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 a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you’re estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that’s because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know it isn’t completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that it should only be 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.
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.
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.
The organization has outdated policies that make delivering changes difficult.
The systems used in development and delivery haven’t been invested in enough to automate repetitive steps, optimize workflow, and increase safety of changes.
Again, complex changes are obviously going to take more time, but if the simplest changes take significant time or effort then something is wrong.
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.
I had to read an article about that. It apparently coincided with the release of the second DLC. It was pretty broken on PS5 as well. That just screams some high level exec said it MUST be out on the announced date cause they told someone that it would be. Likely part of a contract or their bonus was tied to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s unplayable. It ‘met’ the release deadline. Now we’re just ‘doing maintenance’.
I’m a dev and I firmly believe that if people could see the software they use daily as a physical object like a car…they’d be more “Hell, no. That’s a death trap” than they probably realize.
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 a PhD (cough, Risk of Rain 2 on console, cough), and you’re estimating that will take 6 months to fix, then that’s because you (as a company) coded your software badly.
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.
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.
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.
The ROR2 new game menu has only a few elements:
That’s it.
I know it isn’t completely trivial, but as someone with many years of experience making (small) indie games, I know for a fact that a menu like that it should only be 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.
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.
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.
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.
That’s right. Still, it could take more than 6 months to make it right.
💯
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.
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.
I still remember when they somehow broke the Xbox version and nobody could get past the start menu.
I had to read an article about that. It apparently coincided with the release of the second DLC. It was pretty broken on PS5 as well. That just screams some high level exec said it MUST be out on the announced date cause they told someone that it would be. Likely part of a contract or their bonus was tied to it. Doesn’t matter if it’s unplayable. It ‘met’ the release deadline. Now we’re just ‘doing maintenance’.
I’m a dev and I firmly believe that if people could see the software they use daily as a physical object like a car…they’d be more “Hell, no. That’s a death trap” than they probably realize.