#Development Hell

[joskippy]

What year is it

[askagamedev]

The time required to develop games has been getting longer and longer. Do you think there's any solution to reduce this time, like some kind of technological innovation, for example?

Development times haven't really gotten longer and longer, except in the outlier special cases (e.g. Grand Theft Auto, Elder Scrolls). What generally happens is that you see these games in the news that have had long incubation or troubled development periods where they keep going in circles for years, and then finally must commit to finishing the game and take two to three years to ship the game.

The real way to stop this from happening is a stronger production team that enforces decision commitment and completion urgency on the development team. There's no technology in the world that can make commitment-phobic leadership finalize needed decisions. In many such situations, making a real choice means accepting the benefits and drawbacks of that choice. Real drawbacks are always less appealing than a theoretically yet-undiscovered perfect answer without any drawbacks, even if a perfect solution isn't actually feasible. Lack of decision commitment is the primary reason for long, meandering development cycles.

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[whiterose-fans-blog]

Well, Rooster Teeth just got shut down.

Everyone's fired.

Warner Brothers is looking to sell RWBY and Red vs. Blue.

Today sucks.

[dougielombax]

Halo 2 is so unfinished and FULL of scrapped content that it’s actually INSANE!!!

I knew it had a troubled development.

But fucking hell!

I never realised just how troubled until a lot of the recent revelations from former devs and the Digsite project have now come to light.

I mean FUCK!

It’s a miracle the game was even launched in a playable state!

[the-uncanny-dag]

Desperation poll

[conkreetmonkey]

PREDICTION POLL: Which will be finished first, Hiveswap or Andrew Hussie's natural lifespan?

Important notes to aid your guess:

Hussie is currently 43 years old, meaning he's about halfway through a typical human lifespan, give or take. This is assuming no huge medical advances occur within the next few decades that bump up the average a significant amount.

Hussie's net worth is estimated at over $1 million, which is nothing to sniff at but also nothing mind-blowing, so he's not getting any cyborg upgrades or anything. Given the dismal state of his franchise and the not-nonexistent possibility of a lawsuit based on the undelivered promises of his multimillion dollar Kickstarter, this number can only be expected to go down over time, further cementing a standard human lifespan.

If Hiveswap is cancelled, for the purposes of this poll, it will be considered "finished" and Hussie will be declared the winner by default. (Also he'll like 100% get sued into oblivion, but that's irrelevant)

Work is *allegedly* being done on the project, but then again, that's the case for Homestuck 2, and that's not even worth a poll because it's currently set to "outlive" the heat death of the universe. That's a little unfair, though, as there is very real evidence of development (character art, backgrounds), and What Pumpkin objectively does exist as a company with employees that do work of some kind. Still, it remains a distinct possibility that this is all a front for an intentionally meandering, aimless development process so Hussie can run out the clock and not have to face the repurcussions of somehow misplacing $2.5 million.

[courseyoulovemeyoudontknowme]

Planet of the Apes (2001, Tim Burton)

31/03/2024

Planet of the Apes is a 2001 film directed by Tim Burton.

It is a remake of the 1968 film of the same name, based on the novel Planet of the Apes (La Planète des singes) di Pierre Boulle.

In the year 2029, the daring astrounat Leo Davidson works in the Oberon space base in close contact with primates trained to carry out space missions; His favorite is Pericles, a chimpanzee. Once inside, Leo loses all contact with the Oberon and ends up crash-landing in the swamp of the alien planet of Ashlar, in the year 5021.

Leo will soon discover that this planet is populated by talking, evolved anthropomorphic apes who treat humans like slaves. The astrounat, captured by the apes, is later bought by a human trader named Limbo, a greedy and inept orangutan.

Due to a series of circumstances Leo manges to escape from prison and frees other humans and slaves, including the gorilla ex-soldier Krull, whose military career was destroyed by the evil general Thade, a chimpanzee, who manages the hunt to humans since the death of his father Zaius and is assisted by the ferocious gorilla Colonel Attar. The destination of the escape is "Calima", a sacred place for the monkeys, the temple of their god Seamus: according to their religion, in that place the god gave rise to the life of the monkeys.

In the finale, Leo reaches Earth in what he believes is his time, crashing near Washington. Walking inside the Lincoln Memorial, Leo is horrified to discover that the giant statue of the president possesses the face of General Thade.

The film came to light after a very intense development hell: ideas for a remake of Planet of the Apes date back to the 1980s, when Adam Rifkin was brought to 20th Century Fox studios with the desire to make a new film about apes. His film was to be called Return to the Planet of the Apes and described apes in Greco-Roman customs and habits fighting against a society of intelligent humans, the lineage of the protagonists of the 1968 classic, inspired by films such as Spartacus.

Peter Jackson later wanted to adapt a similar project in which the ape society was modeled after Renaissance culture and Roddy McDowall, the actor who had played Cornelius and Caesar in the original films, was open to the idea of having a part in the role of a monkey with an appearance inspired by Leonardo da Vinci. Jackson, however, dedicated himself to the creation of heavenly Creatures and only decided to resume the project in 1998, only to abandon it again when McDowall's death took away his enthusiasm.

[shadowsofthegun-if]

^^me fighting the urge to just refer to guns vaguely because ive spent the last hour looking at time accurate ones and literally cant tell them apart

[grayrazor]

Y'know, it's actually a little disappointing that the only ideas that seem to be going around for System Shock 3 are "nostalgia bait time travel story."

Like, SS2 is basically a completely separate story from 1 aside from a SHODAN cameo.

[sorrowfulwill]

me: alright all I need to do is make the banner and the pfp for the ask blog and I’ll be done that’s it.

also me: *procrastinates my own passion project by making Will in a sweater with puppies for a wholesome boob joke*

[askagamedev]

How much code is reused from game demos sent to publishers? Since developers don't have much time to create a good architecture at first and have to rush things, do they have to rewrite things from scratch once it gets in production?

The most common answer in all of game dev is always "it depends". Most game development falls along a spectrum with one extreme end being "well-oiled machine" (i.e. a project where almost everything is already well-established) and the opposing end being "no idea where they're going and holding on for dear life" (i.e. everything is new and vision/direction is constantly changing). Qualities like clarity of vision, team leadership, and total team experience will determine where on this spectrum each project falls.

If the development process is disciplined and things are proceeding to plan, the demos we show to the executives are not far removed from the final versions we release to the public because things are proceeding as expected. The better-established the game and its feature set, the easier it often is to develop. Franchise games like Madden, COD, or Assassin's Creed, or long-running games like World of Warcraft have a well-established formula, very experienced teams, and a deep tool chest that allow games and game content to be built very quickly and efficiently. They are well-oiled machines that don't often have to reinvent the wheel because they've been using and improving on that process for many years already. They know exactly what they are building and are very good at delivering it. Any demo they build to show off work in progress will be very close to what will be shown in the final version of the game. Very little work will need to be redone.

If development is troubled and the team is having difficulty hitting their goals and milestones on time for whatever various reasons, then the demos will reflect that. Most troubled development executive demos tend to be smoke and mirrors, with a lot of hacks and demo-exclusive assets that are held together by bubblegum and a prayer. These kind of demos can cause the team to enter into a death spiral because cobbling a bunch of hacks together for a demo actually puts the team even further behind schedule because we can't use those kind of hacks in real production. This means that these teams need to build almost everything twice (at least) - a hacky rushed way for the demo and then the "real" way. They constantly need to "catch up", but the hacks they put in place often cause instabilities and [technical debt] that must be addressed later on, which puts them further and further behind. This is commonly known as development hell.

These are, of course, the two extreme ends of a single spectrum. Most game development projects fall somewhere along that spectrum. More experienced and established franchises lean towards the "well-oiled machine" side because they've had all the bad practices beaten out of them over the years. Most new IP and experimental gameplay tends to lean more towards the wild-and-crazy side of the spectrum, because there are too many [unknown unknowns] on projects like that. If you ever find yourself repeatedly behind the 8-ball crunching to put together many demos in a row with lots of hacks, you may wish to consider parlaying the firefighting skills you've learned into a job elsewhere.

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[dynared]

A tale of a writer in development hell, faking he likes an IP, but missing the process as the strike drags on. Worthy of pity or scorn? You make the call.

[dougielombax]

Halo fans: Why don’t 343 Industries do THIS!

343 Industries: Okay then. *does EXACTLY what the fans want for the content update*

Halo fans: Disgraceful! 343 industries has gone TOO far! Halo is dead! (What, again?) Unbravo Vince! Unvrabo Bince! Hire fans! Fire Hans! DISGRACEFUL! The series has been RUINED!

Like I said.

Unpleasable.

[adrianathetransbitch]

@missmiyukidreams , thoughts on my stories?

[davrosfan23]

Oh what could have been. This could the resurrection of a beloved franchise or a Trojan horse wearing the flesh of a beloved franchise….to pass itself off as a beloved IP but who can say for sure