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0 pointsajmurmann2y ago0 comments

As scope increases all the organizational challenges balloon. Coordinating 10 people is much easier than several hundred. It's the same almost regardless of domain. What happens if your core game loop still is no fun, but you got 100 people rolling off a previous project and ready for the next phase of this new project to get to where you need them to start design levels and assets? It's much easier to fix if the additional 3 month of development is just 3 months cost of living for John Romero and John Carmack.

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4 comments · 1 top-level

Pannoniae2y ago· 3 in thread

it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat. look at old games' credits, you'll find maybe even bigger studios (making art and programming with limited hardware was much more time-consuming....) but they had good gameplay on a much smaller budget. Today, studios waste money on analytics, governance things and other fluff...

Best case study is Mojang, the company has over 800 employees but it is literally outperformed in game design and update quality/quantity by ten people at Re-Logic. (which includes managers and legal as well!)

ajmurmannOP2y ago

> it's not like game studios have increased in size, it's just more bloat

Are you serious? Teams have increased massively. Super Mario Kart for example had less than 20 people working on it. That's not even the size of the audio department for many modern AAA games

gamblor9562y ago

Terraria started off as a 2D homage to Minecraft...The very first release basically was just a 2D version of Minecraft. It took a few updates for Terraria to become its own thing.

I enjoy both games, especially Terraria, which I have played since its original release. But let's not lie to ourselves that the volume of content updates for Terraria is anywhere close to the updates that Minecraft has received. Adding content for a 2D game is a lot easier than adding content for a 3D game, even if you're using voxels.

ajmurmannOP2y ago

IMO, the parent picked a terrible example. Comparing any game to "Minecraft" doesn't make much sense to me. What even is Minecraft at this point? There seem to be a multiple versions on a multitude of platforms, some on the same platform targeting different demographics. Different changes are need to keep the different demographics hooked. Of course the original was built by a single guy which avoided all the organizational complexities.

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