, but there’s no point in designing the game around elements that may never be finished, or not polished enough to ship. If it’s not going to happen, get rid of it, the earlier the better.
>Avoid all one-shot technical elements. Anything that requires engineering work must be used in more than one spot in the game. Engineers are really slow. It takes them months to get anything done. If what they do is only used once, it’s a waste of a limited resource. Their main goal should always be to create tools and features that can be used everywhere. If they can spend a month and make everyone more productive, then it’s a win. If they spend a week for ten seconds of game play, it’s a waste.
That last one is the best piece of advice there. At least in my opinion.

>Ken is senior developer at Valve and has contributed to a wide range of projects in the last 15 years, most recently on animation and AI for Half-Life. Previous projects include satellite networking, cryptography, 3D prosthetic design tools, 3D surface reconstruction, and in-circuit emulators. Oddly enough, Ken dropped out of studying EE to pursue a fine arts degree at The Evergreen State College, which he considers far more relevant to creative thinking than any silly differential equations class. You can reach him at kenb@valvesoftware.com.

I'll begin ending this Half Life piece soon and start on the next game. Expect Part 5 sooner than the amount of time it took for me to make this part (and yes, feel free to scold me because it didn't take a whole lot of effort, I just lacked motivation).

>>11428
Blame Bob Rafei. He's a hack. I kinda wish Chris went after him instead.

Anyways I'll finish real soon guys I promise. I'm just fucking lazy.

What about the MvC series, anyone know how that came to be?