Slashdot Mirror
The Future of Game Dev (Except in St. Louis)
ksquire writes "Ben Sawyer, of Digitalmill, has published an interesting article at Avault.com about
the past, present, and future of game development.
Sawyer argues that the game industry is going more and more toward 3rd party development tools and '4th party' publishing -- meaning that game developers are essentially tool developers for game enthusiasts to create mods (also using tools like Alienbrain or Discreet's
GMAX).
I'm really curious as to whether the Slashdot community thinks we'll see a future era of standardized game tools and developers courting modders, or if we'll continue to see more specialized game engines. Maybe a greater PC / Console split?"
Meanwhile, over in St. Louis, the Free Expression Policy Project has filed an
amici curiae brief
by 33 media scholars saying that "Most studies and experiments on video games containing violent content have not found adverse effects."
They're trying to stop the county from banning violent games --
Wired has the story.
ksquire points out that "Sawyer also wrote an article, Serious Games: Improving Public Policy through Game-Based
Learning and Simulation, which was
discussed on slashdot."
netphilter and TCPALaw get credit for the Wired link. Previous Slashdot stories on violent gaming include this one and this one.
TCPALaw's full comment was (minus a dangling modifier): "Wired has a nice story on the St. Louis ban on violent video games. If the ban sticks (it was upheld by Judge Limbaugh against a constitutional challenge... Rush Limbaugh's uncle ... the same judge who struck down the federal ban on junk faxes as an abridgment of free speech - go figure) it could be extended to MP games available to play over the Internet."
Having just started a game development project our major goals include cross-platform compatibility (ala SDL / OpenGL), modularity, and open formats.
How popular would Doom and Quake be without these things? Part of the fun of these games is the possiblity of expansion and innovation by peers. For example Capture the Flag was a user mod that was incorporated into later versions of the Quake series.
I hold a patent on sigs...
Check out the list of scholars who are particpating in the brief. Only a handful are psychologists, and that is the faculty which is perhaps best suited to investigating whether there is any connection between observation of violent behaviour and violent behaviour. A brief read of the bio's of the scholars further indicates that most of these people are stepping well beyond their area of expertise.
I would have thought that a brief to the court would carry more weight if the people lending their name to it had standing in the academic community in that area of research...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
From the wired article: One studio recently signed a deal to make Doom a motion picture. /. story about this by now, or did I just miss it?
At first I presumed they meant the failed attempt several years ago, but then I found this article on Yahoo dated last Wednesday. I figured we would've seen a
NWN is an excellent example of standardizing a game engine so that the core rules, interaction, etc is easily understood, and expandable.
Even if the engine itself is closed source, Bioware et al give a developer everything that they need to expand the game with a professional level editor, object scripting, and releasing server software.
These things show a commitment to the gaming community, allow for the game to become near infinately expandable, and give the users as much (or as little) of the behind-the-scenes action as they want.
I haven't played around with the editors enough yet, but if you could create your own weapons, armour, and races, you could even expand the world from the medieval/fantasy to Sci-Fi, Horror, western, etc, the same way the core rules have been expanded in the pen-and-paper version.
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
As long as the game makers limit the ability of the modders to be compensated for their work, then game engines will continue to be made.
Today, in many ways, you can "mod" a games using net built tools based on distributed games and have little chance of getting paid for your work (if you're lucky, you might get picked up by the original game producer). But, most modern games limit the ability of modders to actually sell their new levels, etc. (e.g. Neverwinter Nights)
The other way to "mod" the game is to actually license the engine from the creator, pay them a fee and/or royalty and be able to then distribute your work based on the engine.
Licensing the engine tends to give you a bit more flexibility in the final game, as you may be able to modify the actual source of the engine, whereas with typical mods you can not.
It would be an interesting development when you can get a "reasonably priced" license from, say, Blizzard to build new mission sets for WC3 and then be able to sell them. Here, you don't license the actual engine, but rather simply use the tools that the internal level designers used to create single play campaigns for resale.
This way, for example, WC3 becomes not simply a game, but also an authoring tool. The issue here, of course, is that if you're licensing the world building component, then later there may be difficulties regarding expanding and enchancing the games through patches and what not. If Blizzard decides to tweak a spell or capability in the core game, that tweak may throw a 3rd party scenario out of balance enough to ruin the scenario for players.
These could all be dealt with, of course, but it would require some extra maintenance and forethought and communication by Blizzard. Now, since there are no licensees of the world building piece, they can change whatever they want and all of the hobbyist fan made changes can be damned.
Mods are a great way to extend the longevity of a game (Total Annihilation anyone?), and keep it popular, but with the engines becoming more sophisticated, it would be nice to have channel for professional 3rd party content as well as amateur content.
Some of the best games of recent memory for me were designed with technologies that are not particularly platform-specific. Id Software showed this during Quake III Arena beta development. Their initial public beta offering was available only for Mac OS systems in the first few days (specifically targeting a system at the time that came with a powerful video card).
That small example expresses a point when developing games. It's not all one world, and many people no longer accept that a particular game is available only for one device (PC, console, whatever). All of these platforms have already converged in technologies and aren't particularly different except for the game accessory hooks (Windows: DirectX, Mac OS 9: InputSprockets) that make porting a pain in the patootie. Some companies that port the most popular PC games to other platforms or develop their games with concurrent release are great at it, but something's amiss now. The lack of ports for Linux games is shameful, given that one of the most popular UNIX-class operating systems show that these games work in this area (Mac OS X). I know it's not a "just recompile" thing, but it shouldn't be that hard, right?
I'm not a programmer, but I've read the general qualms that make game development so richly rewarding and a pox on your soul. In a utopian game development world, I'd stick with these standards:
- USB devices with common, open source drivers that work anywhere (everything handles USB now). Screw proprietary or legacy connectors.
- OpenGL, OpenGL, OpenGL: Everything works with it--just keep refining it
- Clone John Carmack, Westlake Interactive, Blizzard, Aspyr, and any other company/person who thinks the game first, and the platform second
Are programmers so limited in skill that they can't develop without DirectX? Or are there plenty of politics that derail the idea of "code once, frags for all"?
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
Technology forced design changes, too. It took time to become familiar with the Unreal engine. I wish I could say we uncovered all its potentials and limitations quickly, but we didn't. Months of experimentation were necessary to reveal how best to do things in Unreal and what things not to do at all. When we stopped playing with Unreal andactually started working with it (roughly six to nine months after we got our hands on it), lots of ideas we'd come up with in the abstract didn't work quite as well in reality.
Here's a case where game design was sacrificed in name of the existing game engine. Ah, but there's more...
We went into Deus Ex hoping that licensing an engine would allow us to focus on content generation and gameplay. For the most part, that proved to be the case. The Unreal Tournament code we ended up going with provided a solid foundation upon which we were able to build relatively easily. Dropping in a conversation system, skill and augmentation systems, our inventory and other 2D interface screens, major AI changes, and so on could have been far more difficult...
However, to my surprise, licensing technology didn't save us all the time I'd hoped it would. You'd think cutting a year or more of engine-creation off a schedule would result in an earlier release date. On Deus Ex, that didn't prove to be the case. Time that would have been lost creating tools was lost instead to learning the limitations and capabilities of "foreign" technology. Time that would have gone into making an engine went into focusing more on gameplay systems and tuning than normal. Unreal certainly allowed us to focus on content generation over everything else, but we spent more time doing it...
There were times when we should have ripped out certain parts of the Unreal Tournament code and started from scratch (AI, pathfinding, and sound propagation, for example). Instead, we built on the existing systems, on a base that was designed for an entirely different kind of game from what we were making. It's not that Unreal had bad AI or pathfinding or sound propagation, but those systems were designed for a straightforward shooter, which was not what we were making. (The entirety of this can be found at Gamasutra)
As I stated before, using a top-notch third party system might save you some time, but you often need to strip out a lot of the code and do some heavy modifications. Not to mention that they cost several hundred thousand dollars and a royalty percentage. Most of the time it's just better to write one yourself.
I work in the video game industry, and used to work on arcade machines, so I can tell you that the decline in arcades and arcade machines is not a St. Louis area problem, but a nationwide problem. One of the big reasons for the decline in arcade machines is that the home consoles now roughly equal the power of the arcade machines, and throwing more polygons at the problem really isn't going to cause a huge increase in visual quality. This means that the arcade machines have to offer things that are not available at home, hence the reason for too many driving games, shooting games, and dancing games. These games are tend to stand out because of the interface to the machine, and it is something that is just not easily available at home. This has the side effect of increasing the price of the machines significantly. Older arcade games, or at least your standard full-size arcade machine, will run in price from 2000-5000 dollars, depending on the game (mind you, there are exceptions to the rule, but this is about standard, and the price of the machines hasn't changed much since they first appeared). A full size driving game or dancing game will run in the 10,000+ dollar range, and on top of that, with something like a driving game, you really need to have multiple machines networked together to give people the experience they are looking for. The extra mechanical components also result in an increase in the cost of maintenance on the machine. This means the operator needs to increase the cost per game of the machine to make money, which results in lower sales, etc. This is the reason for the decline of the arcade market. Interestingly enough, when doing field tests of games, we tended to make more money when the machine was set to $0.25 or $0.50 price range, rather than the $1.00 to $1.50 price range, as people tended to keep dropping money into the machine, so our usage was much closer to 100% at the cheaper price range, compared to less than 50% at the 1 dollar and up price point. But good luck convincing the operators of this, etc. Anyway, just thought I'd give some inside insight as to why there is a decline in the arcade market.