That depends. If you just want to attend E3 as a visitor (without paying the $800/1000 expo pass cost), all you need to do is [prove that you are affiliated with the entertainment industry somehow]. This typically means that you individually need to submit some proof of employment (typically a pay stub, benefits card, or some other official tax document) for a company that is related to the game industry, and possibly proof of said company’s industry affiliation. They’re pretty lenient about the entertainment industry affiliation bit - you don’t need to be working for a developer to go. E3 is primarily a tradeshow, which means that middleware companies, outsourcing companies, industry analysts, etc. are also going to be in attendance.

If you want to exhibit at E3 (i.e. have a booth and a presence) instead of just attend, then you’re going to have to pay them. You need to [reach out to the conference organizers and discuss it] - how big a booth you will need, what other requirements you’ll have, etc. This will affect the total cost. You’ll also need to provide and build your own booth and hardware. You’ll need to provide all demo stations, which means that everything will need to be packed up and shipped from your base to the conference floor. It will be a nontrivial cost as well - exhibiting at E3 can cost a large publisher millions just to set up and maintain the booth for the show’s three days. This doesn’t include press conferences, parties, or events either.

Overall, it comes down to what it is you hope to get out of it. E3 is a major industry tradeshow where everybody is vying for media attention. Everybody there is spending thousands of dollars to try to gain interest and attention for their upcoming games. If you just want to go to E3 and take a look at the upcoming titles, you can get a free pass with proof of industry employment. It can be a really fun mini-vacation in sunny Los Angeles. But if you want to show off your hot new title in hopes of getting more players or business, you’re going to have to pay the piper just like everybody else.

PS. I don’t give out current personal info.

A couple of publishers have tried this sort of thing in the past - a sort of midcore, lower-budget game that isn’t AAA, but more of an A or AA kind of game - but none have really succeeded on a massive scale. They’ve been reasonably successful at carving out niches, I think - it reminds me of games like Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light (and its sequel “Temple of Osiris”), but I don’t think they are going to be as big a part of gaming as entrenched gamers might hope. Midcore games tend to be more experimental (at least at the moment) than anything else.

I think the biggest issue is that even midcore games need AAA marketing budgets or people just won’t be as interested in trying them. AAA games bring the production values that encourage purchases, while midcore games cannot. I have noticed that a lower launch price point means that people tend to be more forgiving of the game’s quality (I’ve heard the phrase “It’s pretty good for fifteen bucks” used quite often), but smaller games just don’t seem to do all that well. What seems to be much more popular is that we can release an HD remaster or update of a classic (and super popular) game that costs less and earns more, utilizing the same team members that could have built a new lower-budget game. That said, every developer and publisher continues to experiment with new things and we often revisit old ideas that just weren’t right at the time of inception. Sometimes some kind of new technology, idea interpretation, or market shift will make the idea viable.

Yes. The certification process can take weeks to finish (especially if there are multiple failures), and it would be foolish to spend thousands of dollars to duplicate thousands of copies of a build that didn’t pass certification. Step by step, it usually works like this:

1. Build a certification submission candidate
   
2. Publisher’s internal cert team tests the candidate
3. If there are any blocking issues found, fix blocking issues that internal cert teams find. Go back to step 2. Otherwise continue.
4. Submit candidate to first party certification (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc.)
5. If the candidate fails, fix the blocking issues found. Go back to step 2. Otherwise continue.
6. If the candidate passes first party certification, the candidate is marked as gold master and can the publisher can begin duplication. 
7. If there are any non-blocking certification issues that first party require fixing in a day 1 patch, get to work on those issues, and go through the patch certification process (which is less stringent and expensive than full game certification) for it.

Gold master is the exact data that ends up in your retail box. It is the last thing that goes out of the studio for the entire contained package. 

So… the gold in the term “going gold” means “gold master” - the finalized master copy that will be duplicated to every disc that will be manufactured and sold at retailers. In the olden days of yore, there really wasn’t anything to be done after a game went gold. The game was finished and was being duplicated at the disc manufacturing plants in preparation of being shipped out to retailers everywhere. Any further changes were to be patches that the customers may or may not have ever seen. Typically, this meant that we developers would take some post-crunch rest and then start pre-production for the next project - an expansion to the game we just shipped, or a new game altogether.

With the advent of internet-connected gaming devices, going gold doesn’t have the finality it once did. We still have the post-ship rest period, but it tends to be staggered now as people roll off of the main project and onto others like DLC, or work on a day 1 patch to fix any issues that managed to make it onto the gold master. Usually, it takes a minimum of two weeks or so from creating a gold master to the game arriving at retailers to be sold.

Of course. Game Maker isn’t the deepest or most robust or powerful developer tool - you’re never going to build the next Grand Theft Auto on it, after all - but it’s a tool that allows you to prototype something very quickly, and sometimes that’s what you need. 

An explanation only goes so far, especially when written in a document. You know the adage “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Even concept art and still screenshots only do so much. When you want to convey a gameplay concept, then a few seconds of play will mean far more than paragraphs of text and pages of screenshots. Humans conceptually grasp things in a lot of different ways, but experiencing the concept firsthand is almost always far better than simply seeing pictures or reading text. 

That said, I wouldn’t really look at Game Maker as a legitimate release platform for a commercial product, especially with packages like Lumberyard, Unity, and Unreal providing more power, more usability, and more affordability right out of the box. Game Maker’s limitations are pretty well-defined and clear, and I don’t really see it as a viable platform for  commercially viable games. Not when it’s compared to the heftier options available. I prefer to think of Game Maker as a prototyping tool - similar to how SketchUp is a quick 3D planner and visualization tool, but would never seriously replace 3D Studio Max or Maya for 3D modeling. With Game Maker, you can get whatever it is you’re prototyping up and running quickly, to prove that a concept is fun. If it proves out, great! Use those principles to create the system in more detail. Or, if it doesn’t work out, you can scrap it and try something new without wasting weeks or months building infrastructure, assets, and systems to reach the same conclusion.

So… the first thing you have to know is this - when I’m talking to you at E3 (be it at the booth or in an interview or whatever), I’m on the clock. I am 100% acting as a representative of my studio and my publisher, just like you are 100% acting as the representative for your media organization and readers. As a corollary to this, it means that I will never badmouth my employer, my publisher, my business partners, or my teammates. I will never say anything about the product in a disparaging way. My goal is to make the product look good. 

Since I’m there to promote the product that I’ve been working on, I will have a pre-approved list of product-related topics that I am allowed to talk about. There will be future shows, future interviews, and future promotional events where other topics will be talked about, but this list is set in stone for the purposes of this show. This means that any answers to questions asked about topics not on the list will be “no comment”. 

This means that hostile or “gotcha” questions of any kind, like when [John Walker of Rock Paper Shotgun asked Peter Molyneux “Do you think you’re a pathological liar?”], will not be welcome. It should be fairly easy to determine whether a question is hostile or a “gotcha” - if you’re trying to catch me saying something to contradict or incriminate myself, I’m not going to like the question and will not be able to answer you in any meaningful way. It’s a waste of interview time and I (and my studio, and my publisher) am certainly not going to look on the interview fondly. It might make you feel momentarily like a real investigative journalist, but we’re going to be talking about an upcoming video game, not a scandal of epic proportions.

“So what should I ask?” you might be wondering. If you want unique or exclusive information that nobody else is going to get - you’re probably out of luck. That sort of thing usually happens at specific interviews with specific publications, often with specific legal contractual obligations in place. But what you can get at a show like E3 is interesting variations on the talking points. Remember, things that are fair game to talk about are things that have already been discussed. Also, each of us devs that get interviewed will have a different perspective on what is being done and how because of our specific jobs, and getting some of that perspective will vary a lot from person to person. For example, you might ask a Cinematics Designer about how they approached a specific cinematic in the demo you played, and ask her to compare it to a previous build. You might ask a Gameplay Programmer about the sort of systems at work, and how it might affect other, more established gameplay systems. Try connecting something revealed at a previous press event to one newly unveiled, or compare it to a previous game.

Remember, we devs are the ones who are closest to the product, and we’re the ones who have cause to be legitimately excited about it. Ask questions that will allow us to explain why, and try to get more of our unique perspective on it while we’re at it. Even if it’s something that may seem negative (like paid DLC, or collector’s exclusives), try to get us to weigh in and show you where the value is coming from. Remember, we’re development team members because we’re all experts at something. Tap into that expertise, and get us talking about the things we’re most passionate and knowledgeable about. Ask about the sort of challenges that we’ve personally faced, and how overcoming those challenges will lead to a better experience for the player. Frame your questions around how the new features are great from the player’s perspective. That’s how you’ll get the most out of an interview with a dev.

So this is the “non-VR” related GDC16 post. For those interested in what I saw regarding VR at GDC this year, check yesterday’s post. Fair warning - it’s been a few years since I’ve been to GDC. Working outside of California meant that it hasn’t been the easiest thing to make it out to the west coast while there’s some looming deadline. This year’s trip was put together as more of a spur-of-the-moment thing than planned in advance, and I was also riding the medication wave of having my bottom wisdom teeth extracted from the week before, so apologies if things are a bit of a blur.

The traditional heavy hitters had a smaller presence this year, in favor of the newer up-and-comers. No Activision or EA booth at all, there’s only tiny Microsoft and Nintendo booths set up for business meetings only. Developers like Blizzard, Bethesda, Bandai-Namco, Activision, Riot, etc. had no booth presence at all, and instead kept to talks and private dealings. The only member of the “old guard” to maintain a large floor presence was Sony. Instead, the largest booths were from those who had more to push - Unity, Unreal/Epic, Crytek, Amazon (Lumberyard), Oculus, Facebook, and Google were the biggest booths on the floor. Each of them was trying to push the new wave of gaming somehow - Oculus with VR, Unity, Crytek, Lumberyard, and Unreal pushing new features of their engines, Google with AR gaming, and Facebook trying to reinvigorate itself as a gaming platform.

I actually think this is good for indie and amateur developers out there - it shows that game engines like Unity and Unreal are doing well, and also making overtures to court new developers by adding broader features. I saw a small talk at the Unity booth showcasing some new heatmap technology that would be coming soon to the engine, and that the tech would allow developers to parse event data and display it in various ways as a heat map. This could be done with all sorts of events, like frame rate drops. Fire the event, collect the data, and then you could visualize a heat map of the places in a level that players were experiencing performance hits. 

The fact that there are so many good engines out there and available for licensing (cheaply!) fills me with hope for new developers out there. It means that the engines can specialize in doing certain things well as a salient selling point, and that developers can benefit from the competition that the different engines will foster among each other. 

I was very impressed when I saw the Amazon Lumberyard mini-talk about their database system called DynamoDB. It replaces the traditional relational database that everybody uses, and instead sets up a cloud-based system that manages to maintain a steady average seek time, even when getting hammered by massive numbers of queries. My little engineer brain was shocked - I’m not a database programmer, but I hadn’t considered that database scalability would have come this far. If you aren’t sure what this has to do with game development, consider this - have you ever tried to log in to a popular game on patch day and gotten stuck in queues or had really long load times? This is the kind of technology that will fix those problems.

There was also a fascinating talk given by the lead tools programmer from Assassin’s Creed Syndicate about how they built a tool to auto-generate the geometry and props for the roads of London. They managed to establish standardized dimensions for the roads of the game, and then used puzzle piece technology to create the roads and sidewalks, and then populated them with foot paths and parkour props to climb and navigate. Fully 90% of the buildings and props were procedurally generated, which ended up saving the team a lot of development time. Most of the buildings were just placed and the 6 kilometers or so of roads that connected the 80 square kilometers of London automagically appeared.

Perhaps the thing I felt the most keenly, however, was the gradual shrinking of the career section. It seemed like the number of recruiters at the show with booth presences is dwindling, as the recruiters tend to lean away from having a booth and instead for more clandestine meetings with specific individuals instead. There were only a small number of actual studios recruiting, and most of them were mobile and smaller studios. I can kind of understand why - with more and more schools offering game design and game development degrees, there’s a much worse signal to noise ratio of students to experienced developers, and many of the studios looking to hire need that experience. It can end up being a losing proposition to have to sift through two dozen students for every viable candidate. But, at the same time, I sympathize for the hopefuls who are looking for jobs or internships and are finding it increasingly difficult to find an opportunity. I really appreciate that the [Gamers For Good] booth that did portfolio reviews for students and hopefuls, as well as the career-oriented talks for how to break into the industry in the career section. 

That said, the indie scene is thriving and well. There were many indie and student games being showcased, from the very simple and intuitive pick-up-and-play game jam style games to the much more elaborate deep-content games where there’s loads of emergent gameplay from various system interactions. It was also the first year that I stumbled across the board game demo area, where I had a chance to learn to play some new board games and meet some new people. 

Overall, I had a good trip to GDC this year. I got to meet a lot of very cool new people, dispense a some advice to some students while I was waiting in line for some demos, and meet up with some old friends. I learned a few new things and got to try a bunch of new technology, and I’ve got a list of new things that I want to look further into. Lumberyard’s distributed online services especially stood out, that stuff is fascinating.

I also saw somebody reblog my GDC announcement post asking about a possible meetup while I was at the show. Apologies to that follower for the lack of response, since I was rather busy (and medicated) at the time. However, it did get some mental gears turning - if there were an upcoming event that I (or a dev friend) were to attend, say one of the PAX cons, E3, or something similar, would there be any interest in an AAGD-community meetup? Even more, what sort of format would that even take? Q&A session? Roundtable discussion? Just lunch? I have no idea what that might even entail. If you’d like to attend such a gathering and/or have ideas for how to organize something like that, please let me know. Specifically:

• What sort of format (a whole presentation? A Q&A session? A roundtable discussion? Just me, or do you want me to reach out to other devs and try to get more of us together?)
  
• Where? (officially part of the convention, at a nearby location but not requiring convention badge, something else?)
• What time of day (lunchtime, during the show, in the evening after the events of the day are over)
• Which convention(s)? (PAX, E3, GDC, Comic Con, etc.)
• What sort of topics would you like to talk about? (Game career advice? How the industry works? Portfolio reviews?)

I have no idea if this will actually be a thing or not, but I figure that gathering information would certainly be the first step. 

Not back home yet (flying back on Tuesday), but the show is over and I have reliable computer and network access again, so I can post about it. This year, the big theme was virtual reality. It was everywhere, front and center.

The biggest presence was probably the Oculus booth, showcasing both the Rift and Samsung’s GearVR. I tried both. The GearVR is the phone-on-your-face tech, and it suffered significantly from frame rate drops. It already wasn’t that great to begin with, but when the phone started to overheat the frame rate dropped and it physically hurt my eyes.

I also tried the EVE Valkyrie Oculus demo (which was a multiplayer space shooter/flight sim). This is one of the $60 launch titles, where you pick one of three ships and then fly around shooting at other people. The VR in it felt superficial - you can look around from within the cockpit independently of where the ship is flying, but you still use a normal controller and can still only shoot straight ahead.

I also tried the BeVR demo at the Amazon Lumberyard booth. It was also using Oculus technology - they crafted a glass elevator ride that had a branching point - twitch viewers could vote on whether I lived or died as a result of the VR monster in the demo. I will say - the VR setup while you’re standing in an unfamiliar space is really immersive… but it suffered because you didn’t actually do anything. There was no way to actually interact with the world, and the different means I tried to do that never felt particularly good. It all still felt very gimmicky, like a toy. It really felt a lot like everything was designed to be shown off in under five minutes, not really played with for an hour. I just didn’t see it holding someone’s interest for very long.

That wasn’t the end of the VR train though - there were a bunch of smaller booths showing off other VR tech.

This tech, for example, was a harness system set up to keep the user in place while the VR goggles were on. You had to wear these special slick shoes. The setup was designed to let you run in 360 degrees of motion without going anywhere so that you could actually move in VR. Obviously, this is a little crazy to have at home. But it doesn’t stop there.

Another booth showed off their motion capture and VR technology. There were cameras and sensors set up everywhere, allowing somebody to put on an Oculus Rift to see a scene in which they could play with a virtual basketball while somebody else in a mocap suit and a real basketball played basketball nearby. I think their goal was to show off their motion capturing technology in real time, but I’m not entirely sure why they needed to incorporate VR into it. Nevertheless, that’s what they were selling.

This probably took the cake though. It’s a motorized ride that tilts and weaves while you sit in it with your VR headset to simulate motion, similar to the new movie theater chairs that rumble. I have no idea who their target audience is - it’s probably too ridiculous for the home. Perhaps they are aiming at amusement parks or arcade type places?

The most impressive demo was the Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine demo, which was the only VR demo that I felt I could actually continue playing… provided there was actual content to play. It was demonstrated on the Vive, which requires even more buy-in than the Oculus - you need to mount sensors on your walls in addition to strapping on the headset. The sad thing is that ILMxLAB (Industrial Light and Magic) purposely pushed the limits of the technology with this demo, and it isn’t intended to be anything more than just a proof of concept. There’s no real plans to make this a reality for the home. Plus they didn’t even tackle the really hard stuff - making a good-looking human(oid) in VR. You get to hear Han and Chewbacca talk, but never get to see or interact with them. The only characters I got to interact with were R2D2 and some generic stormtroopers. That said, deflecting blaster bolts at storm troopers in VR was pretty awesome.

Originally posted by scarecroe

Overall, my general feelings toward VR haven’t changed. I spoke to a friend of mine at the show about her thoughts and she said that she gets the same feeling from VR this year as we got from Motion Controls a few years back. Remember when the industry was all abuzz about the Wii, the Playstation Move, and the Kinect? How there were these new strides in control interface and immersion? Back when they were big news, there were all sorts of weird motion-control technology demonstrations at GDC too. 

The biggest problems arise not from the technology itself, but in how it is used. The Wii had a lot of potential, just like the kinect and the PS Move… but there really weren’t that many titles to take true advantage of those innovative motion controls. I look at VR the same way - there’s going to be a couple of cute demos that will be played by all of the VR adopters (like Wii Sports), but I foresee most titles being more like EVE Valkyrie (VR as a visualization kind of added onto the game after the fact) than like Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine, where a robust, complete experience is crafted with VR as an interface in mind. Looking back at the Wii, you have to consider how many games were actually built with the innovative controls first. That’s what needs to be done with VR in order for it to have any sort of real success… and I didn’t see much evidence of that at the show.

Tomorrow, I’ll post about the non-VR stuff that I found interesting.

Look, it’s really quite simple. Whenever we hire somebody to do something, we’re agreeing to an extended trade - their labor for our money. We have work that needs doing, and we want the best person we can find to do that work. This is why we are willing to give them money to do it. We are not charities. We do not employ people just because they really really want to work for us. We will only consider employing people with skills, not training unskilled people. Nobody is going to drop it into your lap on a silver platter. Getting a job offer out of nowhere from your favorite dev to work on their game coming up with ideas for others to implement is a fantasy. It doesn’t matter how many posts you make on the forums. It’s not going to happen.

If you want to be an actual developer, you need to do something so well that we think you are the best candidate from all of the applicants that apply for the job. If you want to get a job in the industry, then you have to find something that you like doing and get so good at it that people are willing to pay you to do it. That means you’re going to need to put yourself out there, because there’s often no way to find out whether something you do is any good until you put it out and get people to try it. I don’t know what you’re good at, so I can’t tell you what you need to do to get a job. All I can say is “Find something you’re good at and do it.” 

If you aren’t sure what that might be, try things until you find something that sticks. Download mod tools like the Source Engine, Unity, Unreal, RPG Maker, the Dragon Age Toolset, or the Skyrim Creation Kit. Try building your own map. Try creating your own quest. Try learning to program with some tutorials. Try modeling a new character, or retexturing an existing one. There are lots of resources available online for those who seek them. Try things. Find something you like. Then keep doing that until you’re an expert at it. 

I’ll tell you one thing though - game development is all about iteration. We are always trying something new, finding all sorts of problems with it, then either move on by scrapping it (and trying something else) or fixing the problems and trying again. We constantly go back, analyze the good and bad, and try to improve it. In all my years of development experience, it has never ever worked on the first attempt. If you are paranoid about people rejecting your ideas, this is not the industry for you. Your ideas will not be coddled. Your ideas will not be spared. Try not to take it personally - when things are rejected, it’s almost never personal. It’s just the leadership doing what they think is best for the project. They’ve been doing it a lot longer than you have, and they have a lot more responsibility than you do.

When you begin, most of your ideas are going to suck because you don’t understand the nuances and specifics of what can and can’t be done. And that’s ok, because you’re new and you need to learn. But you have to learn and improve and put out new ideas that are better than the ones that came before it. The more you do, the more experience you gain, the better your ideas will become because you’ll start figuring the pitfalls and problems that your previous ideas suffered from. But you can’t start without finding what it is you want to do, and getting really good at that. 

It’s actually incredibly easy. If you specifically want to start creating game content for the Source Engine, there’s no easier way to do it. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide to set up the Source SDK on your computer.

Step 1: Install the Source SDK

Open up Steam, go to your Library, click where it says ‘GAMES’ and choose ‘Tools’ instead. Scroll down to ‘Source SDK’ and install that.

Then select it and choose “Play Game”. It will pop this up:

It’s got everything you need.

• Hammer Editor: Map creation/scripting tool
  
• Model Viewer: For importing your animations, textures, or new models
• Face Poser: Your cinematic/animation tool for cutscene creation and facial animation
• itemtest: The utility to package any item you create up for sale/distribution in the steam workshop

Before you run any of the tools, make sure you’ve run the engine and game you have selected at least once so that the correct files are created and initialized.

Step 2: Learn to make something with it

You can find the Source developer wiki by [clicking here]. There are lots of helpful links about how to do things in that wiki. The tools themselves can be pretty daunting - they are not designed for beginners! These are the actual tools that the developers created to build games like TF2, Portal, and Half-Life 2, which means that they are very powerful and robust. This also means that they are built by (and for) professionals. There will be a learning curve for certain. However, if you’re serious about modding and creating content, then you’ll keep at it, you’ll learn to use the tools, and you’ll make something cool happen. That’s really what it means to be a game developer - we spend a lot of time learning or creating new tools, figuring out how to do things, and making cool things happen as we improve. 

There isn’t a lot I can do to make it any easier - the tools are all there, and the documentation is out there. There are tutorials online for creating basic mods - just google for them, and there’s a community of other modders out there that you can try asking for assistance. But at this point, it’s really up to you to find that motivation to step it up and make it happen. Remember, making games is actual work. Nobody is going to do all the legwork for you and present everything to you on a silver platter. One of the most valuable skills in an employee is the ability to make yourself productive with minimal handholding from other team members. You’ve got to grab those reins yourself and make it happen, or you’ll just be another armchair designer while I hire the person that actually did put in the effort, created the content, and showed me what she learned.

The general issue with political intrigue and diplomacy in games is that there’s an inherent requirement for the player to “buy in” to what’s going on. With politics, you need to have skin in the game or players won’t care. When people discuss or report on politics, it has an implicit assumption that the people involved will have an effect on the viewer or listener. Without that level of involvement, it becomes more difficult to get a player to care. Games are naturally divided from the reality of the player, so they don’t care as much as they would if it were deciding, say, the president of the nation they live in.

Typical game activities like puzzles, combat, platforming and jumping, etc. carry with them an implicit set of stakes - do this activity or lose the game. The player inherently understands the consequences within seconds of playing the game. Even a game like Civilization will show you the (nearly) immediate consequences of your action - placing your city on this square instead of that one will affect your distance from other beneficial tiles that you feel on every subsequent turn. Most of this is based on the direct feedback the player gets from playing the game - if fill the playing field up with puzzle pieces, the game ends. If you step in the fire, you take damage or die. If those fellows hauling large sticks hit you with the sticks, you take damage or die. If you fall off the screen, you die. There’s a lot of things that just mentally make sense that you get near-instant feedback from in game.

But when going down the “political intrigue” path, you don’t necessarily get that sort of instantaneous feedback on whether things have turned out in your favor or not. You’re not sure which side is the right one, and you have no immediate reason to care about your character or faction when you begin the game. You don’t get to the fun until you understand what’s going on, and that tends to be delayed in an intrigue-style game until you figure out what the stakes and who the stakeholders are. This is usually why the closest games to this type tend to have some sort of other way to hook your interest - a murder mystery, impending doom, moment-to-moment combat, or some kind of external license to draw fans from another IP to the game. You can also graft political intrigue into another kind of gameplay in order to get that initial hook - the Witcher series does a great job of doing this. But nowhere does the political intrigue become part of the core game loop of the game itself, it’s always there as a secondary or tertiary goal.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t some players out there who are willing to spend the time to become involved in the story, the characters, the factions, etc. The problem is that you don’t get a whole LOT of them, because it requires a certain level of commitment that you don’t get with most gamers. Gamers are fickle - we’ve run a lot of field tests to gauge your attention in order to craft better experiences for you. Most of what we’ve studied tells us that players want to play. They generally don’t want to passively listen or read or watch a cutscene when they could be playing - these are things they will watch once or twice and then skip in the future. Until somebody can solve the issue with getting players to immediately care about the characters or places involved without a lot of passive listening or watching, political intrigue will continue to be a very niche subgenre of game, or simply a part of a larger whole.

It depends on what sort of prototype it is. If it’s just to prove out a game concept or system, then the important thing is the playability and fun. A friend of mine has used simple stuff like Game Maker to prove out playability concepts. If you’re talking about prototyping the entire game’s systems out to demo proof of concept to somebody who isn’t internal to the team (like the publisher executives), that’s called a [vertical slice] and it absolutely has to be close to production quality as you can get it.

The thing about Nintendo is that they seem big, but they are actually nowhere near the giants that their main competition is. Nintendo as a company has a current valuation of approximately $16 billion USD, which is pretty good but far less than either Sony ($30 billion), or Microsoft ($403 billion). Nintendo consoles don’t have the market penetration that their competitors do either - the WiiU has only 12.6 million units sold, while the PS4 has nearly tripled that with more than 36 million units sold. Sony and Microsoft have more third party support and bigger install bases with better hardware than Nintendo does, which means one major thing:

Nintendo cannot fight the giants head on

They lack the funding, they lack the third-party support, and they lack the installed base to fight the AAA games that the other consoles will get. Nintendo knows this, because they’ve been fighting this battle for almost two decades now. If you look back at their previous consoles, the N64, the Gamecube, the Wii, and the WiiU have always been inferior to their contemporaries in terms of hardware. However, what they have done with each successive generation has been to experiment and push further than their competitors.

Think about it - who really started the 3D platforming genre? Nintendo did with Super Mario 64. Its graphics weren’t the best, and the controls were sloppy, it had issues with its camera, but they managed to craft a true 3D exploration/platforming genre that inspired a dozen clones. Who really brought the FPS to home consoles? Remember Goldeneye 64? What the other publishers and platforms do is take some of the things that Nintendo innovates with and improves them. This costs a lot more than experimenting with something totally new - it takes time and money with successive attempts to improve the formula. Other publishers spend tens of millions to develop successively better versions and sequels to tried-and-true games. But Nintendo doesn’t do this as often, because it’s usually too expensive to do so. They’d rather spend those resources developing new things for a lower budget.

Nintendo has always been more willing to experiment with their titles and hardware in order to try something new with their games. On the Gamecube, they experimented with genres and controls like Donkey Kong Jungle Beat, Animal Crossing, Eternal Darkness, and Metroid Prime. On the Wii, they played with the whole concept of a Mii, motion controls, more party games, and the virtual console. The DS and the 3DS were both huge risks in terms of handhelds - adding a second screen, and then stereovision 3D was wild. The WiiU has other wacky new entries like Splatoon. You can see how much they’ve tried experimenting with their core Mario titles - look at the progression of Super Mario 64 to Super Mario Sunshine to Super Mario Galaxy to Mario Maker. 

This means that you’re probably never going to see the true big budget AAA visuals or production values on any Nintendo exclusive. You’re going to continue to see weird off-the-beaten-path games and experimental things in hopes of seeing a success, because that’s what Nintendo does in order to survive. They don’t have the funds or the backing to provide the sort of high production value games that entrenched and hard core gamers want, not at the sort of returns they need. Instead, they can gamble on a lot of new things like they have before. It might not be what I want personally as a gamer, but I can’t fault them for using this as their business plan because it’s been working for them.