Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
Nintendo president: “Game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated”
Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa has explained to Japanese magazine Famitsu that video game development will become even longer, more complex, and more sophisticated in the future and that mergers…
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Among the games I've recently played and enjoyed:
- Nova Drift
- Rule the Waves 3
- Dominions 6
Those are all one- or two-man efforts.
I also like some games with much larger teams, but I'm not sure that things are simply getting bigger.
They're definitely getting bigger, but not with anything meaningful. I'm playing through Cyberpunk 2077 and it definitely feels like a lot of the side missions are unnecessary filler to pad out an excuse for the major names they got involved. I'm guessing other AAA are the same, "we need to do more than last time" whether it's impactful to the story and experience or not.
You look at the credits to a lot of games these days and notice that the vast majority of people are in the various art departments or management with, like, 3 people programming it all and the same or fewer people in QA. And it can take upwards of an HOUR to get through all the credits because there are THOUSANDS of people working on it.
Small teams deliver more concentrated quality, IMO.
I don't know if I can reduce it to the programmers making the game, though. Like...yeah, the most-replayable games I've played rely heavily on the code, and less on the assets.
But there are also games where the art is pretty critical that I enjoy. Like, imagine games in the Myst series without the art and sound. Like, none of the code is particularly impressive. The puzzles are...okay, I guess. You play a game like that for the art and sound.
Or Lumines. I mean, yeah, they had to get the gameplay loop right, but technically, it's a very simple game, just a falling-blocks game. But the audio and to a lesser degree, the appearance, is important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bboWlUppp-s
Rez is maybe a little fancier codewise, but it's just a rail shooter. It's really about experiencing the art and music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZLHB5e90pU
And I definitely did enjoy those. In the case of the latter two, those were not AAA games, didn't have huge teams creating assets, but it was still really the assets that made the game.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=bboWlUppp-s
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=gZLHB5e90pU
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It's not even industry standard for lower level staff to be credited at all, though there are slow improvements in that area. Most of the time the people you see credited for QA are going to be managers or managers-of-managers unless they get specific with the job titles. I've done work on six AAA games and have credits for none of them.