One nit (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, June 23, 2015, 21:47 (3526 days ago) @ Beorn

Overall I liked what you had to say, but this part rankles:

I get that your one animator had to work for a day or maybe two to make it, but that ain't worth $5 to over 1 million players.

I get the use of slight hyperbole as a matter of trying to make a point, but minimizing the work of animators, mocap artists, and techs is kind of gross. I think most people not involved with game dev would be absolutely astonished at how much work goes into something as seemingly "trivial" as creating a dance cycle.

I am using hyperbole to make my point, but I also spent over a decade making video games, and my numbers are not total fiction. IF (and this is a huge if because lots and lots and lots of people who do this thing for a living don't understand anything about workflow design) they designed their animations and shaders in a plug-and-play kind of way (which seems plausible, because marathon was done this way and why not keep that same design philosophy), it should be relatively trivial to add new elements to the game. Shaders should be super, super easy - they're just color palette shifts and you've (hopefully) already designed thresholds and limits into each item's base structure. Dance moves, if not mo-capped, are pretty easy, too. You open up the toon in maya or poser or whatever it is they use these days and drag the guy's limbs around until they move the way you want. A professional animator should not find this sort thing difficult, though it is certainly real work. If they mo-cap everything (which big studios love to do because they have to justify the expense of keeping a mo-cap studio space year-round), it gets much more complicated because you need actors, wardrobe, lots of fancy sensors, etc., but even then the actual capture takes less than a single day. Then maybe 1 more day for your animator to clean everything up and make it fit the "look" of your game. So, worst case scenario, 1 day of work for like... 5 people and then 1 more day of work for the animator. I'll go completely crazy and say that somehow costs $30,000 between all of the paychecks and equipment rental fees and whatnot. At $5 a pop, you're asking 6,000 customers to buy it. Destiny has 9.5 million registered users. So you're hoping that 1 in every 1,584 (I'm rounding up) customers buys an animation. Those are insanely good odds. If 1 in every 9.5 people buy the animation, you're looking at nearly my $5,000,000 number on a $30,000 investment. This is why companies go to microtransactions in the first place. The ROI is insanely good.

Now, it's totally possible that every animation and shader in the game is hard-coded and can't be modularly altered. Then you're looking at potentially months of full-team labor in order to change the code to accept a single new animation. This is a horrible way to build your workflow, but it's possible, in which case wow, $5 is a steal. But it shouldn't be, because no one should design a game that way, ever. Especially a game with an initial design concept that included expansions.

--

using an IRL example: The animators on one of the last games I worked on were super bored because we couldn't feed them enough stuff to animate, so they just started building all kinds of idle animations and alternate animations into the game. Sometimes a punch would be overhead, sometimes sideways, sometimes an uppercut... They just did this all on their own because there was time. Even the complicated stuff like hitting a dude into another dude into a wall, they just built it. Not all of it ended up in the final game because of memory limits and whatnot, but if there had been an expansion, we had literally dozens of extra animations - complicated animations - to just summon out of the database without paying anyone anything extra. Occasionally we'd say "hey, we want this guy to fall out of a helicopter" and they'd whip something up in 2-4 hours. This was older-gen stuff, so it wasn't moving as many polygons as Destiny, but my point is that professional animators don't take days and days and days to animate a dance sequence. These guys do this for a living and they're good at it. I doubt it takes them very long. Heck, I bet they made 10 dance options and it took the producers longer to decide which they liked best than it took the animator to actually make them all. Knowing Activision, there may have even been a "what's the best dance move" focus test.