/svidya/ - Strict /v/

From the Big Red Button Entertainment website: http://brbent.com/

>After 13 years of art directing original IP titles at Naughty Dog, Bob Rafei founded BRB in 2009 with Jeff Lander for the mission of creating great character action games. We have brought together a collection of talented veterans from Naughty Dog, Heavy Iron, Luxo Flux and High Impact Games to develop engaging games through addictive gameplay, responsive controls, fluid character performance, highly polished art direction and strong narrative.

So right off the bat we have a couple of nobodies' names who say they have some claim to fame. Lets find out who they are
>Bob Rafei
>Jeff Lander
>talentedzuz veterans from Naughty Dog
>Heavy Iron
>Luxo Flux
>High Impact Games
Well, about one big studio name that has since fallen from grace Naughty Dog.

>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Rafei
>Bob Rafei
>Co-founder of BRBE
>Art director, Concept Artist, Character Animator
>Rafei is also an advisory board member for Game Developers Conference and Game Developers Choice Awards, as well as panel leader of Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences's achievement awards category on art Direction and contributing writer of Animation Magazine and Animation World Network.
>A graduate of Parson's School of Design, Rafei was an employee of Naughty Dog, joining them in early 1995 to work on Crash Bandicoot. Other notable works include Jak and Daxter, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, and Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric.[1]
Crash Bandicoot, the competitor platformer from Naughty Dog in their attempt to cash in on the platformer craze late-game in the PS1 era. In terms of art direction it was nothing special with a couple of good designs, but a dearly unoriginal design for protagonist of the game clearly intended to compete with the likes of many anthropomorphic animal protags of the time.

>Jeff Lander
This guy is harder to find documentation of. Possibly another case of intentionally hiding his tracks. With some more googling I found this.
>http://www.giantbomb.com/jeff-lander/3040-52006/
It credits him with 4 games but fails to mention his latest fuck up officially.
>Dark Reign: The Future of War - Additional Programming
>Supercar Street Challenge - Lead Programmer
>Anachronox - Programmer
>True Crime: New York City - Player Programming Lead
Games not exactly known for their functionality, or their code.

Now the rest of the pieces of the puzzle before we try to put it all together.

Continued…

Heavy Iron Studios.
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_Iron_Studios

A company for licensed videogames that never made it big, were known for anything good, and generally made a load of shit.

With the exceptions of
>SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom (PlayStation 2/Gamecube/Xbox - 2003)
>Family Guy: Back to the Multiverse (PlayStation 3/Xbox 360/PC - 2012)
Which can be argued are games with merit, but those are just two games among 14 shit titles of which only 2 others sold well, or not completely horribly.

Luxo Flux
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luxoflux

Another licensed game company. See a pattern yet? Of which only made 2 games worth any merit
>True Crime
>Transformers Revenge of the Fallen
But otherwise have the same trappings of Heavy Iron.

High Impact Games
>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Impact_Games
A company that helped on some good games like Ratchet & Clank get on PSP, but ultimately also became a company for licensed games. With a stain of a cancelled Crash Team Racing 2010 title, but this also facilitated their meeting with Naughty Dog for people from there to be drawn in to Big Red Button.

Now the puzzle pieces are all there, and together they form Big Red Button. A mix of shitty studios that never made it big, with two guys who barely have a claim to fame. How did this spell disaster for Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric?

>>1393
Thanks for the contribution. It'll help me drive home my final post on all this.

>has edited several game programmer books.
Jesus fucking christ remind me to never touch those books.

>>1395
>>1394
Oh god, I was just joking. How could I have known?

Save me from this fresh hell. I don't want to live on this planet anymore.

>>1397
Fuck this gay earth. If standards for game development is this low, no wonder we've gotten to the point we're at now

>>1392
So we have
>Uninspired art director
>Programmer who barely ever made a splash on the scene despite his insistence on his work
>Modern Naughty Dog ex-devs
>Three companies for mostly licensed shit games, ports, and games that never sold well

What did it mean for Sonic Boom?

>Animation glitches & fuck ups
>Camera glitches & fuck ups
>Character control glitches
>Lighting glitches
>Horrible game design
>Horrible disjointed story
>Horrible art direction
>Game not being able to decide what it wants to be
>Bad marketing
>Rushed development
>Horrible practices between the developer, publisher, and reviewers

Don't believe me? Never checked this game out?

I'm about to give you the proof in the pudding.

>>1398
Sorry for the cancerous links but they do a good job of highlighting the technical problems in Sonic Boom.
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Jb3A0HLe4
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VIIRFpvpl0

They couldn't even settle on a design for fucking sonic. This is proof of the fact that they couldn't settle on a design for fucking anything. The symptoms resulted in a world that never decided on a color palette, a style, a core gameplay to work itself around, and was generally schizophrenic.
>Development for Sonic's redesign went through a long process before the developers decided to stick with the "Scarf Sonic" design.[7] In an interview with JamesGames with Stephen Frost, he revealed that both versions will have a separate story and hopes that some characters may come to the game.[10]

Scrapped content that were supposed to be components to the game
>Voice clips of Amy interacting with Perci during gameplay could mean that Perci was going to be a playable character, but was scrapped as a playable character for unknown reasons.[32]
>In addition, there was a Tornado level during development, but was also scrapped for unknown reasons. Voice clips were also used.[33]

>Combined with Shattered Crystal, Sega confirmed that the games sold a total of 490,000 copies as of February 2015, placing them as the lowest-selling major Sonic launches in the history of the franchise.[23]


So how did this happen? Well we can only dig further to find more development information.

>>1399
Taken from a forum when searching development news of the game
>What we know:
>Sonic Boom spent years in development.
>Big Red Button fired a large number of employees.
>Big Red Button was incompetent, not having key developers and programmers during development.
>Sega made the Wii U exclusive deal with Nintendo, when the game was likely supposed to be developed on other platforms or be multiplatform.
>The engine being used in Rise of Lyric had never been used on the Wii U before.

>I believe this lead to Sonic 06 being the way it is. Sega knew they were producing another game that was very similar to Shadow the Hedgehog. Expecting this game to do badly, Sega decided to not invest anymore money in the development of Sonic 06. But they couldn't just throw away all the money they already spent developing the game. So they just released an unfinished, untested version of the game, and hoped to break even. There is further evidence that this is the case, because the next games, Sonic Unleashed, Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations, Sonic Lost world, all are completely different from Sonic 06 in gameplay and style.

>I believe this is also what happened to Rise of Lyric, sort of. First, Big Red Button were clearly incompetent developers. Secondly, Sega invested a total of $20 million in Sonic Boom, they invested 20 million in a game that wasn't even finished! Thirdly, Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric had been in development hell for years.

20 Motherfucking million dollars invested in the game. And BRBE blew it all during development, ending with nothing but a shit game, and had the gall to ask for more.

Then I stumbled onto something that went even deeper down the rabbit hole…

>>1391
>Rafei is also an advisory board member for Game Developers Conference and Game Developers Choice Awards

>advisory board member for GDC

Ok we need to close this thread now, because muhsoggyknees.

Nothing to see here, please move on, stop triggering people

>mfw its like only the most mediocre fucks out there are part of the gdc

>>1399

>lowest-selling major Sonic launches in the history of the franchise

No shit, the game might be actually worse than sonic06 and to top it off they launched it exclusively on a console that barely anyone has

In fact I'm surprised this shit sold almost half a million copies considering a masterpiece like Conker BFD only sold 50k copies even though the N64 was lightyears ahead of the wiiu in terms of popularity

>>1401

>>Sonic Boom spent years in development

YEARS??! FOR THIS?!!"

Holy shit. How can a multi-million dollar company make so many retarded decisions all at once? And with their most iconic IP no less.

>>1462
>Holy shit. How can a multi-million dollar company make so many retarded decisions all at once? And with their most iconic IP no less.
You wanna know how? Here's how. The game was left under supervision of the Sonic Team. And Takashi Iizuka
>Los Angeles based game studio Big Red Button developed the game under supervision by Sonic Team[17] and long-time Sonic game designer Takashi Iizuka.[18] The game was built on CryEngine and is centered on "combat and exploration".[17] Sega outsourced the game to Western developers in order to increase the game's appeal in Western markets, culminating in a separate westernized Sonic franchise.[18] The video game concept came after the television series plan. Big Red Button was chosen due to the studio's adventure game portfolio and leader, Bob Rafei of the Crash Bandicoot, Uncharted, and Jak and Daxter series.[18] The game remains a separate continuity to the main series, and was originally not intended to be released in Japan.[19] However, it was later revealed that the games would be released in Japan, under the name Sonic Toon (ソニックトゥーン Sonikku Tūn?).[20]

What else did Takashi Iizuka and Team Sonic do?
>Sonic '06
>Shadow the Hedgehog
>Sonic Jam
>Sonic Unleashed
Clearly they will allow any and all fuck ups to go through their production line. Why is this? I don't know, probably incompetency or negligence or both.

Now I'm going to dive into the meat of the development.

>>1464
Part 1: Cut Content

River of Sticks
Sticks is a new character introduced to the universe and was intended to be part of the new gang. Here's a piece of PR that reports on her before the release of Sonic Boom hyping her up as part of the game, show, and franchise.
>http://blogs.sega.com/2014/05/29/introducing-sticks-to-the-sonic-boom-franchise/
>In advance of the highly-anticipated launch of Sonic Boom, the newest branch of the Sonic the Hedgehog universe announced earlier this year, SEGA is pleased to unveil Sticks, a brand-new character that will play an integral role across all Sonic Boom platforms. Sticks, a jungle badger who has spent most of her life living alone in the wilderness, will appear in the Sonic Boom TV series, Wii U and Nintendo 3DS video games, and merchandise, forming a common thread across all iterations of the new Sonic Boom world. Sticks joins Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, and Amy to form the core ensemble featured throughout the Sonic Boom franchise.
>Amy, who helps Sticks adapt to civilization. Sticks and Amy quickly become best friends, with Sticks willing to go to extremes to protect her new pal.

From an autistic Sonic fan website
>When is this explained? Because it doesn’t happen at all in Rise of Lyric, nor does it happen in Shattered Crystal, a game which many have now decided is a spinoff since there’s no way it can relate to Rise of Lyric due to how nobody in the game knows who Lyric is
>The TV show? Possibly.. but don’t forget, Rise of Lyric is the first time Sonic and co meet Sticks, the TV show is set long after it. So where does any of this happen?
>So what happened to this? Was it cut content? Or were we all mislead by PR announcements? For such a build up and so many times we were told how Sticks & Amy are best friends and how Amy helps sticks, neither game shows any of this.
>In fact in Rise of Lyric, Sticks is just an NPC, she’s in a town full of people, there’s barely any interaction with her at all, yet she certainly doesn’t come across as a character needs help adapting to civilisation? She’s standing right there in a town. So where does this anti social stuff come from?
>Stick’s inclusion in Rise of Lyric is so poor and minor, that there does exist the question “Should she even be in here?” As we’ll explain in a second article next week, there is some evidence to suggest that she was never supposed to be in Rise of Lyric, but added as a last minuet inclusion in order to tie in with the TV show and Shattered Crystal.

The Destruction of All Worlds

Here's a screenshot of a level that was supposed to be in the game, was advertist, and fully playable.

>https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=-OhcIu5qv6Y
Shown years before the game was complete. And then again in 2014. This means that it was developed for YEARS, then cut out RIGHT BEFORE RELEASE. Although running on Windows 7 PC hardware, the WiiU version was never able to reach that graphical fidelity.

This third image shows what it ended up looking like in the final version of the game. Stripped down, the level design is different now, and generally shittier in terms of art design.

>>1465
Death of the Ancients

>This is the biggest head scratcher on the whole ancient land plot point. Sonic & Co. go back in time and encounter Lyric, and that’s it. They don’t encounter ‘the ancients,’ nor do they have any meaningful encounters with any NPC in the past, so why and how do they have carvings on the walls when nobody saw them or interacted with them in any meaningful way.
>Which brings me onto the Echidna statues. Why doesn’t anyone comment on them? In the whole game neither Sonic or any of his friends comment on them, I think there is one comment in the whole game which is a random piece of single line dialogue which isn’t in a cut scene which draws attention to it. But nothing more.
>So where are they? They’re nowhere in the game, yet they had concept art made of them, they’re mentioned plenty of times, but we never see them.
>There you go, there’s your ancients, not once are they shown in Sonic Boom. Are the statues supposed to be these guys? If so, why don’t they look anything like them?
>So why does the game not explain or show a reason for these things to exist? Yes they go back in time, but nobody encounters them, certainly not anyone significant enough to explain the architecture and the carvings.
So from what we can gather another plot arc was taken out of the game mid-development with portions of it still in the game, assets made for it, dialogue voiced for it, but ripped out for some reason.

Unplayable Character
>Remember how at the start of this I said “I’m shocked at how we found out about one particular aspect of Boom’s cut content.” This is that particular bit. Perci wasn’t just an NPC who you talk to, at one point she was playable, or if not playable she at least joined you on a mission. How do we know this?
>Because Amy tells you so in a stage in the final retail release of the game!
>I was shocked at this, there’s a mission where if you play as Amy she will actually say “Good job Perci!” Yet the only other character in the stage is Knuckles! Perci isn’t even in the area, she’s back in the Hub town, so how is Amy saying this? Unless it’s left over dialogue from when Perci was in this stage?
>Just think about this for a moment, here is a game in which a playable character is able to reference another who is not even in the stage or in any playable role other than an NPC. This is downright amateurish, this should have been spotted and removed months ago, how is it in the final release? Inexcusable.

I agree completely with this autist. And only further serves to prove how much was ripped from this game, without any care as to what would happen, or to clean it up.

This also goes with
>Cut Lyric content
>Cut 4 player campaign mode
>Rushed inclusion of Shadow the Hedgeheg

Continued…

>>1466
So how long has this giant pile of shit been daunting the Sonic Franchise, before it was ready to fall like it did?

PART 2 THE BEGINNING OF THE END
>Let’s see, according to Sega’s official word, when the entire Boom franchise was announced back in February, it was 2011.
>That is not true.
>Because based on evidence uncovered, it was being worked on during June 2010, nearly a year before Sega said so, here is that evidence.
>Mr Villarreal is a concept artist for Big Red Button who posted a bunch of early concept art images on his Facebook profile before they got mysteriously pulled. What’s interesting though is this post, particularly with regards to Eytan Zana. Mr Zana does not work at Big Red Button any more, however he was an employee there, during June 2010 according to his LinkedIn profile. What did he do? “Concept artist for several unannounced projects.”
>However, it may in fact be even longer than that. TSS staffer Shadzter managed to find another concept artist who worked at Big Red Button from 2009, whilst the page has been pulled from his website, it was full of concept art for Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric.

>Big Red Button has been around since 2009 and finding out exactly what they have done is not an easy task. However based on personal websites of former staff and LinkedIn profiles we do have an idea.
>Big Red Button were a small development studio, how small? About 14 people. According to a former producer and project manager at Big Red Button who worked on delivering Nintendo software during his time, there were only 14 members of it, this manager expanded that number to 65 during his time there. But think about this, if the information found regarding when work on Boom started, there were only 14 people working on Rise of Lyric!
>Whilst in terms of total people who reported to him ended up being over 2000, in house staff at BRB for a number of years was only 14 people before expanding to 65.

>What Have Big Red Button produced?
>Virtually nothing, well that’s not true, based on a number of personal websites and LinkedIn profiles, there have been some unannounced projects that they have worked on, however none of them have seen a release. Boom is their first completed project.

The Sonic Exodus
>The story here comes from multiple sources, the claim is that at some point around June/July, there was a mass ‘exodus’ from Big Red Button in which staff were either let go or left. The biggest piece of evidence comes from Christian Senn, who stated he did not leave willingly…
This was a man who was putting in 14 hours a day in the studio, who was fired. Jesus christ I can see why people say the game industry is harsh.

>Now, according to a developer who posted at NeoGaf, Boom went gold in July of this year and a lot of staff left/were let go. However we have found evidence to suggest not only the claim of an exodus, but that there were major problems at BRB spanning back a period of months.
>Where is this evidence? It’s on Big Red Buttons own website. Job listings were posted which we’ve been able to view thanks to the wayback machine show that as late as February 2014 Big Red Button were looking to fill a position for a ‘senior combat designer’, however they were still looking for one as late as July 2014. Alarm bells should be ringing, for three reasons.

>This matches up to the time period of the so called exodus.
>They didn’t have a senior combat designer in July of this year, for a game which main focus is combat
>Based on the job listing, for a period of 6 months, there was no senior combat designer working on Boom.
>You might be thinking ‘it could be another game,’ that’s unlikely, because we found someone who potentially got this job, Mark Vernon, in his LinkedIn profile he lists a role at BRB from February of this year as combat designer. This strongly suggests that BRB not only didn’t have a senior combat designer, but also lacked combat designers in general.
>This is crazy, you have a game which is mainly combat, yet you have one senior role and an unknown number of minor roles which are for designing the combat vacant with less than a year to go? Might explain why the combat has been heavily criticised.

>However it doesn’t end there. Because we were also able to find the job advert for Senior Level Designer too, as late as February 2014. You might be thinking ‘are you sure this is for Boom?’ Look at the job details.

>Develop missions and levels according to the global vision of the game, the characters’ type and the games’ objective
>experience creating levels; with a strong preference for 3rd person action or character platformer titles
>Passion for knowledge of co-op gaming

It certainly sounds like they’re describing Boom doesn’t it? Also look at the other listings, all of them mention the CryEngine, and various future job listings put strong emphasis on experience with that engine, the same one Boom uses.

>>1470
I appreciate it anon, means my work is not in vain.

>>1471
The CryingEngine 3

>But let’s put this into perspective, no other development studio has released a game on the Wii U using this particular engine that’s in Boom. Think about that for a moment and everything it means.
>Only 1 team has produced any documentation about putting this engine on the Wii U, the developers of the engine.
>There is little to no community support for using this engine on this particular hardware.
>There are no case studies to look at in order to learn and predict problems with using the engine on this hardware.

I was going to write my own paragraph on this topic but this seems to sum up my concerns pretty well with using the CryEngine 3 on WiiU.

>Previously, the developers of CryEngine 3 did get a build of it running ‘successfully’ on the Wii U, however due to speculative reasons around the whole EA thing, nothing has come of it.

>Do I need to go on here? You have a team who are using someone else’s engine on someone else’s hardware with virtually no help or documentation to support them. That team ranges from 14-65 in house staff… There is no way you can do this without problems occurring.

>So what does this mean with regards to the CryEngine 3 working on the Wii U? Can it run it? Probably, BRB have ironically proved it can run. But will it be any good? I don’t know, more developers need to use it and learn from it.
>The problem here is that BRB were the first to use it with little to no support, there was no way there wouldn’t be problems, hoping for a flawless implementation and outcome was a doomed hope from the start.
>In fact according to the LinkedIn Profile of the Senior Programmer Carl-Henrik Skårstedt he had to make major modifications from scratch just to get the game working, there was nothing pre-existing to assist with this work.

Now this might be fine if you were working on a FPS, but Sonic Boom is a platformer with a split screen mechanic and is on the WiiU, a platform woefully lacking in WiiU CE3 engine documentation. There's been no game that involves any combination of these 3 things on the CryEngine 3 so in almost every aspect of actually building the game with code was from scratch.

Why the fuck was this game put on the WiiU in the first place?

Well look back at my first post. The Nintendo-Sega publishing deal, during part of the development cycle they ended up taking an exclusivity contract with Nintendo to release this solely on the WiiU. Maybe in an attempt to get enough funding to finish the game, maybe to run away with a bit more cash when everyone found out it was shit, or to try and bail a sinking ship. Either way it happened. This deal was struck 2013, well into the game's development as we know now. Meaning that this game may have once worked well on other consoles, and the PC before but putting it on the WiiU meant a lot of optimization and cutting away content that would strain the system and the engine.

Problems upon problems

>However, there are one or two things that suggest development was not smooth and that there might have been some problems internally, we have no way of verifying this, but there does exist some evidence to suggest all was not well.
>If you take a look in the credits for the game, specifically the rather large ‘special thanks’ section, you can find a lot of now ex Big Red Button staff, I’d like to highlight one in particular. Rob Flaska, Mr Flaska used to work as a producer at Big Red Button, he was there for just under 2 years and left the company around the time of the so called exodus.
>On his LinkedIn profile, he lists a lot of jobs, he’s also quite professional about his roles at his other jobs too. But when it comes to Big Red Button, he lists his job details as “Working my tail off.”
>This stands out like a sore thumb, what happened at BRB to make this guy put that for his duties?
Probably getting screwed by the studio for 2 years, but I digress.

Continued…

>>1473
I've been going through google, multiple sources, and have been building an architectural foundation of information from others who have tried to come up with the reasons why this game failed. I'm not a journalist, I'm an indie dev and a /v/irgin from '06 so my autism knows no bounds.

>>1474
PART 3 THE FALL OF SONIC'S BOOM, DESCENT INTO LYRIC
Post Theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWdcHcGobG0

Now lets look at how BRB acted once this game was rushed out the fucking door, went gold in July, and was an affront to all reviews, the world, the sonic fanbase, and god himself.


If we pretend it never happened, we might get to keep our jobs!

From the Big Red Button site, the last update is from E3, in which they show their Windows 7 build that has content clearly not in the current game, better graphics, an entirely different design, and is seemingly devoid of so many glitches that are in the final build.

>Not to mention that all the images used on the site are cut from the final game, the graphical representation is completely wrong too. Can you say false advertising? Their site is full of cut content and false images which they claim is in the game.
>Big Red Button still have this image on their website, they are still trying to claim that Sonic Boom looks like this!
>Well how about their Facebook page. Oh… no update since E3
>How about their twitter page? Well it’s a little better, they certainly promoted their product for a while after E3… however something is missing I can’t put my finger on… OH! Wait I know… They’ve not even acknowledged that the game is out!

>This is pathetic. Even Ken Balough was still promoting Sonic 4 Episode 1 & 2 long after reviews had come out utterly slating the game. He was still tweeting about it, making blog posts, engaging in fan and official forums, even doing interviews with the fans about the game.
>Big Red Button are frankly cowards. You have made this game, this is your first game that your employees have worked on, at least tell people that it’s out! How bad does it get? Well, so far there’s been at least two cancelled interviews, reasons are for the lack of a better phrase, completely pathetic.

You said it autistic Sanic fan. You said it.

What of all their contact with their fanbase they had scheduled? Let's see. Oh wait they cancelled them as shown in the pictures above. They weren't even willing to talk to their fans. This was a blatant bait and switch, hype up the game as much as possible before release, and then fade into the darkness to strike again, no goodbyes, no thank yous, nothing. Just radio silence.

>Even if these people did care about their game, if that’s truly the case, then frankly they lack the talent to make the game to expectations. A fun put down amongst the gaming community has been ‘They’re Ex-Naughty Dog developers for a reason,[TOP ZUZ]’ I did once defend and dispute this, only it’s becoming increasing hard to do so when so much of this game is a failure when you take out the poorly optimisation.
>You have Stephen Frost on record for promoting the game by saying “We have ex-Naughty Dog devs! People who worked on God of War, working on this game” as if to say ‘Naughty Dog & God of War are high quality games and studios’ (and they are[Except they're not]) ‘And we’re got their staff working on this game! You know it’ll be good!’ That is what you are saying with this, else, why else would you say it? Don’t blame people for now turning this line back at you given the utter shambles that the game turned out to be.

There's not just that but the game released with accessible test, and debug levels without the use of any hack, glitch, or save file edit.

Hell the game didn't even have proofread subtitles.

All these things, all these bad decisions from design to business to art. They culminated in this game.

AFTERMATH
Big Red Button has made no news since the release of Sonic Boom ROL. They are likely to go under, SEGA will likely never hire them again, and their names are now tarnished for their incompetence, negligence and DELIBIRATE LIES. Everyone involved will feel it in their wallets, and
their reputation. Those involved in this project all have bad things to say about their experience there, their leaving, and some won't even mention the game nor the studio on their LinkedIn profiles anymore.

SEGA blew 20 million dollars minimum, Nintendo a less untold amount, and BRB sucked it all up and shat out this gem.

This game was one of the biggest fuck ups of our time. Nothing from the Game Industry Crash of the generation past will ever compare.

BEHOLD UPON MY WORKS 8CHAN AND DESPAIR

The end. If anyone has any other game to turn our heads to, feel free to dish out some suggestions or comment further upon the research I've made. Have a shit night everyone!

>>1489
Sure thing. I posted some of it in the youtube videos in this post >>1399 but I'll supplement it here.

I couldn't find much on the debug levels besides the screenshots I posted. I'll post it if anything comes up.
Glitches
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJD1eTam7RA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eRUlAnCGe4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IHrgHFcmrq8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXsLnYY_8GA

ADDENDUM, SONIC BOOM IN ALL ITS FLAILINGS

Sonic is fighting Eggman in their world, chasing him down for his latest transgression(never specified). Eggman breaks the road underneath them and they begin fighting his newfound robot army that he says he reactivated after finding them somewhere. The combat tutorial begins. Then a cutscene activates in which Sonic & pals are underwhelmed and have their backs to a giant door with hieroglyphics of what looks like Sonic & Pals with a button on the door shaped to Sonic's hand. He goes in to escape from Eggman, Robot Sanic, and company. They go deeper into this tomb, and begin reactivating it to go out (this makes no sense). They keep going until the tomb is operational again and they are able to reach the centre, in which Lyric has been trapped. Lyric gives a "We meet again Sonic, you trapped me here 1000 years ago!" kind of villain speech, and traps sonic and pals with his robot minons. He leaves them trapped in energy beams, which Tails hacks and they introduce the Enerbeam mechanic, in which they are able to lasso objects with an energy beam from their hacked energy beam handcuffs. They begin to try and escape the tomb with their new tech. Meanwhile, Lyric takes control back from Robotniks hacked robots. It's then revealed to the gang once they escape that Lyric is an enemy of nature and wishes to create a world of robot technology to eclipse all life on their planet, and that he was defeated by THE ANCIENTS 1000 years ago, all this told to them by Tail's dad/uncle/granpa? He needs the 7 crystals of power to power his robot army and they must all race against him to collect them before he can.

So you do all that shit, Shadow comes in and starts being edgy to Sanic about him having friends and they start fighting through time portals, they end up 1000 years in the past after sonic beats him and they go to beat up Lyric and lock him in his tomb. They then go back to the present and continue collecting the crystals. Meanwhile Robotnik goes to Lyric and offers his services. When all the crystals are collected Lyric ambushes them and takes all the crystals for themselves. He then goes off to power his robot shit, they chase after him through a few levels, fight robotnik in a suit Lyric had made, go on to Lyric's hideout where he's powered up his robot earth fucker. You must then fight a robot lyric while Robotnik comes back with his suit and helps you. You defeat Lyric and you all live happily ever after.

The end. Tons of plot holes I didn't mention, or didn't point out in this summary because fuck me if I'm going to put more effort into the story than the developers did.

>>1504
Sure I'll dig that up too.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

Big Red Button Entertainment's Twitter page, https://twitter.com/bigredbuttonent Last activity: November 4th, still haven't acknowledged the release of their game
Website http://brbent.com/ No activity since the E3 2014 update


Staff losses http://nintendoeverything.com/big-red-button-entertainment-suffered-from-staff-losses-before-sonic-boom-launch/ the studio shrunk back down from its engorged state of 60+ people, back down to likely its original 14 man team, although the real number might be much lower or higher.

http://arcadesushi.com/sonic-boom-sales-lowest-in-franchise-history/
This one offers a neat piece of info.
>Eurogamer reports that the combined sales of the Wii U's Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric and the 3DS' Sonic Boom: Shattered Crystal barely reached 490,000 units. This number is extremely disappointing for Sega. While Sega has yet to distinct whether the 490,000 figure pertains to actual number of games sold or number of copies shipped, this is still extremely disappointing for the publisher and a bad sign for the future of the franchise.
Sega has yet to distinct whether the 490,000 figure pertains to actual number of games sold or number of copies shipped
Meaning the game may have actually sold less, than the dissapointing 490k.

People still believe Sonic can be saved
http://www.sportskeeda.com/gaming/why-sonic-booms-failure-does-not-mean-the-death-of-the-sonic-franchise

What about the co-founders of BRB?
Well their twitters are either deleted, or inactive since march, meaning they are also in the radio silence plan. Their profiles still say they work at Big Red Button Entertainment, but no citations of this post-release. Jeff Lander on the other hand has his Facebook set to private now, his twitter is gone, and his LinkedIn doesn't state whether or not he's still working at BRB although he's still living in the LA area of the studio.

Overall though I can't seem to find any more news of Big Red Button post 2015 or post-release of Sonic Boom: ROL. I looked through job listings to see if they happen to be hiring anyone, usually a good way to tell if a company has started a new project, but no job listings from them after the Sonic Boom project.

My guess? This company has 14 people TOPS, may have dissolved already or is about to, and key members like Jeff Lander may have already left it behind. They are all likely shifting around in the decks of other companies right now, GDC is right around the corner s I imagine you can probably find some of them there, especially Jeff Landers with his GDC advisory board member position.

Also this picture made me laugh, never trust a BEST OF E3 award, and never trust Destructoid for objective opinions.

So what game do we do next? I was kinda thinking of doing a bit on Half Life, for those who haven't read the amazing documentation on it, or we could do another horrible game and dissect another corpse.

>>1517
I. I AM A MONUMENT TO ALL YOUR SINS
Is what Sonic Boom would say if it could talk to its creators.

But yeah they've all left and gone back into the shadows as they have before. To strike again and kill another franchise. They've cleared their trail to try and wash the blood from their hands. The incompetence by all parties was really bad. I only wish I could be given a 20 million dollar budget to make one of my own games as I'd actually end up with something substantial by the end of it and still have enough leftover for a "Yay, we didn't fuck it up" party after.

Visual representation of Sonic Boom

Car = Sonic franchise
Polo shirt kid = Big Red button
Black hoodie kid = Sega
White hoodie kid = Nintendo

>>1511

From that article

>However, people seemed to forget the fairly well-designed games, Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Lost World which to be frank is still a game that many continue to play

>Unleashed
>Lost World
>well-designed games

>not generations or even colors

Seeing the other sanic thread I have to say even people in this board would do a better job at saving the series from complete oblivion

But then again if sega didn't even hire the guy who did Sonicfanremix all by himself then its obvious they don't really care much about sanic anymore

>>1568
>Keef the Thief 1989
>Rings of Power 1991 CANCELLED
>Way of the Warrior 1994
>Crash Bandicoot 1996 Was the first non-Japanese game to receive a "Gold Prize" in Japan
>Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back 1997 One of the best-selling PSone video games of all time
>Crash Bandicoot: Warped 1998 Was the first non-Japanese title to receive a "Platinum Prize" in Japan
>Crash Team Racing 1999 Last >Crash Bandicoot game developed by Naughty Dog
>Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy 2001 First game released after being acquired by Sony
>Jak II 2003
>Jak 3 2004
>Jak X: Combat Racing 2005 Last Jak and Daxter game developed by Naughty Dog
>Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
>Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
>Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception
>The Last of Us 2013
>The Last of Us Remastered 2014
>Uncharted 4: A Thief's End 2015

Blame Sony, after they were acquired they were able to pump out a couple good games and then the cancer began. Same story with most developers who are acquired by their publisher.

Thing is if Jak2 was their peak, their peak wasn't all that great.

>Before that they were the little guys who managed to pull stunts bigger studios just couldn't do.
I think that's just the built up image of old Naughty Dog, in reality they were pulling the big stunts everyone had already done and were tried and true. They always played it safe but at least had artistic vision, that can't be said of them now.

So anyone got a game suggestion?

i have neither the drive, focus, or ability to that a investigative journalistic piece like you did to sonic boom OP, but i would love to read a piece like for starbound.

good work OP, if you're one the autistic sonic fans out there, you can be assured you're one of the best, wouldn't even mind if i saw you running with your arms stretched in your back.

>>1577
There's few companies that take fans seriously when they create work that has merits. Even though it's usually the fans who understand their franchise more than they do.

>>1620
I'll see what I can find. Spore is a special case in that it had a lot of marketing power behind it, it may have a beneficial or detrimental effect on how easy it is to find the development documentation on the game.

>>1626
>i would love to read a piece like for starbound.
Starbound would require some snooping in between indie devs who haven't officially established themselves but I'll see what I can find.

>good work OP, if you're one the autistic sonic fans out there, you can be assured you're one of the best, wouldn't even mind if i saw you running with your arms stretched in your back.
Not even a sanic fan, I was just impressed by how they managed to fuck up the game. Might go through with the Half Life idea at some point.

>>1628
Agreed completely. The insult "They're ex-naughty dog devs for a reason" has been legitimized by how far they've fallen from grace. The only reason they still get praise is the corrupt press.

>>1632
>Its truly great to see a serious discussion about vidya without any cancer.
This board is generally cancer free, I like it this way.

>I think I will contribute later on by finding more about not necessaries a game which is shit but a company that has gone to shit and has been creating mediocre/shit games for quite a while. That company will be: Capcom . I am truly curious as to why their quality in games has dropped.
I look forward to it. Capcom has a strange history.

Thanks everybody.

>>1620
Alright so here's my list so far
>Spore
>Half Life 1
>The Order 1886
>Starbound
I'll begin writing stuff up soon.

>>1620
>>1850
>Spore
I will never recover. Much like this poor fellow.

Fucked up the post the first time, lets try this again.

Also, if you have anything specific you want me to look into - I'm gonna look into the story and the audio issues on my own - let me know.

Alright, I've got some information regarding Sonic Chronicles (gonna expand on this later, but here is what I can gleam so far)

Sonic Chronicles released in late September of 2008, after "supposedly" starting development in 2006. That's a broad timeframe as it is, but we have a few hints to tell us just how late development may have started on the title.

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=3965181&authType=NAME_SEARCH&authToken=iXlS&locale=en_US&srchid=3649639921425933040215&srchindex=14&srchtotal=18&trk=vsrp_people_res_name&trkInfo=VSRPsearchId%3A3649639921425933040215%2CVSRPtargetId%3A3965181%2CVSRPcmpt%3Aprimary%2CVSRPnm%3A

Notice Lead Programmer - Handheld Group. Mark was working on Handheld development back in November of 2006 - so at the very earliest, the game was being developed at that time. However, it is also noted within this IGN interview (http://www.ign.com/articles/2008/02/15/sonic-chronicles-the-dark-brotherhood-interview) that "Development began in 2006 when BioWare started looking into developing for handheld systems. The actual Sonic project came along later."

In other words, although "development" may have started in November of 2006, the development necessary for the Sonic game didn't start until later - probably closer to May 2007, since that is when our friend Mark became a project lead. What does this mean? Well; Sonic Chronicles was developed in about a year and a half. Mind you, this includes EVERYTHING about the title - programming, audio, design, story… everything. Also worth noting, is that according to an interview on an australian vidya site
(palgn.com.au/article.php?id=12392), Bioware had difficulty adjusting to such a drastic change in development. Considering that during at least some of the project's development they were working on Mass Effect 2, as well as Dragon Age: Origins - it makes sense that development would have some difficulties.

Finally, for another piece of the puzzle; you need to understand that Bioware might have been under some stress to release the project by a certain date. Archie released a comic "prologue" to the game a few months before it launched, complete with recommendation to purchase the game to see the rest of the story (http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Archie_Sonic_the_Hedgehog_Issue_191) - and as such SEGA may have wanted the game out the door following the issues release to maximize sales. A good example of this latter point would be the audio situation (which I'll go over tomorrow, along with the other issues that occurred during the development of the title.)

>>2334
Forgot to add this picture.

Half Life
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Developer: VALVe
Platform: PC, PS2 port
Engine: GoldSource

This one is for those who are unfamiliar with the development process or history of Half Life and Valve. I recognize that there will be a fairly large chunk of you who won't see anything new, but I think anyone who doesn't know of it already will find it interesting. This story is all about a few geeks trying to make the best game they could, at the dismay of a publisher who didn't care about quality and just wanted them to release the fucking game already. It shows a lot of the attitude and codes that valve still runs by today.

>Valve was founded by longtime Microsoft employees Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington on August 24, 1996,[3][4] as an L.L.C. based in Kirkland, Washington. After incorporation in April 2003,[5] it moved from its original location to Bellevue, Washington, the same city in which their original publisher, Sierra On-Line, Inc., was based.
Gabe Newell, and Mike had just come hot off of Microsoft, they were one of the original 13 employees and their employee stocks had grown thousand-fold since they started. They were rich, so Gabe decided to follow his dream into computer entertainment after Micheal Abrash left MSoft to work at id software. Mike and Gabe used their own money fund Valve and Half-Life through these means. They used their connection with Micheal Abrash at id to get a license for the Quake Engine.

Where did Gabe come from? He's a drop-out from Harvard University who began working on the first three Windows releases for MSoft.

>His favorite games are Super Mario 64, Doom, and Star Trek played on a Burroughs mainframe computer. Doom convinced him that video games were the future of entertainment, and Super Mario 64 convinced him that video games were art.[18]

Essentially he was my fucking nigga.

Now Sierra Software. These days you'll know them as a sub-division of Activision after they were absorbed some years back. But they have a long standing history in videogames before that too.

>Sierra Entertainment, Inc.[1] is an American video-game developer and publisher founded in 1979 as On-Line Systems by Ken and Roberta Williams. Based in Oakhurst, California and later in Fresno, California, the company is owned by Activision, a subsidiary of Activision Blizzard.

They're old blood at the time for valve, and their publishing deal quickly turned into an uneasy alliance over time. Partly because of Sierra trying to push Valve, and partly because Valve wouldn't budge on release dates, milestones, or perceivable progress and wasn't able to promise large returns on the game until they knew what they were making.

Continued…

>>2687
Another bit I forgot to add on the big man himself
>Newell quit Microsoft in 1996 and cashed in his stock options to launch Valve that year. He has put a daunting $15 million-plus of his own money into the company, buying out a cofounder and eschewing venture capital backing. He was inspired by the story of Id Software, producers of Doom and Quake, two massive PC hits that let amateur designers modify the games’ code to change details and scenery. One popular mod inserted Homer Simpson as the main shooter.
I can get more info on his life as an MSoft employee but I don't think it's necessary.

PART 0: What is Half Life? We don't fucking know yet

Originally called Quiver (reference to The Mist, some of their inspirational material) Valve decided in their concept phase to make Half Life a first person horror shooter. A lot of effort was placed into making it as immersive as possible.
>According to Teasley, they wanted Half-Life to "scare you like Doom did".[36] Newell felt that "Half-Life in many ways was a reactionary response to the trivialization of the experience of the first person genre. Many of us had fallen in love with videogames because of the phenomenological possibilities of the field, and felt like the industry was reducing the experiences to least common denominators rather than exploring those possibilities. Our hope was that building worlds and characters would be more compelling than building shooting galleries."[37]

At one point an employee had brought in his relative who did artwork, and Gabe wanted to meet him. He brought his usual portfolio but upon hearing that he also did horror art, Gabe wanted to see that too. They geeked out for hours over horror, vidya, and monster concepts. Pic related. Gabe asked the artist how such a monster worked, and the artist talked about how he would rape the player to death, his relative employee was worried Gabe would cringe at the thought but instead Gabe thought it was brilliant. You can still find Mr. Friendly data in Half Life.

Here's what you probably didn't know, in 1996 VALVe was also working on a second title called Prospero. Mark Laidlaw, the writer of HL, was working on it primarily and was originally only going to do two week's work on Half Life before it shipped. Prospero was a game about psionics in a cyberpunk setting, and an MMO focus. It's at one point that the project was scrapped and the team on Prospero was absorbed into Half Life.
More info on Prospero here: http://www.valvetime.net/threads/prospero-database-episode-3.245352/

PART 1: The Quaking Engine

It is said that on its way to becoming GoldSource, 70% of the Quake Engine's code was rewritten by VALVe for Half Life 1. A lot of the stuff they added was revolutionary at the time and set the bar for many games to come, you can likely recognize these practices used in most games today.

Additions:
>Dynamic Surface Updating. Allowing surfaces to contain bullet hole, explosive marks, and blood textures on walls, floors and other surfaces. Also led to Sprays.
>Scripted events
>Audio programming. Being able to hear enemies talk to each other over radio, grunts, etc.
>Skeletal animation system. Saving a ton of space for animation. Instead of having an animation file be composed of every single frame of an animation, the skeletal animation system just saved the movements of the skeleton. Condensing these files from 500 mb (EACH), into 100 bytes. 40 seconds of monster animations could be condensed into a few hundred kilobytes. Also made the animations transferable to different models and skins instead of making a new animation to make a different act out what is essentially the same animation.
>Better AI. First time flanking maneuvers were seen in an FPS

Despite this massive progress in technology, by 1997 VALVe still wasn't anywhere near to delivering a finished product. From an intervew:

> Our initial target release date was November 1997 — a year before the game actually shipped. This date would have given Valve a year to develop what was in essence a fancy Quake TC (Total Conversion — all new artwork, all new levels). By late September 1997, nearing the end of our original schedule, a whole lot of work had been done, but there was one major problem — the game wasn’t any fun.
>Yes, we had some cool monsters, but if you didn’t fight them exactly the way we had planned they did really stupid things. We had some cool levels, but they didn’t fit together well. We had some cool technology, but for the most part it only showed up in one or two spots. So you couldn’t play the game all the way through, none of the levels tied together well, and there were serious technical problems with most of the game. There were some really wonderful individual pieces, but as a whole the game just wasn’t working.
>The obvious answer was to work a few more months, gloss over the worst of the problems and ship what we had. For companies who live and die at the whim of their publishers, this is usually the route taken — with predictable results. Since Valve is fairly independent, and since none of us believed that we were getting any closer to making a game we could all like, we couldn’t see how a month or two would make any significant difference. At this point we had to make a very painful decision — we decided to start over and rework every stage of the game.

The game wasn't very good and needed a lot of design work. A LOT. And by that point they still didn't have an actual Game Designer, and it showed.

Continued…

>>2756
If anyone is reading this shit, I'd love to hear feedback, and requests to possible leads you'd like to hear more about.

PART 2: Designing Half Life

So Half Life as we know it tech-wise was pretty much there, save for some performance issues they would later resolve, but in terms of design was a mess. It wasn't very good, the level design was spotty and neither the team nor the playtesters had much confidence in it as a game. This was the major decision for them to delay the game the first time, because Gabe wouldn't release an unfinished product. A code they keep by today, and one I think all game developers should be able to afford (but can't in this cruel world).

They were slaving over computers for nights at a time, their main programmer was inputting many more times of lines of code than he was in his previous job at a corporate software company.

Now the rest of the team was put into a brainstorming session, they each had to bring something to the table that would result in a fun design choice. And this is how VALVe still operates in development, they create mini-teams or sometimes work alone in creating a mechanic, level design quirk, or monster that changes the game for the better and then they bring it all back together to see what fits together and what doesn't. Iterative process to the extreme. What they ended up with was a demo level including many of the quirks each level in Half Life is based around, one level. And this was close to their deadline! Sierra software suits came into the studio and pressured Gabe and Mike to release the game as is so that they wouldn't have to push it back but Gabe took a "It's done when it's done" stance on the whole deal.

>We set up a small group of people to take every silly idea, every cool trick, everything interesting that existed in any kind of working state somewhere in the game and put them into a single prototype level. When the level started to get fun, they added more variations of the fun things. If an idea wasn’t fun, they cut it. When they needed a software feature, they simplified it until it was something that could be written in a few days. They all worked together on this one small level for a month while the rest of us basically did nothing. When they were done, we all played it. It was great. It was Die Hard meets Evil Dead. It was the vision. It was going to be our game. It was huge and scary and going to take a lot of work, but after seeing it we weren’t going to be satisfied with anything less. All that we needed to do was to create about 100 more levels that were just as fun. No problem.

Now they needed to find out how to pace all the design decisions of this demo level and extrapolate it through the rest of the game. They ended up taking the design choice of separating every interesting bit through distance allowing the player to set up his own pace.

>The second step in the pre-cabal process was to analyze what was fun about our prototype level. The first theory we came up with was the theory of "experiential density" — the amount of "things" that happen to and are done by the player per unit of time and area of a map. Our goal was that, once active, the player never had to wait too long before the next stimulus, be it monster, special effect, plot point, action sequence, and so on. Since we couldn’t really bring all these experiences to the player (a relentless series of them would just get tedious), all content is distance based, not time based, and no activities are started outside the player’s control. If the players are in the mood for more action, all they need to do is move forward and within a few seconds something will happen.

If only gamedevs these days could take this attitude
>The second theory we came up with is the theory of player acknowledgment. This means that the game world must acknowledge players every time they perform an action. For example, if they shoot their gun, the world needs to acknowledge it with something more permanent than just a sound — there should be some visual evidence that they’ve just fired their gun. We would have liked to put a hole through the wall, but for technical and game flow reasons we really couldn’t do it. Instead we decided on "decals" — bullet nicks and explosion marks on all the surfaces, which serve as permanent records of the action. This also means that if the player pushes on something that should be pushable, the object shouldn’t ignore them, it should move. If they whack on something with their crowbar that looks like it should break, it had better break. If they walk into a room with other characters, those characters should acknowledge them by at least looking at them, if not calling out their name. Our basic theory was that if the world ignores the player, the player won’t care about the world.
>A final theory was that the players should always blame themselves for failure. If the game kills them off with no warning, then players blame the game and start to dislike it. But if the game hints that danger is imminent, show players a way out and they die anyway, then they’ll consider it a failure on their part; they’ve let the game down and they need to try a little harder. When they succeed, and the game rewards them with a little treat — scripted sequence, special effect, and so on — they’ll feel good about themselves and about the game.

But they still needed a game designer, and where would they find one? Turns out the answer was inside them all along

>Throughout the first 11 months of the project we searched for an official "game designer," — someone who could show up and make it all come together. We looked at hundreds of resumes and interviewed a lot of promising applicants, but no one we looked at had enough of the qualities we wanted for us to seriously consider them the overall godlike "game designer" that we were told we needed. In the end, we came to the conclusion that this ideal person didn’t actually exist. Instead, we would create our own ideal by combining the strengths of a cross section of the company, putting them together in a group we called the "Cabal."

What the fuck was the cabal?

>The goal of this group was to create a complete document that detailed all the levels and described major monster interactions, special effects, plot devices, and design standards. The Cabal was to work out when and how every monster, weapon, and NPC was to be introduced, what skills we expected the player to have, and how we were going to teach them those skills. As daunting as that sounds, this is exactly what we did. We consider the Cabal process to have been wildly successful, and one of the key reasons for Half-Life’s success.

Essentially it was the first real Game Design Document. One that has become almost like a template for modern design docs. The group itself around the cabal was the prototype for their current design meeting sessions, the format of forum they use to discuss design today.

>Cabal meetings were semi-structured brainstorming sessions usually dedicated to a specific area of the game. During each session, one person was assigned the job of recording and writing up the design, and another was assigned to draw pictures explaining the layout and other details. A Cabal session would typically consist of a few days coming up with a mix of high level concepts for the given area, as well as specific events that sounded fun.

>Once enough ideas were generated, they would be reorganized into a rough storyline and chronology. Once this was all worked out, a description and rough sketch of the geometry would be created and labeled with all the key events and where they should take place. We knew what we wanted for some areas of the game from the very start, but other areas stayed as "outdoors" or "something with a big monster" for quite some time. Other areas were created without a specific spot in the game. These designs would sit in limbo for a few weeks until either it became clear that they weren’t going to fit, or that perhaps they would make a good segue between two other areas. Other portions were created to highlight a specific technology feature, or simply to give the game a reason to include a cool piece of geometry that had been created during a pre-cabal experiment. Oddly enough, when trying to match these artificial constants, we would often create our best work. We eventually got into the habit of placing a number of unrelated requirements into each area then doing our best to come up with a rational way to fit them together. Often, by the end of the session we would find that the initial idea wasn’t nearly as interesting as all the pieces we built around it, and the structure we had designed to explain it actually worked better without that initial idea. This is what a piece from the cabal session would look like.

>During Cabal sessions, everyone contributed but we found that not everyone contributed everyday. The meetings were grueling, and we came to almost expect that about half of the group would find themselves sitting through two or three meetings with no ideas at all, then suddenly see a direction that no one else saw and be the main contributor for the remainder of the week. Why this happened was unclear, but it became important to have at least five or six people in each meeting so that the meetings wouldn’t stall out from lack of input.

Can't imagine what that's like, to have a meeting stall from lack of ideas. Me and my partner in crime are brimming with ideas in every discussion we have, and our dynamic just helps us generate more.

>The Cabal met four days a week, six hours a day for five months straight, and then on and off until the end of the project. The meetings were only six hours a day, because after six hours everyone was emotionally and physically drained. The people involved weren’t really able to do any other work during that time, other than read e-mail and write up their daily notes.

Oh fuck nevermind, six hours a day, now I see it.

>The initial Cabal group consisted of three engineers, a level designer, a writer, and an animator. This represented all the major groups at Valve and all aspects of the project and was initially weighted towards people with the most product experience (though not necessarily game experience). The Cabal consisted only of people that had actual shipping components in the game; there were no dedicated designers. Every member of the Cabal was someone with the responsibility of actually doing the work that their design specified, or at least had the ability to do it if need be.

And this is why idea guys are never good. People who take part in gamedev already have their own ideas of design, and concepts they want to make, it's because ideas are cheap and implementation is what matters most. And the people who best know how to implement ideas, are those familiar with that implementation.

>The first few months of the Cabal process were somewhat nerve wracking for those outside the process. It wasn’t clear that egos could be suppressed enough to get anything done, or that a vision of the game filtered through a large number of people would be anything other than bland. As it turned out, the opposite was true; the people involved were tired of working in isolation and were energized by the collaborative process, and the resulting designs had a consistent level of polish and depth that hadn’t been seen before.

Point proven.

>Internally, once the success of the Cabal process was obvious, mini-Cabals were formed to come up with answers to a variety of design problems. These mini-Cabals would typically include people most effected by the decision, as well as try to include people completely outside the problem being addressed in order to keep a fresh perspective on things. We also kept membership in the initial Cabal somewhat flexible and we quickly started to rotate people through the process every month or so, always including a few people from the last time, and always making sure we had a cross section of the company. This helped to prevent burn out, and ensured that everyone involved in the process had experience using the results of Cabal decisions.

Something that as a large company, they could afford to do. As an indie dev, burnout is an ever-present threat because you can't just have someone fill in for you, you take a day off and nothing will get done that day unless the rest of the team is working enough to fill your lack of effort.

> The final result was a document of more than 200 pages detailing everything in the game from how high buttons should be to what time of the day it was in any given level. It included rough drawings of all the levels, as well as work items listing any new technology, sounds, or animations that those levels would require.

>We also ended up assigning one person to follow the entire story line and to maintain the entire document. With a design as large as a 30-hour movie, we ended up creating more detail than could be dealt with on a casual or part-time basis. We found that having a professional writer on staff was key to this process. Besides being able to add personality to all our characters, his ability to keep track of thematic structures, plot twists, pacing, and consistency was invaluable.

This ended up being a pretty efficient process for dealing with the design of the game.

Continued…

>>2687
>Super Mario 64 convinced him that video games were art
Even the most influential person in videogaming can't fucking discover that videogames are media, not art.

>>3174
Media is an art medium, whether you want it to be or not.

>>3197
>>3198
>Postmodern art
If you're arguing by postmodern art "standards" then everything passes and this argument doesn't even fucking matter and nobody in here would take it seriously.

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?