Game Design reports and market data
3,360 documents·56 writers·968 charts and tables
Documents
Game Developers Conference36 min
(P)Layer Character: Designing Immersive Narratives for Location-Based AR Layers
Effective augmented reality narrative design centers on the concept of seasoning physical environments with digital layers rather than attempting to overwrite reality.
- Effective AR narrative design should 'season' physical environments with digital layers rather than attempting to overwrite reality.
- Developers should utilize reverse level design, constructing narratives around existing physical architecture to ensure the experience remains grounded in the tangible world.
- To mitigate player self-consciousness in public spaces, designers should issue direct prompts that invite participants to define their own roles within the fiction.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2021
Game Developers Conference30 min
A House Built on Sand: Engineering Stable and Reliable AI
Achieving stability and reliability in artificial intelligence requires a rigorous architectural approach that strictly separates high-level gameplay logic from low-level mechanical services.
- Strictly decouple high-level gameplay logic from low-level mechanical services to prevent rigid systems and cascading failures.
- Replace functional proxies like animation states with dedicated mapping layers and robust predicates to ensure probabilistic AI data translates into predictable, discrete actions.
- Centralize decision-making processes and establish a unified frame of reference to eliminate floating-point errors and conflicting calculations across the codebase.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2021
Game Developers Conference29 min
Critiquing Game Visuals: Common Problems and How to Solve Them
Effective game art critique requires moving beyond subjective, instinctive reactions toward a structured, goal-oriented analysis.
- Effective game art critique requires moving beyond instinctive reactions by defining clear project goals, such as player focus or information legibility, before evaluating visual effectiveness.
- Visual clarity issues are often solved by adjusting value contrast rather than hue; converting an image to grayscale is a reliable diagnostic tool to ensure characters or objectives stand out against backgrounds.
- To manage high-density visuals in genres like bullet hells, developers should prioritize brightness and clear silhouettes over heavy outlines to ensure hitboxes and gameplay elements remain readable.
Game Developers ConferenceJul 2021
Thomas Brush9 min
How I Made My FPS Weapons - Devlog
The primary objective of this development overview is to define and demonstrate the concept of game feel in first-person shooters.
- Game feel is defined by the immediate, responsive relationship between player input and audio-visual output, serving as the primary differentiator between mediocre and successful FPS titles.
- Weapon systems should utilize a centralized state machine paired with animator override controllers to manage weapon-specific animations, particle effects, and kickback intensities within a streamlined codebase.
- Dynamic screen shake can be achieved by integrating Cinemachine’s Perlin noise, with amplitude and frequency scaled to match the perceived power of individual firearms.
Thomas BrushJul 2021
Presentation37 pages
Universals vs. Differentiators: A Tale of Two Motivations
Understanding player behavior requires distinguishing between universal needs and individual differentiators.
- Player behavior is driven by two distinct categories: universals, which dictate baseline retention and quality, and differentiators, which determine game selection and audience targeting.
- The underlying motivation model is built on data from over 500,000 video gamers, categorizing drives into six primary pairs: Action, Social, Mastery, Achievement, Immersion, and Creativity.
- Universal requirements—such as intuitive UI, clear goals, and consistent feedback—are objective metrics where higher performance is universally preferred for all titles.
Quantic FoundryJul 2021
Game Developers Conference61 min
Balancing Nightmares: An AI Approach to Balance Games with Overwhelming Amounts of Data
Modern game development faces a significant challenge in maintaining balance within titles featuring billions of potential party combinations and frequent content updates.
- Square Enix utilized genetic algorithms (GA) to automate game balancing for 'Grimms Notes Repage,' a title featuring over 10^182 possible party combinations across 80 heroes, 60 weapons, and various costumes.
- The GA system evaluates party performance by mapping diverse metrics—such as battle time for victories and damage dealt for defeats—onto a single dimension to identify the top 80 parties for each subsequent generation.
- To manage the massive, evolving dataset, the team implemented Apache Spark for scalable, cloud-based processing and Apache Superset for low-cost, customizable data visualization.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2021
Game Developers Conference62 min
Creating a Deeper Emotional Connection: The Cinematography of God of War
The development of God of War centers on the pursuit of empathetic immersion, a state where players move beyond mere sympathy for characters to experience the narrative as a personal, lived journey.
- The development team utilized a continuous, no-cut camera technique to eliminate traditional editing, preventing the mental disconnects that typically disrupt player immersion.
- To achieve a documentary-style aesthetic, the team implemented a 'first-and-a-half-person' perspective that anchors the player directly to the protagonist’s internal emotional experience.
- The production relied on sophisticated technical maneuvers, such as invisible zooms and precise character blocking, to replicate the impact of film editing within a single, unbroken shot.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2021
Thomas Brush10 min
Before you make your DREAM INDIE GAME… WATCH THIS
Aspiring indie game developers should avoid making their dream project their first commercial release.
- Avoid making your dream project your first commercial release to prevent burnout and ensure you have the necessary skills for long-term success.
- Apply the 80/20 principle to your development process, focusing on the 20% of your efforts that generate 80% of your success to identify your unique value proposition.
- Release small, low-stakes projects on platforms like itch.io to build technical proficiency and practice the essential cycle of finishing and publishing content.
Thomas BrushJun 2021
Game Developers Conference65 min
End-to-End Procedural Generation in Caves of Qud
The procedural generation architecture of Caves of Qud functions as a multi-tiered pipeline designed to bridge the gap between abstract historical simulation and concrete environmental manifestation.
- Caves of Qud utilizes a multi-tiered procedural pipeline that translates abstract historical data—such as factional history and religious practices—into concrete game objects like NPCs and architecture.
- The generation process follows a five-step pipeline that converts abstract key-value pairs into specific game states only upon player entry into a map, ensuring memory efficiency and narrative coherence.
- The system integrates advanced algorithms, including Dijkstra maps for pathfinding and Wave Function Collapse for context-aware layout generation, to bridge the gap between cultural blueprints and physical environments.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2021
Extra Credits9 min
5 Rules for Design Tools - Developing RPG and Tabletop tools for other people to be creative!
Designing effective creative tools for tabletop role-playing games and sandbox environments requires a balance between providing structure and allowing for user-driven innovation.
- Prioritize versatile, basic building blocks over hyper-specific components to maximize user creativity and system flexibility.
- Embed hidden synergies within the system to encourage user experimentation and discovery of unintended, creative combinations.
- Define a clear project vision using evocative adjectives to ensure all design elements remain cohesive throughout development.
Extra CreditsJun 2021
Game Developers Conference30 min
Building the Interface of The Elder Scrolls: Blades in Landscape and Portrait
The development of The Elder Scrolls: Blades for mobile devices necessitated a strategic decision regarding screen orientation, ultimately resulting in the implementation of both portrait and landscape modes.
- Supporting dual orientation in mobile game UI adds 20% to 60% to the total UI conception time, as every mock-up and wireframe must be produced for both landscape and portrait layouts.
- Portrait mode is a critical accessibility feature for mobile gaming, as it enables one-handed play for users in contexts where they cannot use both hands, such as during commutes or meetings.
- Designing for dual orientation forces UI simplification; for example, Bethesda distilled complex crafting information into simple visual indicators (red X or green check marks) to fit the narrower portrait screen, which improved user confidence during testing.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2021
Game Developers Conference36 min
Collaborative Approaches to Getting Great VO Performances
Achieving superior voice-over performances in game development requires shifting from a transactional model to a collaborative partnership.
- Shift from a transactional model to a collaborative partnership by treating voice actors as creative contributors to foster shared ownership of the final product.
- Provide comprehensive context during auditions—including character visuals, narrative goals, and emotional arcs—to enable actors to achieve the neural synchrony necessary for authentic performances.
- Balance narrative secrecy with the actor's need for information by providing non-spoiler parallel details that maintain intellectual property security while ensuring performance depth.
Game Developers ConferenceJun 2021