Game Development

King Kong director Peter Jackson famously produced a series of over 50 video diaries while filming the 2005 remake, the first of which was published well over a year before the movie hit theaters. Almost a decade later, he would do the same thing for The Hobbit , uploading behind-the-scenes highlights from the set directly to YouTube. The only comp... See more

The case board, inspired by HBO show True Detective, originally featured free placement of clues and gated progress until players found a specific answer, but this led to high player frustration. Remedy shifted to a board that featured more questions with easier answers, leading to more dopamine hits with players, and finally scrapped free clue pla... See more

if nothing else, video game development is a series of concessions and tough decisions. There's that perfect game you WANT to make... and then there's the game you CAN make. Sometimes, if the gods smile on you, those two are very close.

"We have a lot of exposition in this game and we didn't want the player locked into these increasingly repetitive gameplay conversations," Maloney explained. "We needed more varied ways to relay exposition; also, it's fun to grill and interrogate people."

In the finished version, Saga sits at her profiling table and receives something akin to unsett... See more

“[Y]ou can dislike parts of a game. You can hate on a game entirely,” Pagliarulo wrote several messages later. “But don’t fool yourself into thinking you know why it is the way it is (unless it’s somehow documented and verified), or how it got to be that way (good or bad). Chances are, unless you’ve made a game yourself, you don’t know who made cer... See more

"Wrong answers can be fun as long as you keep the wrong answer interesting enough that there is still some value for the player," Wasselin said. "Letting the player experiment is a great way to give agency, and allowing the player to find the right answer by themselves gives them a sense of ownership over the solution. It also creates more opportun... See more

By becoming a PlayStation exclusive, FFXVI more or less ends up having the economic advantages of a first-party title. Sony has most likely waived most, if not all, of its platform fee for the game, so every unit sold is more profitable for Square Enix; it has also almost certainly absorbed some of the marketing costs for the game by rolling it int... See more

so long as Larian is generating enough revenue to make payroll, Vincke can operate the business in whatever fashion he chooses. The downside, of course, is that a single flop could completely tank Larian — hence the three years of early access.