A question to the devs: What was hardest part of development?

Im genuinely curious as to what the most difficult part of development of this game, and for a number of reasons. For one, Im wondering why so many devs have steered away from making a game with dinosaurs in it for so long even though a huge part of the collective gaming community has been asking for it for such a long time. Is it the amount of work in the modeling in the dinosaurs itself? The animations work on dinosaurs maybe being too demanding? Balance? Structuring how it would work in fitting and fun environment? Are dinosaurs considered more taxing to program for?

Another reason Im curious is because I just want to hear from veterans of the industry what their biggest hurdles in game development are. I studied and graduated from college learning game design not too long ago, and because Im still such a novice pretty much EVERYTHING in game design is a struggle for me lol (especially since I have to go it alone :sweat_smile:). So usually whenever I go to conventions, or events, Ill usually ask the devs at the booth what was their biggest hurdle in development, and what they loved about it the most.

Everyone has their different answers and responses, but I think its interesting to hear the personal experience of game development behind the scenes. It lets you know just how much people go through in game design, and it helps me personally get motivated in my own design work lol.

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Good questions. I’d like to know this too.

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Let me shoot this over to the dev team :slight_smile:

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Hi! I’m Simon Vickers and I’m the Design Lead for Second Extinction here in sunny Malmo and I’d love to add a little bit of my perspective on the matter.

I’d like to start off by saying how much I love your question. Only a teeny tiny bit of game development is coming up with ideas, the vast majority of it is solving all the problems that get thrown in your face along the way to realising them. It’s an experimental and iterative process and leads in all sorts of directions but those explorations, dead ends and revelations are so often hidden from the public view. I believe strongly in open communication between developers and players and that showing how the sausage is made is a great way in bridging the gap in understanding. There’s a certain degree of vulnerability that comes from a dev acknowledging those challenges however, so getting questions that show an interest and appreciation in the trickier bits is great.

So…anyhoo. Dinosaurs. They’re brilliant but they present unique design challenges as enemies in an FPS compared to more humanoid ones. For starters, they’re generally close range combatants. Humanoid/armed enemies can be armed with ranged weapons which means they largely share a similar goal to that of players, wanting to get to cover and maintain a safe distance. It means you can distribute enemies quite happily around an arena and have players engage with their environment to try and outmaneuver and outaim their opponents.

Dinosaurs on the otherhand, want to get close up and bitey which means they want to close distance quickly as possible, the challenge then becomes more about crowd control and trying to take them out before they can get close. Extremely close range combat in an FPS can feel uncomfortable and if we’re not careful as developers the main combat experience can devolve into simply running backwards and shooting the closest target.

There are plenty of games that manage to do that ranged vs melee combat really well but I feel like that’s kinda where all those zombie games started popping up. They’re either slow enough that they they’re easier to keep out of the ‘discomfort zone’ or are fast and stupid enough that they’re predictable and easy to mow down. We wanted to make a shooter with dinosaurs, however, and that meant embracing that they’re not slow and they’re not stupid so we had to come up with our own solutions that let them shine. For me that’s been the trickiest part of the project to figure out.

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Hello and thank you so much for replying lol. I really appreciate the time and effort. Also, apologies are in order. I didnt realize how poorly my grammar was when I was typing this late at night, so I doubly appreciate the response.
That is completely understandable and I appreciate you taking the time to share that. After learning about game development I found Im able to see things from a consumer, and creator point of view, and often times, even though I have no affiliation with a team or studio, when conversions among friends or people come up regarding a games development or the industry in general, my brain automatically floats to the dev side and I try to communicate in a way that shows the thought processes behind those doors and the reasons, only to be met with confusion and occasional backlash. Not brutally. But its more frustration from confusion that they have. I remember reading how the team at CD Projekt Red a couple years ago said they would love to share more with the community when they were still in development of Cyberpunk 2077, but couldnt because sometimes people are to quick to jump to conclusions and critique even the littliest detail. And thats usually why only journalists and other game devs are given behind closed doors, unrecorded screenings of gameplay during events even at cons like E3. It was definitely an interesting read to know that game devs have even their own little hidden community that they use to share and communicate information with, and swap thoughts just so they can share what they are doing, but without the public knowing just because they dont want their game taken out of context preemptively. Sorry, I kind of rambled a bit there.
Ah yes, I thought as much. There are a lot of lurking variables when it comes to programming dinosaurs. My initial thoughts were its model, animation, and coding being the problem, but yeah, the fact that humanoid creatures give a more versatile field of range when it comes to what they can do does make them a bit more easier to handle on the dev side. Not to mention, with humans you can easily program them to be able to swarm a player. With dinosaurs…its a bit trickier. Theyre expected to be more damage sponges, but how far can you push that envelope with them being too spongey? How much bullets are players going to have to dump into a single target without feeling exhausted and like they are still having fun? Are the dinosaurs pack hunters? Or do they prefer to travel solo? Do we have to program it so that x dinosaur wont show up when another x dinosaur shows up because people may nitpick that they would fight each other instead? You just opened my eyes to the fact that there are quite more to consider about putting dinosaurs in a game than I originally thought lol.

P.S.
That bit about only a tiny bit of development being coming up with ideas, and the rest actually being the work is quite the interesting response, and actually one I have heard frequently surprisingly. One of my professors once told me during development something along the lines of “If you’re doing everything right, something is going wrong”, and another piece of advice I got from another was “Sometimes its better to just put down the pen and paper and just do it. Otherwise, you’ll spend forever writing your GDD, and never actually making your game”. Just goes to show. In my amateur brain, you think of the ideas like a skeleton, and once thats complete, everything else is cake. You’re just putting on the meat. But then you realize thats not how it is at all. Sometimes you just gotta dive into it, because the more you focus on the idea, the less work you will actually get done. Besides the fact that well, some ideas dont work out. Either they sound better on paper than in practice, or they clash with other feature, or maybe they just arent as efficient or fun as initially thought. Sometimes, you just gotta get in there and let nature takes its course along the way.

Thanks again for the response. Much appreciated. Hope all is well with development, and hope you guys are staying safe during this crisis. :grin:

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No worries at all! There’s a saying that 99 percent of design is invisible so its nice to peel back the curtain a bit

If you’re interested in further reading here are some links to my favorite resources on the matter;

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Its funny because I have already read and bookmarked those very articles :joy: The Door Problem article my college professor introduced me to, and Ive been following Astronauts and their development of Witchfire for a long time and thoroughly enjoy their dev logs lol. Its great to see Im at least on the right track when it comes to reading material haha.

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“Close up and bitey” love it! Thanks for the insight. Can’t wait to get my teeth into it!