Hey! If you're a dev and have a story/lesson from having to "reinvent the wheel," I'd love to hear it for a quick story on Game Developer. - ThreadSky

bryantfrancis.me • 49 days ago

Hey! If you're a dev and have a story/lesson from having to "reinvent the wheel," I'd love to hear it for a quick story on Game Developer.

Reposted from dr. hazel 🐝

It's amazing how much time in spent in game development just... reinventing the wheel.

Comments

michaelplzno.com•49 days ago

Feels like sometimes I'm inventing the wheel, not re-inventing it, but I've done things like write my own UI system for unity, as well as an HTML5 Javascript engine that works better than those old flash games (runs on phones)

toxicaliengf.bsky.social•49 days ago

I did in fact spend about a year coding a tire friction simulation from scratch for my gamebecause I didn't like the physX wheel component in Unity

suiteddevil.bsky.social•49 days ago

I'm wearing my Ask Me About My Thrilling New Quest Log System That Turned Into A Normal, Classic Quest Log After An ENTIRE YEAR Of Public Alpha shirt

bryantfrancis.me•49 days ago

Care to chat about your Thrilling New Quest Log System That Turned Into A Normal, Classic Quest Log After An ENTIRE YEAR Of Public Alpha over DM? 😛😛😛

suiteddevil.bsky.social•49 days ago

haha I am totally down!!

wolscott.bsky.social•49 days ago

what do you consider a "normal, classic, quest log" and what made your initial attempt "thrilling and new"?

yesboxstudios.bsky.social•49 days ago

Neat, I’ve got some from Metropolis 1998. I recreated a common path finding algorithm from concept to obtain a deep understanding of it, then modified it to invent a new one for perf and simulation gains.
I also wrote my own game engine for my game.

dmgregory.ca•44 days ago

I was teaching a game design course when the switch to distance learning hit in 2020.

A major assignment was using card games to explore emergent interactions between mechanics.

I tried coding my own Tabletop Simulator for the students' games.

It technically worked, but at what cost. 😅

murderblonde.bsky.social•48 days ago

The number of times I've seen this happen INTERNALLY at a studio is especially maddening. Good ideas for minigames would pop up frequently at one studio and I was like "why is there no easy prefab for this, if we've used it FOUR TIMES already? Or even any documentation?" Nobody had any answer.

murderblonde.bsky.social•48 days ago

Another place, which was developing a looter-shooter with status effects on weapons, was OPENLY HOSTILE whenever I mentioned looking at how Borderlands did things. "We're doing our OWN thing!" was the protest, and I was like "yes, and we should, but - we should know how others did it at least..."

murderblonde.bsky.social•48 days ago

And I have incredible amounts of empathy for UI Artists/Designers, who are both told "make it like X but NOT EXACTLY like X" with little feedback, and a lot of bullshit from people who had no idea why a thing worked in X context but would be a disaster elsewhere.

spriteborne.bsky.social•49 days ago

I coded and administered an intense reaction time battery to figure out parry timings that made sense. Time between telegraph and impact, parry window, parry cooldown, all of it

It should be common knowledge! It’s neurological and knowable! But nope, started from scratch bc that data isn’t common

spriteborne.bsky.social•49 days ago

For the record, it’s 400-600ms. Anything shorter is too little time to react. Anything longer feels detached and harder to read

servus.bsky.social•49 days ago

You beautiful human

spriteborne.bsky.social•49 days ago

I do my best. Knowledge is only knowledge when it’s shared

joramwolters.com•49 days ago

It's not explicitly in the book 'game-feel' by Steve Swink, but he does discuss things like how long it takes for visual data to arrive in, and be processed by the brain for a fair bit :)

spriteborne.bsky.social•49 days ago

Excellent book. Yes, that’s where I got the idea to run an experiment to pin down exactly what the number is. I know all about the sensory input > mental model > motor action > visual feedback system

allawayj.bsky.social•49 days ago

Not me, but one of @alexanderbevier.bsky.social 's most common sayings about narrative (which I agree with) is that what sets game writing apart is that not only do we have to put pen to paper, we often have to invent the sheet of paper before we can start.

marscardua.bsky.social•49 days ago

I do. God, do I.

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