Proceedurally.
So, “hands are supposed to be here” and the arms figure out the rest.
By the time add in “finger pointing at this” combined with spells to make your thumb big (or whatever, ultimately everything is made at a base level to allow for a lot of creativity further up the stack) means the finger might drive the scaling of the arm.
Same with the strange jumping. Body “jumped” in a downwards direction, and the feet animated correctly in an upwards direction. Ends up with a body doing a strange wrap around itself as it figures out how the feet can be above the torso.
Walking books might be a really easy way to animate a book flying around, have physics and a health pool without having to create a whole new object/entity class (just inherit all the features and disable the standard person/object body).
The faces-talking-out-the-head thing is animation data imported with the wrong scaling. Some parts can just move to where the animation says they are, others warp the geometry of the rest of the model.
Remember that a lot of the models and animation will be made with no idea how they end up being used, at the same time as they are actually programmed into the game. There might be some iteration, but its not like they know the end result, make the models, make the animations, make the game. All this happens at the same time, and any iteration might set multiple departments back days or weeks.
So, super flexible APIs, models and animations are designed at the start in a way that allows for a small amount of specialisation and iteration, but the rest is all “bodge what you have available”. Ultimately if it isnt flexible enough early in development then its going to cost a lot to fix
Every time I think about this sort of thing I remember that in Fallout 3 the developers added a moving train to the game by making the train a hat that was worn by a man that ran really fast underneath the ground to make the train move.
I think so. It’s got an interesting story, and finding all the evidence to catch the perp is pretty fun too imo. It definitely plays up the “noire” of it all, with the pulpy detective cases and interrogations.
So, I had a look at it… It feels like a Blooper reel made for the game… The Toy Story one I believe started off with them using bloopers from the VA sessions.
But nonetheless, to have such content requires the game itself being fully finished before the deadline. This is the basic requirement we lack currently, so such stuff will only add to the stress of the devs.
I have yet to see anyone ask “But is it actually fun?” about, say, Baldur’s Gate 3.
Maybe part of the reason why is because games like Hogwarts Legacy don’t respect player agency and spend their time forcing you to play the game the way the developers wanted, while Baldur’s Gate 3 allows you to experiment and try to break guardrails.
Hogwarts Legacy literally won’t let you jump over a fence that your legs are visibly taller than. I only finished that game because I wanted to be able to write correctly about how deeply that game disrespects player choice and is all-in on “you play our game the way we intended, or you don’t play.”
It is 😬 I really appreciated the nuance they covered the topic with because holy shit
It was also weird to hear one of the interviewed players talk about how people were moved to tears because of how patriotic some of the stories were. Really curious what that even means
I guess a “patriotic story” could be made in any country about its respective fight for independence, and/or any war. Something like every character having a well built background, then sacrificing it for the greater good.
Maybe with the goal being to unmask the traitor, but the traitor being an NPC, then everyone learning of everyone else’s sacrifices as the game progressed, empathizing and ending up crying?
Dunno, I guess there could be many ways to make a mostly scripted game a patriotic one, when nobody can say “I throw a box of lit dynamite sticks into the air and cry Leeeroooy!!”, or “A book? I read aloud whatever it says. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh…”
This is a meaty demo, taking me a little over 2 hours.
As someone who adored the “City Building” series by Impressions (Caesar, Pharaoh, Emperor) and thought going in that Synergy had similar vibes, it’s about what I expected. It has a lot of similar systems with plenty of different resources, both physical and “well-being,” which is like Desirability. It does away with the really fussy stuff like city walkers and labor availability, and instead gives buildings a range of effect. Travel time for your populace still appears to be important (like Tropico).
It also has its fair share of jank. Building work orders are by far the biggest problem; you can only assign one task, and even when there are available resources for an alternative task, the building will just idle. This is especially bad in the gathering huts because you have to manually select the plants to collect from, and plants have multiple resources (but only one mode is available at a time). I could see this being a recipe for micromanagement hell. There are some other small issues I figure will be resolved for the full release, like missing ambient audio from the settlement itself and untranslated elements, although the translation itself was good (this was developed by a French studio and publisher in case you couldn’t tell; no native English speaker in their right mind would release a video game named Synergy).
Overall, I’m interested. I also got the impression it might be a continuous city campaign, unlike the chapters you’d get in the City Building or Tropico series, which could be a fun change of pace. I’ll be keeping an eye out for a release date.
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