#console development

[askagamedev]

With heightened levels of security when it comes to development kits, SDKs, etc., does it negatively affect how efficiently/well a studio can develop a game?

It doesn't really affect us that much. Most studios are constantly operating under some level of NDA, whether that's unreleased future games, unreleased future game content, or other things. Since we're always already working under NDA, having more NDA doesn't really do much.

The only time it gets a little weird is when only some part of the studio is working on unreleased game console work. Normally it still isn't that big a deal - all those working on the new console(s) get moved to a different part of the office so accidental NDA breaks get minimized. This doesn't always work perfectly - during the PS4/XBone leadup they eventually marked the greater area where my desk was located as NDAed territory but forgot to NDA me - but no plan is perfect. I was eventually NDAed when they realized it and brought on to work on the new consoles anyway. Aside from that, we really only have to hide the console NDA stuff when visitors come. Sometimes our offices will have holiday celebrations (e.g. an office trick-or-treat event for the kids at Halloween or an office holiday party with families). In those situations, our workstations are either off or locked, and the console prototypes are covered up so nobody sees them.

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[askagamedev]

Is direct console development (for a multi-platform title) only about certification requirements and console specific bug fixing, or is there more to it?

There's two sides to console development. There's the software certification side, which is what you asked about - all of the cert requirements and fixing console-specific and certification bugs like using the proper glyphs, using the copyrighted terms, and so on. The other side is actually setting up the software at the engine level to interface with the hardware drivers and utilize the game hardware. This tends to be the really crunchy programming work done by senior software engineers who really love playing with hardware.

All software needs to interact with the actual hardware at some point - there must be data sent to the hardware and the hardware has to operate on those data. There are often many layers of abstraction between the hardware and the software - most programmers don't need to think about how the math is done, only that the math is done. It's the experts who work with the hardware that do what they can to squeeze additional performance out of that hardware in the time they have allotted to do so.

One such example would be back in the PS3 days. The PS3 famously had a bunch of "synergistic processing units" (SPUs) that could do a bunch of math very quickly, but required a special half-float format to operate. Most game dev teams didn't bother to utilize those SPUs for that reason - it took a lot of additional effort to set up the software to store data in that format, send them to the SPUs for calculation, and then convert those data back to the normal floating point precision numbers we usually use. Some teams like Naughty Dog's Uncharted team, however, took full advantage of the SPUs and used them for the post-processing effects to make Uncharted 2 look so good.

This is the other side of console development - writing code to take advantage of the specific hardware bells and whistles and squeezing out better visuals and performance from the hardware that's waiting to be used.

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[askagamedev]

How do pro consoles affect what happens to developing games if any, considering you have to make a game that also has to work on the less powerful console.

We typically have a "target" platform that we're primarily aiming at. That's what gets the majority of the work, that's what we build our stuff on. That might be the PS5, the PC, or whatever. Our target platform is typically the platform we believe will make up the largest percentage of our player base. We make all of our stuff work on that platform first and foremost. Then, we have our artists and engineers do extras and optimization (depending on the budget) for the other platforms. Most of the time that means paring things down for weaker platforms like the Switch or min-spec PCs, but it also means adding in the extra visual bells and whistles for the enthusiast PC with beefier specs and/or the Pro version of game consoles. The general priorities are, in order:

Make it work

Make it fast

Make it pretty

You can probably guess where work for the "pro" consoles fall in the priority list.

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[gaminglinkmedia]

Game Dev Tycoon #3 - Rise of a Gaming Empire

Game Dev Tycoon #3 – Rise of a Gaming Empire

Last time we fell to the vile clutches of bankruptcy, now this time we rose above ourselves and survived.

Last time I did indeed go bankrupt! I started the level over and instead of showing you all the tutorials and the bits that I have done already I went ahead to the approximate time where I went bankrupt. So with that said lets dive into the void!

In order to survive I had to take out…

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[gaminglinkmedia]

Game Dev Tycoon #2 - Rising of a Gaming Empire!

Here at Rhombus we strive to create fantastic games driving ourselves towards the genre of RPGs

Last we left off we were given the chance to move into a new building which I gladly accepted! Once here it was told we could hire more employees but first we needed some training, Staff Management. Using this new knowledge we hired Parker & Preston and began our work.

Although we expected that the…

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