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."

Comments

Doom movie negotiations round 2?

[sheetsda]

From the wired article: One studio recently signed a deal to make Doom a motion picture.
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 /. story about this by now, or did I just miss it?

Re:Future Game Development

[Torgo's Pizza]

Ah, you'd think that. But that's not the case. Here's a quote from Warren Spector, designer of Deus Ex:

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.