#game developer analysis

I watched the video. The opinion of the former employee gels with more junior employees I've worked with in the past - typically the perspective of devs who aren't privy to the decision-making process and lack the kind of context that's needed to understand the costs and benefits to the choices made. Here are a few specific thoughts I had on the various topics mentioned in the video.

Contract workers are often treated quite badly in our industry, especially those in QA. Contractors are the first to be let go, get little or no benefits for working, and are generally hired on through shell companies in order to protect the actual employers from liability. It's an unfortunate situation that's arisen from our legal system and extends far beyond the game industry.

Disagreeing with a major design decision like art direction is not at all uncommon. Leadership takes the responsibility on that one. I will be the first to admit that I've had my share of times where I disagreed with leadership and was right, as well as my share of times where I was dead wrong. I look back at the latter as valuable learning experiences.

I can tell that the person being interviewed doesn't really understand business because they'll say something vague about "record breaking profits" at the corporate level, but no solid information at any level below that. It doesn't matter that the overall company is profitable or not - each product that is developed still needs to justify its own existence via its accounting.

The pandemic, work from home, and return to office policies have affected the industry as a whole in many large ways. Publishing leadership sets the policy for the publisher, and studio leadership sets policy for the studio. My own publisher had different studios enact wildly different policies for work from home and return to office - one studio required all employees return to the office full time, while another only required two days per week.

It sounds like WayForward's engineering team and workflow faced a lot of challenges they had a hard time overcoming. I don't know whether this is because their team was shorthanded, lacked strong leadership, or just was always on the back foot and never able to stabilize due to a never-ending series fires that needed putting out. When everything is constantly on fire, it's extraordinarily difficult to get ahead. Remember, all tasks get prioritized. Fixing crashes is more important than adding new features like multiplayer or new units - crashes stop other dev team members from working, so the effect is multiplicative. I suspect that this was the root problem that caused the rest of the development to get caught in the development hell it sounds like.

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A context-sensitive action is an action that can only occur under a specific conditions. In order to allow them to be used, we need to detect that those conditions have been met. If all conditions are satisfied, we can offer the player the option of performing the action.

Imagine we're trying to add a fairly common context-sensitive action - vaulting over a waist-high wall and landing on our feet on the other side - to our game. In order to do this, we need a vaulting-into-landing animation and a way to detect a vaultable waist-high wall. What kind of conditions would need to be met in order to allow the player to vault over the wall? Here are some conditions that I think we would need to meet:

We cannot vault over a wall and land on ground that is a different height than what we started from or the animation won’t work (clip through the floor or land on thin air)

We can only vault over a waist-high wall that is exactly waist-height so that the animation does not clip through or float above the top of the wall

We cannot play the landing animation if there isn't enough ground on the other side of the wall for our feet to land on (no vaulting over a cliff or into another piece of geometry)

We cannot vault over the wall if the wall isn't thick enough for our character model to place hands on it as part of the vault

We may have to adjust the character model's position and orientation in order to ensure the correct approach angle and starting location

We shouldn't move the player too far or it will look really weird, so we need to restrict the player to certain facing angles and distances

This list of requirements sets specific limits of where in our levels we can place these vaultable walls. We can't put them in places where these conditions cannot be met, which means that we need a certain amount of clearance and open space around each vaultable wall. This effectively standardizes contextual actions within the level environment - the level designer can only place vaultable walls in areas that meet these conditions. This kind of constraint exists for all contextual actions - wall running must be at least this length and cover this much area and the player must approach from this angle, climbing a ledge must be at least this tall and have at least this much flat space on top to stand up after ascending, computer keyboards must be this height and this angle in order for the animations to line up, chairs must be a standardized height to match player sitting animations, all stair steps must be the same height in order for the player model's foot not to clip through them, and so on and so forth. If you carefully observe games like Uncharted and Tomb Raider while playing, you'll start seeing the standardization in terms of size, spacing, approach angle, etc. of many of their contextual actions.

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About a week ago, I posted an anonymous salary survey to try gathering compensation data from various industry contacts. I got 168 responses total and I’ve collated the results. I wasn’t too surprised by them. I’ll be posting more about them and breaking them down in other ways since I have a good amount of data to break down across different dimensions (seniority, discipline, location, salary statistics, etc.). That said, let’s get to the data.

First, we have the average salary by discipline broken down by seniority worldwide. The survey had only $150,000+ as the final bracket, so any bar with an average salary above $150,000 could be much higher. Artists saw the biggest jump in compensation to senior, while QA and Customer Support are the least compensated disciplines overall. Producers don’t really start pulling in the big money until they reach lead or executive status, while Programmers show a pretty regular and strong growth as they gain experience. This is just worldwide, however, so let’s take a look as we break it down by region.

I received the most responses from California by far, probably because the survey was circulated in a particularly large Californian game company’s internal slack. This encompasses both Southern California and Northern California. California is an expensive place to live! Pay across the board is significantly higher in California than worldwide averages. The only reported discipline in California that isn’t paid at least $50,000 per year on average is junior QA.

The salary for the rest of the USA is pretty low in comparison. These areas were broken down into the Midwest (mostly Chicago area), Seattle, Texas, East Coast, Utah, and Canada. Programmers continue to see the most reliable growth. Overall, you can definitely see that the general salary bands are lower if you aren’t in California, which corresponds to the cost of living. I do feel a little sorry for the folks from the Seattle area though, they have a cost of living approaching California’s and don’t get paid as much as Californians do.

Finally, we can take a look at Europe which is the aggregate of the responses I got from the UK, Ireland, Germany, Finland, France, and Sweden. The biggest thing you probably notice is significantly lower compensation across the board in Europe. Few disciplines pass the $50,000 annual mark. Even programmers, who tend to be the most all-around solid earners, barely break the $50,000 mark.

There were a few other responses from across the world - a handful from South America (Brazil), two from Southeast Asia (Singapore and Malaysia), one from Russia, and one from Iran, but I didn’t get enough responses to work them in. I would love it if I could get more data, perhaps from bigger Asian players like China and Japan, but this is still a pretty good first go. I think I knew the generalities, but never realized how low pay in Europe was across the board, or how much more California pays than the rest of the US.

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I find it helpful to think of a feeling or kind of experience that I want the player to have for the level I’m laying out. Maybe that feeling is “tall”, or “cold”, or “sliding”, or “enclosed”. Maybe I just finished building these cool jump pads that I wanted to use in interesting ways to navigate a space. I come up with a list of these things I want to include, and try to think of what I have that I can use to build a game environment in order to deliver that kind of experience.

Once I have a rough idea for the level itself, then I start thinking about individual bits. Let’s say I choose “cold” as the experience I want my player to feel. How do I do that? What things have I experienced that have made me feel really cold in the past and remind me of the cold? 

Walking slowly through snow banks

The sounds of snow crunching as I stepped on it

Getting wet and shivering

Seeing clouds in my breath

Wind blowing on me

Snow falling from the sky

Then I start thinking about crafting elements of this in my game. Maybe there’s an area where I will make the player move more slowly. Maybe there’s a spot where I can play sound effects. Maybe I’ll reduce or remove music from the level to add to a feeling of isolation in addition to cold and replace it with wind that comes and goes. If we can’t have the player fall through ice and get wet, maybe we can have the player rescue somebody from that kind of situation - a wet and shivering NPC who speaks with chattering teeth. I take these ideas and write them down.

These are all still separate ideas at work. Then I start thinking about the order I want my players to experience these ideas. Is there a natural-feeling progression? Maybe I start with the sounds and the wind, then build up to rescuing somebody from the ice? Maybe I want the rescued character to help sell the slow movement? How do I want the player’s interest curve to look for this level? Maybe I want to rearrange the order of the different experience bits for emphasis or increasing tension. Once I figure out a good progression for it, then I can start laying out the ideas in an actual environment, usually on my trusty whiteboard, noting down ideas as I go.

Once I’ve got a good progression for the level, then I can start mapping it out in space - where will the player begin, how long a distance from points of interest, what sort of landmarks would best serve to draw the player to the next area, and so on. Once I have this rough map of the environment down, I can start plunking down placeholder objects and spaces in my level editor to start carving out the overall shape and progression of the level.

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The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work too busy.

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Read it first, then hit the "read more” for my take so I don’t influence your initial reading.

Lightning Mailbags are a regular feature here where I can answer several questions with short answers in one post.

Why did Disney give EA an exclusive licence for Star Wars games? I can see why EA would benefit from such a deal, but what's in it for Disney?

A bigger cut and a proven track record of financial success.

How do dev's critique games? Seeing how vastly different the knowledge gap of games is between gamers and devs, I wanna know how you guys criticize each other on their work.

Most of the time we don’t critique an entire game in a professional setting. Usually, we examine a single, specific feature rather than the entire game because we’re discussing something specific. That said, if you want an idea of how my mind works when analyzing games, you can take a look at some of my old posts on some specific games

A little about Final Fantasy 13

A little about Bulletstorm

A little about Evolve

The AAGD Dragon Age Inquisition review

A little about Pokemon Sun and Moon

A little about Mass Effect: Andromeda

Features and polish, 2016

Features and polish, 2017

Why are a lot of studios located in the most expensive cities to live in in (i.e San Fransico, London, etc.) ?

A lot of game dev talent lives in those areas already. Some bigger publishers are willing to pay a lot more money to start up a studio in a more out-of-the-way location like EA did with Orlando, but it’s difficult (and expensive) to entice tech workers to relocate to a place like Wyoming or Nebraska.

There’s something I’ve been curious about for a while now (and I’m positive someone else has asked it before but I couldn’t find it in the FAQ) Why do game dev’s push for pre-orders so hard? I understand the appeal for the customer, devs and publishers love to tack on all sorts of pre-order bonuses. But what does the publisher get out of the deal? Why put so many resources into creating those pre-order bonuses?

[Click here] for a post I wrote about preorder bonuses that should answer most of your questions.

I’d also like to add that most preorder bonuses are very small in scope compared to anything else. Most preorder bonuses are built by the artists and designers that are not allowed to touch the actual game during the last few weeks of cert while the engineers iron out the certification issues, and have almost no engineering requirements. That’s why they’re often reskins, alternate weapons, or some other small bonus that has very little effect on the game overall.

Your simple stealth example is great on how game complexity quickly spirals out of control. However it seems that companies like Cloud Imperium Games and Hello Games then make your job more difficult because they promise so much to the players (we could even go back to Peter Molyneux). Do you see this over-promising contributing to the problem for the average developer?

It hasn’t been a problem for me. If they bring games like Star Citizen up, I use them as practical examples to explain how feature creep affects delivery schedules and budgets.

The FANTa Project is currently on hiatus while I am crunching at work.

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I’m finished with Mass Effect Andromeda and did a reasonably complete playthrough of it. I know that some folks like to read my thoughts on things, and the game’s reception has been mixed. This is not a comprehensive review, but it is a few observations that stood out while I was playing the game. I’ve been meaning to write this for some time, but then Persona 5 claimed my soul and I’ve only recently managed to extricate myself from that particular rabbit hole. I do plan on, eventually, writing some thoughts on P5 as well, but today you get MEA.

#1. Open-ish World is the new normal

Dragon Age Inquisition won Bioware a huge amount of faith from EA, and Mass Effect Andromeda was clearly designed to capitalize on DAI’s success. Exploration of new worlds is the core of the game. MMOG-ish quests continue to draw the player through new environments and encourage the exploration of large world maps. A variety of subsystems such as alien sudoku, scanning environmental objects for information, and driving a space car up mountainsides provide different things to do in between shooting and using various powers to kill bad guys. The new jump jet feature is a fantastic addition to the gameplay, especially in multiplayer. Locomotion just feels better due to this additional degree of freedom. There are a few issues with the jumping granularity on small ledges, of course, but the better handling of verticality in the environments adds a sense of satisfaction in the field distinctly lacking from DAI and previous Mass Effect games.

Pacing in the open world environments is also improved. The environments were designed with a sense of enormous scale in mind, similar to the planets of Star Wars: The Old Republic, and it helps reinforce the feeling of exploration. The ancient ruins are cavernous, building interiors are often large enough to drive a car through, and everything feels huge and open to the point of being able to see a landmark in the distance and head towards it from what feels like miles away. In that respect, MEA follows many of the classic environmental design patterns found in theme parks. Wherever the players are on the map, they can usually see at least one or two landmarks or points of interest to draw them towards it. This way, they never feel lost.

Generally, I found the world design better than DAI. The explorable planets felt mostly distinct from each other (aside from the two desert planets), I always had something interesting nearby that I could spot and visit, and they didn’t feel like the too-dense content trap of the Hinterlands, or extraordinarily sparse like the Hissing Wastes. I think the best part was that there were things to do on each planet after the initial visit, encouraging players to return later for additional gameplay. It was a good way to leverage content for further reuse.

#2. Growing Pains and Rough Edges

Obviously, creating large amounts of modular, disposable content to populate open worlds isn’t without its issues. Because there’s so much content that needs to be built and placed for an open world game, quality of each individual piece of content will suffer. That was clear in DAI, it’s clear in Bethesda’s open world games, and it’s certainly on full display with MEA. There are a large number of small bugs and issues, and the overall effect is the feeling of an unpolished game experience overall. 

These aren’t limited to any one particular field either; there’s plenty of issues with animation, scripting, texturing and lighting, visual effects, cinematics, enemy spawning, AI, UI, and so on. I’m purposely not using the term “bug” here, because some of these issues are clearly intentional. There were problems with dangling plot threads that were simply ignored, such as the Jien Garson/Eidetic Memory Trigger story bits. There were issues with social things like the introduction of the trans character on Eos. None of the squadmates feel particularly distinct in combat - I never felt a reason to bring Cora over Drack or encouraged to pair Vetra with Jaal outside of narrative reasons, and I feel like that’s a real lost opportunity because the squadmates have no distinct roles in gameplay other than “primer of combos” and “detonator of combos”. Overall, the game shows a general lack of polish.

#3. Trying hard is not a bad thing

For all of the negative reactions to aspects of the initial game, I think that the team has done some really good things to improve on the open world experience and formula since Dragon Age Inquisition, and I am looking forward to what they do next. I do think that the general quality issues show that there were some problems with scoping, and I do hope that the production team at Bioware scopes more aggressively in the future. But I do think that they’ve been improving their work as time has passed, and the general issues with MEA were much smaller in terms of scope (but not quantity) compared to DAI. Many of the issues I had with DAI were structural, like the distribution of content or the problems with the tactical camera. These are not small problems that could easily be solved, and would require planning and foresight earlier on in development. MEA’s problems are generally more superficial than DAI’s; it’s just that there are just so many of them. 

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Not really, but I've always had trouble suspending my disbelief and immersing myself completely in games. My brain has never been able to turn off "analysis mode" when playing games. Every game I've played since I was a student has been an examination of what the devs did, how they did it, and whether it worked. That's how I've always enjoyed playing games so it's totally normal to me.

It’s not unlike a stage magician seeing other stage magicians perform their acts. I admire the artistry and performance of the entire experience and I can think about the way that I would perform a similar trick, but I would probably never believe that the magic is real. 

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