Author: sick skills

Matthew Allen loves shaders.

“I love putting on the headphones and writing shaders,” he told Gamasutra recently, while chatting at an Xbox press event. “It scratches the technical itch and the artistic itch, because I get to make things look shit-hot by writing code.”

But there’s a problem: Allen loves shaders a bit too much. He most recently served as the technical art director on Monolith Productions’ Middle-earth: Shadow of War, and in the early stages of the game’s development, Allen created a bit of a bottleneck for the team by allowing himself to become “the shader guy.” 

He loved writing shaders, but couldn’t devote enough time to both them and his other duties to keep up with the pace of production. To solve the problem, he removed the bottleneck: himself.

“I realized, you know what, this is cool, I do it well and it’s awesome, but…I need to find a better way,” he said. “So I ended up finding a super awesome woman, just out of college, and she wanted to write shaders, so she basically became our shader queen. She’s written almost all of the shaders in the game.”

This is a practical, timely example of how Allen solved a production problem, something he believes game devs should constantly be looking to do if they want to be good leads — even when it means making yourself obsolete.

‘Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do’

Hiring someone new onto the team helped dislodge Allen as a bottleneck, since shaders were someone else’s full-time responsibility now. That also meant he suddenly had a bit more free time in his work day, and to fill that time he went looking for something to solve.

“I moved on and started looking at what our problems would be,” he said.”One of the big ones we ended up tackling was all the facial animations for all of our orcs, and the 40,000+ lines of dialog, and how we were gonna animate all that with all the actors.”

So Allen and other folks on the Shadow of War team spent about a year “completely redoing” the animations for the game’s monstrous maws, revamping how many bones were in each face and how they move in response to the data they’re fed. Looking back now, Allen isn’t sure it would have happened if he’d kept happily writing shaders.

“The best thing you can do, for yourself and for us, is to make yourself obsolete. Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do.”

“If I hadn’t said ‘alright this thing that I’m doing, that I love doing…I should move on,’ if I hadn’t thought through that, then all of that updated face tech, that improved pipeline….well, it probably would have existed, but the system was already sort of long in the tooth, and by focusing on it, I think we got it to a lot better place than it would have been otherwise.”

Allen shared this specific example from Shadow of War‘s development to illustrate a piece of game dev career advice he wants other devs to think about: always look for new problems. Someone told him that once, when he was feeling stuck, and it’s stuck with him ever since.

“I once got really great advice from Samantha Ryan, who used to run WB [Games], and before that was Monolith’s studio head,” said Allen. “She was my manager, and she said the best thing you can do, for yourself and for us, is to make yourself obsolete. Make it so you come into work every day and you don’t have anything to do.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, this notion of going to work every day and looking for ways to make your job extinct. Allen acknowledged that it can feel counter-intuitive, but suggested devs who want to be good leads think of it less as eliminating their value and more as solving problems.

“It seems very counter-intuitive; I was like, are you just gonna fire me then?” Allen recalled, with a laugh.

“And she’s like ‘no, because there’s a certain personality type that will always look for the next problem. And if you’re too busy focusing on existing problems, you’re not doing the thing that’s best. The best thing for you to do, would be to look for the next problem. Because when you look for those problems, and solve those problems, we as a company are better, and you are more valuable. So really her whole point was, shift responsibility onto folks. Which seemed counter-intuitive and weird, but I don’t know, I loved it, and I’ve lived by that ever since.”

Of course, many devs will feel like they’re in a position where they can’t shift responsibilities onto others — if they’re working alone or in a small team, for example, or doing remote contract work.

Allen acknowledged this as well, noting that his experiences are most relevant to devs at large studios but can also serve as a general reminder to try and solve problems permanently whenever possible. If you can figure out a permanent solution to something you regularly spend time working on, you can move on to solve bigger and better problems.

“Always look for new problems. Look to solve new problems, look for people to help you solve them. Being stuck someplace is really about not pressing through, sometimes,” added Allen. “Our industry is unique in that, the whole point of the job is constantly solving problems…so every day you can sort of learn something new, solve a new problem.”

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

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This article contains minor spoilers for the first act of Divinity: Original Sin 2, including location and quest names.

As the market for modern role-playing games grows, developers are under increasing pressure to appeal to as many niches as possible. This is a problem endemic to mainstream game development – AAA development in particular – but Western RPGs are arguably the hardest hit by this. In this genre, attempting to accommodate every type of player results in a vast diversity of viable approaches to quests, story, and combat, but can give rise to disparate elements of the game and its narrative clashing with each other, resulting in a final product that feels vague, unfocused, and unguided. This pushes players into feeling bored or frustrated, which can quickly translate into disengagement and unfulfillment.

It’s In The Name

In Dragon Age: Inquisition, released 2014, a zone called the Hinterlands perfectly embodies this problem. It’s the first open-world area players visit, and it’s gigantic: larger than the entire playable areas of the first two Dragon Age games combined, according to the developers. It’s also densely packed with non-player characters, enemies, and quest content. In total, it contains more than fifty sidequests, which is a dizzying amount of content by any standard. This should be laudable, but in practice it’s a gigantic (and avoidable) misstep. When players were exposed to the zone, they got trapped in endless checklists and meaningless, irrelevant busywork that actively hindered story progression. Where BioWare tripped up in this situation was their failure to provide and, most importantly, maintain narrative and systemic motivation for players to continue out of the Hinterlands. There are a number of potential solutions to this: having sidequests require travel to other zones, for example, or designing some sort of in-game narrative event temporarily pushing players out of the Hinterlands to a scripted story segment (again, in another zone). A fundamental part of the Hinterlands Problem is that any momentum the story had before players entered the zone quickly dissipated. Something along the lines of these solutions would leave the Hinterlands and its fifty-four sidequests largely intact, but push players back into progressing through the game’s narrative.

Of course, Inquisition was hardly the first, or last, role-playing game to suffer from this – it’s just a highly visible example. Overly large amounts of quests and sidequests have historically been a selling point for RPGs, especially in BioWare’s earlier titles. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a large number of quests, or amount of narrative content in general, is the problem. The Hinterlands Problem is a complex beast, but a large contributor to it is the overall design itself being just a bit too shy to lend players a gentle nudge (or a firm shove) towards progressing through the game, narratively and systemically. It’s easy to understate the difficulty of doing this well: game designers constantly walk a tightrope, balancing the need to allow the player the illusion of organically advancing through the game with the need to make sure they’re actually advancing through the game and not wasting time rescuing lost cows. The solution isn’t just in removing the meaningless busywork or putting less context in: it’s a problem that has to be attacked from multiple angles, and it can require a multidisciplinary set of skills to fix.

Writing Narrative Cheques Your UI Can’t Cash

Divinity: Original Sin 2, an open-world RPG released this year, also suffers from the Hinterlands Problem. When the story and gameplay are heavily scripted (the narrative bottlenecks, so to speak) the game is lush, exciting, and does a splendid job of allowing the player to devise creative solutions to the narrative and combat-based puzzles that it provides. However, when the player is released into open maps such as Fort Joy and Reaper’s Coast, the narrative thread very quickly unspools into a tangle of half-finished quests and hinted-at storylines. Unlike in Dragon Age, though, most of these quests aren’t meaningless busywork. With few exceptions, they’re interesting, quirky, and humorous. Where many sidequests in Original Sin 2 do fail is in maintaining the game’s narrative cohesion, and this is a problem with potential solutions in tweaks of both its narrative design and its user interface.

When we look at Original Sin 2, we see a flawed gem: a sequel that had to live up to a hugely well-received predecessor, while introducing new mechanics and ambitiously pushing the envelope of how game systems and narrative interact. The downfall of the game is in its ambition: while the line-to-line quality, and the quests themselves (viewed individually) are stellar, the narrative cohesion falls apart when the player finds themselves pursuing any more than a few of the dozens of elaborate, impressive sidequests. It’s not a given that the average player can keep track of all these narrative threads, and a major contributor to Original Sin 2’s lack of guidance and cohesion is the game’s quest log (or Journal, as it’s referred to ingame). In a title that executes well on almost everything it tries, the Journal stands out as a piece of the user experience that disincentivizes its own use and largely fails to guide the player through the narrative as a whole. Progression-related quests are given no special markers, and there’s no way to “bookmark” a quest, so players must constantly bounce back in and out of the menu system to keep track of what they’re meant to be doing. Not only does this break the game flow, it contributes to the failure of the Journal at the one thing it’s there for: guiding the player through the process of completing quests. Divinity: Original Sin 2’s version of the Hinterlands Problem is one where an overabundance of narrative threads and an undercooked UI element crash into each other to cause a muddled, unfocused open world experience, and the game is the lesser for it.

Snip Your Threads Judiciously

The Hinterlands Problem can be summed up as being a situation where too much optional content and a failure to provide a clear forward path for the player causes frustration, boredom, and a decrease in narrative cohesion. No game designer designs systems with these outcomes in mind: rather, the Hinterlands Problem is a common and natural byproduct of good-intentioned, if myopic, design. It’s the result of a failure to keep the bigger picture in mind, and, again, nobody does this on purpose. It just happens. To mitigate the chances of this happening, narrative designers and game designers must continually interrogate the means through which players will consume and advance through content; they must have open dialogue with systems and UI designers; and above all, they must play through and review each other’s content. Too much work in studios of all sizes takes place in isolation, and that status quo is the perfect breeding ground for problems like this.

 

Damon Reece is a narrative designer from Adelaide, Australia, passionate about open-world and modular storytelling. Damon prefers gender-neutral pronouns (they/them), and hates talking about themself in the third person. You can follow them on Twitter, or look at their portfolio if you’re having trouble figuring out whether to take them seriously.

Virtual reality studio Bigscreen has secured $11 million in Series A financing to make new hires and accelerate the development of its social platform. 

The round was led by venture capital outfit True Venture, and takes the company’s total funding for the year to $14 million. 

For those unfamiliar with the company, Bigscreen is the developer behind the aptly named Bigscreen social virtual desktop app for Vive and Oculus Rift. 

The free app (currently in beta) lets users hang out in virtual theatres and other digital spaces where they can do things like play games, work, and watch movies together. Bigscreen hopes the latest cash injection will help it cope with the app’s rapid expansion. 

“Over the past year, Bigscreen has grown significantly to more than a quarter million users. In just the past few months our core metrics grew over 300 percent,” reads the Bigscreen blog.

“Our power users spend 20 to 30 hours using Bigscreen every week, and many users have spent more than 1,000 hours in Bigscreen.

“Based on usage and user reviews, Bigscreen is now one of the most popular VR apps in the world. We now need to grow the team in order to improve the product and expand the Bigscreen platform to more VR and AR devices.”