Comment on Helldivers 2 and Palworld devs wish players understood that 'easy' additions and updates are sometimes really hard: 'That's half a year's work. That takes six months'

• RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It was only an example. As the asset already exists in the game elsewhere, adding that same asset somewhere else in the game should definitely not take even an intern more than a week to implement.

  Again, it is understandable in certain circumstances that major content drops take time. But for something as simple as the flashlight attachment example (which again is only a hypothetical example), there is no excuse for something like that to take 6 months or more to implement. Even if they have other priorities, something like that is so menial to implement that it would not take any significant amount of time away from higher priority development. Particularly because, in the example, other guns already have flashlight attachments, it already exists in the game. Unless they programmed the game in the literal worst way imagineable, they likely have a modular weapon system with slots that accept attachments. Very easy to add a new slot and allow it to accept the flashlight attachment, again as an example.

  source

  • AstralPath@lemmy.ca ⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I think you’re misunderstanding the concept of priority.

    source
  • ramirezmike@programming.dev ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    a big part of the complexity in programming (especially game programming) comes from balancing flexibility with speed (both implementation and performance). At some point, decisions are made weighing out risks, priorities and plans that will solidify a part of the code base in favor of speed (or some other factor) at the cost of flexibility.

    this happens all the time

    A lot of the reasons a solo dev or modder seems like they can progress so fast changing things is they aren’t facing a lot of the same factors and they aren’t needing to go through any rigorous testing.

    At some point in the process, there’s too much risk and and overhead involved to make any change. This is totally normal from triple A down to game jams.

    And, you can’t ignore that some of these things come down to game design. A change like you’re suggesting, just adding a light, can negatively affect the balance of things even if it seems like it wouldn’t.

    source