#lightning mail

Work got me busy, who knew that Slick could get THAT much mail haha!

I’ve also been talking more to Blue Lightning, it’s a bit awkward at times, like the time when she gave me a letter with a heart seal but put a address to deliver to, but she is the only diesel I like other than Greaseball.

But anyway, I will try to continue talking about my day to day life!

With all sympathies to artists and animators, do you think characters clipping into parts of themselves or their clothes will ever be fully solved? Or is this just one of those fundamentally intractable problems that can only be mitigated?

Hope springs eternal, but it's something we just have to deal with for the foreseeable future. Maybe once we figure out quantum computing?

How much does lore and narrative contributes to player's engagement in non story-focused multiplayer games like Apex Legends and Overwatch?

There's usually a small (less than 5%) but hardcore group of players/fans who are very into that sort of thing. Most players (80+%) don't engage with external lore content in games like that because it isn't the focus of the game.

Is it normal to feel cringe about your game after weeks or days or more?

After it’s released and out in the wild? Yes. I always feel like all I can see are the flaws when I play it, even if the players are enjoying the experience.

Which social media platform should I use as a dev?

For your career, LinkedIn. If you’re an indie trying to cultivate an audience, Discord. And if you’re in AAA, I advise against being on social media in general, except for LinkedIn.

On the topic of crossover (specifically when you have characters from different license holders interacting) how does a dev team keep all the license holders happy. For example, in Mortal Kombat 11, Spawn has several specific interactions with Robot Cop in a pre battle chatter. Do both license holders need to sign off on that battle chatter?

Yes.

When working under an NDA, how do you talk about it with friends and family? Realistically, do you let your partner know? Trusted friends? Or is it best to just avoid specifics/the topic generally?

I talk about things in general terms, but I make sure my partner knows not to talk about my work with anyone. Between friends, I will occasionally toss out the term "FrieNDA" for things that are more specific. Mostly, we just know not to talk about that stuff.

Is it common that old builds are getting leaked to the web? Like the Duke Nukem Forever 2001 build?

No.

How much money does it take to start a new AAA game studio?

A lot. It’s usually at least in the low to mid six figures to hire enough talent both to start a company and build enough of a project to pitch to publishers.

Why don't open-world games reuse or add on too old maps? You'd think a new Assassin's Creed, Farcry, Horizon, or whatever else could save effort by remixing and adding on to old maps, yet it rarely if ever happens. Why is that?

Players complain about notable content recycling, especially open world maps.

Is calling a sequel "DLC" offensive to you?

It isn't worth spending attention on feedback like that. I'd rather just say "I'm sorry our offering was not to your liking. Maybe you'll enjoy something else we make in the future."

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I’ve got a bunch of questions with short answers once again.

I could be wrong but I think your main criticism of NFTs is that a lot of the functionality has been implemented before and as such NFTs aren't anything new and come with more problems. However as time goes on won't the price of incorporating blockchain tech into your game become cheaper as new middleware is built? Might it not become an attractive alternative to building your own trading solution, especially for smaller studios? Are some legal obstacles avoided with NFTs?

It still isn't worth the tradeoff of not being able to issue refunds or reverse fraudulent transactions. Players hate getting scammed and will feel really bad if we can’t make things better for them. They will go play a different game that treats them better.

Question that might be too hard to answer. Are CSGO skins & TF2 hats/weapons be considered as NFT?

This actually isn't hard to answer. They aren't backed by any blockchain, so they cannot be NFTs.

In recent years there has been nearly no games released without a delay. Companies act as if the date given doesn't matter, as if it would be natural to delay them. And the dates given are so early that even us can tell how the project is obviously going to be delayed. Even though the producers know the game will get delayed as well as us, they still choose to give early release dates. Nowadays releasing a game 6 months after the initial date became a sector standart. Why is this a thing.

We're two years into a global pandemic that's forced all game developers to immediately transition to working from home. We’ve had to reinvent the wheel so that we can work on it remotely at scale. Most games take at least 2-3 years to develop. Throwing a massive logistical challenge in the middle of development and forcing workers to adopt a new workflow causes a lot of lost productivity. That's why there are so many game delays.

Dev...WHAT or WHO is a Forza? :l

Forza is an Italian word that means "strength" or "force" - the phrase "forza della natura" means "force of nature". It's just a semi-descriptive word that's been adopted as the title of a AAA racing game franchise published by Microsoft, likely because it sounds cool.

What are the reasons why attempts at boycotting games generally don't work?

Not enough players do it to make a noticeable difference.

You talked a lot about certification requirements, and how something as simple as “the game crashes if you stare at this highway for several hours” can deny certification. However, do you know why some games that infamously crashed often, had extremely poor frame rates, or were otherwise extremely glitchy in ways that consistently impacted gameplay. such as last gen port of Cyberpunk 2077 or No Man’s Sky at launch, get certified?

Certification requirements aren’t set in stone. As time passes and tech improves, cert requirements will also change. Platform will also occasionally give certain titles a pass or loosen requirements because they want the game on their platform. This is especially true early on in a new console’s life cycle because they need more games to attract more early adopters.

Can studios offer remasters and remake ideas to publishers who own the rights?

Yup!

Mario Kart fans are saying that the new DLC is a graphical downgrade. Can DLC cause some downgrades to graphics?

There’s the technology to display the assets and then there’s the assets themselves. If the technology is messed up, everything looks bad overall (e.g. the Switch Ocarina of Time port). If the assets themselves are messed up, only some of the game looks bad - the specific areas with the ugly assets. 

is it frowned upon to use maps or visuals from the asset store?

It depends on the level of fidelity your community expects. I would say that it’s generally fine for most small dev efforts.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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Questions with short answers, go!

Where does getting the age rating from rating boards like the ESRB fit into the timeline of a project?

The targeted age range is usually decided upon very early in the game's preproduction phase but the actual final rating isn't obtained until the game is nearing completion and we can submit it for evaluation. The ESRB has to vet the game’s shipping content, similar to how games undergo certification with platform.

What are your opinions on the recently released PlayDate handheld console? Do you think it will be successful enough to create its own audience? Do you there will be enough developers to make games for it?

I think it's too expensive. $180 for that thing seems too high, especially when compared to available alternatives. A new Nintendo Switch Lite retails just slightly higher at $200. I wish them luck and I’d be happy to be proven wrong, but that price tag is surely going to induce some sticker shock.

Funding / Pitching your intillectual property, A friend and I have an idea for a game and thought the best way to begin funding the project would be to pay for a "video" montage of the concept / basics / mechanics and game play - obviously nothing is developed but to show the idea or secure funding is this a road many developers go down ?

Absolutely. You need to persuade the people with the money that the product you hope to build can be successful. Even if you cannot build a fully playable prototype by the time you get the meeting, being able to show off what the game should be like goes a long way toward persuading people that the idea can work. Of course, you still need to persuade the investors that you can hire the sort of developers you know you'll need in order to make what you showed in the video a reality, but that's usually much easier than selling them on a product idea they don't really understand.

What do you think of cloud versions of 3rd party games on the Nintendo Switch? Is it going to become a norm, or just a temporary solution while Nintendo catches up with hardware?

"If it's stupid and it works, it isn't stupid." It’s a functional and timely solution to a difficult technical problem, so I’m not surprised that publishers have leaned in that direction. If it’s popular enough, they’ll continue to do it.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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It’s another Lightning Mailbag da, meaning short answers for multiple questions. So let’s begin!

Since it's possible that Sony will want to milk a new market with God of war. I'm curious as to why they haven't done Bloodborne yet? It seams like every time a Sony game is given PC port the other question is "why not Bloodborne?" I've heard that apparently Sony is jealous about that it was successful while it wasn't made by them but that seams dumb.

I suspect that they will if God of War does well. They brought Horizon Zero Dawn to PC in August of 2020, God of War launches in January 2022, so other PS4 exclusives like Bloodborne, Last of Us, or Ghosts of Tsushima seem like fair game after that.

A follow-up on the Sony/God of War question: what about the people who would buy the console in order to play future exclusive games, but who now think "they will release it on Steam in 3 years anyway, might as well wait and not buy the console"?

There are so few of them that will actually follow through on this for the reasons stated that they are statistically insignificant.

You mentioned that mobile games need to spend more on marketing than on development. Do mobile developers in the trenches (gameplay/level designers, artists, programmers) mind the fact that the vast majority of the game’s budget is going into marketing instead of into the game itself?

Not to my knowledge. Those in the trenches don't usually get much insight into the marketing budget or the marketing itself unless we are involved with those initiatives or we're just particularly nosy and want to know. Most of us just focus on what we're working on directly - our schedules, our tasks, and our milestones.

Hey I have a game in my mind but a question hovered into my mind. The question is: Do I need to ask for a writer's approval for me who is following his story as the game plot?

You need permission if you use anything copyrighted. That means a specific story, characters, names, locations, plot details, etc. If you make up your own (similar) story, you don’t need the writer’s permission.

Several different FPS games of the past year or so have added grapples. Is there some technical reason this has become more feasible, or is it a stylistic trend?

It's stylistic. There was a grapple mod available for the original Quake (1996).

You mentioned there is not a common academic curriculum on level design and most designers are self taught. I’d the rise of game colleges changing this?

Not that I’ve seen yet, but hope springs eternal.

How prevalent is cheating in online games? It's very common for people to accuse others of cheating when they lose a fight/game, but I wondered how much of that is actually true. Would companies even share information like that, for fear of making their game look bad?

It depends on the game. Generally speaking, cheating is not very prevalent for very long because widespread cheating tends to make players quit. Most of the time, cheating (like piracy) is a question of ease. The easier it is to cheat, the more commonplace it becomes.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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It’s time for lightning mailbag, questions with short answers!

Following up from the previous question, Salary is a taboo topic depending on the culture. In game dev, is that sentiment there?

Yup. There's been more movement towards transparency by some using the #GamedevPaidMe hashtag on social media, but the cultural bias is very much privacy when it comes to pay here in the US.

With Marvel Studio's having made shows tying into the films, why have they never approached anybody to make a game set within the MCU?

It's probably too expensive to sign the movie actors and actresses for their likenesses and voiceover for a game.

Did Epic Games stole an idea from Among Us or did they just followed the trend like they did with Fortnite by turning it into a battle royal?

I think the issue isn't so much that Epic made their own Mafia-inspired game mode similar to Among Us, but that they didn't put enough work into it to differentiate it sufficiently from Among Us. The result feels an awful lot like they are the same game and that doesn’t sit well enough with players who know that they are distinct.

Based on the answers given to the casino game questions, just for clarification, are these answers based on the laws in the United States or does it apply everywhere else in the world? There has to be more than just United States, like differing laws and rules and such.

The laws vary from state to state here in the US. I don't know what the laws are regulating gambling outside of the US. There are some blanket federal laws, but the majority of the laws that casino game companies adhere to are defined by the individual states that allow them.

With the release of Deathloop, the discussions about DRM causing performance issues on PC have fired back up. A new one I've seen this time around is that reviewers have been dishonest in not reporting these issues. Do review copies of games even come with DRM?

Yes. Removing something as big as DRM from the build so close to release is too dangerous to game stability, so we don’t do it.

What about naming in coding conventions? Do those cause similar problems?

Yes. On one project, I had to deal with two effect systems - an old one with objects named Effects and a new one with objects named EffectSystem.Effects that inherited from the older Effects. That caused all sorts of problems when discussing the system out loud.

Hi dev! I've been noticing recently a lot of games with special abilities tend to only give you three at a time to work with. Why is that? And why not four abilities instead?

I think it's because of the four face buttons on a controller. Usually you have one "default action" button that players can usually do (attack, jump, etc.) from the get-go of the game, and then there are three additional buttons on the controller face which are mappable to other actions or abilities as players earn them through gameplay.

Why is it that aside from children, humanoid NPC's all have the same height as each other instead of varying height?

They all probably use the same animation skeleton (rig). Keeping measurements and proportions consistent across models ensures that there won't be any problems playing the same set of animations on all of them.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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It’s time once again for some short questions with quick answers!

Why might Pokemon Unite not show the teams' total scores during the game?

I suspect this is because they want players to keep attention on scoring, rather than coasting with a big lead in the end game. This is also likely why the Zapdos gameplay is the way it is - the designers want to make the end of the game exciting so they set up a difficult wild pokemon to defeat which also encourages a climactic team battle and enormous point swing in the final two minutes of the game. The overall design goal is to have the climax of the game be at the end, rather than players feel like things are already decided.

I heard there was a free weekend of Far Cry 5, but people who tried it on steam are complaining that it wasn't free because uplay can't activate it. Now it's not longer a free weekend on Steam what I checked. Can "free weekends" be a trap to force people to download a launcher which also force to buy the full game?

The number of people who would actually pay for the full game is miniscule compared to the number of people who would just delete the entire thing.

Any insight as to why we are suddenly getting a wave of remakes? From Final Fantasy 7 to something as obscure as Sam and Max Telltale games, it seems like everything is getting a new generation face lift.

They've been earning a lot of money so the publishers have taken notice.

So what was the last era of dev kits that could even theoretically work without online blessing? Did they need software from the console manufacturer but physical? Or were they entirely "make your own software" sort of situation?

You always needed official software tools to connect to and develop on dev kits. The back end network authentication didn't happen until online connectivity became a thing which mostly started with the first Xbox. The PS2 had some online connectivity before then, but it wasn't a real thing until the X360/PS3 generation of hardware that online became ubiquitous.

On Twitter people are now joking about the idea that Overwatch will now have a new lgbt character because of this lawsuit. Can a actblizz actually do this now? Force the developers to make representation of a community they already failed to protect?

Nah, that’s not possible. From concept to design to modeling to skinning to animation to voice recording, it takes months to create a new character. Anything that they release or announce now has been in development since March at earliest.

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The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

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