Craig Wotherspoon

Lead UI Programmer at Ubisoft Massive, Sweden. Currently working on Tom Clancy's The Division 2

[craigw1701]

Tales From the Trenches: AI Disaster Stories - S.Rabin, R.Graham, J.Abercrombie, A.Champandard, T.Karlsson, T.Humphreys

Number 78:

Video: 30 Mins. 10/10

I do really love these. It makes me feel better about my day-to-day job that these people I admire also do really crazy things sometimes and how they deal with it and improve and get better and then share the experience so others can learn from it. Amazing.

I do love the idea of more automated testing and it was fun to hear Alex talk about it. The Medic example from Tobias sounds so familiar! hehe It would have been funny to have a video of it :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Implementation of a component-based entity system in modern C++ - Vittorio Romeo

Number 77:

Video: 1 Hour 5 mins. 7/10

This was an interesting talk, where he did a good job of explaining the issues with the most popular implementations before going through his own.

My biggest issue would be working with this once the framework was finished. He only spent a little bit of time showing some use cases and it didn’t look the most friendly or scalable. If feels like a really great tech-demo or home project but I’m not sure it would be workable on a large scale project.

There was a lot of “modern” C++ code I’d never seen before (mostly the Metaprogramming and template code) so it was interesting to see their use in this situation.

Still, I’d like to find the time to look at the code in more depth and I’m glad he posted it so that i can :)

References:

https://github.com/SuperV1234/cppcon2015

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

The Second-System Effect - Frederick P. Brooks, JR.

Number 76:

Essay: 10/10

The Fifth essay from The Mythical Man-Month, this focuses on the problems that arise from creating a second system. The issues stem from having lots of ideas on how to do it better or things that weren’t done for time reasons and try to fit them all into this new Super-System.

The best way to get around this is to be mindful that you are not over engineering what you are designing.

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

The Division Podcast: Episode 10 – “We Live to Server” - Anders Holmquist

Number 75:

Audio: 30 Mins. 10/10

A really good breakdown of how The Division back end works, from how the Server is authoritative, to how the game can scale and the numbers of players and AI running on a single server.

Hopefully this helps explain to people how The Division works :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Keeping Level Designers in the Zone Through Level Editor Design - Robin-Yann Storm

Number 74:

Video: 1 Hour. 10/10

This was a really amazing talk about the UX of various editors and how little design decisions can make a huge impact on the development time and the developers Quality Of Life.

He talks pretty fast to cover everything that he does but it is always understandable and he does a great job explaining everything. It really makes me want to do the same tests with our internal tools and look if there are ways to improve them :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Programming Context-Aware Dialogue in The Last of Us - Jason Gregory

Number 73:

Video: 1 Hour. 10/10

A very nice talk on the Dialogue systems used in The Last Of Us, and how they created believable conversations between characters and enemies.

The Location Aware section was very interesting, where they allowed level design to tag areas and then enemies would include that in their barks, so if they were inside a building they would shout that, and if they were being a car the enemies would shout that too. This makes the AI feel much more believable.

Their scripting language also looked interesting and they way they could script together branching dialogue was cool :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

NYU Game Center Lecture Series: Tim Schafer

Number 72:

Video: 1 Hour 43 Mins. 10/10

I love Tim Schafer. I could listen to him talk for hours, he’s so funny and always has interesting things to say :)

I loved they way he showed off the prototype Double Fine made, and it reminded me a lot of working on Kinect games in the past. That whole presentation was amazing!

The presenter was also really good and the Q&A brought up lots of interesting stories and it was nice to hear what he has to say on so many topics :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Strategic Butt Coverings - Tropes vs Women in Video Games - Feminist Frequency

Number 71:

Video: 7 Mins. 10/10

It’s hard to not notice this now it has been pointed out. It’s quite embarrassing really. Then again, almost everything that is pointed out in these videos makes me embarrassed to be a game developer.

Anita did a very similar talk to this while visiting Massive a few months ago. The only difference between the two was really she was able to make more jokes and the talk was pretty funny. I can understand why it’s harder to do that in this format and they are more likely to be taken the wrong way :(

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Developing UX Practices at Epic Games - Celia Hodent

Number 70:

Video: 55 mins. 9/10

A very nice talk about UX and how we should better embed UX Designers into the game development process better. There was also some nice examples of how the UX effected the design of Epic’s Fortnite.

This, along with previous videos, makes me better understand the UX Designer’s role, and why it’s a good idea to always have UX in mind.

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

The Making of UNCHARTED 4: A Thief's End - The Evolution of a Franchise

Number 69:

Video: 8 Mins. 10/10

A really cool video explaining the evolution of the Uncharted series. I really like these developer videos and it really makes me want to go back and play the first two that I missed.

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

LIVE from GDC! State of Unreal Engine

Number 68:

Video: 8 hours 35 Mins. 8/10

There was some really interesting things, especially a the beginning. The new Sequencer, the facial capture and mapping was really good too.

I really like what Epic are doing with their engine and the way their Engine and even the new Unreal Tournament is all up on github for anyone to view and work on.

The VR Panel was also interesting, and very different from the VR panels from GDC last year (I’ve not watched the ones from this year yet :))

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Blending Autonomy and Control: Creating NPCs for 'Tom Clancy's The Division' - Philip Dunstan, Drew Rechner

Number 67:

Video: 1 Hour. 10/10

A really great breakdown on the NPCs that are in The Division, from the Game Designer and the AI Programmer who made them.

It was nice to show how the Archetypes were built and how they work together with other Archetypes as well as how their different behaviors work.

There was also a good section on working with Level Design, which was very important while working on The Division.

This was a really good talk and it even taught me some things I didn’t know :D

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Update

Who knew that the Post-Launch of a game could be busier than shipping? :p

I’ve still been watching videos and reading articles every day I’ve just not had time to write reviews of all of them. I’m going to hopefully try to catch up in the next week or so :)

[craigw1701]

“Intro to the C++ Object Model" - Richard Powell

Number 66:

Video: 47 Mins. 8/10

A really good intro to the C++ Object Model, especially for beginners..

I have to be honest and say I never actually knew what that meant until I watched this video. I already knew everything that he talked about, but I just didn’t realize that’s that it was called.

There was also lots of interesting discussions after the talk which were worth watching too :)

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

2016 Game Developers Choice Awards (And IGF Awards)

Number: 65

Video: 3 hours. 8/10 (Starts from about 28:40)

I don’t quite understand why games awards shows are always so awkward. It’s like the audience has never seen an award show before. Maybe other award shows have big “Applause” signs flashing above the stage, or maybe the people who go year-on-year have been trained and games isn’t quite there yet because of the constant stream of new talent. But it’s strange.

I was there two years ago and some of the behavior was disappointing. The Indie crowd booing when AAA games were mentioned which was so bad that the people who went to pick up the GTA award just walked straight though the stage.

Again this year, people not clapping when they should, not standing when they should, it’s disrespectful.

The show itself was pretty good, the random shorts in between were bizarre and not really sure why they were there. 

Todd Howard’s speech was a highlight (02:19:30) and I was genuinely inspired by his words.

The tribute to Satoru Iwata was truly wonderful and it made me cry a lot. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YG9INjO91Y) He will be sadly missed.

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

Antichamber: An Overnight Success, Seven Years In The Making - Alexander Bruce

Number 64:

Video: 53 Mins. 12/10

Truly amazing! I’ve never seen game development distilled down so much into one talk. His honesty is so incredibly refreshing and his “mantra” was really inspirational.

Everyone in games should watch it!

The emotion that this brought up in him was felt by myself as well. Making games is an incredibly difficult and every time I watch talks by Indie developers or things like Indie Game: The Movie I realize that there is no way I could ever do what these people are doing, I’m forever in awe!

I feel incredibly disappointed that, according to steam, I bought Antichamber on 12/07/2013 and I have yet to even install it! I will have to fix that ASAP!

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews

[craigw1701]

The Tar Pit - Frederick P. Brooks, JR.

Number 63:

Article: 10/10

A really great essay on why programming projects are so difficult to complete.

Even programs that are easy to write end up taking longer and longer when you have to make the program robust, stable, document and make general enough to be useful in situations you haven’t considered yet. Brooks states that this takes as much as 3 times as long.

The other side is if you need to write your program to be integrated into other systems, write nice interfaces etc, which can take 3 times as long as well.

Thus to make a total Programming system can take 9 times longer to write than the simple program

It also has a great section on the Joy and Woe of “the craft” of programming. The joy from creating and problem solving to the woe of having to depend on others code systems and having to be creative only within someone else’s vision and goal.

The Mythical Man-Month remains an incredible read for all software developers

2016 Challenge: 366 Days of Game Dev. On Twitter: @GameDevReviews