Lightning Mailbag: Baggy Pants
It’s time for another lightning mailbag, because I’ve accumulated a bunch of questions with suitably short answers.
Which dev kit is easy to use & which one is your personal favortie?
Microsoft traditionally has the easiest and least painful dev kits to develop for.
Multiple save slots for a game seem to have fallen out of favor as compared to the past. Any thoughts on why this is?
Most games without multiple save slots are probably actively discouraging players from save scumming.
What is the current purpose of a lives system?
Having a limited number of attempts gives the player’s actions a greater sense of urgency and weight. If you know you have to risk something (progress made), you’ll play more carefully. It can be a double-edged sword if gameplay requires a lot of trial and error to learn though; it multiplies the frustration if the requirements aren’t properly communicated to the player.
You say curation is the holy grail of a storefront, but hasn't GOG been advertising a fully curated collection for a while now?
When I say “curation”, I mean an automated system that suggests offerings to customers with a high degree of accuracy. It’s something companies that Amazon, Netflix, Google, and Facebook have sunk millions into improving, because we all want to offer you things you’ll want to spend your money or time on.
To allow existing owners to download the game, all 13 episodes of Minecraft Story Mode have been temporarily relisted on the Xbox 360 store at $100 an episode. If someone were crazy enough to buy an episode, where would the money go?
It would probably get divided up the same way. Microsoft gets their 30% platform cut, then the rest would go to whoever owns the rights to Minecraft Story Mode. Any other standing agreements like the owners of the Minecraft license (which I believe is a different division of Microsoft) would take their cut from the 70% that wasn’t taken by platform.
So the announced Avengers game includes Avengers who look almost nothing like the actual Avengers. Since you've talked about copyright and game developement budgets a lot, do you have any insight on how much it would cost to get the actors actual likenesses in the game rather than... whatever that is we are getting instead?
Probably too much. I suspect that it would entail some flat fee to each actor for his or her likeness, and possibly a percentage of each sale. That said, I suspect the part would come from Disney’s cut for the licensing fee, which is probably why Disney didn’t do it.
How hard is it to get famous actors for stuff like motion capture/voices etc?
There’s two main issues with getting A-list Hollywood actors for video games - cost and scheduling. Cost should be obvious - Robert Downey Jr. can demand practically anything he wants for payment. Scheduling is a bit less obvious. Famous actors are often extremely busy living their lives - they get to choose what work they do and when they want to do it. If their availability window doesn’t match our production schedule, we can’t get them no matter how much we pay.
I've noticed in a console multiplayer game that the match loads quicker when I'm backfill in an ongoing match than when it's loading the beginning of the match. It feels significant, like a 30-50% shorter wait. What kinds of things might be causing that?
The matchmaking system is prioritizing backfilling existing matches over starting new matches up. I’d do that too, since an ongoing match that fails (especially in a team game) is often super unfun for the losing team, so it generates a lot more overall frustration than a player waiting in the queue for a fresh match.
Why do you think so many new developers have a trouble with adjusting the scope of a project? Would you attribute it due to lacking experience within development, thus believing that it's possible to do everything in one go?
Everybody has trouble adjusting the scope of a project. Even us veterans who have been doing it for ages have trouble adjusting the scope of the project. It’s worse for new devs because they have no context by which to gauge their estimates. They look at a game developed over years by a team of dozens of full time professional experts and think “That doesn’t look so hard. I could probably do that with my friends”. That’s why scoping down is really hard for newbies, it’s hard to gauge scope if your only reference points are games you’ve played and not things you’ve made.
The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.
[What is the FANTa project?] [Git the FANTa Project]
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