Writing those particle effects was no doubt solid work…but that wouldn’t have mattered if a guy hadn’t looked at it and said “you know, this cover slide doesn’t feel visceral [sorry] enough…it needs some effects to really hammer home the impact.” In other words, design.
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I think this is what makes your game cool though. It’s important for your design to get those details 100% right.
Kind of like the xcom example, if you get those details solid enough - then many players will overlook other things that aren’t perfect.
I think this is also an important part. Most especially for small project teams.
You cannot do everything 100%. You must make sacrifices to some things, and knowing where to focus your time and add more polish is probably the single most important thing to being successful.
Or at least this is my excuse for not successfully releasing yet - because I suck at this 
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… and then implementation apparently in an equally thorough way. 
Design is super important. No doubt about that. But the programming is too. See the thing is any programmer (at least that I know) when translating design into technical design and ultimately code put their spin on it. They will tweak and adjust as well. An iterative process until it feels good. Or at least that is what a great programmer does. So yes we could say well this is also just design. Because it is the programmer implementing tweaks based on their ideas.
But I think to keep things sane it is best to divide it up by the disciplines… designer comes up with something and passes it over to programmer. Programmer implements it. Hmm… this is pretty good but it doesn’t quite feel right yet. A few iterations later… it feels different (hopefully better).
Again I am not saying programmers are the most important or anything like that. I am saying that they can make something better or worse just like the designers can.
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@frosted So very true. You just have to divide and conquer and start with the things that you think will bring most value to the players. We have 3 maps for now, that will probably not change for a while for example. Better to focus on existing features and polish those. Add some new weapon types, perfect the net code, etc
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@GarBenjamin Good points, a dev that blindly implements a requirement without coming with own ideas are not a good dev in my opinion.
I actually have noticed this is also a problem with freelancing artists (or artists in general offcourse, not just freelancing ones), I had a really great guy that really understood requirements and he came with his own input on my requirements. Which is great, I’m a developer/gamedesigner not 3d artist why would I know everything th. Sadly he got a full time job (Most great artists do eventually). So I got a new guy, still very talented, but he does not come with his own input and ideas. I’m sure his technical skills are the same, but to me he is on a complete different scale from the first guy…
With those wise words I will call it the day, its soon half past 2 in the morning here in Sweden
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I don’t know if I’m good enough to pull off a lot of games. I do know that I’m not good enough by my standards, if that’s any consolation 
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The irony there being some of the most famous / successful games have some of the clunkyest controls / systems out of both Indie and AAA… Like I love W3 and Skryim, but let’s face it I spent half my time blowing out candles and facing the wrong direction… Skyrim was press back and spam until you won with it’s rather clunky third person animations / controls and everyone levels with you system…
Again amazing games for sure but they must of missed that unshared secrect not revealed in GDC… I’m not saying this to be a bitter old cod, one of the issues with Indie’s is we tend to look too deep because we’re obsessive / cyclic perfectionists and even when you look at the best of the best they are flawed gems…
One of the reasons AAA is successful is they can holistically put a game together well and choose their battles, or at the very least they spend millions in prototypes to sort it out… The most memorable games show they are masters of crafting an experience and from what you hear about “waste” are not worried to cut the fat to make the experience the best it can be as a whole.
Sure they are also known for pushing hardware boundaries but as you said 10 years on and some of these games still play better than most of the games in the market… I had a chat with an experienced sound engineer who said something that always stuck with me, if you solo a track like a guitar you can mix it to roar like thunder; stick it back in the mix and the rest will meow like a kitten… Just like most things in life, it’s about balance…
TLDR;
We need to cut ourselves some slack sometimes…
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Please do name the indie games that somehow beat them for gameplay though? Thing is maybe these games do practise content over playability, they’re hardly driving/action after all. Shame, because they could be.
Skyrim definitely carried the day despite some flaws. Skyrim included a horrible opening sequence with nearly no player agency for a very long time, before finally giving the player some control. Even then the controls were somewhat clunky. But Skyrim absolutely shined with vast content and polish. In terms of strictly gameplay, a lot of indie games beat Skyrim. In terms of the entire gaming experience, Skyrim beats all indie games.
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You also need coders who can design and write flexible, maintainable software. (That doesn’t mean that it’s pretty code or that it’s textbook code, though I will say that good textbooks suggest the things they suggest for good reasons, so they’re often solid ideals to aim for!)
Shortcuts might help you meet a milestone and they’re great in game jams, but cutting a corner could cost you much more time in the future than it saves now, and often it’ll do it by stealth. If you’re making a product for commercial release then chances are that you’re pouring money into your dev team to get it done. Poor code means reduced productivity, and that costs you money and makes “finished” harder to reach. Your source is an asset that should be cared for and maintained as if your business depends on it. Because it does.
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The Forest, Ziggurat to name a few (there were a bunch of them posted on that AAA thread and some were indies)… Don’t get me wrong, when we start comparing to Batman / Shadow of Mordor, Nier Automata then AAA straight up wins… Some of the best combat systems out there…
They probably could but it just proves said game doesn’t have to be the best of the absolute best in every area to compete… Some of the systems in Skyrim were mediocre and it didn’t stop anyone (including myself) thoroughly enjoying the game.
Actually my favourite game of all time is Dragon Age Origins and that certainly does not have a fluent / uber responsive / impressive combat system… Ironic, DA2 had a very fluent control / combat / arcade style system and not many seemed to care for it…
I agree with @EternalAmbiguity and @frosted about UI being primarily a design problem. Code-wise, I’ve never encountered anything terribly sophisticated in and of itself, it all comes down to clear organisation and management of hierarchies of states, and managing dependent variables as a single entity as much as possible. So it can become quite tedious but mainly because of the interdependency of many relatively simple states, so,like with any state machine, organisation is absolutely the most important thing.
But design wise, it’s not so clear. For example, I’m working on a radar targeting system where you can lock multiple missiles onto the same target, as well as showing ‘lead target’ pips for multiple weapons with different projectile velocities. Sure, all I have to do is pass multiple instances of the targeting data to the HUD, so the code is somewhat straightforward … but how do I display it in the HUD in a way that doesn’t get too busy or confuse the player?
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Should I allow multiple locking animations on the target box widget?
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How does the player know how many weapons are locked?
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How does the player know which weapon locked onto the target? It’s not an option to load tons of text information on a widget flying around the screen. Is it even necessary for them to know?
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What about the ‘lead target’ pips? Does the player need to know which pip corresponds to which weapon? Can/should I fade out the pips furthest from the players current aiming point, to make the whole thing a bit cleaner?
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Can I display part or all of this information in a static sidebar UI? What difficulties are there spreading out the information between the target box widget and a sidebar? Does it destroy the fluidity and coherence of the information?
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What about sounds? Can I add sounds to amplify information that I cannot display in an ideal way?
That’s not to mention other UI design issues such as power management, weapon groups management, and a host of other things that have to occur in a limited screen space, possibly interacted with only with joystick controls, and still somehow be quite easy for a player to intuitively pick up.
Some games (I would argue especially space combat games) are essentially UI-based games. These games live and die on how well the UI is constructed. I think it’s quite easy to underestimate the difficulty of making something that just feels like an extension of your senses, and not like some kind of whiteboard that nobody has bothered to clean off.
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No, you don’t need to go viral/fluke/full add campign to make reasonable income from your game. You can build expectation, potential customers and community around your game simply by regualrly interacting with people, showing them works in progress, keeping them posted on release dates, having a piece dedicated forum/blog, giving out preview keys, getting in contact with youtubers that might like your game, gaming press etc.
There are tons of guides on marketing with no budget/very limited budget. Rules don’t change; if you don’t have the money, put in the time.
If after all that you still can’t sell your game, well, make something that someone other than you would like to play. The opposite (making a game that nobody, other than you, would play), I would argue, is harder.
I haven’t seen a game that nobody would play. Jim’s “problem” with unity image really hammers this point. Those games got on steam becasue they had an audience.
You know you can preview most books these days, right?
There are library sites made for just that purpose. Even amazon lets you do that. Same with games. You can look at reviews and gamplay videos and make an informed decision on whether to buy it.
Programmer tend to inflate their influence, but a lot of very advance stuff only happen because artist faked the impossible and producer keep everyone on tracks. I mean who have seen unchartred 4? The game have advanced hair physics that react to water and even chest hair in animated, the grass sway realistically and bend when the player is close, the game features massive soft physics deformation on car … all driven by the exact same system the artist pulled off after programmer told them that wasn’t possible. By the way they also have skin that bend on contact realitically … using a curve that deform stuff.
I’d definitely say that DA: O had a fantastic combat system. One of the best I’ve played in a game period. Probably helped by my use of a mod that allowed me to automate the player character and watch combat play out, based on my tactics set up beforehand. Incredibly enjoyable.
DA ][ had essentially the same system as DA: O. You had some minor differences like things like spell combinations or weapon switching and the admittedly large difference of allowing a character to use whatever weapons they wished (though, I strongly doubt any significant portion of the playerbase used these). But in both you pointed and clicked to auto-attack, and had a list of skills you could use.
I’ll point out that I played DA ][ a year or so after release, so I wasn’t around for its first few months. But when I played it was all but identical to DA:O.
The main difference between the two was the feel and pace of the combat - the design, you might say 
The (dual-wield) Warden took 1 or 1.5 seconds between attacks, while with DA ][ it was like 0.5 seconds (and the animations were far more exaggerated).
Hyper Light Drifter and Furi both come to mind as indie games that dramatically outclass at least Skyrim in the gameplay department, though I can’t speak for the Witcher games as they’re still in my backlog, mostly because of the huge swaths of indie games I have to play still.
Edit: I wrote those two entries, but here’s a few more games I think have a better core combat loop than skyrim in the combat department. I’ll leave out games with better dialogue options as we’d be here all month if I did, since Skyrim was a huge step back compared to even Oblivion, a game I despise.
- Hyper Light Drifter
- Furi
- Volgarr the Viking
- Bleed 2
- The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight
- Noitu Love 2: Devolution
- Risk of Rain
- Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight
And probably countless others I’m missing, since I mostly just went down my Steam games list and slid my mental filter to primarily focus on indie games. Really, Skyrim (again, haven’t played more than five minutes of the Witcher 2 and 3) leans super heavily on the scope of its world rather than how you really interact with it. It gives you a breadth of choices to be sure, but each choice you make quickly devolves into a very same-y encounter strategy, which I feel goes against the few attempts at emergent gameplay that Bethesda was going for.
I firmly disagree with this, as some of the best combat I’ve encountered outside of games made my Platinum Games has been coming from indie games, even extending past the ones I listed up there. The best indie games can have core gameplay loops that dramatically exceed most AAA games because indies actually have less time to dedicate than the massive manhours a AAA studio can put forth.
When you’re an indie, it’s best not to try and make an entire game that’s super polished if you want to stand out. Instead, it’s best to find what the most important thing to your game and really polish it to a shine. Take Flinthook, a game which I forgot to mention earlier. Movement is a big deal in Flinthook and the movement in that game is absolutely miles ahead of the movement in most AAA games I’ve played outside of… maybe Titanfall 2? I’ll come back to Titanfall 2 later, along with Platinum games. Back on topic though, Flinthook is absolutely polished to a mirror shine in its movement system, which plays into its combat, but the rest of the game is kinda lacking. The thing is though? It dramatically outclasses a lot of AAA games just because of how well the movement and combat end up working.
So now we come back to Platinum Games and also Titanfall 2. I’m not saying Titanfall 1 was somehow bad or anything, mind, just that I never played it because I’m first and foremost a single-player gamer. Now, Platinum Games, I feel, really embodies the spirit of polishing your best feature until it’s at a mirror shine, like I recommend indies should. In METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE, this manifests in the combat loop. Everything outside of the combat? Completely forgettable, honestly. But the combat itself, especially the boss fights? That’s where the game goes from being a rather generic character action game to one that absolutely blows me away. This applies when you’re playing on hard or higher mind, as the lower settings are kinda ehn. It’s this level of polish in just the right places that make that game one of my favourite games of all time.
Titanfall 2 is another example, but in this case, it’s because of the movement and how you interact with the environment. COD tried to do similar, but never really polished the movement systems to a shine quite like Titanfall did. Titanfall’s exceptionally polish when it comes to features like wall-running and sliding made the game feel like an absolute joy to play, far more than many other AAA games, as movement is one of the things you kinda exclusively do in shooters other than shooting. Now, while Titanfall 2’s shooting is okay I consider it kinda serviceable rather than excellent. However, that never really gets in the way, since the action of sliding under a wall, jumping off a wall behind it, on to the roof of a building and then shooting somebody in the back 100 times more than makes up for some honestly kinda weedly feeling guns.
This all is why whenever I talk to indie devs working on something asking how to balance the design of their game I recommend they put their best foot forward and polish the hell out of the big feature of their game and putting a focus on that, rather than trying to polish everything equally. I think Platinum Games and Respawn entertainment both get this.
Wow, these edits turned into a massive wall of text.
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Sorry if I misunderstood but none of these games have the same gameplay as Skyrim or Witcher. That is, 3rd person, open world, exploring, trading, aiming with bows, weapons, 3D 3rd person jumping, movement, arrow to the knee and so on. I don’t even like Skyrim or Witcher. They don’t particularly play well. But we can’t compare those except against each other, probably throwing in another RPG for good measure that’s also 3D.
Hyper Light Drifter plays way better than Skyrim or Witcher does, but it plays top down and the gameplay in it won’t function in those games so we would need to take HLD and a very similar game to HLD and compare those to see. The best way I guess would be to examine clones of games and why they fall short.
The argument I’m making isn’t that “wow this totally different game is more fun to play” just that “wow this game doesn’t measure up in playability, feel, etc to similar games.”
For example, does it feel fun racing on a horse? if so why? Does it feel fun running along in 3D? how about dodging and melee? why is it fun in game A but not in super similar game B.
I’m sure some do. An example would have been Dark Souls vs Necropolis. Necropolis gives it a good shot but falls short. But it doesn’t fall short much at all. Whoever made it knew what made DS tick went another direction.
My arguments were more about how nintendo can make something feel brilliant and even if it looked simple, it wasn’t simple to get right (Mariokart). If you look at other kart racers, well let’s just say they’re basically not that good, and I’m not talking about the graphics, audio or anything other than how good it feels to play.
Another would be overwatch vs just about everything ever. Why can’t an indie make overwatch with cubes, and make the gameplay just as good? What is missing? Evidently, a lot. A lot of AAA titles do not measure up to it.
You can design something on paper but 2 different developers will give you 2 different results even with the same project manager standing behind them.
Also it somehow got dragged into Indie vs AAA. That’s not my intent. My intent was that bad devs make bad games. By that I only meant the playability, it’s an old term we used from 8 bit until today, but I don’t see people saying it much any more. AAA obviously is a little better at doing this because there’s some Darwinism going on: bad devs tend to be out of business, so they can make a good (but not exclusive) testbed.
Welcome to my world 
Nah, it was not good.
DA:Origins had that problem where an outcome of an attack was determined at a beginning of an animation.
I remember fighting the first revenant, and trying to run away from its melee attacks. It didn’t work. Basically, the dude starts a melee swing, you start running away, you’re 20 meters away from him, and you will be STILL hit by the attack, even though you’re outside of his reach.
Older “Golden AGE Rpgs” and Infinity engine games often had better combat system. DA:O was modeled after those, it was a solid effort, but it didn’t quite get to the same level.
DA:2 had the system dumbed down and moved towards flashy combat animations. In DA:O there were more tactics involved, for example, cone spells were narrow and could be targeted between party members. In Drago nAge 2, cone spells suddenly had 130 degree arcs, and by default friendly fire was off. Lack of friendly fire simplified combat animation, and wide spell arcs made your life much more difficult if you’d try to enable friendly fire back. DA:2 also had poor battle design - where in dragon age origins enemies were present on the maps, in DA:2 we had waves of them spawn and jump down from the roofs for no reason whatsoever. Meaning tactic component got thrown away and focus moved towards arcade-like nonsense.
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Yeah, but I find that when we start comparing games of that scope to indie games, it’s best to compare the quality of the execution of the core gameplay loop rather than the games themselves, as the scope factor ends up casting a LOT of indies to the side since it’s just plain near impossible to compete. Even open world indie games fail to come close because a lot of them are relying really heavily on procgen which is super difficult to get the same quality out of as a handcrafted world, or even a world made in World Machine. Heck, even 3D is a pretty big barrier to entry, though not one near as difficult to surmount as open-world.
I’m afraid you’ve lost me on this one.
I’ll also defer to your knowledge on this one as I’ve only logged a whopping 51 minutes in the first Dark Souls and haven’t played any of the games that share its design inspiration. I’m still waiting on a new Armored Core from FromSoftware instead.
I feel this is kiiiinda covered by the part of my reply addressed to ShadowK, where I mention how it’s generally a good idea to put the bulk of the polish up front for indies. I know I have a semi-functional prototype for a game that I think I could polish up and have a contender for a really good multiplayer shooter, but I know it’s only really working because I spent so much time polishing the movement and the core concept. Sadly, I’m ass-terrible at netcode, so it’ll probably never see the light of day.
And… there’s a thing about the cube argument that always gets me. Cubes still need to look readable and nice. It’s absolutely possible to make primitives look decent (Thomas Was Alone springs to mind) but to do so still requires a bit of an artist’s touch. In 3D, at least, you need to be able to determine depth at a glance, and walls of untextured cubes can very quickly become difficult to read. There are ways around this, of course. I tend to use a shader that slightly darkens things the more the normal becomes parallel to the view angle for this very purpose.
Absolutely, which is what makes things interesting :v
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I edited my post so that you would have to roll your eyes and edit yours. Walls aren’t built overnight you know!