AAA Development vs. a Bag of Chips | Semi-Ramblomatic
This week's episode of Semi-Ramblomatic is now available!
AAA Development vs. a Bag of Chips | Semi-Ramblomatic (YouTube)
Comments (18)
Came to mind that this whole process doesn't necessarily feel THAT complex depending on how the game developer is setup and what a NPC eating chips is intended to actually turn out like in the final product... but then I was thinking like, Animal Crossing style graphics and animation. Imagining it with modern AAA photorealistic graphics and yeah, I can see how this becomes a problem. I'm just kinda guessing here, but makes me think that in a halfway efficient development process- which may be a nigh-mythical thing in modern AAA development- they'd be able to hash this kind of thing out early in the design process, put in the design document the kind of animations you want characters to be doing, if they're going to be eating, drinking, and otherwise doing stuff with their mouth and hands. At least then you can get all that stuff out of the way at once while you're modelling food and drink, deciding on what they look like, making the animations and sounds, etc. Probably could call it an assembly line process rather than an artisanal one, for better or worse. However, that just makes it all the more egregious when these games obviously get shuffled around and last-minute changes... see also Hollywood. The celebrity resemblance and/or brand tie-in also isn't surprising as an exponential layer of complication, and it'd be just the same if you have a major licensed character- I'm reminded of hearing about the development of Wreck-It Ralph where Disney is dealing with up to dozens of licensees who likely have very specific and often arbitrary stipulations about how their characters are depicted; Nintendo has reference sheets and requirements for how Bowser sits in a chair and drinks coffee, for example. (and you can't exactly blame companies too much for this either, given how we've seen what happens when they don't keep an eye on what people with their licensed characters. And it's even standard practice just for artists and animators to make sure your character actually looks like what you want them to in the final product)
This was surprisingly interesting, also depressing. As a player with no knowledge of the AAA game dev industry, it's starting to make sense to me why all the big releases lately feel so soulless. I always look forward to the new big budget titles and 9/10 times I'm just disappointed. It's made me switch to mostly indie games.
As a solo dev, I'm going to add a nameless NPC eating a bag of off brand chips to my game because of this video.
Wow, ok, I've been thinking about a similar situation albeit a completely different medium. I've been helping a local college theater club by being the students' advisor, which also makes me the director of the shows. I don't want to do everything myself, but it's been fun to work with just the students and a couple of volunteers from the community to do our plays. I recently was approached by the college's new choir director, who's very much in a parallel position as mine, and they've been pushing to "ask what your budget is, hire people to manage tech stuff, get prop/set builders, etc.". And all I see is those extra people meaning that many more questions to answer, details to hash out to the nth degree, and logistics that are a pain to work thru. I already have a completely separate full-time job, and I'm trying to keep the stress of directing to a minimum. But pulling in more people, managing them, and getting them paid, would *not* reduce my stress! So it's an oddly similar analogy to Indie/AAA, but rather than "production control", my desire is "less headaches", which I think is an appropriate takeaway from the video essay. Well done!
It's just a pretty universal rule as the scope of a project grows, whether technical or creative, being in charge of it becomes less and less about the technical and/or creative aspects and more and more about being a *manager*. This becomes more of a problem when people don't understand this and find themselves in roles outside their core competencies. Of course, management is a skill in itself, if one far too few managers possess one way or another, and a good manager's job is to try to make this whole process as smooth and painless to navigate as reasonably possible.
I can recall when I was at university hearing someone complaining as a member of the team they were with decided to implement a new feature in the software project they were working on. The rest of the team had to spend about a day rewriting the documentation as a result.
Crisps Vs Chips Maybe we could schedule a meeting to discuss the merits of a native English speaker using the phrasing ‘chips’ to discuss a bag of crisps 😉
I sort of lived this experience WAYYY back when I was a contract worker at a nationwide phone company (Sprint's local phone division). It was quite the change. I'd done work for large entities (maybe not this large, but way up from some sort of mom and pop) but still had a lot of freedom to innovate. Not there! I once determined that theoretically any change required something like 6 meetings, three documents, AND the input of the QA team. It was maddening. And the really annoying part? I could see and understand the reason why all this was taking place! This stuff needed to WORK, we couldn't iterate on the fly for people trying to run a phone network! So, yeah. The bigger and more complex your system, the more steps required to make sure even the smallest change won't bugger something up. Still frustrating though, since they had made it excessively clunky.
Was thinking while watching that in that the video is even presenting a BEST case scenario when there's an established pipeline of who to go through first to get something done and pass it on to the technical people, and for a lot of companies that's probably optimistic in how it shakes out especially when you get into dysfunctional environments, office politics, perverse incentives, etc etc...
There's something to be said about all of the meetings that go into making even the smallest decisions but the rest, the parts where people have to go back and forth between departments to get everyone on the same page, that sounds less like an issue with bloat and more like not having people on a team with multiple skillsets. Not having the 3D modeler also being the animator, someone on the team not being a concept artist in addition to their regular job, that sort of thing. When you're an indie dev, you're able to skip the communication between departments but you still need to do everything yourself, which is not something most people would be able to do. Even on a smaller team, non-AAA, you'd still need to coordinate the implementation of said bag of chips, although if the game isn't 3D then it might be easier since a 2D game would probably just require a new animation which, while still difficult, would just require the one animator (or team thereof) to create the person sitting down, eating from the bag
when you get to that kind of team size... the workload per person usually is high enough that switching contexts like that is prohibitive... basically its a matter of "do it yourself and learn more about how that is done in x time" or "chuck it over to the specialists and stick to your specialty and do the job in half x time" if there is no time constraint... you can do the first... but if tasks come flying in at a rapid pace and deadlines loom? second is always going to happen of course that will lead to overspecialisation and problems from lack of communication or just errors in translation between specialties... which basically erases any benefits from that specialisation... oh and heavens forbid some specialists become unavailable at any point.. with smaller teams or a LOT of communication (often in the form of meetings) you can somewhat avoid that and still benefit from a level of specialisation while maintaining broader understanding... but in the "AAA" world? forget it... its all assembly line stuff with no slack in the process...
Right. Then again, we want all those 15 to 30 people to have a job, so... Buy more smaller scale games in hopes of splitting the large dev teams into smaller ones, I guess?...
Guys Yahtzee doesn't do the visuals for Semi-Ramblomatic. So he wasn't the one who put the Lays in and probably was talking about fries (or chips if you're not American) in his example.
"Chase" and "high interest savings account" do NOT go together.
🤔
When did you start saying crisps wrong?
Chips, not crisps? Yahtzee’s gone fully native, hasn’t he?
Came here to say the same thing. "'Ees forgotten 'is roots so he 'as"