Amazing interview (Gaming)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, March 02, 2016, 15:45 (3188 days ago) @ CruelLEGACEY

2 parts of the interview really stood out to me:

Jaime, Golem is your story, right?
JAIME: I was driving [it], yeah. I usually work kind of from the player out, so I almost always think about the controls and camera and the core gameplay loop before anything else. Lots of people start with story, but I just feel like story is so flexible, and ultimately it’s easier to match a story to gameplay than it is the reverse.

So we were like, OK, we want to have a game [you play] sitting on a couch, otherwise it’s not safe and it’s exhausting. So what is the story conceit where that makes sense? How about you’re in bed and you can’t get out because you’re injured?

Stuff like this right here is why I think Jaime is such an incredible developer. He just has these great instincts for how games work, and how game development works. How many games have we all played where you can just tell that the story got hacked to pieces right before release, and both the game and the story suffer for it. But this idea of creating story in service of the gameplay is exactly why Halo CE worked so well, even when large changes/cuts had to be made. Every now and then you get a developer like Naughty Dog who is able to put story first, but for the most part game development just doesn't work out that way.

Even the folks at Naughty Dog admit that, until the last month or so, they're all worried it's going to be a horrible mishmash of crap rather than a cohesive game.

Personally, I like developing a vague concept first, then core mechanics, then story, then ancillary mechanics to fit the action of the story, and then you brainstorm to see what else you can do with what you currently have. But all of that needs to happen well before actual coding.

2nd thing:

JAIME: Bottlenecks.

MARTY: Yeah, things get backed up. And you suddenly see all these really talented people just waiting in a line, ‘Well I need to get approval for this thing.’

JAIME: Or leaving, because they’re sick of getting yelled at because they didn’t read the director’s mind.

MARTY: And even worse is when you’ve been backed up for a long time and you finally get up to present and they say, oh yeah, that’s not going to work. Or it goes through but is reconsidered later—like, yeah, we gotta start over from scratch on this huge thing. That’s not a good healthy way to make progress. And I just think the bigger the project and the more people there are, the more you can’t be that kind of a leader.*

*emphasis mine

Does everyone else think he's talking about what I think he's talking about?

It certainly sounds like he's experienced what he's describing, and since he's only really worked at one place big enough to have that sort of problem... Yeah, it really does.