Microsoft has released free Visual Studio Community Edition. It’s basically a free full featured Visual Studio IDE (apparently with everything included) that can be used to make all kinds of apps. I was even surprised to find support for Python and Git included. Even more surprising was the Apple and Android logos in the “supported platforms” section!
Link: http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs
Ah! Design Patterns! Yes those seemingly magical concoctions of code that appear to solve all of the problems plaguing software design. So profound is the initial impact of design patterns, that the engineer begins to believe that he/she has finally found mythical scrolls of wisdom, bestowed upon him/her by divine beings, so much so that after reading through them every design problem can be automatically deconstructed into a set of familiar design patterns. Using them seems to solve every challenge software engineering has to offer — and the engineer begins to believe that all that is ever needed on his/her desk is a copy of those very patterns. Yes, there was a time when I have been guilty of the very same thing.
There is also the misconception that patterns are drop-in replacements to traditional software design practices. It’s tempting to approach a design problem with a pre-packaged solution that patterns seem to offer. “Oh, we have a Composite, that means we need a Visitor for collaboration. So let’s use a Visitor then.” That was easy, but what was missed was the overhead of designing something as a Visitor. No one asked the question why a Visitor was needed, or if it was indeed needed. Often the only reason given for such design decisions is, “… because a design pattern says so.” That’s not what design patterns advocate at all. Excess use of design patterns while designing software, inadvertently leads to Over-engineering.
This contradicts the popular perception which is of the view that patterns were created to address most commonly occurring design problems. Yes that is true, and no I am not trying to be a design pattern heretic and declare that patterns are useless. Patterns are in fact very useful when applied correctly. It is true that most software designs can broken down into sub-designs which can be collectively solved using a combination of different design patterns. But just because they can be, doesn’t mean they have to be. A designer well versed in design pattern use can quickly find adaptable patterns for most design problems — and can probably get them to work together if he or she understands the modalities of pattern behavior. There is a dichotomy here; design patterns lead to over-engineering — and they are useful!! What is it then?
The truth lies somewhere in-between. Most problems with “Over-patterning” begin when there is an overbearing urge on the part of a designer to adapt his/her design, and sometimes downright bend it to fit to a design pattern. Just because a pattern fits or solves a problem, doesn’t mean it has to be used. Loading a software design with patterns is a mistake. One must remember, patterns add cost, and by cost I mean engineering cost. Strange — an engineering solution adding an engineering cost? But, thats how it is with any engineering problem in any engineering domain. Ironically if you refer each pattern you will often see these costs clearly pointed out by the authors. Call them disadvantages, limitations, issues or whatever other name you come up with, but the reality is that these issues aren’t trivial. An oversight or a failure to understand the implications of these in the overall design of a software system is what leads to overly complex or over-engineered solutions.
An excellent article to read with regards to this is Joshua Kerievsky’s Stop Over-engineering.
Yes we are all hooked on to Facebook and Twitter, maybe some of us more than others, but what does the future hold for social networking? It’s interesting, but if you were to look at it, online virtual worlds are becoming a lot like social networking sites. I was reading Shawn Fanning’s remarks on online games and it got me thinking about social networking in a virtual world. His technology Rupture attempts to connect gamers together via a common API/Interface. Your typical online game will probably feature quest and sub-quests; not your typical social networking activities. That said, the idea of having “social networking” in a virtual word is not something new. Second Life is probably the best example of how future social networking could be. To me a future 3D social networking virtual world would be something that I can log on to and create applications for. Something like a 3D Facebook, something having it’s own API that can be coded to. While Second Life does offer some capability to create your own content, what is needed is probably much more. How about allowing me to create my own little game in a 3D world? Maybe a full online game inside the service itself, something along the lines of a Facebook app/game. Ah! That would be amazing indeed!
Not all social networking users are actual gamers — but in a way they are. Most people will often end up playing those small little games or interact with others apps which give you an often ridiculous score that users like to brag about to other users/friends/community members. “Ooh lookey here, I have an IQ equal to Einstein” or “Joe Facebooker got 2,000,000 points on SomeApp” are all too common. People like to compete — and at the same time also like to interact, join communities. What current SN sites do is allow people to build communities and groups easily and rapidly — the two most important aspects for a success of an online game! With the advent of sites like Facebook, literally 100s of online games and apps have found easy adoption without needing to worry about things like server programming, latency, hosting, hardware, and you name it. The list goes on. However the most important thing they have cashed in on is an easier way to build communities for their products. Creating an online game/app today is not an easy task, besides the obvious engineering difficulties it is equally difficult to build successful community around an online game/app. Some future service that abstracts all these aspects and allows people to easily and rapidly build apps and games would probably be the social networking virtual world of tomorrow.
I was a bit hush hush about my current activities, but I guess it’s OK to talk about it now that the project has been put on track. I am not revealing too many details as yet, but I can tell you what it is going to be. Well it’s actually a smaller project considering the my previous one (Doofus Longears – The game), lot easier in complexity and pretty small in size. Yes, it is related to games and gaming and involves a game, but it’s not a 3D project — it is 2D. Well it is 3D under the hood since it is based on Direct3D but it rarely uses the third dimension so it’s not 3D per say. The entire project involves creation of a game, which I must say is pretty trivial, but more than that it involves the creation of a generic game builder software, the work for which is already under way. The name of the entire thing is still under wraps, but you should see it come out in later entries.
The engine is an already written, accomplished 2D engine — no I am not writing the engine this time. The major job is to create an elaborate game builder (GUI), a designer, a scripting engine (Lua in this case) on top of the engine and integration of the engine and the scripting system into the game builder and designer. The game will be built on top of the scripting engine and should be pretty simple to make once the game builder and the scripting systems are in place and properly integrated. The game builder is designed to be generic enough to make any kind of 2D game (arcade, adventure, platformer, puzzle,…)
So — Yes, I am taking a holiday from our engine for a while, I hope only for a little while. I have been up to some interesting R&D which I hope I can integrated into the O2 Engine soon. It’s been a long time since I worked on a 2D game, almost 7 years now since I wrote a 2D pacman clone. The game had 3 levels and crappy graphics, makes me laugh looking at it now. But hey — that’s how you learn.
As it stands today, a fair amount of progress has been made on the GUI side of things. A lot still remains to be done with integration, but 2D games are lot simpler than 3D ones so I hope and can tide over this project pretty soon. More details about the project and the game builder will be out in due course. I will post some screens of game builder when the game engine is integrated and there is at least a semblance of a game running inside it.
As you probably already know, the first Doofus game was released a few weeks back, and though I haven’t fully shaken off the lethargic hangover that accompanied the game release; I am slowly coercing myself to get back to daily chores. After every project one must look back and take a note of hits and misses of the project development cycle (Causal Analysis). That’s what I have been doing for the past few days, and though there have been lots of those (hits and misses), one of the important lesson I have learned from the whole experience of making the game is the importance of data-driven programming.
Most of the tedious and time consuming activities during development turned out to be simple manipulation and ordering of code. Placing scene-nodes, structuring the scene-graph, ordering render batches, grouping shadowing objects, and the list could go on. Things like these took up ridiculous amounts of time. In the game all this is done through code — when this could easily have been solved by a more data driven approach. I must admit there were times during development of the project when I yearned (almost cried) for a more flexible system. The problem was a lack of script driven programming, or should I say, a lack of a more data-driven system on top of the engine. Everything with the engine is currently done in C++, except maybe the configuration files. I hate it when you have to recompile 20-30 files just because you had to move a local variable to a class member. This does happen, especially for classes that have a long list of data variables and/or the ones that operate and integrate game data. We had initially planned on integrating a script and data-driven system into the engine, but that was later push down the priority of things to be done — and ultimately pushed out from the release due to lack of time and resources. Through not verbatim, that’s probably the story with every dev project out there that has to keep up with at least some sort of deadline.
In data-driven programming, data controls the flow of the program. Data is not just used to define an object state but also used to control the program flow, sometimes externally. Data-driven programming means writing generic code that consumes data and modifies it’s behavior depending on the structure of that data. The concept of data driven programming is not new. UNIX utilities have traditionally been data-driven and many applications use data driven designs. A web browser is a good example of a data driven application. It consumes a web page and modifies it’s behavior based on the structure of the web-page code, in this case HTML. Markups are again an excellent examples of data that encodes structure within itself (XML).
Well, there is a lot to take away from the current project. The engine will be made more data driven in the future, that’s for sure. The game also allowed me to pinpoint exact areas where a data-driven approach is needed. Many of those places wern’t immediately obvious during design.
I was recently asked as to what I thought about in-game advertisements. Given the fact that I am a game developer, the whole concept of in-game advertisements does seem like an intriguing subject. There are two ways to really look at the whole idea of in-game advertisements.The first and the most obvious one is of course as a potential money spinning tool for developers/publishers and is quite an interesting idea to explore. But there is a also a view that such ads inside games will end up polluting and degrading the overall game experience and could attract an ire from the players or the community as a whole, and in the worst case have an adverse effect on games sales. The last thing you want is a commercial break or a cutscene marketing something inside a fast paced game. Such a thing will be a disaster and I am sure players will frown on games that take this road.
My feeling is, game designs don’t need to this drastic to have the whole in-game advertising thing working for them. It would be a horrendous mistake to have advertisements inside the game that degrade gameplay. However having interactive ads that are properly integrated into the game may not necessarily be a bad prospect. That is exactly why ads in games need to be more than just inert props and simple banners. To a player such things make little impact and might or might not get noticed. The impact from any 2D inert items will be limited, especially if the game features a 3D world (2D games could still make use of banners more effectively than 3D ones, but even they could do better if the ads were interactive). Games typically differ from other traditional forms of digital entertainment in the fact that they are an interactive medium and therefore like every other gameplay element, ads within games will also be most effective when the player interacts with them.
Gamers (, especially hard-core gamers) might frown on the idea of having in-game ads but it may not be all bad. Not all games are ideal for in-game ads, I will touch on that point a little later. I personally haven’t seen any ads in most of the games that I have played. But I have seen it in some games, the example I can sight is Second Life. Second Life is a great example of how ads can make into games without being immediately frowned upon. The player is given a choice of whether he/she wants to interact and view the content (of the ad) instead of something being forced on him/her. A player will appreciate this, and the ad campaign will thus be successful. In the brief time I played Second Life (here), I visited a couple of interesting places where the in-game advertisements looked really great. Music seems to be the best appreciated followed by fashion when it came to ads there, but I am sure people must be advertising all sorts of stuff over there. As I said, my stint with Second Life was pretty brief.
As a game developer I look at the whole scenario of in-game advertisements positively. I am sure using proper game design advertisements can be made sufficiently interactive so that they could “fit into” a game without actually nagging the player. I would even go further and say that if used effectively a game could actually be enhanced (case in point Second Life) so that marketing inside games could be something that player can look forward to and actually find an interest in the whole idea of having an online try-before-you-buy opportunity. Can all games be effective as in-game advertising mediums? No, some might do a better job at it while others might not be as effective. MMOGs like Second Life will probably be far better at it than say a FPS with it’s setting on an alien planet. Some games like shoot-them-up tournaments might not be effective at all. Having said that, we can never be too sure about marketing ideas and how “genius minds” work. So, someone might just find some way to insert a “Matrimony Online” banner inside the Strogg Nexus on Stroggos, you never can tell.
It’s a fact that C++ has been the most successful and probably the most widely used programming language till date in the gaming industry. Even if you were to look at the software industry as a whole, a near countless software projects owe their existence to the language and probably many more will eventually be made using C++. Universities around the world still churn out thousands of CS grads with C++ knowledge and there will be no shortage of programmers who know C++, at least for some time to come. So why is C++ so popular? The reasons may be many (, I am sure there are other near infinite blogs which touch on this,) but at the end of the day it just boils down to the simple fact, “it gets the job done”! While it made good business sense to employ C++ (some years ago), it doesn’t make all that much sense when we consider scalability looking into the future. C++ in it’s current form is — well, simply inadequate. Most people will agree with me that C++ has probably outlived it’s time, and it was time the programming community as a whole moved away from the language. Easier said than done though, but the question to ask is, what real options do we have which provide radical new changes to the way C++ operates? Very few approaches I would say. Before you raise your hand and give out the name of <insert your favourite language here>, let’s look at some of the challenges facing future game development and/or rather future software development as a whole.
Lets first look at the C++ language itself. It’s well known that C++ has it’s faults. It’s not an easy language to learn and an even more difficult language to master (, compared to other languages). It takes a substantial amount of time and experience to understand the intricacies of the language and takes even more time and effort to fully grasp the quirks and subtleties involved in software creation using C++. Typically it takes quite a lot of time before an average programmer can become truly productive with C++. The learning curve for the language is high and not for the faint hearted. Besides this the language has increasing come under flak for allowing seemingly undefined behavior without complaining too much. The language does very little to deter flawed assumptions regarding some (very) basic constructs that contradict how things actually work. Even with proper planning, strict development cycles and stringent coding practises, software development using C++ is difficult. Memory management is a bane and can cause unexpected and unwarranted catastrophes which are known all too well in the industry.
There are a growing number of languages that address the shortcomings of C++. Be it Java, C#, Python or most new(er) languages, all try to fill in the gaps left out in C++. As a matter of fact most languages do a good job at it. However with all it’s faults, C++ still stands out as a viable game development choice. That’s because of 2 primary reasons; a) it has vastly more libraries, code dumps (, I am talking about game development only), engines, examples and everything really, that it simply wins over the argument right there. True many libraries have bindings to other languages, but most of them seem rather inadequate or poorly maintained. Besides there are a lot more examples on cutting edge technologies (,especially graphics) written in C++ than there are in all other languages put together. and b) It’s easier to get programmers for C++ than any other programming language, Java being the exception. Things are changing though and there are some concerted efforts being made to promote other languages and platforms (XNA, PyGame) as viable game development alternatives. However all those remain some distance away from challenging C++ for the number one position.
The above mentioned points in support of C++ are non trivial. They go a long way in weighing out the demerits of building a game using the language. So the question really is, do we really have any viable options beyond C++? The answer is somewhere in between a complete YES and a total NO. As we stand today the best scenario is probably building the core engine using C++ and then having a scripting system on top of it. Be it Lua, Squirrel, Python, or whatever. That way you can always find a middle ground between having to reuse existing code and at the same time allow rapid development and prototyping capabilities. Many engines/games take this route and there is little doubt that such a process proves to be advantageous in the game building process. There are already a lot of games out there that use scripting language for rapid prototyping and in some cases building large sections of the game. Having a scripting language on top of the engine core is clearly a step in the right direction.
Scripting languages solve but some of the problems. They do a part of the job and they do it pretty well. However, there are issues related to game development which require newer and more radical approaches. The challenge facing game development in the future is building an engine which can effectively and efficiently use parallel programming/computing techniques (Invasion of the multi-core machines). Current generation programming techniques fall short of addressing the issue effectively. More importantly most newer approaches to effectively address multi-core problem are just way too complicated to be implemented effectively in C++. Efforts are on to find radical new solutions (C++ STM), but thus far they look good only on paper and still seem too cryptic to be put in production use. The issue of effectively using multiple cores of a CPU will probably be the biggest challenge for the next generation engine designer. The more natural choice for addressing the multi-core and parallel programming issue is the the use of functional programming languages. Since functional programming approaches are typically side effects free, parallelizing functional programming code is easier than imperative programming. However mixing functional and imperative styles can be an equally daunting task. As my argument in the above paragraphs suggest, there will still be a lot of code in C++ that will need, someway, of interacting with any functional language that may be used.
It’s debatable if going “strictly functional” will solve all the challenges the future will throw at us. A more plausible scenario would be to have specific portions of the engine/game parallelized either by using a functional language or by having a subsystem level parallelism. This obviously would allow existing (C/C++) code to be reused, however there are still challenges to overcome even with such approaches. Sub-system parallelism means having each subsystem (physics, renderer, logic, AI, sound, network…) run in a separate thread/s. This however is a very optimistic approach since sub-systems tend to overlap and in some cases critically depend on each other. Such a system could be achived with existing code also, however I remain very skeptical whether such an approach will actually work on the ground. Another approach is to have job based parallelism. Divide your most CPU intensive tasks into jobs and then have a kernel system to marshal them based on priority. This is something similar to what an OS does and seems the best way to shoot for parallelism with existing mechanisms. This approach however requires you to split your design into a job based approach and that could prove challenging. Having a functional language as a script system (on top of a C/C++ based engine) is another idea to think about. I am not really sure how helpful this would be and can’t really comment on this (, since I myself haven’t tried such a radical approach, maybe I ought to give it a shot). But it seems very much possible to have a functional language as a scripting system, and could in theory be used to parallelize sections of the game/engine.
So it would seem C++ might just survive in the game engine of tomorrow, although in a less prominent form compared to it’s position today. It may happen that over the years C++ may eventually fade out, however it’s part can’t be total ruled out. Transition from C++ to any other language will be slow and may be tumultuous, with teams opting for a hybrid approach than just downright building existing functionality from scratch. As new technologies progress and CPUs with 100s of cores start being commonplace, we sould see the popularity of C++ waning and been replaced by some other (maybe functional) language. As time progresses C++ might well become increasingly irrelevant as more and more libraries get promoted to newer and more modern languages or newer more efficient ones take their place.
Fable is a game developed by Lion head studios and to be honest I missed out on it a couple of years back when it first came out. Interestingly it was my bout with Oblivion that actually first piqued my interest in this game; since the game seems very similar to Oblivion, and yes Oblivion is pretty high on my list of all time favorite games. Fable is interesting because it just seems so much like what I have in my head as to something I might be working on. A very cartoonish backdrop, a very serious and in-depth gameplay with, what can be called as, dark humor. I have only very briefly played the game and it seems like a well designed game overall. I like it, and like it a lot. While not exactly same as Oblivion, some similarities do exist between the two and, well, it’s hard not to compared the two.
For one, although Fable is open-ended, Oblivion allows you more freedom, definitely more than Fable does. (Those of you who don’t know what an open-ended or sandbox style game is read this.) You can play Oblivion at your own pace and the game can play differently depending on the choices you make quests you complete and how you interact with world (and NPCs). Fable does allow you something similar and does have a sandbox style play, but unlike Oblivion it has a more linear gameplay, or should I say, more linear than Oblivion. Fable is actually an older game as compared to Oblivion, so it wouldn’t be fair to compare them outright, since of course the game predates Oblivion by almost 2 years. Then again 2 years isn’t such a long time after all.
The one thing I didn’t like about Fable, or should I say, didn’t appreciate too much, is that fact that you can’t deviate from your play area, meaning you can’t go anywhere and everywhere in the game world. Exploration is kept to a confined area and the player is not allowed to go beyond that. In Oblivion you are free to explore every corner of Cyrodiil which, I must say, can take quite a while. I played the game for 8 months now and I still haven’t had time to go to every place on the map. The world along with every cave and dungeon is just simply huge. I can understand the technical limitations for such an approach, but Oblivion addresses this very subtly and elegantly. Coming back to my point about exploration; I think exploration is a critical component of any sandbox style game. It gives you so much freedom or should I say gives you an illusion of total freedom and that is something I have come to appreciate a lot after playing the Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind and Oblivion).
In support of Fable, it has a fantastic combat system. I would place it better than Oblivion and I can safely say Fable allows you to have a more balanced combat game. I can give you an example; both Oblivion and Fable allow the use of Mêlée and Ranged weapons, but for some reason I didn’t find the use of ranged weapons in Oblivion all that intuitive. I can’t really explain why, can’t really put a finger on one particular reason, but while playing the game I used to get clobbered if I used a bow & arrow. In Fable I use both to an equal degree. Both games are sandbox games and both games build the player character by the choices the player makes. In Oblivion I ended up being a beefy guy with little resistance to ranged attacks from other NPCs. In Fable my character seems to be a great balance of both. Now I can take down NPCs with proper planning and lure them into traps by using a combination of mêlée, ranged and magic. On the whole Fable does allow you to build a more all-round character.
Fable’s graphics are top notch. Spells and magic, combat system, weapon augmentations and teleportations are all done wonderfully. Even the cartoonish world is built beautifully and so are all the NPCs, of course considering the triangle budget and the fact that the game runs flawlessly on a Geforce 6200 with an impressive frame-rate I must add. The camera navigation and the cut-scenes are also pretty good. Graphics complement the gameplay very nicely and that’s what is important. Graphics are not over done and that’s good. You will find games that are galore with graphics that do nothing more than slowdown the game for no apparent reason and have no particular function other than to please graphics “fanbois”. Fable does none of that. The only thing I really hate about Fable is it’s game-save system. You can’t save your game in the middle of a quest. All you can do is save the skills you have learned. I can’t understand the reason for this, just defies logic. I generally play games only for 20 to 30 mins and quests take significantly longer to complete. So this “feature” is a real PITA. This is probably the only real complaint I have with the game.
I am a fan of sandbox style gameplay but my interest in Fable was 2 fold; it’s true I like playing games, however this time around my interest in the game was more of an academic nature; as a student of game design. I wanted to see how the game was designed overall. Yeah! I have this crazy idea of actually making a sandbox style game some day (long time in the future… or maybe not so long) and Fable seemed too hard to resist. Mind you I haven’t fully played the game yet but I am already pretty impressed; and the same goes of Oblivion too. Baring little quirks, I think both games are equally good in presenting the player with a out-of-the-box experience. Both games allow you to build the player character in unique ways (, sometimes not so unique) but non-monotonous none the less. Both game are “different” and it would be unfair to say that one is better than the other. True they each have their good and bad points, but both games are equally enjoyable.
I haven’t said or ranted about gaming in quite a while now. Quite unlike me. I often have to say and rant a lot, especially about gaming. If you read the last 10 posts you would never guess I was a game developer. So I guess it’s time to put the Blog back on track! The absence of any game related post have been for a couple of reasons. For one, I haven’t installed any new games as of now. Too busy with finishing off Doofus 3D. Neither have I upgraded my old aging NVIDIA 6200 and 6600 cards. So anything new like Bioshock or Crysis is out! I have promised myself a brand new 8800 GTS or something newer as soon as I complete and ship the game, and that’s been now like, forever! On the contrary, for the past 6-8 months I have had the opportunity of actually watching others playing games and it’s been a learning experience as a game designer. You wouldn’t believe it, one of them happens to be my mother. She has been doing all the playing while I have been working my ass off to finish my game, though I must say her taste is very (very) different from mine. No Half Life-s or Oblivion-s for her, she kinda enjoys the Zuma-s and the Insaniquarium-s; casual games in general.
Just watching and being a spectator can teach you volumes about how people enjoy computer games. Casual gamers in many ways can very different from hardcore counterparts and can be very similar in other respects. A casual gamer is generally not interested in complex gameplay. They are the ones who enjoy simple yet immersive games. Simple puzzles and not overly complex challenges are ones that are favored over long story lines and dark alleys. Also appreciated are short levels. For instance, I tried selling a game called Caesar III to my mother but nope, didn’t work. For those who don’t know, Caesar III was a city building game, kinda like Sim City and I loved that game when I played it. The game has no gore, so I was pretty sure she would love it. However, the comments I got from her were, “Too complex”, “Very difficult to manage”, “Can’t understand it”. It just goes to show casual gamers tend to favour easier set of “game-rules”. Anything that is more complex than a few set of keystrokes is a big NO.
Over the past few months I observed and chatted with a few other casual gamers too. Mostly friends and relatives who often play casual games. It’s always good to understand the market mentality, especially if you are developing a product catering to them. Most casual gamers I chatted with have played 2D games, but quite a few I must say, have played 3D games. Interesting, since I am developing a 3D casual game myself. When asked if they would be interested in such a game, the overwhelming response was, Yes, to obviously a simple 3D game. Most of them said they would be very interested, but were unsure if they would like it. Some even told me they wouldn’t mind learning a few extra keys to play something like Marble Blast. So it means Doofus 3D does have a market after all, but it remains to be seen if it would indeed translates into sales.
In general I have found casual gamers dislike having to learn a lot of rules, period! Games that involve significant learning effort quickly become unpopular. So I guess games like Oblivion are out. Also not so much appreciated is, gore. There is an interesting paradox here, unexpected I must say; many casual players admitted to playing arena games like Quake III. The reason; such games was easy and fast paced. Most enjoyed it, some said the games were violent but they generally didn’t mind. None of the casual gamers I talked to knew exactly what game genres were, none cared. Most said they looked at the game cover or screenshots to decide if they would indeed play a game. 90% said they played flash games. About half said they don’t understand things like DirectX or OpenGL or h/w acceleration. Nearly all said they had only on-board graphic cards. More than half said they didn’t even know you could install separate graphics cards. More than 75% said they had and do play games on laptops.
OK, my survey is far from being completely accurate. All I have done is maybe asked a few questions to people who I have met in the past year or so. I have in no way used a proper methodical approach for the survey. However, it does give you an insight into the mind of a casual gamer. As a game developer I generally tend to forget these important lessons and sometimes do go overboard. Then, I usually drag myself back to reality!
If you are graphics geek and love to see those so called next-gen effects, then recently released games like Crysis, UT3 and to some extent Bioshock will give you lot to cheer about. Crysis for one has shown that modern top line cards can push extraordinary amounts of detail. However, raw figures show that Crysis and UT3 sales have been anything but extraordinary. They have in fact fallen flat! Interesting figures there, and to some extent I am a bit surprised by what the figures show. As the articles point out both games were pretty hyped out before the release and they should have made flat out more sales than what the did. True Crysis has some crazy hardware requirements, but still the game can be played with older and less powerful graphics cards, so can UT3. Maybe not with all the graphics effects and resolution maxed out, but they can be played nevertheless. Besides both games have *huge* fan bases so the figures are very surprising indeed.
Well I can’t speak for everyone but, my personal take on the whole thing is the fact that vanilla FPS genre is kinda getting old. After so many games that churn out the same mundane gameplay, it has pretty much lost it’s charm. True the graphics have improved but not the gameplay in general. Games like Bioshock stand apart from the crowd because they give that little bit more to the overall game and it is exactly why they sell more. I can tell you from my experience over that years of playing games is the fact that (, and I have pretty much repeated this a lot of times on this blog,) FPS games are getting kinda boring. As a gamer I want more interesting stuff in there. That is exactly the reason I spent nearly 6 months playing Oblivion. The game gave me so much more to do than just run kill, run kill, collect ammo, run kill, collect health, run kill …..
I myself haven’t played UT3 and for that matter only watch someone else play Crysis, but from what I have heard people say about the games makes me wonder if they are nothing more than tech demos. Maybe we should look at it from a different perspective; it’s a fact Epic markets it’s engines via the UTx games, and I think to some extent Crytek does that too. So maybe that is exactly why those game are here for, to show off what their respective engines can achieve. The graphic brilliance achieved by both games/engines is amazing, there is little doubt to that, and the hardware requirements for the games is equally demanding. But that is for now. The same hardware will become mainstream in another 6 to 8 months and the same engines can be used/licensed to make other games. I therefore wouldn’t count them as outright failures.
Different people have different tastes and different points of view, so naturally have different tastes for game genres. However the feeling I get is, in general, game genres are beginning to overlap. This I think that is because of necessity. Game designers that strive to make their games “immersive” have started incorporating ideas and methods from other game genres to make gameplay more interesting and challenging. However having an equally good engine is a must. Case and point to Oblivion. The game looks great because it uses Gamebryo, which is another good engine. I am pretty sure we will see more and better games using both the engines in the future.