Yamauchi highlights ballooning development time, which unfortunately has changed - because it’s ballooned. Companies shove out “AAA” games that must succeed, or they’ll have to sacrifice an entire studio to appease the stock market gods, or something.
The worst offender is Red Dead Redemption 2. Why? Dirt. Dirt and wood and rocks. The whole fucking game is filled to the brim with naturalistic textures and narratively-convenient wilderness. Why was all of that made by hand, by human artists? We’ve been able to generate those patterns for decades. It was old-hat even when Yamauchi gave this interview. Procedural generation doesn’t have to mean everything’s a random dungeon; you can just describe how trees work and pick one. Undoubtedly that’s part of the human-artist pipeline. And you can ship the tree-generator instead of whichever trees it gave you. The performance cost of running it has never been worse than the time spent loading a finished model. Especially when your game has so much dirt that it takes two BluRay discs to hold it all!
Games have only gotten fatter since then, and their production staff keeps growing proportionally, and budgets are growing at an even worse rate because schedules keep getting longer. This is madness! It has never been easier to make a video game than right now! People do it in 24-hour contests, for fun! Those games are not the same kind of product as multi-disc quintuple-A flagship titles, but they also don’t require selling a billion copies and bleeding customers dry. They’re not playing Russian roulette every time you ship.
In the distant past, when “game consoles” were called that because televisions were furniture, a commercial video game’s typical production staff was A Guy. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was infamously developed in five weeks, but to the company, that was just how long it took to make a game. You can still make games that way. I’ve done it - and my games look way better than any 2600 title. You get a jawdropping advantage by living in the future. Any staff size, and any production time, between the invention of video games and right now, is still a valid way to make a thing.
You’re not gonna accidentally make a PS2 game by budgeting like they did for PS2 games. You don’t have to bet the whole company on black, either.
Make smaller games. Not worse, not older, not simpler - just smaller. Use simpler art. Not uglier, not lower-res, not lacking in style - just simpler. Hyperrealism doesn’t even look like anything anymore. And it ages terribly. You’ve got an army of artists, let them do art.
Yamauchi highlights ballooning development time, which unfortunately has changed - because it’s ballooned. Companies shove out “AAA” games that must succeed, or they’ll have to sacrifice an entire studio to appease the stock market gods, or something.
The worst offender is Red Dead Redemption 2. Why? Dirt. Dirt and wood and rocks. The whole fucking game is filled to the brim with naturalistic textures and narratively-convenient wilderness. Why was all of that made by hand, by human artists? We’ve been able to generate those patterns for decades. It was old-hat even when Yamauchi gave this interview. Procedural generation doesn’t have to mean everything’s a random dungeon; you can just describe how trees work and pick one. Undoubtedly that’s part of the human-artist pipeline. And you can ship the tree-generator instead of whichever trees it gave you. The performance cost of running it has never been worse than the time spent loading a finished model. Especially when your game has so much dirt that it takes two BluRay discs to hold it all!
Games have only gotten fatter since then, and their production staff keeps growing proportionally, and budgets are growing at an even worse rate because schedules keep getting longer. This is madness! It has never been easier to make a video game than right now! People do it in 24-hour contests, for fun! Those games are not the same kind of product as multi-disc quintuple-A flagship titles, but they also don’t require selling a billion copies and bleeding customers dry. They’re not playing Russian roulette every time you ship.
In the distant past, when “game consoles” were called that because televisions were furniture, a commercial video game’s typical production staff was A Guy. The 2600 version of Pac-Man was infamously developed in five weeks, but to the company, that was just how long it took to make a game. You can still make games that way. I’ve done it - and my games look way better than any 2600 title. You get a jawdropping advantage by living in the future. Any staff size, and any production time, between the invention of video games and right now, is still a valid way to make a thing.
You’re not gonna accidentally make a PS2 game by budgeting like they did for PS2 games. You don’t have to bet the whole company on black, either.
Make smaller games. Not worse, not older, not simpler - just smaller. Use simpler art. Not uglier, not lower-res, not lacking in style - just simpler. Hyperrealism doesn’t even look like anything anymore. And it ages terribly. You’ve got an army of artists, let them do art.