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After playing the new hotness (fortunes weave) I ended up wondering about what teams have to do during a significant shift in scope. During development, they ended up droping the route number from 8 to 4. How do internal schedules usually work around that kind of mid dev content slash? I remember you saying that game dev builds on other teams work and got really curious how that looks. Like, surely people don’t just sit around while stuff gets rewritten, but I cant imagine what they would do.
Ask a Game DevToday
Here's the thing about game development - we plan for modularity (meaning that it should be possible to make each major part independently and at the same time as the other major parts). For example,...
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2026-09-25

Tell us a story, Dev… :c
Ask a Game Dev26/09/25
Sure. I'll tell you about a very important lesson I learned years ago. Once upon a time, I was working on a mature (read: years-old) MMOG - one that had a solid audience and was profitable. It paid th...
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2026-09-24

Is the RAMageddon materially effecting game dev at the moment? Are current specs going to be targeted for longer? And I know future consoles are under broad NDAs, but hypothetically do you see their plans changing in the current climate?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/24
The price of game hardware is absolutely affecting game dev. The vast majority of games are developed with target performance bands in mind:High end, where the game is performant with all of the bells...
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2026-09-23

How common is hot reloading in AAA engines?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/23
Very. Most AAA engines support it in some way, primarily because it saves a lot of dev time if we don't have to restart the game in order to see changes made. If I make a change to a script, I want to...
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2026-09-21

Follow-up on the abondonware issue. You are working on some long running live service game that still is popular and generating revenue, so the company wants to keep it running. However, some software the game relies on the backend has itself been abandoned. How is this kind of thing dealt with and what is so bad about dealing with this problem you used the term “hate?”
Ask a Game Dev26/09/21
This is essentially what governments do to keep their own internal programs running. Have you ever wondered why government agencies often run ancient computers? It's not because they can't buy new stu...
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2026-09-17

Are game programmers allowed to request certain features from engine programmers, or is that strictly up to higher-ups?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/17
We typically won't request others to do work without reason. If the gameplay programmer needs some kind of engine function to do her own work, then yeah - she's totally allowed (and expected) to reque...
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2026-09-16

On the topic of Wolverine, do you think the handholding issue could be because they are expecting a lot of less experienced players to play it do to the IP? Like they are expecting people who mostly come in from the Marvel movies and play the games more “casually” then the normal audience for M-rated games?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/16
The available evidence does not support this theory. If my primary target audience is Marvel moviegoers without a lot of game experience who want a movie-like Wolverine experience, I would absolutely...
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2026-09-15

Any thoughts on the Wolverine handholding controversy? I understand that Sony probably has some data to determine when players are likely to get lost or drop the game, but when does it become too much?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/15
There is absolutely a place for player handholding as a development goal, but it varies significantly depending on the genre and target audience. When the game's target audience skews toward less expe...
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2026-09-14

I understand how they deffer from the players perspective, but from a developer perspective whats the difference between an open and closed beta? Are there different feedback uses/desire or different stages of game dev at play?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/14
Our internal goals of closed and open beta are different, mostly due to the logistics involved. Closed beta is primarily about gathering feedback from testers and fine-tuning the player experience. Op...
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2026-09-11

I see the Ocarina of Time remake and immediately think about Unreal Engine. It’s clear that Nintendo put a lot of effort into their own engine, but the fact that it looks so similar makes it feel amateur. If it were an indie game, I think most people would overlook it. Do you think the fact that gamers can look at a game and think, “It looks like Unreal Engine,” is harmful? It can completely invalidate a significant part of a gaming experience and the work put into it. It reduces it to a pure gameplay judgment, and I don’t think that’s very fair, even though I subconsciously do it myself.
Ask a Game Dev26/09/11
It doesn't actually have that much to do with Unreal Engine itself so much as it is more about how many games have a certain similar "look" that is characterized by realistic lighting, lower color sat...
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2026-09-10

In Chess, and in many games, there is a first move advantage, where the player who goes first is more likely to win. Some games, like Price is Right, have a last move advantage. Why don’t more RPGs have a simultaneous move system like Pokemon where everyone makes their choices without perfect knowledge of what the other is doing to remove either potential advantage?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/10
Most RPGs are single player or cooperative, so competition isn't really a thing. Competitive RPG games tend to be MMOGs, in which case the player's capacity for burst damage tends to matter more than...
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2026-09-08

How do you go about designing coop challenges that don’t just feel like “A must hold switch to let B through door” or “this monster pins you until another player saves you” but still actually require more than one person? It feels like so many coop experiences are that or parallel play.
Ask a Game Dev26/09/08
Let's take it back to first principles. Consider the [information channels] we have to convey information to players, such as:Visual cuesAudio cuesPeripheral vision cuesHaptic/Rumble cuesThese channel...
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2026-09-07

Could you go more in depth with the pre-production phase? What usually occurs during this period, and is it just an amalgamation of separate prototypes, or more organized than that? Is this where technical and design documents are created, too?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/07
It's better to take a step back and look at where a game idea is before we enter preproduction and then where it is once we finish preproduction. Before we enter preproduction, the project is in the C...
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2026-09-04

You’ve mentioned that for live service games, the team has content they’re working on for the next 2-3 patches/months. So suppose the game launched and the next 2 patches that were in the pipeline were applied and all 3 received negative feedback and negative internal metrics. What happens to the 3rd patch that was already being worked on? Is it still pushed out based on the vision prior to the negative metrics or has it already been modified based on the metrics?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/04
It doesn't (or at least shouldn't) work like that. That would basically mean we were asleep at the wheel for roughly six months of live service (launch + 3 months for patch 1 + 3 months for patch 2)....
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2026-09-03

I read somewhere that the studio behind Star Wars: Zero Company furloughed part of their staff because they ran out of money. They are hoping that with the money from sales they can get the people back. Is this something that happens often in the game industry?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/03
I was part of an employee furlough early in my career. The studio ran out of money. "Furlough" sounds better than "laid off" - the difference is that we were technically still "employed" if the studio...
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2026-09-01

What would you define as “table stake” features?
Ask a Game Dev26/09/01
"Table stakes" are features players expect any game in the genre to ship with, despite generally being unmemorable or uninteresting. That's what makes them "table stakes" - we have to build them just...
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2026-08-31

I have noticed a number of mid to indie devs love to make souls-like games. As a game dev, can you explain what is the appeal of the genre for someone who makes and sells games? I am not a fan of these types of games because of their punishing difficulty. So why would smaller dev companies make games with hard combat and put off people?
Ask a Game Dev26/08/31
First, let me put on my speculation hat. I don't pretend to know for certain and I have no data. This is all speculation on my part.Let's examine what generally makes a Souls-like game and consider wh...
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2026-08-28

Let me rephrase the MOBA question. Obviously a community management system alone is not going to make a game successful alone. I am more wondering what other more successful games aren’t “looting it’s corpse” as it were to use that after match reward system? Like Overwatch has a similar endorsement system having system where you could mark players as nice ones to give them some battle pass progress, but why don’t more games have it?
Ask a Game Dev26/08/28
The reason Dawngate's system worked wasn't the voting on its own. Lots of games have post-game voting systems for player karma - FF14, Overwatch, Rainbow Six Siege, and many others. In these other ga...
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2026-08-27

If that moba you cited came out in 2014 and it’s system was so good at making the community act better, why don’t more games use it’s system or systems like it?
Ask a Game Dev26/08/27
Unfortunately, Dawngate's other features weren't sticky enough in a market that was flooded with other options. They didn't gain enough players to reach their target numbers over their first five mont...
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2026-08-26

Piggybacking on the latest ask. I’ve seen videos arguing that some MOBAs such as league of legends foster toxic player bases unwillingly through the level design itself; it’s easy to lose a game when a single member of the team crashes out. What’s your opinion on that? Should a game designer steer the game in order to make the experience less toxic, or is it an unavoidable side effect of the game one is making?
Ask a Game Dev26/08/26
In such a situation, it isn't the game itself that's toxic. We choose the words we use and the actions we take, just like we choose the buttons we press. There are options we can take as designers to...
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