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A Brain Dump of What I Worked on for Uncharted 4
- speps 10y agoActual article : http://allenchou.net/2016/05/a-brain-dump-of-what-i-worked-on-for-uncharted-4/ http://allenchou.net/2016/05/a-brain-dump-of-what-i-worked-o... Interesting comment : "Yes. We don’t have specific titles and do whatever is needed."
- epaga 10y ago8 mentions of Last of Us shows how influential some of the mechanics in that game were for future games - this is obviously especially the case for Naughty Dog themselves, but there were so many innovative takes on that genre in Last of Us that I'm sure many other dev studios have been impacted by the ideas and near flawless execution. Haven't played Uncharted 4, but Last of Us is a masterpiece.
- criddell 10y ago> but Last of Us is a masterpiece Really? I bought and played that game on the PS3 and thought it was pretty good and that's about it. I didn't think any part of it was especially novel.
- 67726e 10y agoI have to agree, there wasn't anything particularly innovative in terms of gameplay or experience. I actually went out and bought a PS3 just so I could play Last of Us. Mechanically it's not much different than other games in the genre. It was great because it presented a story that made you wish you didn't have to put down the controller, and made you wish it didn't end. That is not to diminish the work in making the game play well, if the mechanics were shit I likely would have not liked the game as much.
- jsmeaton 10y agoIt felt like playing an interactive movie to me. There was nothing particularly amazing about the gameplay, but everything felt right in that game. There was nothing I could fault in it (from memory, so within reason). I still remember my room mates watching me play from the other room like it was a TV show they were invested in. One of my favourite all time games.
- criddell 10y ago> like it was a TV show It was plotted like a TV show and so rather than feeling fresh, I felt like I already knew what would happen. It was too predictable. For example, at one point Ellie gets caught and wakes up in a cage. I couldn't help but roll my eyes and thing "gee, I wonder if she'll escape". Like I said in another comment, I think the hype surrounding the game had set my expectations way too high and I ended up being disappointed in what was really a good game.
- brobinson 10y agoAt another point, she hops down onto a bus fording a canal and runs halfway across it and stops. I immediately thought "as soon as I approach her a cutscene is going to start where the bus is swept away or something". Yup. I think it was an okay game, but it was definitely overhyped.
- jboons 10y agoSounds like you'd be difficult to please in general.
- bhaak 10y agoI'm not sure that you can take that as an example of how influential TLoU is (disclaimer, I played Uncharted 1-3 and TLoU but not yet Uncharted 4). Technically, TLoU wasn't that impressive (just look how Ellie used to hide in plain view of enemy humans and zombies). The impressive bits were IMHO the setting and the story.
- rev_bird 10y ago>just look how Ellie used to hide in plain view of enemy humans and zombies I loved TLoU, so I might be biased, but I tend to be pretty forgiving of companion weirdness in games -- I can appreciate how hard it is to make that work. Fallout 4 has similar problems, but they've at least made it harder for your dumb old companion to ruin your life -- before, Dogmeat (a companion German Shepherd) would just wander through tripwires and lasers and stuff. Now, they still act a little wonky, but they don't call attention to YOU while they're doing it. That was pretty annoying.
- bitwize 10y agoThey decided to sacrifice verisimilitude for upholding what I call Tails's Law: A game that features AI companions should never allow AI stupidity to severely compromise the player's ability to progress. I call it that because back in the time of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, before the franchise shat the bed, the developers at Sega were canny enough to make "Tails" effectively invincible, as well as make him always follow the player and "catch up" with his helicopter tails -- so that the player need not feel responsible for escorting a character with wonky AI, nor guilty for leaving him behind or accidentally imperiling him. If the actions of an AI character can significantly impede your progress, then you've lost control and that's a frustrating situation to put a player in. We all know what happens when this rule is not followed. See: Daikatana. Another example: the companion Lydia from Skyrim is basically programmed without any idea of stealth, subtlety, or nuance in combat situations and routinely charges headfirst into battle, putting herself at great risk of getting killed as well as compromising your position. Generally in The Last of Us, a companion character being killed is a game over condition. If enemies were sensitive to their presence during the stealth bits, they would either have to use the environment and available cover absolutely perfectly, or they would put the player in jeopardy of a game-over without them doing anything to warrant it. The player already has enough to think about. Having to worry about what Ellie is doing and whether she fucks off someplace, attracts a Clicker, and gets bitten while not being able to do anything useful about it is a burden the player can't handle. At least you can order Lydia around, or send her home. No such option exists with the TLOU companions, and you're stuck with them. I forgive Naughty Dog for putting gameplay above absolute realism.
- cloudjacker 10y agoI played Crash Bandicoot in Uncharted 4, it is a recurring theme of them reusing game mechanics
- Tiktaalik 10y agoThe gameplay and tech behind the two game franchises is closely intertwined. The gameplay of Last of Us requires the high quality animation and cover systems built for Uncharted 1 and the melee combat system added with Uncharted 2. Now we see Uncharted 4 take some of the improvements to friend AI and dialog from Last of Us and push that forward.
- rndstr 10y agoI don't play games but have always been into 3D graphics and Visual Computing. Interesting read and watching the gameplay trailer afterwards was fun and very impressive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB0xy74Zrj8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB0xy74Zrj8
- Retric 10y agoSo, is this guy supposed to be secretly kryptonian or something? Because bullets, body armor, fences etc seem to be a non issue.
- partisan 10y agoI love the way this article is written. Sometimes these types of articles go deep into personality and politics and you really get that anywhere you go. Here you get a peek into the nitty gritty while keeping it at a layman level. Plus, it gives you a chance to imagine how you might solve the problems he faced.
- xiphias 10y agoThis looks like a CV to me that he can use in the future whenever he applies for a job/promotion
- illumin8 10y agoThis is probably the best type of CV imaginable - actual project work for a AAA game title, with screenshots and easy to understand commentary on what worked and what didn't.
- Graham24 10y agoIs it still commonplace for them to get a percentage of sales as a bonus? I know someone who worked on Tomb Raider 2, 3 and 4. he's not poor.
- indy 10y agoI don't think that's ever been commonplace. The games industry is known for long hours and relatively low wages
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- vvanders 10y agoRoyalty payments work somewhat like the music industry where your publisher "advances" you the ~40M+ gamedev budget + 40M+ marketing budget. Once the game has made more than ~80M is when you start to see royalties. Don't go into game development looking for a good wage, industry usually pays 60-70% what you see for equivalent SE jobs.
- louthy 10y agoIt was commonplace when I was in the games industry (1996-2006). I never saw a penny, that is also commonplace.
- vvanders 10y agoI once got a $25 Starbucks giftcard for pulling an almost 48-hour epic coding session to fix some major issues right before a large trade show(we were blowing the 64 open file handle limit, so I completely rewrote our audio system to stream from the texture cache instead of individual files). That's all the bonus/royalty/atta-boy I ever saw in my times in games. The 90/10 rule is in full effect in that industry where the top 10% make 90% of the profits.
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- Volscio 10y agoTo complement this, I found this video interesting in demonstrating some of the technical achievements and flourishes in Uncharted 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2am8WRBXQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2am8WRBXQ
- danso 10y agoFWIW, the dev cross-posted to r/gamedev: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4itbxq/a_brain_dump_of_what_i_worked_on_for_uncharted_4/ https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/4itbxq/a_brain_dum... Interesting tidbit: ActionScript was his first language and he still uses it to prototype tools.
- lost_name 10y agoSomeday I sincerely hope to publish a game. When I read articles like this, though, I begin to realize just how little I understand about working on a project like that. I can't even begin to understand how they make all these systems work together in the same environment.
- aiaf 10y agoWhat does "going gold" mean in the videogames industry?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- monocasa 10y agoReleasing the final contents of the disc to manufacturing. Think 'gold master'.
- eridius 10y agoThis article is great. I've played through most of the game at this point, and I've really been noticing how good the single-player AI behavior is. Your AI buddy is pretty good about picking places to go, when to follow, when to lead, finding their own routes up cliffs and such that have multiple choices, etc. About the only oddity I've noticed is in combat areas, your buddy sometimes moves from cover to cover in full view of enemies or otherwise hunkers down in cover in a position that's actually in view of an enemy, and it doesn't matter (presumably enemies simply don't ever see your buddy unless they've already seen you). From a gameplay perspective this is absolutely the right choice, and it's such a minor thing that I really only noticed it because I looked specifically for it, I'm just kind of amused.
- zurn 10y agoThose identifiers in the screenshot look lispy... wonder if their tooling is still in lisp even though they switched to C++ for the engines?
- lispm 10y agohttp://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-In-Data-Compilation.pdf http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Adventures-...
- bronz 10y agogamasutra provides a link to the blog post where this actually came from. i just want to say that his blog is one of the best i have ever seen and that you should check it out. it has tons of posts that are just as interesting as this one except about getting hired at naughty dog, implementing a physics engine and much more.
- kin 10y agoJust had to chime in and say thank you for such an amazing two games. Loving Uncharted 4 so far. I know you worked on mostly NPC AI, but this is the most beautiful game I've played and my PS4 sounds like it's about to die.