ArmoredThirteen

ArmoredThirteen, miesiąc temu

I’m in the game industry. This is entirely person observation I have not studied this topic so can’t source anything

The people I saw going to early mobile market were a lot of handheld console and flash game devs and companies. They were adapting the closest existing game designs and brought with them a “small game small cost” philosophy. It also wasn’t really known yet how impulsive people are on phones. So it was an unproven market with smaller teams and people making yester era design choices. There also used to be a few bigger games with bigger price tags but people didn’t buy into those because anyone willing to spend that on a game at the time would have had a console or PC and could buy a better experience there for the same price.

The only mobile game experience I have was back in like 2012, smart phones were really taking off, and the market for mobile games was proven. The company I worked for we built a release ready game but it never got released. We couldn’t sell it to investors because the monetization was never aggressive enough for them (the investor money at that point was less about making the game and more to fund marketing and stabilizing the studio as a long term business). I quit when my job stopped being dev work and started being round tables about how to psychologically trick players into paying more. Anyway with so much focus on heavy monetization it stopped being economically worth it for a lot of startups to actually make good games when thinly veiled skinner boxes pleased the investors all the same

ArmoredThirteen, miesiąc temu

The original XCOM soundtrack slapped and I’m curious what a remaster would be like

ArmoredThirteen, miesiąc temu

This is such a bad time for me to be trying to get back into the game industry fml

ArmoredThirteen, 2 miesiące temu

I’ve never played so I’m not sure what the systems are. Is that video not showing someone complete the level? Is it the level creator having to prove it is solvable to submit it?

ArmoredThirteen, 2 miesiące temu

As someone currently working in QA, they might have a bunch of high priority tasks related to monetization or partnerships with legal obligations. QA for things the consumer sees only needs to be prioritized enough to keep the profits vs. outrage ratio in the green

ArmoredThirteen, 2 miesiące temu

Have you not bought a game since the early 80s?

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Shout out to MOO2 which had instructions on the disk for which files to copy where so you could play it without the disk!

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Morrowind is the reason I’m in the game industry and has impacted my life more than any other single piece of media. It’s been heartbreaking for me to see the treatment Elder Scrolls has gotten. I was so excited for Skyrim it was the only game I’ve ever preordered, it’s the reason I originally got a Steam account, and the whole game is a let down start to finish.

I was hesitantly optimistic for FO4 when I bought it, it was off-putting but I worked through the disappointment of running into invisible walls so often, and when I finally got the gear and the freedom to power armor my way to the roofs I was pumped until I discovered they put fuck all up there. Morrowind was designed with jumping and flying and they made a 3D world that was fascinating to explore, Skyrim is completely flat, FO4 pretends to have 3D space but it’s a contentless liar. I’m so jaded now I didn’t even get to the hesitantly optimistic step with Starfield I just assumed it was going to be empty filler

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Oblivion suffers from middle child syndrome. It is the transition from the weird and fantastic of Morrowind to the mass appeal of Skyrim and it doesn’t really do either of those things well. I liked a lot of aspects of it. Like the changes they made with vampirism were interesting, dimension hopping was a blast, the addition of skills providing special bonuses like running on water helped liven up the skills. There was a lot of garbage though like how the level design was a clunky mix of simplified vs. capturing what Morrowind did, UI switch to prioritize consoles but didn’t even work well for console, the overall distancing of mechanics and the world. I remember it feeling like they put a lot of work into streamlining while keeping things unique which I appreciate but they didn’t hit the mark and ended up with a lot of hollow concepts.

Skyrim never even attempted to be weird so I think it’s a lot more cohesive comparatively. Like there’s no pretending anywhere in that game about what it is and in that way they did a reasonably good job. Probably the biggest differences though is Morrowind is clearly a game made with incredible amounts of passion. Oblivion also has passion in it but there are a lot of areas you could see that were rushed or they kept the devs leashed. Skyrim’s rare flicker of care makes me feel sad mostly knowing the devs had the capacity to go hog wild with it but didn’t for probably a variety of reasons.

It’s been a good while since I played oblivion though I’d probably have to run through it again to give you a proper answer (and might change what I’ve said here as I reevaluate it fresh). What’s your belated revelation on Oblivion?

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Gassy Moos

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

That’s fair, I figured I’d post here though since there’s been gaming related news before. This is helping show the state Unity is in: bidding off departments to other companies. I think it is relevant that way

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Whales, idk if we can make them stop, often times yes they need help

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Holy information density batman! That’s a fucking mess to look at there’s so much going on it stopped being cool looking

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

Who’s out there down voting brotato lol

Game is a gem and potato’s are objectively the best thing

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

A core part of the first game is how isolated you are though. I don’t usually say this with survival crafters, but for me coop would take away more than it would provide

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

My thing about it is designing for both an isolated feel and a cohesive co-op may be impractical, and I’d prefer they focus on the part of it that makes it really stand out. There are also things like how do you progress world events, can either player trigger them, do they have to be in the same area together, etc which all adds design overhead.

I also want more good co-op games they’re a lot of fun. Personally I don’t think this is the right series to target for it though, but also idk what direction they’re taking it so co-op may fit well with the new one.

ArmoredThirteen, 3 miesiące temu

This is exactly what I was thinking reading some of the comments. “Back in my day you could store everything as long as you trusted someone enough to keep an instance open while you throw valuable stuff at the ground and switch accounts”

ArmoredThirteen, 4 miesiące temu

I want a machine with a handle on top that looks awesome

ArmoredThirteen, 4 miesiące temu

Morrowind player checking in, that game was able to support lan for my entire friend group in high school

ArmoredThirteen, 4 miesiące temu

I’m talking about my friend group size (at that time)

ArmoredThirteen, 4 miesiące temu

My stress levels are in fact well beyond the moon, moon was last year stuff that’s all old news

ArmoredThirteen, 4 miesiące temu

I can’t talk on this personally because I do still really need this job’s insurance and am trying my best to not get fired for 6 more months, but also I’m just a grunt all I’ve got are contradictory rumors.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Don’t forget the contracts with the military to help train them to “definitely not kill people”!

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

There are, yeah

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Hello I work for Unity (for now lol, we’ll see)! I’d like to just say from my end of things we do actually do a solid amount of R&D. Just that a depressing amount of it either never sees the light of day, takes so long to release it has already been done better by someone else, or is unannounced with little to no documentation on release so it never gets visibility. The other thing to note is that Unity does a lot of non-game things that might not be that noticeable if you’re just looking at it from a game making perspective, like our publicly known contracts we have to help train the military to “totally not kill people you guys”!

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Damnit I was hoping I was in fast enough to be the Morrowind fan girl post but you’ve already mentioned it lol. Still play Morrowind, my favorite game, and the primary reason I’m in the game dev field.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

You don’t really ‘finish’ Factorio, but a few months ago I FINALLY launched my first rocket after a thousand hours of play over 6.5 years. I just always had other things I was up to and for a long time launching a rocket mechanically did nothing so I had no incentive. Here I am detailing some of it at that other site

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

But they got rid of the ability for people to post their own games to the site and ditched chat, so it’s old format is effectively dead.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

I work at Unity. The brain drain is for real. It started 2 layoffs ago and is picking up speed. My department lost some really valuable workers, because layoffs are imminent they don’t let leads hire many replacements, and the resulting critical work gets dropped on people already doing full work loads. Some of the people my department has lost helped build core systems from scratch years ago so that intimate knowledge of those systems is just gone.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

I can’t get too specific on that one because people get fired for leaking meeting info (I’m hoping to keep this job for one more year wish me luck lol). But in my opinion the new CEO has been a lot more open about what’s going on. He’s very straightforward and has been engaging with us in a more human way than JR ever did.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Unity tripled in size in like 4 years iirc. It is trying very hard to be a large company. Like the culture has been shifting from small company feel to big corporate feel for a while now (since before I joined). It still is clinging very hard to having small company feel though because that’s the kind of culture almost everyone here was sold on.

As far as the efficiency of our size, I’m honestly not super sure. We’ve been multitasking a lot and have cut things in the past, like Gigaya. My department has always felt understaffed and I get the vibe that a lot of departments feel the same. I haven’t talked to anyone that was like “my team is too big to function well”. So if there is an inefficiency issue it is maybe a broad thing that could be hard to see from any one part of the whole. That said I work in a very specific part of the company and don’t branch out a whole lot to other groups so my interdepartmental knowledge is limited.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

I work for Unity, granted I’m just a lowly worker they don’t tell me shit. I honestly don’t know on this one, or rather I feel there probably still would have been but maybe not to the extent this one is rumored to be. Our change in leadership is the starting point for some internal reworks so it is possible if the pricing scheme worked JR wouldn’t have ‘resigned’ and we’d be operating on a more status quo basis. I suspect layoffs would have come down the pipes again sooner or later though

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Remember kids, for a lot of public companies you can find this info: www1.salary.com/Unity-Software-Inc-Executive-Sala…

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Don’t get me started on Plastic… There’s this weird thing that happens internally sometimes when we get to work on fun projects, like mini game jams kind of thing. Someone in the group will inevitably be like “We should use Plastic” and we all kinda have to go along with it because it feels like we’re not allowed to admit that Plastic blows. Then we end up frustrated and complaining about it but not switching to Git because again, can’t say out loud that one of our own tools doesn’t work well that would just be silly

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

We won’t, lol. Also minorities tend to get fired disproportionately and hired less afterwards so that’ll be fun

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Gigaya, yeah. I have very little insight on that one it came as a bit of a shock internally too from my understanding. I really wish that project kept going it had a lot of value. From my point of view in my fairly limited position, the tech debt I deal with isn’t too bad but there are wild scaling issues from growing too fast in the last few years.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

I work for Unity. Morale is super low here and we’re experiencing brain drain from the people in positions to leave. Another layoff is going to hose things even worse and I don’t believe the product will get better in the near future. I’m learning Godot now.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

“Reducing our office footprint” these ghouls are going to fire people who aren’t following the return to office decree because it will be an easy on paper excuse. Also “revenue came in within guidance” so they expected / planned for revenue to be low enough to justify firing even more people? They’ve already done two other mass firings morale is terrible right now. Lots of the best workers have been quitting to find better work and the drain is noticable. I just need stable insurance for another 6 months then I can leave too, I hope I don’t get fucked

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Thank you, I’m honestly terrified. I spent my whole life so far trying to get into this industry, I finally pull it off in my early 30s and now all this. I spent 10 years roughing it and finally have been able to do things in the last two years like go to the doctor ever. I don’t have tech people wealth laying around I’ve spent so much basically doing damage control for having previously been paycheck to paycheck. I’m only just getting the ball rolling and I’m going to be so fucked if I lose this job.

ArmoredThirteen, 6 miesięcy temu

Thank you for the caution but I’m very aware of what I’m getting into. I have a life goal and I’m ride or die on this one.

ArmoredThirteen, 7 miesięcy temu

Well you probably played before they had the “fun and engaging gameplay” dlc ready

ArmoredThirteen, 7 miesięcy temu

Steady decline save for any time JR opens his mouth then it goes into a nosedive for a week.