#gamedevlessons

The thought struck that I'm doing my writing in Hard Mode.

If you're unaware, I play Star Trek: Fleet Command, and one of the biggest complaints the player-base has is the devs never...take...breaks. Every three months is a new arc with new content and sometimes even a new game mechanic. There's never a time for things to go 'fallow.' Pretty much everyone in the player community would be perfectly happy if the devs took a quarter off from new STUFF and just focused on the 'cleanup and polish' of the game (bug fixes, interface improvements, QoL updates, that sort of thing.)

As I've hit burnout ONCE AGAIN, I realized the other day that I've been trying to do exactly what I'm critical of the ST:FC devs for; trying to churn out content literally year-round and never 'sharpening the saw,' to borrow a phrase.

What this boils down to for my writing is...I'm just not gonna push so hard all year. This last year I JAMMED out text, literally hundreds of thousands of words spread across no fewer than 10 books and quite a few short stories. I was so focused on creating the content that I was able to put zero time into my health, my family, and my job.

So that's going to change this coming year. My new goal is three chapters a month for Code of Ethics. Period. This should give me 36 new chapters by the end of the year, and I'm NOT going to push myself to produce more. That'll put CoE at 97 published chapters with a total word count just shy of 500k by the end of the year. (That's half a million words for Code of Ethics alone.) Ch. 97 is expected to be smack in the middle of Part 4 and into some of the deeper character growth for Diane as she encounters more players in the game and confronts many truths she's been shielded from behind the American Wall. This does mean the 'big reveal' that my Spoilery Spoilers What Spoil crowd are getting hints of won't happen until 2027, sadly.

2026 gets to be the year I work on me. I'm hoping to either get a real promotion at my current workplace or a new job that pays what I'm worth. My kiddo will be 18 and that will change a LOT in my life, giving me a level of freedom and a wealth of options I've been barred from due to parenting agreements and the legal structure of everything. If we haven't fully toppled the Orange Fascists' regime by then, I'll probably be preparing to move to a part of the country I'm not afraid for my life every time I walk out the door.

Limiting my output to just 36 chapters this year means that I'll have time to do other things I've had in mind for CoE and everything surrounding it. I've had ideas for promoting the book on Tiktok/Youtube Shorts, going back and polishing up chapters I dashed out to get out the door by a certain time or I'm not quite happy with, etc.

So here I am naive little dev thinking, “hey I’ll port a game. How hard can it be?”.......I wish I could go back in time to slap myself with a candy cane. It was tough, but only because I had no clue what I was doing. A monkey banging a wrench on its food dish was more productive. 

I did learn a lot about porting. Just because your engine allows you to port doesn’t mean that everything is going to transfer over like a flash drive that can sync with Mac and Windows.....No it will never be that easy. So here were some little hiccups that I learned from:

1.) Cut scenes. I need to say that I worked hard on making my cut scenes last for the perfect amount of seconds. Well throw that cupcake out the window because I couldn’t port over my little gifts of happiness. Instead I opted for what I call the comic version. I took the most important images and used one sentence text to show the story. I used my splash screen script to bring this to life. (i.e. Invoke)

2.) Controls. This was another one of my babies. My partner has a thing for perfection in controls; to the point where I get frustrated. I obviously can’t use PC controls to work on a new platform. So trying to figure out based on my current script what implementation would best suit the game for touch inputs. (I ended up using the very space heavy Event Trigger)

3.) Camera. Though not as bothersome as the first two, having the camera a different size and aspect ratio made a huge difference. My levels went from bam! to WHABAM! just from changing what the player will see on the new platform. 

4.) Why did I update? Yes, the life long question I keep asking myself. Why the helabit do I update my game engine?! Do I like punishment? Do I enjoy delaying my progress? Each time that I do, I have to relearn what the engine will allow or not.....I still haven’t learned my lesson....So I still have to learn how to use this darn thing.

5.) Back up and test. I actually learned this from programming on PC, but I best implemented this practice while porting. I was so worried to lose something when I made a break through. So I would back up on the engine’s cloud, in my dropbox, on my computer, and on my thumb drive.....I wish the tech gods would test me now!! Muahahahaha (Tech gods please don’t test me! I am but a humble servant.)

I thought it would be a fun exercise to reflect back on some of the games I’ve worked on and think about some things that the experience taught me, or that in retrospect had interesting things to learn. To keep it focused, I’m going to stick to 5 things, but I may do more in the future!

Context: I was the first QA tester at Obsidian on Neverwinter Nights 2, eventually became lead tester when the QA team expanded, and by the end of the project moved into production as an assistant producer. So these aren’t really design lessons so much, though they are development lessons!

Teach Producers to do stuff - Producers are support folks, true. But producers should learn some aspects of your tools and development process for two important reasons:

Understanding how people do their jobs makes you a better producer and helps you make better decisions.

Producers being able to pick up the slack in implementation can be a huge help in the 11th hour. On NWN2, the executive producer and I took over most of the implementation of the front-end GUI in XML, and our ability to do that meant that other, much more challenging aspects of the UI, were able to be implemented. Without us handling that, the people who were more capable to do the heavy lifting couldn’t have dedicated their time to more important things.

Being a Lead is hard - Managing people is really, really hard. This is where I personally came face to face with the Peter principle - the idea that people get promoted until they hit a job they are incapable of doing. In the game industry, you can learn that when you promote your best programmer to Lead Programmer, you lose your best programmer and get a mediocre lead in his place. In my case, I went from a skilled, experienced tester to the manager of a team of almost 20 people, many of whom had no QA experience, and I had basically no training or management experience. That was hard and I did not do a very good job. I feel bad for the testers that worked under me. I don’t know that there was a better option in my case, but it definitely made me respect the idea that there should be a path for promotion for folks who excel at their job but don’t make good managers, or who don’t have the managerial training or experience to manage a large team.

Copy the right things - After I became a producer, I was assigned to work on the UI. Because we didn’t have a real UI designer, and we were getting very negative feedback on the UI, I was assigned to work with engineering to see what we could do to improve things in the time we had. The first thing I did? Open WoW and figure out why dragging buttons to different hotbar slots felt fine in WoW and was awful in our game. It felt extremely finicky, and you’d drag an icon went you meant to use it all the time. Turns out, there’s a dead zone in WoW - about 50% of the size of the icon - outside of which you have to drag your cursor with the button held down in order to “pick up” the icon. Windows has this, too, but it’s much smaller (and clicking and dragging feel worse in Windows than in WoW for this reason IMO). This dead zone makes the difference between a click and drag and a click to use the ability much more pronounced, and stealing it fixed the problem. When you have a problem that is tricky to solve, you should figure out the “state of the art” solution before you try to roll your own. Copying is okay, as long as you copy the right things.

Feedback is King - There were major feedback problems with NWN2 before ship (and after ship, but before ship is was far worse). Because NWN2 simulates D&D, and characters are running turn timers every X seconds, players would often select an action (like casting a spell) and the characters wouldn’t actually do anything until their next round came up. The game felt broken as a result because you would click to cast a spell, and not tell whether the game ate your input or whether you were just waiting for the next turn. The solution ended up being to add a UI element that shows the next queued action - your queued action icon would change when you gave a new command, which was all the information that you needed to know that the game did hear you and was just waiting for your next turn. The gameplay feedback that we got after implementing this was massively more positive - and it was the first of many times I learned that UI, sound, and animation feedback in response to actions is as if not more important than issues like game balance, cool loot, and great story.