masterspace@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Lol if gamers are bitching about a game not adding a whole new island, you should ignore them because they’re clearly idiots.
If gamers are bitching about your menu system being navigable by someone with less than an a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough) then if it takes 6 months to fix thats because you coded your software badly.
menu system
I think you are vastly underestimating how complicated menu systems and UI in games are. I have a friend who works as a professional game developer in a small studio and far as I heard, he’s spent most of his time just working on their UI/menus.
Changing these things is neither easy nor fast.
If you’re spending months on your menu system, you’re doing something wrong. Bang it out in a few days and revisit just prior to launch. It’s really important because it’s the first thing players use, but it can also be overhauled late in development because it doesn’t impact much.
I would understand if it was a complex in-game menu system for a grand strategy or 4x game or something, not for a game launch menu. Get your UX team to iterate a bit during development and have devs throw it together once the major features are ready and it’s mostly time for bug fixing and polish.
revisit just prior to launch
This is simply not feasible - menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuff. All of that is necessary for proper gameplay testing. You can’t just “bang that out in a few days”.
I’m sorry, but this idea that any of this is easy enough to do in a few days and not crucial enough to iterate on throughout development instead of just doing it at the end, is exactly the kind of naive attitude that the Helldivers and Palworld devs are talking about.
menus include pause menus, talent trees, inventories, all that kind of stuf
Right, which is why I specifically said there’s an exception for menu-heavy games like 4x and grand strategy. If we’re mostly talking about launch and pause menus (which was my intent), that’s a small scope of work, as in weeks, not months.
You can absolutely build that in a few days, and then redo it later once UX has decided what needs to go there. It’s pretty similar game to game, so build it properly once to be data driven, and then tweak the UX and options a bit for each game. Optimization is generally done pretty late in the dev cycle, so those options don’t need to exist until later in development anyway, and that’s like half the work.
The important thing is to have your UX team iterate on it before your devs get involved, so it’s ready. And have them build it out while optimizing things for release. Your menu systems don’t need a ton of testing relative to the actual mechanics and gameplay.
The ROR2 new game menu has only a few elements:
That’s it.
I know it isnt completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that is only changing a few global variables. It’s a frontend with very little backend to consider.
Something like that is not a year’s work. I could agree with a month, and even at that, most of it will be testing, not design.
And tbh - the main problem with it isn’t even its design (the design is fine) just its controls. You inexplicably have to use the D-pad for character select, but the analogy stick for everything else, apart from switching to difficult select with R2. Why not navigate the whole menu with either D-pad or left stick? That should only take a week to fix at the absolute maximum, unless they’ve managed to tie the code in a spaghettified knot that’s unnecessarily coupled with actual game mechanics.
AAA gamedev here. I agree in principle with the gamefeel critiques, but I’d like to bring up that scale absolutely matters here. You should know as a guy who works in the space that every degree of complexity your codebase adds can cause cascading issues, which is one of the million reasons indie devs are told to keep their game scope small.
Scale absolutely matters, but the scale of the new game screen is (or should be) very minor compared to the game itself. That one scene should only be setting the variables for new play, not interacting with anything outside of it.
And, to be clear, the main concern is simply the input handling in that scene. The UI itself doesn’t really need to be changed, just which buttons change the highlight focus.
I can imagine it was likely thrown together quickly, perhaps with some unnecessary coupling, or maybe reading the inputs using action names that also relate to gameplay, so it becomes awkward changing it out.
I’m not so experienced with Unity, but in UE and Godot, adding and mapping inputs is fairly trivial - select the “up” button and map it to “ui_focus_up”, etc. I can’t see it being much more complex in Unity.
Correct. Once again, Gamers take developers for granted because something LOOKS like it’s simple, but it rarely ever is. It’s hella frustrating to deal with this every day as a dev, but I guess that’s what you sign up for in this line of work.
Alternative reasons (not mutually exclusive):
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
6 months doesn’t sound unrealistic for re-doing a menu system. Designing, reworking art, re-programming workflows and then testing everything can take several months. Even just the logistics of releasing it after it’s done, that alone can take a month.
Yes, it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work that has to be prioritized with the scope of the project and the team members available.
it is possible to setup everything in a very generic way that is data-driven, but that also is a lot of work
Sure, but it can also be reused in future games. Separate styling from behavior and you can make it look unique for every game with minimal code changes.
cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough
I still remember when they somehow broke the Xbox version and nobody could get past the start menu.
I like to link them to any modding SDK (official or unofficial) and as them why don’t they make it.
Well for one they’re a consumer who paid for a functional game. Nobody expects drivers to break out power tools and mod their car right off the lot.
It’s even more embarrassing when modders do fix it. Some random guy with no source code access manages to fix an issue in 3 weeks that a whole team couldn’t fix in 3 years.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
No doubt.
killeronthecorner@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Describing design problems and attributing them to “bad code” is part of the problem tbh. The issue in your example started long before any code was written.