No problem, just mention it in the requirements - early on. Not when everything is built to work this one specific way.
mf said choas
The giant is easy. The ground is easy. The lava though... Do you want the particles to stick together? To visually connect? To collide with each other? To interact with dynamic objects?
Design lead wants parting earth and flowing lava. Budget dictates static assets and baked in animations.
The player will jump on it, what happens then?
Alt text: In the 60s, Marvin Minsky assigned a couple of undergrads to spend the summer programming a computer to use a camera to identify objects in a scene. He figured they'd have the problem solved by the end of the summer. Half a century later, we're still working on it.
Edit: seems I'm the third person to comment this! :')
I love how this is actually an example of progress. These days, ML can be used for this kinda thing and it's not too bad at it even.
https://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or-bird/
This page about it still exists, but I guess the identification site died with Flickr.
Only in 3D. In 2D, you slap some pixels on top and there's your scarf:
Do you have the Orb yet?
I actually do, yes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of hours played and I made it down there and back out exactly once. 🙃
Lol, I still died half way up my one orb run, so you're further than me. I save scummed right before Zot:5 and did get it on my second try, but that doesn't count.
It was a gnoll abyssal knight IIRC. What about you?
According to the screenshot I took, it was a gargoyle berserker with an axe. I had some ridiculous luck with armor drops, so basically every resistance was either maxxed or close to it. I only really got into trouble down in Zot:5...
And hmm, I should do more with Lugonu. I never really have a reason to pick him, but that means I also don't experiment with him, so I won't really learn what reasons there are to pick the guy...
I tend to find it's the other way around. Once you've got a scarf modelled and rigged, it'll work* for all animations, but for animated 2D sprites you have a lot more things to do.
* May have visual artifacts like clipping
There's an XKCD comic for that.
This comic is so old, that both should be rather easy now
TBF it had been a long standing problem for roughly a half century before this. Specifically birds were the thing researchers tried to identify first, which is probably the reference here.
Oh, yeah, the specific example listed was solved within roughly a month of the comic being posted. But the idea still applies, as seen with the twitter post above.
There’s already a codebase for bursting from the ground in an explosion of lava. Everyone wants that.
You’re the first person asking for a scarf, and our system doesn’t even know what a neck is.
Time for the old NPC-with-a-train-for-a-hat trick.
Way back in the 90s I did a contract job at MS Research on a project called "V-Worlds" - a world simulator similar to the Doom or Quake engine, but it was browser-based and everything was a script, so changing how the world worked didn't mean you had to restart a server, just change the scripts and new stuff would appear right in front of you.
Anyway the concept of adding accessories to the player's avatar and even having a pet follow you around came up, and I remember there was an involved discussion of how difficult/impossible that would be. The player's avatar was a special object class that represented a user, and didn't have the same capabilities as ordinary objects in the world. I remember asking, "Why isn't the avatar just a world object the player happens to control? Then you could do all kinds of cool stuff like let the player transform into something else just by switching objects, or let another player run your character." Dead silence. I was just a contractor, what did I know?
A browser based Doom or Quake engine world sim to run around playing with others sounds like such an awesome concept. I'd love that!! And in the 90"s no less. That would've been crazy impressive.
Microsoft and MMOs, man. I remember they were gonna make a really neat online fantasy one for the Xbox and canned it, too.
That's such a wild story. Thanks for sharing that with us! I wish they wouldn't have cold shouldered you like that...
Here's how I was imagining that went down the whole time I was reading it lmao. Just for you.
Wow, nobody's ever put me in a cartoon before. I'm honored!
It does kind of fit the situation lol.
Well yeah, we have a character model for the giant demon and the giant demon has a huge use case.
A scarf? That's a model extension. Either you're asking me to create a whole new character with a scarf baked into the mesh that will deform weirdly as the character moves, or you're asking me to implement an accessory-anchor system all for the sake of a scarf (albeit other accessories might use this new framework) which will then need a physics/cloth sim to even look half good.
Game director : we’re gonna add interact-able doors with proper door opening animations for the characters
The game designers:
The programmers and artists:
The producers:
Now we need to decide in the case of collisions if:
The frustratingly comedic unintended results of any choice makes for great organic marketing though.
Gamedev is magical.
Aside: Know what did this really well though? Resident Evil games after RE:4.
The ability to "slowly quietly open", and then at any time decide to violently action-hero kick it open to send a zombie on the other side flying, was genius.
Player? Easy. Scarf? Easy. Wearing a scarf? That depends on a lot of factors such as which part of the body, how the models were made and rigged, etc.
Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it's easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they're even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it's good that they ask. There's lots of places where they assume and things go badly.
I just want a game that lets my avatar be left handed.
As a gameplay programmer, I got anxiety from reading this (and I think the animators are already in a fetal position on the floor)
Can't you just swap x for -x. Run some unit tests just in case. We'll push to prod next Wednesday. Sound good? Got to dash, strategy meeting started 5 minutes ago. Seeyoubye.
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