9 ms·
The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four real
by georgeecollins 9y ago
The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. Back in the day when we made Battlezone we had at least four really amazing engineers (one was a Masters in CS from MIT, one wrote early 3d workstation code, UCLA, Cal Tech CS degrees). In those days you needed people like that to just 3D to work in Windows. Direct X helped a lot. Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 9y agoOh hi co-worker of my old friend Ken :)
- georgeecollins 9y agoOMG: Ken is one of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. You are lucky to count him as a friend.
- egypturnash 9y agoI haven't seen him in person in years, what with me living in Seattle these days and him being in Austin. But yeah, he's a pretty good guy!
- kennethdmiller3 9y ago"I'm not dead yet!" :D
- egypturnash 9y agoOh hi there :)
- kennethdmiller3 9y agoHello! :)
- DoofusOfDeath 9y agoWe've never met, but I believe you owe me about $17,000 in quarters, with interest. :) Now if I can only hunt down those bastards who made Tempest, Qix, and Galaga...
- andybak 9y agoQix... I need to play that again now...
- skj 9y agoI understand you're joking, but why would you be owed quarters? Did you not enjoy the games!
- georgeecollins 9y agoI don't, because it is not that Battlezone. Sorry.
- brisance 9y agoJeff Minter posts regularly on Taitter.
- lanius 9y agoThank you for making such a great game! Battlezone was one of my favorite games during my childhood. I loved the hybrid RTS/FPS aspect.
- icefox 9y agoSo the question would be what type of game could be made with that type of team today?
- klodolph 9y agoThere are still great people working in the games industry, but it's larger and segmented. These days you can be an engine programmer working on e.g. Frostbite or id Tech for EA and ZeniMax, respectively. These have resulted in games like Dragon Age: Inquisition and Doom (2016). Dragon Age: Inquisition required a lot of engine work because Frostbite was originally designed for first-person shooters like Battlefield, and Doom is a bit of a technological marvel, and it's kind of a showcase piece for id Tech 6.
- andybak 9y agoThis article is mind expanding if you want to understand what happens on just the graphics side of things in a modern game: http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-graphics-study/ http://www.adriancourreges.com/blog/2016/09/09/doom-2016-gra... Bear in mind everything that's not included in this analysis: AI, mesh deformation, level logic, player mechanics, enemy mechanics, all the lower level stuff and so many things I haven't even thought of.
- pjmlp 9y agoThis is one reason why the simple mindset of just using OpenGL or Vulkan would solve all Linux gamming problems doesn't work.
- georgeecollins 9y agoThere are certainly teams of people of that technical caliber today at Blizzard, Riot, Sony Santa Monica (and lots of other places farther from me) making amazing, cutting edge game tech. But there are also teams like the ones the author described that don't have amazing tech skills that still can make games we couldn't dream of thanks to game engines. I think it is exciting.
- MisterTea 9y ago> The amazing thing to me is that now people can make games without a bunch of great engineers. I remember reading an interview with a well known person in the 3D and gaming industry in a gaming magazine well over a decade ago. I can barley recall the details but one thing that stuck out was the interviewer asked why couldn't the game engine be the API giving the developers higher level tools instead of OpenGL or direct 3d, as well as audio, input and others. The answer was that game engines were too focused and not flexible enough to be used as a kitted API. Fast forward to today and that is exactly what Unreal and Unity have achieved. They built game engines that are flexible enough to be complete tool kits to build other games. Interesting to see how far we have progressed.
- mattnewport 9y agoThis is at least in part because hardware has advanced to the point that for many games it makes sense to optimize for development time over runtime performance. Unity and Unreal are still not as performant as a well optimized specialized engine could be in many situations but it would probably take too long and cost too much to build that specialized engine. There are also trade offs in flexibility that come with using Unity or Unreal. They make it easy to make games that fit within their paradigms but it's relatively harder to make a game that does something radical or experimental with rendering or physics. I say this as someone who lives in Unity. It's absolutely the right choice in many situations but it's not without tradeoffs and compromises.
- danbolt 9y agoI love the productivity Unity brings, but sometimes I feel like making a game in the engine requires extra polish as I need to make sure the game has character and not “a Unity game”.
- failrate 9y agoI've found that the polish step is necessary no matter what engine you use, or even if you roll your own.
- ythn 9y ago> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible. Such as mountains of bloatware/shovelware template games clogging up every single online store and platform.
- andybak 9y agoShall we go back to the old days, then? Because there were no crap games then. The solution is better curation and discoverability. Not harsher gate-keepers and horribly difficult development. So many incredible games wouldn't exist without modern development tools. Just because you were mildly inconvenienced the last you time browsed an app store, don't wish it all away.
- Maxious 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983
- georgeecollins 9y agoThere has always been mountains of books and huge libraries of music being created and we have always managed. Find people you trust to recommend things to you. I recommend Tom Chick at Quarter to Three.
- eropple 9y agoTom's alright; his forums are a mess, though. I find Three Moves Ahead to encapsulate a similar viewpoint with a lot less gross around it.
- zrobotics 9y agoI've never understood why there's so much rage about crappy games on steam. I certainly wouldn't have the gall to charge money for a unity tutorial game, but I absolutely love some of the insane games people like zachtronics make. If we want to go back to publishers controlling access, who in their right mind would approve Schenzen IO? There's a lot of crappy products on EBay as well, but that doesn't mean the platform is useless.
- bitwalker 9y agoWas this the Pandemic Studios version of Battlezone (i.e. Battlezone II) or the first version of Battlezone for PC? If you had a hand in either, then I owe you a beer (or whatever you prefer) a bunch of times over because I loved both of those games so much. Endless hours of entertainment!
- georgeecollins 9y agoI worked on both. Thanks. If we ever run into each other I hope we can have a drink.
- jagerific 9y agoOh man thanks for making those. I spent so much time as a kid playing a copy of Battlezone I checked out from the local library. Love me some biometal
- moultano 9y agoI'm getting little pangs of joy just remembering battlezone. Such a wonderful game, and it still holds up.
- tomaskafka 9y agoThank you! The physical model of the 'hovercrafts' in Battlezone 2 was so satisfying, I just enjoyed piloting over the landscape so much and no game has come this close to that feeling!
- kennethdmiller3 9y agoHover physics was literally the very first thing I worked on for Battlezone, back when we were working in Interstate '76 and the game was called "Badlands". Within a week or so I had Groove Champion's orange Packard Piranha hovering around. There were many changes and additions later, but the core of hover physics started there.
- knewter 9y agofancy seeing you here. I loved battlezone as well, though I just played the arcade version (at my local thrift store)
- starpilot 9y agoGolem reporting.
- laythea 9y agoYes. I'm not sure that is a good thing for the consumer though, and has led to the market being flooded by rubbish. It is one thing to produce a game. Another, to produce a good game.
- zanny 9y agoBoth ends of the market have been driven wildly off course. The major publishers have become so risk averse that the only games they greenlight are iterative skinner box perpetual loot box cash grab wastes of talent. And on the low end you have the Unity asset store run amok. I'm not sure how you do it, but there is a happy middle of reasonable risk with reasonable competency missing in the market. There are few games made there every year, but they are a paltry few next to the regurgitated annual CoD game or the thousand random shovelwares put on Steam every month.
- kennethdmiller3 9y agoBattlezone and Battlezone 2 were the first two games I worked on professionally so they'll always be special to me. That's part of why I ended up supporting them unofficially for almost 15 years after release. :D
- kennethdmiller3 9y agoIt's still good to have engineers on a Unity or Unreal Engine 4 project (especially the latter). Designers can accomplish a lot with visual scripting but for a more complex game you'll often need custom components written by engineers.
- vasili111 9y ago> Unity and Unreal have made things we couldn't have dreamed of possible. And that is why nearly 95% FPS games are practically clone of each other.