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Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

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Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#131

Post by snickerbockers »

austin-cheney wrote: post #111

So, this begs a rather obvious question. What makes that team different? Is it the talent, the leadership, the focus on product? As a long time JavaScript developer I honestly believe, and I really mean this, that maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%. It seems at the beginning many of the early Valve team had a lot of passion but almost no real exp…

>maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%.

Because it's JavaScript. It's a language specifically designed for people who don't care about how anything actually works.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#133

Post by panopticon »

masklinn wrote: post #80
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't see that happening today, to be honest, in "AAA" titles at least. Thanks for adding that caveat; it's an unfair comparison IMO to compare the well-selling games of 25 years ago with AAA games of today. Half-Life was built by a team of about 80 people according to a quick Google, and there wasn't the ecosystem of tooling, resources and outsourcing that we have today, versus hundreds if not thousands of peopl…

> Anyway, 80 people is pretty substantial even at the time; for comparison, indie hits like Hades had ~20 people working on it I wouldn’t call Hades an indie hit in the classic sense. Bastion was an indie hit, but by Hades supergiant had releases 3 acclaimed games. That’s not to detract from the well deserved success of Hades, but SG was damn well established by then.

Past success is a weird way to define "indie". The term is usually used to distinguish smaller teams from their bigger AA/AAA counterparts, and I think most people still consider Supergiant an indie studio.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#134

Post by leviathant »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #89
rib3ye wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somehow audiences will respect effort vs resources as long as there is community outreach and the price makes sense. There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience. Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.

> Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10 That's fighting talk round my way! There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.

Everything about Vampire Survivors made sense to me upon learning that it was developed by an Italian guy who used to work on slot machines. It also reinforced that I've been right to avoid casinos my whole life.

I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#135

Post by thereddaikon »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #50
eur0pa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable. The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e…

I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#136

Post by Goronmon »

Goronmon wrote: post #51
eur0pa wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.

You know, I was wrong on this. I had forgotten how many games were available around that time. Plenty of competition was available in that space around when Half-Life was released.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#137

Post by thereddaikon »

Blackthorn wrote: post #127
chucky_z wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just got the OLED Steam Deck the spark is not gone!! Valve is still the same company, they’re just succeeding in very different ways. I think this is the benefit of not being a public company. They’ve pivoted over and over and over. They’re still in the same space (video games) and the breadth of the areas they’re in are immense!

Yeah, this. They don't have a ton of releases, but their batting average is insane. I can think of only one really notable failure (Artifact). So many of their other releases have been industry changing in many different ways.

It helps a lot that they self publish. Many cant afford to do that but Valve is flush with cash from Steam in a similar way to how Apple is propped up by the App Store. That allows them to pick and choose what they do and only release products they are confident will do well.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#138

Post by CaptainFever »

thrdbndndn wrote: post #74
capableweb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> possibly due to unnaturally fast change in perspective when turning Couldn't you just move the mouse slower so the turning is slower? Or lower the mouse sensitivity?

As a person who almost can't play any 3D first-perspective (shooter, action) games due to serious motion sickness, I'd say a slower cursor doesn't really make much difference. If you're not used to it (due to being different from your desktop environment), it probably would make it worse. To me, the biggest factors to (worse) sickness are 1. Narrow FOV: usually the bigger the FOV, the better. But when it starts to ha…

I find that full screen makes the problem worse. Playing windowed makes me feel less motion sick.

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#139

Post by deckard1 »

austin-cheney wrote: post #111

So, this begs a rather obvious question. What makes that team different? Is it the talent, the leadership, the focus on product? As a long time JavaScript developer I honestly believe, and I really mean this, that maybe 4% of the people employed primarily doing JavaScript work actually know what they are doing. Just 4%. It seems at the beginning many of the early Valve team had a lot of passion but almost no real exp…

There are lots of reasons why Half-life was a success. You shouldn't discount stupid luck, as well. Their first iteration was awful, as mentioned in the YouTube video. They essentially had to start over with a "cabal" and pull the game together with the good scraps of work they had already done.

Here's a more detailed article on the cabal process (starting on page 2):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210823181232/https://www.gamas...

From 1999 and much more detailed than the video.

Now, game development is inherently waterfall. You work for years and built up to this huge release. Nowadays you might have some agile processes embedded into milestones, etc. But fundamentally it's all leading to a huge waterfall.

That's important. Because what agile does, today, is that it turns autonomous developers into cogs of a large machine. But Valve's "cabal" was entirely free to do whatever they felt best. Gabe Newell probably had final say and input, but ultimately the group had flexibility. The developers had full system awareness. They weren't pulling Jira tickets off a board like a blind man in the elephant parable[1]. They knew how the pieces fit because they put them there. And if the pieces weren't fitting, they had the authority to make them fit.

Perhaps more interesting is how the story of Half-life can be viewed through The Mythical Man-Month[2]

> When designing a new kind of system, a team will design a throw-away system (whether it intends to or not). This system acts as a "pilot plan" that reveals techniques that will subsequently cause a complete redesign of the system.

Their cabal has a bit of overlap with the "surgical team" concept and usage of formal documents. The rest of the employees did nothing while this group operated. Thus, they reduced manpower that actually allowed them to move forward. Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast (from the US Navy Seals). Most companies do the opposite. They crank up the number of employees to hit deadlines, which creates more bugs and more work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month

Re: Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary [video]

#140

Post by kar1181 »

dagoodboy wrote: post #129
kar1181 wrote: post #87

I was heavily involved with the australian team fortress (quake 1 version) community in the late 90s and 'bro' (Robin Walker) and John Cook were gods to us, regularly involved in the RMIT/Melbourne Lan scene and online even when back then mostly it was 28.8/33.6k modems with a few LPBS on East coast uni isdns. The struggle for them to move on from qwtf to 'tf2' was probably for the best as a lot of the lessons they l…

I was in the same scene (Clan PlanetFortress FTW). Robin and those guys saved us from the annoying cheaters that were exploiting the old qw code. I was so excited for them when they got hired by Valve to make TFC and then HL2.

Clanpnp/ftb myself. Still remember some of the server IPs by muscle memory.
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