Great games: from independent or large studios?

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I could list the relevant answers for you almost by rote - but it’s much more useful (to you) if you track down the previous debates and get to see all that was said and why.

I’m not singling you out here, but to be honest, this is why I was never keen on a game-design area on JGO - this is a topic that has been discussed in detail several times over, and if anyone’s interested in the answers (and the new unanswered questions they generate), they really ought to go to the relevant places for these discussions. Places like the games-development mailing lists over on Sourceforge. Can’t remember the URL’s, but should be easy to find…a couple are run by Brian Hook (ex id-Software) IIRC.

The major point is that I see few mainstream games developers here on JGO. OTOH, the SF lists are full of pro games devs (even if lurking or only reading indirectly, via a company-feed), and they’re a friendly bunch. And there’s other places like that too, where mainstream developers hang out who live and breath this stuff and have lots of additional thoughts etc to add. If you want to discuss stuff like this, you should go there, because you’ll find lots of people who know a lot about it (though of course that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right ;)). Here on JGO there’s only a few (inevitably leads to fairly one-sided conversations - simply because there’s only a small number of perspectives from people with first-hand experience/knowledge), and so most people are just theorising, rather than adding new information.

What’s the point in having this conversation here, when you could instead have it with the involvement of EA’s employees, and Blizzard’s, and…etc ?

Kevglass’s post about improving the design of a game he already had clearly broke new ground, and led to the forming of this Topic. Now the topic’s moving back towards chat about game-design in general. Whilst that’s quite fun, it’s producing a very low signal-to-noise ratio.

Right, sorry about that. I’ll get off my soapbox now. :slight_smile:

[quote]but then there’s games like Super Mario 64 and Final Fantasy 7 which are definitely not bad, but probably were more successful than they would have been normally due to good timing.
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SM64 was just a good game and in fact a game that spawned its on subgenre of games. Final Fantasy 7 was simply the best RPG available with excellent production values. It was just a high quality game. FF7’s popularity has more to do with the strength of the franchise coupled with being a good game. No Final Fantasy game has ever sold less than a million units here in the states - so that should say something :slight_smile:

[quote]I could list the relevant answers for you almost by rote - but it’s much more useful (to you) if you track down the previous debates and get to see all that was said and why.
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Well, thanks for the anwer; I’ve just deleted my above paragraph, let’s forget about it. Too general question(s) indeed.

Back to the topic. :slight_smile: The answers I’ve seen so far are interesting IMHO because the discussion could show if it’s an option to delve into “Java game programming” which currently means on a “small independant basis”, or forget about it.

Technology is a tool - publishers for the most part really don’t care which you use unless they really want/need a console SKU. So the technologies you choose shouldn’t really matter. Heck there have been retail games made that ran entirely in Macromedia Shockwave. If a certain technology works for you and yields a product - unless you don’t try to sell it, chances are there is someone out there who will buy it (publisher wise). So many developers burn out their energy in Java vs C++, PC vs Console, DirectX vs OpenGL, Less Filling vs Tastes Great - that they never actually make anything.

99.9% of everyone here will fall into the small independent category and if they did their game in C/C++ they’d still fall into that category. Your choice of technology won’t change that. I know quite a few startup studios who own copies of NDL and Renderware and they spent a lot of money to have the latest and greatest and they have produced nothing as well.

Technology is just a tool, its what you make with it that has any relevance. If Doom3 was written in Perl I’m sure it would sell just the same. Vampire Masquerade used Java. Alien Flux uses Java and there are other games that use Java. Technology usage is just not a selling point to the consumer. It is either a good game or it isn’t. Consumers will do what it takes to make sure they can play the games they want to play. I know quite a few people now who have installed JRE1.4.2 just to play around with Wurm Online where they would otherwise not even have bothered having Java installed. In fact if my statistics serve, Limewire (P2P client) has caused more client side installs of Java than any other single piece of consumer software.

What this forum really needs to be focussed on is how to make better games - games that are fun and games that people want to play. Waste your energies there as that’s the only thing that matters.

Hopping off soap box :slight_smile:

They should. Because I’m new to Java and OpenGL I don’t know the answer yet. So I’m reading and writing here in order to find it out. I think it’s exciting if it would be technically possible to develop a game in such a nice language/system/platform like Java. Well then, the discussions on topics like “Java compared to C++” and others on JGO are interesting to me, because so far they showed my that you actually should be able to do a game in Java which is comparable to the speed of C++. Shouldn’t it? Since I can’t judge this on my own yet, I’ve to learn these basics from somewhere. :slight_smile:

A nice Sunday to you all.

I think the independance of a games studio is maybe a bit of an irrelevance- I think the important thing is who is in charge- is it a gamer/designer/developer or is it an accountant/marketing type? It seems to me that the games that innovate are the ones where the people in charge care about games rather than income.

I work just up the road from where Bullfrog used to be based before EA bought them out and they were a classic example of the creative game development company turning out successful but innovative and quirky games. When they were bought out, the new owners were only interested in making sequels to previous successful games (notably Theme Park and Theme Hospital) rather than making the most of the talent available to them. The developers became increasingly disillusioned and the majority of them left to join other companies (notably Lionhead, but there are quite a few other small development companies around town) where they were able to create rather than following the spreadsheet.

[quote]I think the independance of a games studio is maybe a bit of an irrelevance- I think the important thing is who is in charge- is it a gamer/designer/developer or is it an accountant/marketing type? It seems to me that the games that innovate are the ones where the people in charge care about games rather than income.
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The games that innovate are those that are written by people who innovate. That has absolutely nothing to do with whether or not the person in charge is fiscally responsible. Since I would do great harm in naming companies I won’t but there are plenty companies that are fiscally responsible that make innovative content and quite a few that are out of business because they weren’t fiscally responsible. I can go into the gaming forum of just about any site and find 90% of the games being designed are derivatives of other games. There isn’t anything particularly wrong with that - it just serves as an example, not everyone is an innovator - that’s just not the way of the world.

Most games I’ve seen recently are just improvements on existing formulas. Nothing wrong with that - they make money, but everyonce in a while a Homeworld or HalfLife comes along. Truly innovative games are rare. Not everyone is a good designer and not everyone can innovate. Whether or not you’re independent or fiscally responsible has absolutely nothing to do with your creative process. A truly innovative game will stand out in a crowd. Go to 2 or 3 E3s in a row and look for games that truly stand out. Go to GDC and talk to developers and do the same. I used to do this for year after year after year and to be honest there are just few innovative ideas out there.

[quote]I think the independance of a games studio is maybe a bit of an irrelevance- I think the important thing is who is in charge- is it a gamer/designer/developer or is it an accountant/marketing type? It seems to me that the games that innovate are the ones where the people in charge care about games rather than income.
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I think thats right !
Unfortunately, almost all of the big devteams out there are sponsored by big publishers,… and i’d bet 95% of all people working at the publisher just care about income, instead of gameplay…
on the other hand , IMHO, it depends on how much mney the publisher has available… sierra could afford that an experimental game flops on the market, so they can be much more flexible, so in conclusion i’d say, that it doesn’t depend on the devteams, but on the publishers situation.

And for the Publishers: the ones residing in the middle between ‘we-can’t-spend-a-single-buck-more’ and ‘who-cares-about-crap-like-money’, will sponsor the most
standard (boring) gametypes.

And imho timing has its importance, too !
Imagine TheSims would be invented 15 years ago, where just hardcoregamers and/or coders had fast computers…
i don’t think most players of thesims could really be called ‘gamer’…

Hope my english isn’t too bad, and you didn’t misunderstand my point… :-/

I think the greatest game of all time was Moria. It took me 11 years to complete it (!), and my god did I feel good when I did (although by then it was called Zangband). It was free as well…
Everyone I suggest you download it immediatly.