Category: News

CEO of Skybound Games Ian Howe and former creative director at Telltale Kent Mudle held a Reddit AMA yesterday to shed some light on the future of The Walking Dead: The Final Season, following the vague comments recently provided by Skybound on how the deal with Telltale will shape up.

Skybound (owner of The Walking Dead franchise created by Robert Kirkman) reached a deal with Telltale earlier this month to finish development on The Walking Dead: The Final Season.

While the terms of the deal are still being fleshed out, Skybound has confirmed that members of the original development team will be brought back to finish the project.

The AMA also confirmed that the scripts of episode 3 and 4 are being kept, so the writers’ original vision for the ending won’t be scrapped.

“Regarding the story, the process of developing the narrative isn’t changing, there is a long standing collaboration between the writers and Skybound over story approval and all the same people will still be involved,” Howe explained.

When asked about how the transfer of employees from Telltale will work, Howe maintained that the team will work directly for Skybound to complete the game, although he couldn’t provide more detail.

“The plan is for it to be staffed 100% by former Telltale staff,” he wrote. “The only time we’d look elsewhere is if we can’t fill a particular role from former Telltale people.”

He goes on to describe the role of Telltale staff within Skybound, noting that the transition is a difficult and slow-going process.

“In the development of any game, it’s often not a fixed team, people roll on and off of projects all of the time depending on where the game is at in it’s development cycle and this is no different,” Howe writes. 

“That means there are people who were on the team who were close to rolling off onto something else, it’s unfair to ask someone to come back and do a couple of weeks work, especially if that would get in the way of another job offer, so this is just one example of some of the challenges we face.”

One Reddit user asked what players should expect for a “slight delay” on episodes 3 and 4 of The Final Season.

“I would guess this is everyone’s number one question – What I can say is that the team is not currently working on the game and until we’re back into production, it’s going to be nearly impossible to give an accurate answer,” Howe said.

“What I can say is that we will announce new dates as soon as we know what they are, there is no reason for us to hold that information back, so it will be public immediately that we can talk about it with confidence.”

After being asked if there was a possibility the third episode would drop by the end of 2018, Howe seemed optimistic, saying: “I’m going out on a limb and will say yes, I fully expect Episode 3 to be this year and I’ll be very disappointed if we can’t make that happen.”

The entire thread provides more information about Skybound’s hopes for the partnership and also provides some behind-the-scenes on how a Telltale episode was developed, so be sure to read the entire AMA here.

Rob Nelson, the co-head of Rockstar North, sat down with The Guardian to talk about the company’s day-to-day in response to the outcry that rose up following Rockstar founder Dan Houser’s 100-hour weeks comment last week.

The full story has some quotes from Nelson about the studio’s typical working hours that help paint a picture of what a week at Rockstar Games looks like. It’s worth noting that Rockstar has been making a significant effort to fight back against the claim that heavy crunch is the norm as of late. 

The company lifted its social media policy recently and encouraged current employees to speak candidly about their time at the company, though its fair to point out that employees with more negative opinions might be reluctant to publicly share their thoughts.

To that end, the Guardian story offers a more empirical look at the hours game developers tend to work at Rockstar Games. The company provided the publication with employees’ self-reported hours spanning from January to September of this year.

According to those numbers, the average Rockstar developer works between 42.4 and 45.8 hours a week. Across the entire studio, the longest average workweek fell in early July at 50.1 hours. During that week, the Guardian says that 20 percent of employees recorded working at least 60 hours, with at least one employee working as many as 67.1 hours.

“Do people work hard and is there overtime and extra effort put in? Yes, there is. Is it something we want happening regularly for long periods of time or as an accepted part of our process or as a ‘badge of honor’ thing? No, it is not,” Nelson tells The Guardian. “We are always trying to improve how we are working and balance what we are making with how we make it and we will not stop working to improve in this area.”

Developers that spoke about their experiences at Rockstar Games say that crunch happens, but doesn’t approach that now infamous 100-hour mark, a comment Houser has since clarified to be about only he and 3 other senior writers toward the end of Red Dead Redemption 2’s development. More comments from those developers can be found here, while additional comments from Nelson can be found in the full Guardian story. 

In this GDC 2012 talk, Naughty Dog’s Eben Cook breaks down one of the flood effects used in Uncharted 3, discussing how a fluid simulation was used to inspire the final look.

Cook goes on to explain how the fluid simulation was used to create an animated surface mesh that made it into the engine, going over the particle techniques used to complete the look of the flood in Uncharted 3.

He also covers shader features for both the surface and the particles before closing off the talk by explaining the technique used to light the particles.

It was an insightful talk that’s still worth watching, so developers shouldn’t miss the opportunity to do so now that it’s freely available on the official GDC YouTube channel!

In addition to this presentation, the GDC Vault and its accompanying YouTube channel offers numerous other free videos, audio recordings, and slides from many of the recent Game Developers Conference events, and the service offers even more members-only content for GDC Vault subscribers.

Those who purchased All Access passes to recent events like GDC or VRDC already have full access to GDC Vault, and interested parties can apply for the individual subscription via a GDC Vault subscription page. Group subscriptions are also available: game-related schools and development studios who sign up for GDC Vault Studio Subscriptions can receive access for their entire office or company by contacting staff via the GDC Vault group subscription page. Finally, current subscribers with access issues can contact GDC Vault technical support.

Gamasutra and GDC are sibling organizations under parent UBM Americas.

According to Ubisoft Massive COO Alf Condelius​, the decision to avoid taking any concrete, political stance in video games like The Division is purely a monetary one, as politics are “bad for business.” 

Speaking earlier today at the Sweden Game Conference in Skövde, Condelius explained how Ubisoft Massive attempts to distance itself from any political interpretations players may have.

According to GamesIndustry.biz, He goes on to justify why developers and publishers may choose not to include politically charged messages in their work. 

“But I felt that it was so much better than joining boring other projects, so I decided to join this project as game designer.”

– Katamari Damacy’s creator Keita Takahashi on taking a professional risk to pursue creatively fulfilling work.

Japanese business culture runs deep within the Japanese games industry, where the hierarchal structure is deeply rooted in tradition. It was safe and generally expected for employees to stick to the norm– and that applied when it came to pitching video games. 

In an excerpt published to Polygon from the upcoming book Katamari Damacy, author L.E. Hall (and accomplished escape room designer) spoke with Katamari Damacy’s creator Keita Takahashi to discuss the uphill battle of getting the higher-ups of Namco to accept his game idea.

Takahashi’s desire to create a new type of game was hindered by the fact that at the time, Namco had no real internal process for pitching a game design from his position or the department he was in. It was an internal roadblock with no clear solution in sight. 

Unsure of where to start, Takahashi spoke with his boss Mitsutoshi Ozaki on how to move the idea forward into actual internal production. 

“Usually game ideas were proposed from the game design department at Namco, but we both worked in the art department,” Takahashi explained.

“Also, technically Ozaki-san was not my actual boss at that time. He had moved to another department, so I had to talk to my current boss about my idea first—but he was not a manager of game designers, he was a manager of artists. He seemed to not have a bad impression of my idea, but he couldn’t make a decision about the game itself.”

Despite the setback, Takahashi remained resilient in getting his pitch to stick. 

“It sucked, and I was stuck, but Ozaki-san had suggested a very unusual method for moving forward to me,” Takahashi said.

“At that time, I think he worked in the ‘new business department’ where they explore new business models. And that department was going to establish a specialized school for making video games for Namco by collaborating with a school for learning computer graphics called Digital Hollywood.”

The Namco Digital Hollywood Game Lab was a six-month course aimed at helping developers learn the necessary skills to create games for the PlayStation 2, with the goal being that their program would spit out different and interesting work while turning graduates into new hires.

“Ozaki-san said that Masaya Nakamura, then president of Namco, was interested in being a school principal, and that is one of the big reasons for this business,” Takahashi noted.

“And this game class had a curriculum where they actually make a game. But the students of this school [were] learn[ing] to be CG artists. So Ozaki-san needed a game idea that was easy to collaborate on with very junior artists, and my idea was selected. Ozaki-san thought the students could make objects that a katamari can roll up.”

Thus began work on the Katamari Damacy prototype.

The entire excerpt is well worth the read and offers more detail into the prototyping stage of Katamari Damacy’s development, so be sure to check it out over at Polygon.