6 ms·

Because technically, they didn't. As they say in the documentary, the version of the game that they made after the first year or so was bad, and they acknowledg

Because technically, they didn't. As they say in the documentary, the version of the game that they made after the first year or so was bad, and they acknowledged it, and they changed their processes and introduced the "cabal" - so they basically paid that first year to gather experience. And what's important, their publisher Sierra was okay with it. I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Budgets have gone through the roof, and the publisher won't give you a plan B, they will force the developer to duct-tape what they have and ship it no matter what. And the game can always be patched later, right?

hello281237 3y ago
Sierra is an interesting company. In the video game industry has very few well known female game designers, and that was even more true back then. Yet the adventure game genre had several - Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen, and Christy Marx (not as well known, but her games are well regarded), all of whom worked for Sierra. One has to wonder if Roberta Williams being co-owner of the company (and the designer of the first graphical adventure game) is one of the reasons for this. Another interesting story is when Ken Williams (Roberta Williams husband, the other co-owner of the company) hired middle-aged retired police officer Jim Walls to design the Police Quest adventure games (he designed the first three). Ken apparently was talking to his hairdresser about his idea for a police adventure game, when she mentioned that Walls, her husband, might be an interesting person to talk to.
- bena 3y ago
  If you're the only one willing to tap into a talent pool, you get to pump that resource as much as you want. So if Sierra is the only company really willing to hire female game designers, they really get to take all the best.
  - bzzzt 3y ago
    I don't think others were not willing to hire female designers; some Infocom games from that time also had female authors. I think it's more to do with the time they started. Somewhere during the 80s the 'white male nerd' stereotype became a self-reinforcing thing which scared a lot of women away from everything computer-related. Also, I don't consider Sierra games 'the best designed'. Some of their games have lots of 'personality' and they were first with many innovations, but it's clear everyone was still figuring out how to design games at the time.
eur0pa 3y ago
The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.
- whywhywhywhy 3y ago
  The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable. The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2). Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine. But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took. Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom. But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks. And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.
Cthulhu_ 3y ago
> I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of people (if you include outsourcing / engines / etc) for AAA titles today. And the modern day game devs will have enjoyed a relevant education, whereas back then those educations didn't exist yet. Notably, John Carmack did a lot of ground work in translating math into 3D video game engines; he was behind Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake, and the Quake engine was used as the basis for Half-Life's. Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it, Hollow Knight's Team Cherry has just 3 employees (but they used Unity so they didn't have to do much engine programming, and the ports to various consoles was outsourced); Wube (Factorio) has had a few dozen people working on it. "indie" hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance had like 240 people working on it.
- masklinn 3y ago
  > Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games. That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.
  - panopticon 3y ago
    Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.
    - philistine 3y ago
      Exactly. Indie doesn't come from the word new, it comes from the word independent. Are you a team detached from the traditional large players in the industry. Yes? Then you're indie.
bombcar 3y ago
Reading the Factorio blogs shows their progression from "developer" to "game developer" to "top-tier game developers" - it took years. You could likely do the same today, but the key would be finding someone (like Gabe) to fund it whilst it got off the ground.
- kevinventullo 3y ago
  With all due respect to the Factorio devs (it is one of my favorite games of all time and I credit them with essentially creating the genre), have they made even one other game?
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    number of games made does not correlate with game-making skills. They aren't coupled, anyway. It is probably much more correlated with game design skills, but that's not the context, here. Their skill in honing the game and becoming a respected game development company are what are in question, and while not an AAA studio, they are recognized as a company that knows how to highly optimize their game. They deserve as much respect as any other game developer, in my mind. Their approach is different than other game studios, and that alone is testament to their abilities to both make a game and run a business. They're doing things their own way, focusing on the one game (at least as far as we know) and they are still simply "killing it" and I mean that in the very best way.
- riffruff24 3y ago
  I imagine you will see similar things with Icefrog, in their tenure as the custodian of DotA map in Warcraft 3. Balancing a competitive game is something that even Blizzard struggle with. (well, Icefrog isn't burdened by the need for monetization.)
tapoxi 3y ago
Today they ship in early access, which is a better approach since it opens you up to a ton of feedback. The most recent, and successful, example being Baldurs Gate 3.
ajmurmann 3y ago
I think time and trust is so critical. I remember a talk by the people who made FoundationDB about their approach to testing. They spend a year just creating a variant of C++ that allowed them to control concurrent execution order and build a framework to simulate/mock network, disc access etc. It's incredible work and AFAIK more than paid for itself. Yet, at most places it would be impossible to get a year-long testing effort of that scale funded or really any engineering effort that produces nothing shippable. All too often you might get 3 months and after 2, a urgent product request comes up and the work sits and rots away till it's useless and nobody gets back to it

hello281237 3y ago

Sierra is an interesting company. In the video game industry has very few well known female game designers, and that was even more true back then. Yet the adventure game genre had several - Roberta Williams, Lori Cole, Jane Jensen, and Christy Marx (not as well known, but her games are well regarded), all of whom worked for Sierra. One has to wonder if Roberta Williams being co-owner of the company (and the designer of the first graphical adventure game) is one of the reasons for this. Another interesting story is when Ken Williams (Roberta Williams husband, the other co-owner of the company) hired middle-aged retired police officer Jim Walls to design the Police Quest adventure games (he designed the first three). Ken apparently was talking to his hairdresser about his idea for a police adventure game, when she mentioned that Walls, her husband, might be an interesting person to talk to.

bena 3y ago
If you're the only one willing to tap into a talent pool, you get to pump that resource as much as you want. So if Sierra is the only company really willing to hire female game designers, they really get to take all the best.
- bzzzt 3y ago
  I don't think others were not willing to hire female designers; some Infocom games from that time also had female authors. I think it's more to do with the time they started. Somewhere during the 80s the 'white male nerd' stereotype became a self-reinforcing thing which scared a lot of women away from everything computer-related. Also, I don't consider Sierra games 'the best designed'. Some of their games have lots of 'personality' and they were first with many innovations, but it's clear everyone was still figuring out how to design games at the time.

eur0pa 3y ago

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable. The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2). Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine. But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took. Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom. But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks. And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago

> I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of people (if you include outsourcing / engines / etc) for AAA titles today. And the modern day game devs will have enjoyed a relevant education, whereas back then those educations didn't exist yet. Notably, John Carmack did a lot of ground work in translating math into 3D video game engines; he was behind Wolfenstein, then Doom, then Quake, and the Quake engine was used as the basis for Half-Life's. Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it, Hollow Knight's Team Cherry has just 3 employees (but they used Unity so they didn't have to do much engine programming, and the ports to various consoles was outsourced); Wube (Factorio) has had a few dozen people working on it. "indie" hit Kingdom Come: Deliverance had like 240 people working on it.

masklinn 3y ago
> Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games. That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.
- panopticon 3y ago
  Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.
  - philistine 3y ago
    Exactly. Indie doesn't come from the word new, it comes from the word independent. Are you a team detached from the traditional large players in the industry. Yes? Then you're indie.

bombcar 3y ago

Reading the Factorio blogs shows their progression from "developer" to "game developer" to "top-tier game developers" - it took years. You could likely do the same today, but the key would be finding someone (like Gabe) to fund it whilst it got off the ground.

kevinventullo 3y ago
With all due respect to the Factorio devs (it is one of my favorite games of all time and I credit them with essentially creating the genre), have they made even one other game?
- naikrovek 3y ago
  number of games made does not correlate with game-making skills. They aren't coupled, anyway. It is probably much more correlated with game design skills, but that's not the context, here. Their skill in honing the game and becoming a respected game development company are what are in question, and while not an AAA studio, they are recognized as a company that knows how to highly optimize their game. They deserve as much respect as any other game developer, in my mind. Their approach is different than other game studios, and that alone is testament to their abilities to both make a game and run a business. They're doing things their own way, focusing on the one game (at least as far as we know) and they are still simply "killing it" and I mean that in the very best way.
riffruff24 3y ago
I imagine you will see similar things with Icefrog, in their tenure as the custodian of DotA map in Warcraft 3. Balancing a competitive game is something that even Blizzard struggle with. (well, Icefrog isn't burdened by the need for monetization.)

tapoxi 3y ago

Today they ship in early access, which is a better approach since it opens you up to a ton of feedback. The most recent, and successful, example being Baldurs Gate 3.

ajmurmann 3y ago

I think time and trust is so critical. I remember a talk by the people who made FoundationDB about their approach to testing. They spend a year just creating a variant of C++ that allowed them to control concurrent execution order and build a framework to simulate/mock network, disc access etc. It's incredible work and AFAIK more than paid for itself. Yet, at most places it would be impossible to get a year-long testing effort of that scale funded or really any engineering effort that produces nothing shippable. All too often you might get 3 months and after 2, a urgent product request comes up and the work sits and rots away till it's useless and nobody gets back to it