Serious Question - the future of art development in games
Greetings Polycounters,
tldr : Would you be willing to create next-gen art alongside mobile/handheld art in a single development cycle if it meant the game reached a larger audience and made more money?
Im working on a thesis and part of my discussion looks at the future of game development, the rise of mobile and casual gaming and how its shaping the future of our medium. The way I see it is that soon the concept of cross/multi-platform releases will expand beyond the usual Xbox/Playstation/Wii medley to include the routinely improving handheld consoles and mobile platforms.
I feel we can see the foundations of it already, the likes of UDK with inbuilt mobile game optimisation and exporting tools, relative newcomers like Unity offering browser and iOS support and still sporting an impressive repertoire of engine features. Android and Adobes 3D Flash both show great potential for growth.
How soon will it be when there is the opportunity to develop a game that can be instantly portable from next-gen console to your mobile phone? I imagine many console developers are familiar with downscaling art to fit tighter specifications for the Wii. Would it be too much to go further and meet the requirements of a 3DS? At what level, in todays industry, is it more feasible to have an external development team recreate assets for a handheld version of the game from scratch?
I suppose my main question to us as artists is, are we lazy? As next-gen artists are we reluctant to go back to basics and make a 1k triangle mesh of our 20k main character. To take a game weve worked on for a year or more and not spend that extra period of time using tools that in a sense already exist to virtually double its potential to make money.
Is it disheartening that simple games like Angry Birds make so much profit because they can monopolise on the casual gaming market. If you had the opportunity to unleash your PC/console game to the same market would it be worth the effort? There are so many 3D artists portfolios that include next-gen characters or environments alongside low poly handheld creations, I see little shortage of artists with passion on both sides of the field. Will artists of the future be valued more for versatility developing among a much broader range of target platforms? If you had a bigger paycheque would you be willing to make low res iterations of your art so your studio can release on PSP as well as PS3?
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My theory could be wrong, I might be overlooking some major issues but it would be interesting to see what people think about this issue. Please dont slate me if Im seemingly ignorant, Im by no means an expert on the matter, Id just love to spark some active discussion, and if youve read this far I thank you for your time. Our industry has seen some major changes over its short history, and its not always an easy one to call. As we progress through these economically difficult times I think its important to see what changes we may need or decide to take along the way.
Thanks for reading
ManxViking
Replies
The thing about making a popular handheld game like angry birds, or an indie game like minecraft is it's not so much of a production as a AAA console title. When a large company like EA makes madden, or when blizzard puts out starcraft 2, they make a laundry list of things and more or less they know if they throw X human resources at it, Y marketing dollars they will likely turn Z profit. They have the staff for it, everything is in place. There isn't much gambling going on, or a big effort to make something "new" that's going to turn the market upside down. This is why these companies are slow to react to the emerging hand-held market, they don't know how without throwing large sums of money at it that likely wont come to fruition since their human resources weren't hired to be people who create new ip, they were hired with the idea that they would make sequal X. Even new IPs from emerging and existing companies feel oddly familiar.
The arts the easy part. Throw a few more artists on the team to work side by side with the console guys later in development and have 'em go through and remake things for the handheld device. But AAA titles don't translate well to mobile devices because the input isn't quite as good, the screen isn't as big, the game session isn't as long. Because of this games really need to be tailored specificaly for their specified platform.
It's late and i don't know if this is making any sense but i'll make 1 last point about the difference between angry birds and minecraft. Angry birds existed in many forms in various flash games on computers. They were pretty decent, but nothing anyone would pay money for. In the wake of the growing handheld market, just about every flash game ever made was remade for handheld devices by various people hoping it would "stick". Sometimes games just get lucky, of thousands of little quarky games, one just happens to fit perfectly for the platform, not because the designer was a genius thinking it'd be perfect for the handheld, but more like the whole "million monkeys writing on typewriters will eventually write the works of shakespear" sorta deal. A large company paying for advertising and staff cannot make this volume of content hoping 1 title will "stick".
Minecraft is different though, it's the kind of game you could play on a handheld and doesn't require fancy graphics at all, sheer innovative gameplay that came together because of good design desicions and less elements of chance (I say this considering how great minecraft has become patch after patch). But these games aren't born at companies again because it's too hard to know who has the great idea. It's impossible to pick out the 1 in 1000 brilliant ideas from good ideas, and in the end an idea alone doesn't make a good game, it takes execution and until you're already proven yourself you wont have a job at a big company, but by that time, you're already sitting on 10 million dollars from your little indie game.
Hope that helps a bit! Sorry it wasn't about the graphics so much as i really don't see that as the limiting factor (check out tony hawk pro skater for game boy advanced, amazing game).
Quick edit!: I think that until handhelds can literally match consoles for graphics, graphics wont be their selling point, because if you want good graphics you'll simply play a console. Handheld games' strength is in their unique development that by and large completely disregards major graphic production.
A game such as Portal 2 has such potential on mobile devices, and although they've managed to bring the experience to console. I can only imagine the potential success if a smaller scale version of the game was released on iPhone.
the vast majority of games don't come out on all 3 consoles. Most of the time its ps3/360. The exception to that is games by mega publishers (such as madden or something)...but they usually make their game for every sku imaginable already.
Also, half of the porting work is outsourced to other companies.
Unity is really cool in the way that you can go to your build options and pick from: Web build, PC build, Mac Build, iOS build, Android build...instantly.
However, when working with both iOS and PC, you end up giving up a lot of tools that slow you down. For instance, terrains are simply not compatable with iOS...so you have to go back to hand creating your terrain. Maybe in the future that will change though.
Angry Birds is the exception, NOT the rule. There are thousands of other apps out there, some better than others, that are completely looked over.
Also one thing worth mentioning. Multiple platforms..as they are now, and as they will likely be in the future...are way to different to just port titles across. Right now we have: A handheld with stereoscopic 3d..a handheld with no buttons, a console with a wiggly remote, a console with a no-controller controller, a social networking site.... Things have to be radically redesigned to make sense in all these different situations.
And don't think for a minute that the future will bring us...more of the exact same but better graphics. Well have handhelds/mobile phones that are controlled just by eye movement, super awesome kinect with camera-less mocap suit controllers that urge us to play in traffic, and well have real life pokemon that are genetically modified yippy dog freaks. (at least I hope)
The point is, none of these hardware manufactures will say "hey! I want to be the same as all the other products on the market so when they make awesome applications for us, they can just give people the exact same experience somewhere else!"
/late night ramble.
http://portal.wecreatestuff.com/portal.php
Portal definitely falls next to "minecraft" for a very innovative game with simple gameplay that doesn't rely on fancy graphics. But it's also very mouse driven and requires lots of very precise aiming at fairly rapid speeds even in the 2d flash version, something that would be impossible with today's hand helds.
Also, funny that crazyfingers, I remember playing that a good while ago, it was on my mind when I wrote my response, just couldn't remember where it was from :thumbup:.