The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible.
> The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers.
I remember reading an interview with a well known person in the 3D and gaming industry in a gaming magazine well over a decade ago. I can barley recall the details but one thing that stuck out was the interviewer asked why couldn't the game engine be the API giving the developers higher level tools instead of OpenGL or direct 3d, as well as audio, input and others. The answer was that game engines were too focused and not flexible enough to be used as a kitted API.
Fast forward to today and that is exactly what Unreal and Unity have achieved. They built game engines that are flexible enough to be complete tool kits to build other games. Interesting to see how far we have progressed.
This is at least in part because hardware has advanced to the point that for many games it makes sense to optimize for development time over runtime performance. Unity and Unreal are still not as performant as a well optimized specialized engine could be in many situations but it would probably take too long and cost too much to build that specialized engine.
There are also trade offs in flexibility that come with using Unity or Unreal. They make it easy to make games that fit within their paradigms but it's relatively harder to make a game that does something radical or experimental with rendering or physics.
I say this as someone who lives in Unity. It's absolutely the right choice in many situations but it's not without tradeoffs and compromises.
I love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.
Is it a cliche if it's true? The difference between some slapped together product and one that feels decent is layer after layer of detail and polish. Long after you feel that you've put forth a reasonable effort, you still have half of the development left to go.
This has not been my experience.
Game developers I've worked with have generally been pragmatic and willing to use the best tool for the job.
Also triple AAA isn't that old! There's not a generation retiring quite yet :) People who want to still be in the industry are. I've seen the industry get older on average as I've worked in it.
Forms of middleware have been there since the early days of AAA style games - sound, video encoding etc. such as RAD Game Tools
Can you give some examples? I had worked on many games and a licensed engine had been always evaluated. Some went with one, some did not for technical and economical reasons. Never seen people just outright declining it because it's "heresy".
Things were already moving in that direction though. Many games used Doom / Quake / etc engines in the 90s
I think the turning point came when the work to write a new engine became greater than the work to use an off the shelf and make it your own. And that only came about as people's expectations for physics, lighting, etc got pushed ever more.
Was this the Pandemic Studios version of Battlezone (i.e. Battlezone II) or the first version of Battlezone for PC? If you had a hand in either, then I owe you a beer (or whatever you prefer) a bunch of times over because I loved both of those games so much. Endless hours of entertainment!
Thank you! The physical model of the 'hovercrafts' in Battlezone 2 was so satisfying, I just enjoyed piloting over the landscape so much and no game has come this close to that feeling!
Hover physics was literally the very first thing I worked on for Battlezone, back when we were working in Interstate '76 and the game was called "Badlands". Within a week or so I had Groove Champion's orange Packard Piranha hovering around. There were many changes and additions later, but the core of hover physics started there.
I worked on both of them too, along with the unofficial patches and the remastered versions Battlezone 98 Redux and Battlezone Combat Commander. 20 years of Battlezone!
Yes. I'm not sure that is a good thing for the consumer though, and has led to the market being flooded by rubbish. It is one thing to produce a game. Another, to produce a good game.
Both ends of the market have been driven wildly off course. The major publishers have become so risk averse that the only games they greenlight are iterative skinner box perpetual loot box cash grab wastes of talent.
And on the low end you have the Unity asset store run amok.
I'm not sure how you do it, but there is a happy middle of reasonable risk with reasonable competency missing in the market. There are few games made there every year, but they are a paltry few next to the regurgitated annual CoD game or the thousand random shovelwares put on Steam every month.
It's still good to have engineers on a Unity or Unreal Engine 4 project (especially the latter). Designers can accomplish a lot with visual scripting but for a more complex game you'll often need custom components written by engineers.
There are certainly teams of people of that technical caliber today at Blizzard, Riot, Sony Santa Monica (and lots of other places farther from me) making amazing, cutting edge game tech. But there are also teams like the ones the author described that don't have amazing tech skills that still can make games we couldn't dream of thanks to game engines. I think it is exciting.
What's Blizzard done that's technically impressive as of late? They scrapped Titan, and Overwatch isn't particularly groundbreaking from what I can tell.
This is a sad comment that reeks of the gaming community where nobody creates anything so they've no grasp on the feats that these companies have been delivering over and over again for decades.
It's a genuine question; their most recent games have been an FPS, a MOBA, and a card game. I can't tell what "cutting edge game tech" that they happen to be creating with them.
Good games? Depending on your outlook, yeah. But there's nothing really...different? About them?
There are still great people working in the games industry, but it's larger and segmented. These days you can be an engine programmer working on e.g. Frostbite or id Tech for EA and ZeniMax, respectively. These have resulted in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Doom (2016). Dragon Age: Inquisition required a lot of engine work because Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters like Battlefield, and Doom is a bit of a technological marvel, and it's kind of a showcase piece for id Tech 6.
Bear in mind everything that's not included in this analysis: AI, mesh deformation, level logic, player mechanics, enemy mechanics, all the lower level stuff and so many things I haven't even thought of.
Battlezone and Battlezone 2 were the first two games I worked on professionally so they'll always be special to me. That's part of why I ended up supporting them unofficially for almost 15 years after release. :D
Every single person I've ever heard talk about Unity or Unreal in such an aggressive way was completely clueless about software development. They all have high hopes of making the best game/engine the world has ever seen yet are stuck in the planning phase. Either that or they're gullible gamers who watched too many youtubers.
The reality is, every single engineer who built the very optimized engines you my have in mind (that power a few specific games at most) have great respect for Unity and Unreal.
Game development is a small world, people know each other across companies, share tech stuff on Twitter and go to the same conferences.
Shall we go back to the old days, then? Because there were no crap games then.
The solution is better curation and discoverability. Not harsher gate-keepers and horribly difficult development.
So many incredible games wouldn't exist without modern development tools. Just because you were mildly inconvenienced the last you time browsed an app store, don't wish it all away.
There has always been mountains of books and huge libraries of music being created and we have always managed. Find people you trust to recommend things to you. I recommend Tom Chick at Quarter to Three.
I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. I certainly wouldn't have the gall to charge money for a unity tutorial game, but I absolutely love some of the insane games people like zachtronics make. If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? There's a lot of crappy products on EBay as well, but that doesn't mean the platform is useless.
>I've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam.
It's because there are so many crappy games on Steam that it makes it all but impossible for indie developers with decent games to be discovered. The perception that Steam is a cesspool of con-artists and incompetents depresses the perceived value of any game on the platform not released by a known publisher, meaning any independent game is more likely to fail merely by being associated with Steam to begin with. Also because the last time the video game market was drowning in mediocrity, it crashed.
I mean... when I was in high school I used to doodle Mario levels on my schoolbook jackets because I was just that kind of nerd, and now I live in the glorious future of Unity and Godot and Game Maker and C++ and SDL2 if I want to be a masochist. It's fantastic that anyone can more or less make something that can at least theoretically be called a "game." But that doesn't mean all of it deserves to be on the open market.
>If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO?
You're right, if it were up to publishers no one would be making anything but MOBAs and first person shooters and maybe Candy Crush clones. Independent game development allows niche and non-profitable genres to thrive. However, again, it's still a problem that the sheer bulk of garbage on these platforms makes it difficult to find that good content without some kind of gatekeeping.
> Similarly, it is not because one can play a guitar that they are entitled to turn into musician, or writing something doesn't turn one into a writer.
I disagree.. playing a guitar does make one a musician, and writing does make one a writer. What either is not entitled to is success in the marketplace, but then, no one is, regardless of skill. Once you put your work into the marketplace, the market decides its value, and your value by proxy. But for that to work successfully, the marketplace has to efficiently sort for quality, and one way to enforce quality is having the barriers to entry be sufficiently high. In practice, that doesn't often work because entrants don't want to be sorted efficiently, they want to be sorted to the top to maximize exposure and revenue. It's why SEO exists - to optimize the Googlebot for you and you alone by any means necessary. Unfortunately, Steam also wants to maximize the size of its library and revenue, so it has an incentive to engineer a marketplace that favors quantity over quality.
But even amateurs put in more effort than the developers publishing much of the garbage onto Steam - using the term "developers" loosely. These are incoherent rage games or weekend projects, barely functional tech demos and tutorial games, asset flips, etc. Games that don't even run. If the bar for quality on Steam was merely "amateur" then I would be happy, but it isn't. There seems to be no bar, and that makes it bad for everyone, except maybe Valve.
If you're going to "get discovered", in any industry, you're doing to be very disappointed. Marketing, just like engineering, shouldn't be an afterthought.
