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shuttershocky · 7 months

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Warren Spector (known for a LOT of stuff, but most known in the mainstream for Deus Ex) just wrote a blog post about his 40 year career in game development, a truly spectacular feat considering this industry grinds up way too many developers in less than 5.

There's SO much to go through, but some highlights for me were:

Wing Commander is why video game expos to this day play their sound so damn loud. When they displayed the game the devs bought a home theater setup and set it to max volume to grab as much attention as possible

Deus Ex became a reality when Spector told Paul Neurath to shut down Looking Glass' studio in Austin (his own studio) to save the company, saying "I'll find another deal. We'll be okay." In came John Romero to the rescue promising Spector the biggest budget he's ever had, the biggest marketing budget he's ever had, and zero creative interference to make the game of his dreams if he joined Ion Storm. That became Deus Ex.

Spector's original pitch for a cyberpunk game was actually a sci-fi spinoff of Wing Commander called Alien Commander, but Doug Church had a similar pitch that he loved more than his own, which became the landmark title System Shock.

He's often credited as the creator of Thief: The Dark Project, but Spector insists he worked on it for 1 year out of its 3 year development and the credit should go to Doug Church and Greg Lopiccolo.

Spector originally wanted to be able to fight in Thief because sometimes stealth was too hard, and the other devs said he was crazy. That "I want players to be able to choose to fight or sneak" is eventually what led to Deus Ex!

Spector had a collab going with John Woo (holy shit) where they would make a movie and video game series together called Ninja Gold, but unfortunately studios dropped them.

Epic Mickey was shooting for the Moon. After the movie studio deals and the collab with Valve fell through, Spector's studio was desperate for work until Seamus Blackley suggested they pitch to Disney. Spector thought it was crazy, but they went for it and to their surprise they weren't just given a Disney IP, they were given Mickey himself. Unfortunately, working with Disney can be cursed but we all already knew that

Very important: The game is called "Deus Ex" only partly because it's about gods from the machines. Spector thought it would be really funny if people mispronounced the game and had to say "sex"

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belleandkurtbastian · 23 hours

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Okay, so leaving aside the actual game content for a while here…

Is Dropout giving this season of Game Changer a MUCH higher budget?

Like, I’ve been having this thought for a while, but there are so many little additional costs this time that add up:

Half the episodes have fully-custom replacement podia…

I assume they had to completely repaint the back wall after Pencils Down…

The SINGLE day of shooting covering Bingo and Déjà Vu required SIXTEEN actors, not including Sam. (9 Bingo players, the PA, Siobhan, Ify, Zac, BDG, Josh, and Kevin).

Of just THOSE two episode: the huge number of cameras and storylines in Bingo was a huge production burden… While the AMOUNT of editing required for Déjà Vu is above and beyond anything they’ve done in this show before (EVEN including Escape the Greenroom, which is in some ways the prototype for both of those episodes, featuring both the unusual camera setup and the editing interstitials for backfilled story)…

#game changer #dropout #dropout tv

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dailyadventureprompts · 4 months

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Villain: The Gleebringer Battalions

Gallard Gleebringer only ever wanted to make people happy. By using his skills as a toymaker and inventor he sought to fill the world with devices that would bring wonder, and save people from the drugery of labor to give them more time for play.

Seeking to save his neighbours from the horrors of war, and under the patronage of the battlehungry local margrave, Gallard has a constructed an autonomous army of toy soldiers that in some weeks time will go berserk and begin rampaging across the land, playing out an inexplicable war-game that will leave villages sacked and the entire region destabilized.

It’s up to the party to notice the looming crisis and do something about it before the toys begin their march, As the powers that be are not only blind to the looming crisis but actively dismissive of any

Adventure Hooks:

Scraping together enough coin to fund a construct army has left the margrave’s treasury more than a little tight pursed, leading them to skimp on things like repairing infrastructure, public festivals, and resupplying their garrisons. There’s plenty of opportunities for adventurers as bandits and monsters propagate through the wilderness, and the lesser nobles rely on mercenaries to guard their holdings. Its only so long before the cracks begin to show however, as roads wash out and the realms defenders turn to brigandry.

The party end up in a tavern drinking with an old military officer previously employed by the margrave. She’s iresome and illtempered, but she’ll crawl out of her cups long enough to tell the tale of how after twenty years of loyal service she was let go for protesting when some of the troops under her command were killed in a training exercise. If the party press a little she might just let it slip that it wasn’t training so much as a field test of Gleebringer’s machines, which her boss insisted be against real troops. Later on, they’ll find an official bounty posted for the woman, who’s rallied some of her fellow discontented soldiers and started on a campaign of sabotage.

For his part Gleebringer is quite blind to the looming threat, having been carried by his ever shifting attention to yet another new project once the design and manufacture of the armies were complete. The party might get a chance to talk to him however if they manage to sneak into the excursive exposition he's hosting in the province's capital, either by riding in on the coattails of a wealthy patron, or by sneaking in among the serving staff. Actually getting an audience with the toymaker will be even more difficult as the margrave has set his agents to watch and protect Gleebringer, and it's only so long before they notice the uninvited guest have crashed the private function.

Setup: While many gnomes dabble in artifice, it was early in his apprenticeship with the village toymaker that a young Gallard discovered both his love and prodigious talent for the technical arts. It wasn't just a magical knack, it was an eye for detail that had people saying that the gnome's creations seemed to be alive long before he figured out how to make them move on their own.

Soon Gleebringer toys were in demand across kingdoms, and Gallard found himself not only patronized by innumerable wealthy merchants and nobles but sought out by engineers and craftsfolk of all kinds who realized the genius packed away in his creations.

Gallard didn't let the fame or the fortune go to his head, instead using his growing connections and commission budget to experiment with even more complex designs. For example: scaling up from music boxes to clockwork bands, and eventually an automated opera house.

As a man who dreamed all his life of building a flying town, it was safe to assume that Gallard had his head in the clouds. He hated to see people suffer but seldom thought through the implications of his inventions, Such as when an automated lumber mill intended to supply materials for his projects put an entire town of foresters out of work. This penchant for distraction was only encouraged by the margrave, who saw the military applications of Gleebringer's gifts from the moment a clockwork dragon bought for one of his children ended up badly maiming one of the servants who saught to tidy up the toyblock castle it had been charged with guarding.

Over the past ten years, the Margrave has become Gallard's most generous patron, supplying him with workshops ( staffed by apprentaces who's loyalty can be counted on) and an endless series of new projects ( which always end up increasing the margrave's power and standing at the cost of the common good).

Art 1

Art 2

#villain #villain noble #villain artificer #artifice #construct #bounty #city encounter #tavern encounter #town encounter #gnome

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milk5 · 6 months

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THE MILK5 COFFEE GUIDE VOL. 1

REMOVE #BADBEANS FROM YOUR LIFE FOREVER

If you are a #TrueBlueCoffeeHead and subsisting on supermarket beans and/or frequent visits to big chains like Starbucks, PLEASE help yourself (and your local community, the environment, coffee workers, etc) and buy a pour over filter and freshly roasted, quality beans from a local roaster. Explicitly seek out Fairtrade Organic/Smithsonian Bird Friendly certified beans if possible. The taste of shade-grown coffee is incredibly flavorful AND you can be certain that your beans aren't the product of yucky pesticides, actual slave labor, and the annihilation of millions of acres of rainforest.

To start with what you need, a goose-neck kettle and pour over carafe are good purchases, but a suitably sized mason jar and regular kettle still work on a budget. Learning how to make a great pour over will raise your home coffee game to professional standards without needing to spend literal thousands of dollars on a real grinder/steamer/espresso machine setup -- if you're able to buy all of these items new for less than a thousand dollars, you're going to be down a few hundos in exchange for some pretty shitty machines. Regardless, a pour over setup with good beans will pay for itself VERY rapidly, assuming it replaces frequent Starbucks visits or whatever other chain you were going to. If you frequent a LOCALLY OWNED coffee shop that you like, keep going! You're an important part of the ecosystem.

What about grinding the beans? Should I get pre-ground beans? Would a cheapo blender-like blade grinder work?

NEVER touch a blade grinder again. It doesn't matter as much if you have #BadBeans, but if you have good beans, ALWAYS use a grinder with a burr; blade grinders just chop up your beans randomly into particles of massively varying sizes, leading to simultaneous over-extraction and under-extraction, generally leading to wildly inconsistent flavors and low repeatability. Burrs will always grind the beans into uniform particles and ensure that you're always (more or less, every cup is different to an extent) getting a consistent flavor. Don't buy a burr grinder -- just bring your beans to a local coffee shop, buy a drink, tip well, and ask the barista if they could grind the beans for you when you can clearly tell that they aren't busy. I have NEVER been refused, just go to a place with less sour employees if they won't help you out. Specify the coarseness that you'd like; smaller grounds have a greater surface area, so they're extracted to a greater extent, resulting in a more intense flavor; coarse grounds are the inverse. Lots of people recommend medium-coarse for pour overs (about 80% coarse 20% fine), but I prefer the stronger flavor of medium/drip (dead middle, 50% coarse 50% fine). It's also better to grind your beans periodically, as freshly-ground beans will taste better, but it's fine to have it pre-ground or ground all at once if you aren't able to easily make coffee shop trips every week or two. As far as roasts go, there's an entire gradient for you to explore -- not just the few that I list here; light roasts have a more sour, fruitier flavor, medium roasts are well rounded, and dark roasts are rich and smokey. Medium-dark is my personal favorite.

Experiment!!! It's all about your own taste, after all.

How do I make a good pour over?

Again, it depends on your taste. My go-to is a vigorous fourth-cup of grounds to 300ml of water; this is easily on the stronger end, but it's what works for me. More common ratios are usually weighed out on a kitchen scale, so consider picking one up if you don't already have one. Document your process until you get to your favorite! I always stop the kettle a little before it gets to its terminal temperature, then pour just enough water onto the grounds to let it bloom -- wait for one minute, and then start pouring a small-ish portion of the water onto the grounds every 20 seconds (this is where my own technique varies the most, it usually takes between 3-4 minutes to finish since I'm not pouring standard amounts; some people DO measure their pours for even greater consistency). Use the stopwatch on your phone, it's much better than keeping track in your head. Make sure to distribute the water evenly over the grounds, particularly making sure to wash the grounds off the sides every pour. When I'm finished, I like to immediately take a sip to see if a splash of milk or half-and-half would help or hurt the cup -- I think a very good cup of coffee can easily stand on its own without anything else, but additives can absolutely help depending on your personal preferences. Just be sure to taste the black coffee before you add anything.

What if I like the syrupy sweet drinks? What about iced coffee?

From my experience working at/visiting coffee shops, Monin is the most common syrup brand I see at local places. As far as iced coffee goes, coldbrew would be probably be the superior option -- it's also pretty easy to make at your home. I'm not going to be writing a guide for coldbrew any time soon, so you're out of luck there. I also never steam my milk if I'm doing a pour over, so I can't really point you to an inexpensive way to do that. Just know that the cheap handheld stick-frothers do not do the same thing as an actual steamer.

What was that about certifications?

Fairtrade is a pretty notable certification for food items produced in areas that have a history for being exploited (so pretty much the bulk of the global south), it can get very complex -- read more about it here. The goal is to ensure that the workers and communities involved in the production of the product receive fair, livable wages, that labor conditions are safe and reasonable, and that the decisions around the production of the product are made by those directly involved in the labor. FTO refers to Fairtrade Organic, which just means that it meets the standards of both Fairtrade AND organic production -- I'm not exactly sure if the organic standards are based on where the coffee is sold, produced, or both, but regardless, it's still a bonus; organic coffee will almost ALWAYS be shade-grown, which is the way that coffee grows naturally. Since coffee is an understory tree in nature, shade-grown coffee is produced more slowly and under a canopy and thus does not require the forest to be damaged or destroyed to grow; however, not all organic coffee will necessarily take place in a completely natural, untouched rain forest setting. Industrial non-organic coffee is most often produced under direct sun in gigantic clear-cut monocrop rows and usually with massive usage of potentially harmful inputs like, such as various pesticides and fertilizers. Direct sun coffee grows faster, but it has a distinctly different taste and is easily the most damaging method of coffee production to both the environment and the local communities. Smithsonian Bird-Friendly is the most rigorous certification for coffee in particular; FTO is more or less a pre-requisite to achieve SBF. Coffee likes to grow in tropical, equatorial environments -- these environments are also the areas of the greatest bird diversity in the world (and, really, biodiversity in general) and the destination for most migratory birds during the winter. The coffee industry has destroyed literal millions of acres of rain forest across the world, which has resulted in the death of billions of birds worldwide over the past 50 years. SBF guarantees the FTO criteria PLUS the additional criteria that the coffee must be produced in forests that are more-or-less in their natural state with thriving diversity of endemic species of flora and fauna. It's harder to find SBF-certified coffee than FT(O)-certified coffee, but the Smithsonian website has a handy vendor locator here. I'm not confident that it works beyond U.S. vendors, so I apologize to anyone interested abroad. Note that some of these certifications may be exclusive to particular continents; I need to do more research on the subject, but the tropical forests around the world vary wildly -- this adds a level of complexity to the goals and criteria of a particular certification. I am confident that all of the certifications that I have mentioned apply to South and Central America (and most likely the Caribbean), so keep that in mind. Also, watch out for phony certifications; big corporations frequently buy out existing certification organizations and/or create new green-sounding organizations to fool well-meaning consumers.

Where should my brand new beans come from?

Like wine, the exact qualities of a bean depend on its terroir, or the specific methods and geographic factors involved in its growth. However, some countries have trends in how the coffee is generally grown; some counties will practice shade-growing more than others and some countries will practice direct-sun industrial methods more than others. As a rule of thumb, Arabica beans are mostly grown in shade or partial shade, while Robusta is generally grown in direct sun. Defer to certifications if applicable.

The following areas primarily practice shade-growing:

Mexico

El Salvador

Peru

Panama

Nicaragua

Guatemala

Cuba

Timor

New Guinea

Ethiopia

Burundi

Rwanda

Tanzania

Zambia (*)

Zimbabwe (*)

Papua New Guinea

Sulawesi

Timor + East Timor

India

The following areas primarily practice direct-sun growing:

Colombia

Brazil

Costa Rica

Hawaii

Yemen

Kenya

Angola

Benin

Central African Republic

Congo

Gabon

Ghana

Guinea

Equatorial Guinea

Ivory Coast

Liberia

Nigeria

Sierra Leone

Togo

Cameroon

Madagascar

Malawi (**)

Democratic Republic of the Congo

Sumatra (***)

Java

Vietnam

China

Jamaica

Again, this is just a rule of thumb; there are exceptions to both and I'm sure that I've left out several production areas. Most of this information comes from the blog Coffee and Conservation, written by ornithologist Julie Craves. I've only tried a very small percentage of these origins; so far, my favorites are Sumatran (Arabica, of course) and Peruvian.

*The source that I got this information from mentioned that some avoid Zambian and Zimbabwean coffee due to concerns of it helping fund violent conflict in the area; this particular article, however, is from 2006 and may be wildly out of date. I couldn't find much more info on this topic when I searched elsewhere.

**They primarily produce Arabica with organic methods, despite the sunny conditions.

***Sumatra is likely the most notable coffee-growing island in Asia; while the majority is Robusta grown on plantations that have deforested a horrifyingly large percentage of the island, the Arabica grown in the north is well-known for its far healthier growing conditions (shade + organic, usually) and extremely distinct flavor.

Volume 2?

I may eventually add on to this post, most likely with a Turkish coffee guide coming next. I used to make Turkish coffee quite frequently, but I would need to dig up my old favorite recipe and cezve first. French press and coldbrew stuff will be in the more distant future if at all.

If any of this info looks wrong, let me know and I'll edit the post :-)

Enjoy your cup!!!!

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devsgames · 5 months

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Game Optimization and Production

I wanted to write a bit of a light primer about optimization and how it relates to game production in the event people just don't know how it works, based on my experience as a dev. I'm by no means an expert in optimization myself, but I've done enough of it on my own titles and planned around it enough at this point to understand the gist of what it comes down to and considerations therein. Spoilers: games being unoptimized are rarely because devs are lazy, and more because games are incredibly hard to make and studios are notoriously cheap.

(As an aside, this was largely prompted by seeing someone complaining about how "modern" game developers are 'lazy' because "they don't remember their N64/Gamecube/Wii/PS2 or PS3 dropping frames". I feel compelled to remind people that 'I don't remember' is often the key part of the "old consoles didn't lag" equation, because early console titles ABSOLUTELY dropped frames and way more frequently and intensely than many modern consoles do. Honestly I'd be willing to bet that big budget games on average have become more stable over time. Honorable mention to this thread of people saying "Oh yeah the N64 is laggy as all hell" :') )

Anywho, here goes!

Optimization

The reason games suffer performance problems isn't because game developers are phoning it in or half-assing it (which is always a bad-faith statement when most devs work in unrealistic deadlines, for barely enough pay, under crunch conditions). Optimization issues like frame drops are often because of factors like ~hardware fragmentation~ and how that relates to the realities of game production.

I think the general public sees "optimization" as "Oh the dev decided to do a lazy implementation of a feature instead of a good one" or "this game has bugs", which is very broad and often very misguided. Optimization is effectively expanding the performance of a game to be performance-acceptable to the maximum amount of people - this can be by various factors that are different for every game and its specific contexts, from lowering shader passes, refactoring scripts, or just plain re-doing work in a more efficient way. Rarely is it just one or two things, and it's informed by many factors which vary wildly between projects.

However, the root cause why any of this is necessary in the first place is something called "Platform Fragmentation".

What Is Fragmentation

"Fragmentation" is the possibility space of variation within hardware being used to run a game. Basically, the likelihood that a user is playing a game on a different hardware than the one you're testing on - if two users are playing your game on different hardware, they are 'fragmented' from one another.

As an example, here's a graphic that shows the fragmentation of mobile devices based on model and user share. The different sizes are how many users are using a different type of model of phone:

As you can tell, that's a lot of different devices to have to build for!

So how does this matter?

For PC game developers, fragmentation means that an end-user's setup is virtually impossible to predict, because PC users frequently customize and change their hardware. Most PC users potentially have completely different hardware entirely.

Is your player using an up-to-date GPU? CPU? How much RAM do they have? Are they playing on a notebook? A gaming laptop? What brand hardware are they using? How much storage space is free? What OS are they using? How are they using input?

Moreover PC parts don't often get "sunsetted" whole-cloth like old consoles do, so there's also the factor of having to support hardware that could be coming up on 5, 10 or 15 years old in some cases.

For console developers it's a little easier - you generally know exactly what hardware you're building for, and you're often testing directly on a version of the console itself. This is a big reason why Nintendo's first party titles feel so smooth - because they only build for their own systems, and know exactly what they're building for at all times. The biggest unknowns are usually smaller things like televisions and hookups therein, but the big stuff is largely very predictable. They're building for architecture that they also made themselves, which makes them incredibly privileged production-wise!

Fragmentation basically means that it's difficult - or nearly impossible - for a developer to know exactly what their users are playing their games on, and even more challenging to guarantee their game is compatible everywhere.

Benchmarking

Since fragmentation makes it very difficult to build for absolutely everybody, at some point during development every developer has to draw a line in the sand and say "Okay, [x] combination of hardware components is what we're going to test on", and prioritize that calibre of setup before everything else. This is both to make testing easier (so testers don't have to play the game on every single variation of hardware), and also to assist in optimization planning. This is a "benchmark".

Usually the benchmark requirements are chosen for balancing visual fidelity, gameplay, and percentage of the market you're aiming for, among other considerations. Often for a game that is cross-platform for both PC and console, this benchmark will be informed by the console requirements in some way, which often set the bar for a target market (a cross-platform PC and console game isn't going to set a benchmark that is impossible for a console to play, though it might push the limits if PC users are the priority market). Sometimes games hit their target benchmarks, sometimes they don't - as with anything in game development it can be a real crap shoot.

In my case for my games which are often graphically intensive and poorly made by myself alone, my benchmark is often a machine that is approximately ~5 years old and I usually take measures to avoid practices which are generally bad and can build up to become very expensive over time. Bigger studios with more people aiming at modern targets will likely prioritize hardware from within the last couple years to have their games look the best for users with newest hardware - after all, other users will often catch up as hardware evolves.

This benchmark allows devs to have breathing room from the fragmentation problem. If the game works on weaker machines - great! If it doesn't - that's fine, we can add options to lower quality settings so it will. In the worst case, we can ignore it. After all, minimum requirements exist for a reason - a known evil in game development is not everyone will be able to run your game.

Making The Game

As with any game, the more time you spend on something is the more money being spent on it - in some cases, extensive optimization isn't worth the return of investment. A line needs to be drawn and at some point everyone can't play your game on everything, so throwing in the towel and saying "this isn't great, but it's good enough to ship" needs to be done if the game is going to ship at all.

Optimizing to make sure that the 0.1% of users with specific hardware can play your game probably isn't worth spending a week on the work. Frankly, once you hit a certain point some of those concerns are easier put off until post-launch when you know how much engagement your game has, how many users of certain hardware are actually playing, and how much time/budget you have to spend post-launch on improving the game for them. Especially in this "Games As A Service" market, people are frequently expecting games to receive constant updates on things like performance after launch, so there's always more time to push changes and smooth things out as time goes on. Studios are also notoriously squirrelly with money, and many would rather get a game out into paying customer's hands than sit around making sure that everything is fine-tuned (in contrast to most developers who would rather the game they've worked on for years be fine-tuned than not).

Comparatively to the pre-Day One patch era; once you printed a game on a disc it is there forever and there's no improving it or turning back. A frightening prospect which resulted in lots of games just straight up getting recalled because they featured bugs or things that didn't work. 😬

Point is though, targeted optimization happens as part of development process, and optimization in general often something every team helps out with organically as production goes on - level designers refactor scripts to be more efficient, graphics programmers update shaders to cut down on passes, artists trim out poly counts where they can to gradually achieve better performance. It's an all-hands-on-deck sort of approach that affects all devs, and often something that is progressively tracked as development rolls on, as a few small things can add up to larger performance issues.

In large studios, every developer is in charge of optimizing their own content to some extent, and some performance teams are often formed to be dedicated to finding the easiest, safest and quickest optimization wins. Unless you plan smartly in the beginning, some optimizations can also just be deemed to dangerous and out-of-reach to carry out late in production, as they may have dependencies or risk compromising core build stability - at the end of the day more frames aren't worth a crashing game.

Conclusion

Games suffer from performance issues because video game production is immensely complex and there's a lot of different shifting factors that inform when, how, and why a game might be optimized a certain way. Optimization is frequently a production consideration as much as a development one, and it's disingenuous to imply that games lag because developers are lazy.

I think it's worth emphasizing that if optimization doesn't happen, isn't accommodated, or perhaps is undervalued as part of the process it's rarely if ever because the developers didn't want to do it; rather, it's because it cost the studio too much money. As with everything in our industry, the company is the one calling the final shots in development. If a part of a game seems to have fallen behind in development it's often because the studio deemed it acceptable, refused to move deadlines or extend a hand to help it come together better at fear of spending more money on it. Rarely if ever should individual developers be held accountable for the failings of companies!

Anywho, thanks for reading! I know optimization is a weird mystical sort of blind spot for a lot of dev folks, so I hope this at least helps shed some light on considerations that weigh in as part of the process on that :) I've been meaning to write a more practical workshop-style step-by-step on how to profile and spot optimization wins at some point in the future, but haven't had the time for it - hopefully I can spin something up in the next few weeks!

#gamedev #game development #game dev #indie games #indie game #gamedevelopment #indiegames #pc gaming #pc games #indie dev #indiedev #video games #video game #blog #thoughts #optimization

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