With the promise to bring back the fun to a popular genre – First Person Shooter -, the Epic’s Bulletstorm is a mess.
One of the main problems is the core idea: stimulate the user to perform vary the play style by using different weapons. The player now is psychologically forced to vary. And because this concept is presented and used in the main campaign, several times the player will stop to pay attention on the story – which will comment later – in order to
Several of the “skillshots” are too dependent on luck, like killing several enemies at the same time in a specific condition. It brings a lot of frustration. It’s an immense TODO list to be executed.
The other pillar of the game, extensively advertised, is the bad language. Fun at the start, it becomes an annoyance by the end of the game because the player feels it is forced and unnatural.
The story, I must say, is terrible. ALL the characters try to look bad but be good ALL the time. The players’ character best friend, the cyborg Ishi, through the WHOLE game goes back and forth saying “Ow… the pain is huge. The computer is trying to dominate my mind”… we simply not buy it. I would say that the 4 characters of the game are among the worst I ever seen.
The visuals are amazing. Even with a modest pc you will still get a fantastic looking game. The loading time are impressively quick and there were only few times when the framerate dropped. Unreal Engine showcase.
The curious part is that the gameplay is actually good. If the player were not “forced” to worry with the long TODO list, it would be much better. I didnt play the multiplayer yet, but if it follows the chaotic formula of the single player campaign combat, I think people will like at first but the annoyed soon.
The new version of the Unity 3D engine was just released and I’m super excited.
All the previous features continue there: great asset integration (several 3D, 2D, and sound file formats), programming scripts, and a great IDE. But now the visual performance is better, even with the new features enabled.
Pre-baked lightning is now included by default. It allows the creation of amazing scenes that most of the lights pre-rendered. It allows the video card to work on other stuff, like shaders. Speed is also better than the inclusion Ambient occlusion package. It analyses the scene/map previously and checked what parts of it will not appear depending on where the camera is and saves the information to be used in real-time. The performance gain is huge.
The animation manager is also a great plus. It seems very much like video editing, with curves and keyframes. It is now very nice to program animations, especially for designers.
UDK (Unreal Development kit) is also gaining a lot of attention from the media, but with a feature set somewhat similar (again, 99% of the game makers are not even capable of using the engine fully), it is quite an irresponsibility to accept the license that makes you give 25% of the profits to Epic (and after paying your distributor, marketing, etc…).
The New Business Scenario for Gameshttps://www.brunomassa.com/en/blog/the-new-business-scenario-for-games/Bruno Massa
There was a time that making and selling games was simple. puf…. old times. The last years opened several options. The amount of variables now can be a bit overwhelming and inevitably will make people get the wrong conclusion. A lot money to be made and to be lost!
Indies
The indie movement is officially in vogue. World of Goo, Limbo, Amnesia, Darwinia… they made, together, quite some revenue and receive amazingly good critics. The small financial risk, the creative independence to explore some bold choices are all elements of its rise.
A important part of the emergent trend of indie games is the access of good middleware. Unreal released the same award winning engine that power AAA games in an indie-kinda-friendly license. UDK, its name, is impressively complete. Torque continue to expand. Unity 3D 3 is better than ever and even big fishes are using it. The cost of AAA tools reduced so much that the “limited only by our imagination” cliché is now more true then ever.
Handheld
Recent data indicates that the handheld (game-only devices) market is in decline, mostly because the smartphones are now powerful enough to host not only Tetris and Bejeweled but full featured 3D games. Some games for iPhone and Android are really impressive. And because the distribution costs are really a tiny fraction from a full console distribution (Apple store and Android Market only charge a small percentage), the market is dominated by indie companies, that have a better development cycle ans scale.
Browser
Zynga, by generating more revenue with FarmVille than Facebook entirely, proved that casual gaming can be lucrative and be a big-company business. But like the new handheld scenario, it’s flooded by low quality titles made by indies. Zynga also proved that micro-transactions can be considered as a serious option. Several big 3D engine suppliers are creating browser plugins so more high quality games can be placed in an internet only environment.
Consoles
With the new motion controllers and online strategies, consoles are living a new good era. The prices are going down and they are getting even more popular on south american, asian and eastern european countries. The problem in this segment is the high competition in the AAA tier. The production cost is so high that is getting more and more common to read about studios being closed or rearranged after one single bad-selling project.
Cloud
The most surprising things on gaming, almost unbelievable, is the use of external computing for gaming. OnLive (defunct) is already live and sells games as service: they run the game in their computers and you only need a monitor and joystick/keyboard. No need for a top-notch computer or console. The games could be even played, at full power, in a tablet or old computer.
The amount of computing power needed is enormous. And I mean it: I cannot think that they invested less than billions of dollars in several data centers. The paradox is the servers are all in US, the very market that games prices are lowest and piracy is not a major issue. Brazil, Russia and Europe would be much more receptive to this model, but I don’t think the cost would ever pay off…
The bottom line is: for major companies, the “several studios working on a single franchise ratter than several franchises being developed by a single studio” mantra will still apply. Call of Duty and GTA will continue to generate millions. But I foresee the rise of several small and mid-sized companies that will focus on niches pointed above. Zynga is one of them. I believe that there will be a quite a number that will make the break even point and grow simply because the market size expanded and entry barriers lowered.
Good luck.
Edited 2022-07-13: Torque
Unity 3Dhttps://www.brunomassa.com/en/blog/unity-3d/Bruno Massa
Started recently to play with Unity 3D, an IDE/Platform to develop games. I’ve heard about it because they recently decided that the indie version to be free. And because this version is quite similar to the Pro version and the Pro version is affordable, I decided to give it a try.
I am really impressed with the package. It is solid in features but what impressed me most is the easy user interface. Generally, programs that strive to be easy to use also make things too restrictive. Unity 3D is not one of them. It is a super intuitive IDE but also can be changed through code.
As I discussed before, the competition of engines should be irrelevant to game makers because we have a lot of data demonstrating that while the technology might help, the actual implementation is what matters. Good games with old/bad engines and Bad games with state-of-the-art engines are quite common.
The main reason to choose one is… current knowledge. Learning things all over again is costly, and Unity address this by adopting several standard technologies. For scripting, you can use C# (very close to Java and C++), JavaScript or Boo. For 3D models, it imports the most used formats (3DS, Max, Ma, Blender…). The same goes for 2D (which also includes importing Photoshop native files), sound and music. All that means that your workflow and suite of programs will remain basically the same.
With the indie version being free, a huge increase of documentation and community support is expected. The same for professional assistance. I’m happy to move from Torque (which uses several conceptual dogmas that I’ve never liked) to Unity.
PS: with the web player, its possible to create games for web pages just like Flash… take a look in the demos.
