Life is like Gamedev

It happens to me when I code all the time: Create something just to later discard it and start new from scratch. You make two steps forward just to make one step back again. It's frustrating sometimes.

Come to think of it, it's just like real life. Sometimes you're trying to make a change in your life, trying to adapt some habits, like trying to stick to your marketing schedule or diet plan. Then there's times when things happen, you slack and fall back to your old habits.

It's a bit like marble in a funnel that's slowly rolling towards the hole in the center. You're trying to roll towards the center, but sometimes you go too fast and bounce back to the outer edge. You do this until you finally achieve your final breakthrough: when your good habits finally stick and your code finally works (well... mostly ;) ).

Just like in gamedev.

So when you practice going through this with gamedev, it will likely spread over other parts of your life.

Code away, never stop creating and keep making awesome games!

One Reason why Companies fail

From stories and own experience I know and have heard much about companies and their sometimes questionable way they treat their employes; and simultaneously, complaining about decreasing productivity and/or revenues. In this article, I want to describe possible threats and offer solutions. Be aware this only covers one aspect of leading a company successfully, and it may not be the best/most practicable advice - I am no CEO after all - however, I think I am still able to deliver some insight and thoughts for you, no matter your background.

I want to examine the leadership-employee relationship more closely. Leadership, communication, feedback and team work: All of them are connected with the other. So what can you do to create a good company in this regard?



Leadership. For one, what your employees think of you is very important. Companies must be lead by example. Employees will adapt to negative and positive behavior alike - the former is something you want to avoid, the latter something you want to promote. If you as a CEO do not seem to be doing your job, this likely is the behavior the employees are going to immitate. If you want people to see and value work, you must communicate with them and for example, arrange meetings for work status reports; Or make them write a short list of what they have done today at work. This is also handy if you want to see what your employees are doing in the first place.
Be aware that every routine and meeting you make your employees do, you should also do yourself. In return, they are more likely to do actual work instead of just sitting around doing nothing, which sadly happens quite often in larger companies. This also has the effect that you can easier recognize whether a routine or meeting you made them do/attend is reasonable. If it's a waste of time, why doing it? If you participated in the meetings you have ordered and came to that conclusion, then it's best to get rid of them - the faster the better.
Optimism and problem solving is another important aspect of good leadership. If you are hopelessly optimistic about your horrible revenues or sales then you'll have a credibility problem. If you are hoplessly optimistic about your horrible revenues or sales AND have multiple business plans and strategies to get out of that situation, then employees may find you're the right person to lead that company.

Offer your employees the chance to give feedback on your production or employment methods. This is important so you can react on potential problems appropriately and avoid them. You MUST in any case take this feedback seriously. If an employee points out a serious problem and nothing is done to solve it, the message you're sending by ignoring it ("I do not care what you think") will spread fairly quickly through all departments of your company, thus making communication between leadership and employees extremely difficult. What's also important is that 1) solutions for one problem must be as effective as possible and 2) if your own behavior is the problem, stand up for it, change it and do NOT not shove that responsibility to your employees; If this is not granted, your employees will start questioning your competence, and this is something you want to avoid under any circumstance.
It takes a lot of character to recieve criticism and change, but keep in mind making mistakes is natural and necessary. You as leader AND your employees can make mistakes if attempts are made to change the situation (and ideally, succeed doing so). Make your employees aware of this. There is no point in pretending as it hinders employee satisfaction and potentially company growth, so be truthful and honest and ask for the same in return from your employees. Make your employees aware of this, too. Always remember: being part of a company means you are part of a big team that works together in order to do a living. If a company is successful, it's not only you who contributed to the success: its the entire work of you AND your employee - and possibly of any employee and leader who has worked here before.



Feedback. How should feedback be recieved? Ideally, feedback should be delivered in written form through a person of trust, or directed to the CEO him/herself directly. Sadly, if the "right" people come together, unanonymous (constructive) criticism may lead to internal fights you want to avoid. This is why most companies offer feedback options through anonymous forms or letters.
The letters should be designed in such way your employees can get over the "barrier" of submitting one. You can lower this barrier by daily reminding employees to give feedback, or make it a daily routine to write a round of feedback letters after a meeting (and also participate in it). You can also place the forms/letters to a location where it's visible and many people pass by (i.e. next to a coffee machine) and also have the possibility to sit down and write. To add up importance to these forms or letters on a more subconscious level, you should "decorate" the location a bit and spice it up; ideally in a way it's only noticable when you're aware of it (no Santa Claus statues for you! Maybe a little plush or mascot would be nice however). Do NOT ever place these forms in a lifeless corner of a room where noone notices. The Uni I'm studying at has their feedback submission box attached to a wall you normally don't look at often, and is surprised why no one ever bothers giving feedback. As a consequence, they hardly know about the mess that's going on in their own faculty.
Another option to give feedback is to offer surveys using ethernet/internet, which probably has the lowest barrier for office jobs. You're welcome to find your own ideas here, but always consider it from a employee's perspective.



Communication. Always keep in touch with your employees. Go around the work place from time to time, not necessarily to monitor their work, but to detect problems or maybe also opinions about you, your company, or anything company related. Be keen to keep a good relationship with your employees. Get involved, get to know them personally. Make sure the employees will get to know eachother and establish good relationships with one another. For this purpose, you can organize company events once in a while, i.e. attending a soccer match, going to a restaurant and so on, IF it fits in your budget. Or you can organize such events in from of a reward if the company mades more revenue.

As leader, do NOT ever be passive aggressive towards your employees even if you have a good reason - you'll make the impression to favor/disfavor certain people. Favorism only leads to internal fights and arguments, as people will attempt to please the boss as much as they can (and some will also go over dead bodies for it) instead of doing actual work to get promoted. The footprint these kind of people leave behind is not one of competence and leadership, but strive for power and possibly abuse. That's the kind of people you don't want in leading positions, because once they got there, they'll try to bring hell to their "opponents"; this only leads to discrimination and internal division.
Instead, try to be as objective as possible. Take people for the fact they are a human being just as you are, a being that deserves any kind of respect and dignity. This also means that if you are better AT something than them, that still does not mean you ARE better, or have a higher value. You are still human, regardless of your role or skill. Everyone should have the possibility to get promoted or get a leader position, if their social skills and craft seem fit for the job.
In my opinion, this is one of basic requirements to lead a company - if you cannot do this, you should think twice of becoming a CEO of any kind; Not because you wouldn't be able to lead a company, but because you will stumble upon a lot of talent hidden behind skin color, burqas, turbans and possibly vaginas; Talent you would otherwise miss if you are slave to your own prejudices. For every missed talent, you miss a chance to improve your company's endeavours. For every discriminated individual, your employees will lose trust in you, and possibly add up bad karma that will be retaliated one day or the other. Build up positivity, not negativity!


Even in a capitalist system, the value of each human cannot be expressed by money. Maybe work force has a monetary value in a market, but life is invaluable. And so is talent and skill. Hence, treat your human resources right, and it WILL contribute to the success of your company as a whole - EVEN if they're not the most competent ones!

When games become "saturated"

UPDATE [24.02.2017] As of Minecraft version 1.11.2 much what is described here does not apply anymore. For example, survival and exploration mechanics were balanced and it has become quite enjoyable for me.

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Recently I stumbled upon an interesting comment on youtube. It was about how adding too many features may spoil a perfectly fine game. Unfortunately I didn't save the link to this comment, as I would have never thought I'd ever pick it up to create an entire post about it. As I started to see the same pattern on other games, it indeed made me think about how some games progress as a product and subject of design.


I will describe in my own words what this comment was about and give examples. Please note this post should not be taken as "you should change this immediately". This is merely an analysis/opinion people may learn from (or not).

During a game's alpha phase, it's fun to see it grow and develop, each update adding more content and creating new experiences for the player. However, after a while some games start growing beyond the point they are supposed to be growing.
This state I'm talking about is reached once the developers begin to add more and more content which "disrupts" the original idea, feeling or atmosphere of the game. To a certain degree, change is necessary and part of the development progress. However, many "disruptive" changes may result in a complete (intended or not) reinvention of existing game design, atmosphere, or experience. This is where you, as a developer, have to ask yourself whether you are still developing the game you wanted, or still making use of the atmosphere and creating experiences the game is supposed to create.

One example that was mentioned in the comment was Minecraft. I absolutely loved playing this game when I bought it in alpha, in fact I still have some ancient maps, including the first world I ever started. I still remember well when cake and sandstone was added to the game, and those little add-ons I perceived as a pleasant addition; same applies for breeding. A lot of features you can keep yourself busy with were added. But sometime during the 1.4 update, I started losing interest in this game. So what made me stop playing?

One main reason was that I simply burned out on it. The other main reason was "flawful" game design thus making me lose interest. The mistake Mojang did was adding plenty of stuff to Minecraft that - in its entirety - was difficult to unify in one game to the extent it can still be called "good design". Minecraft offers mechanics such as survival, building, mining, breeding, logic (redstone & pistons), exploration, boss fights, but it really excels at neither. Survival is easy even on hardest difficulty once you managed to build a nice shelter and get some animals or a farm (at least for "older"/adult players). Building (including redstone) gets boring after a while once you build everything you wanted to build; at least for me adding new materials will not change this on a long term. Exploration tends to be repetitive, possibly due to procedural generation. The boss fights aren't too special compared to boss fights in other games, unless you're playing with friends maybe.
In fact, I find myself lost in the amount of features I could possibly use, and I am not even using half of them, either. I realize people may have different experiences or opinions about this, however one must still question whether this is a sign of "bad" game design or not.

A while ago, with the Adventure Update Mojang added multiple features that still somewhat fit to the game (villagers, temples...). With the most recent update they added realms. While I acknowledge the importance of the former, what is the point of the latter? At least I know I'm not going to use this feature at all. The main reason I bought this game years ago was survival, mining and building. Since survival has become easier and easier with every update (breeding, farming, enchants to obtain even more gems etc.), what is the point of playing this game for someone looking for a challenge? I assume this is the reason why Minecraft mods and alternative minecraft-like voxel games are so popular.

During Minecraft's existance, more and more building blocks have been added, most blocks possessing slightly different appearances, but similar or even the same properties to existing blocks. If one block can easily be substitued with another, diversity is not substantially changed as new ones essentially do not add more functionality; other than looking pretty/different perhaps. Alpha Minecraft had a distinct look, but with all the new block types (that often don't even look good or too different to already implemented ones, i.e. stone brick) I think it kind of lost that charme it once had.
But what about texture packs? To be honest, adding texture packs only allows you to bypass the mistakes the developers are held to be accountable for; it doesn't get rid of the root of the problem, it doesn't make the original game design better (maybe better in the sense you can change the looks of it).

What makes this situation worse is that plenty of Minecraft mods exist for a wide range of purposes. For example, if you want to go crazy with factories and extended materials, you install yourself Feed The Best to enhance your crafting/building experience.
Minecraft does not need to add more features; instead it should improve the game mechanics it already utilizes. One step towards this goal would be to implement effects to food, for example. Or put more detail into the survival aspect by introducing energy, temperature, seasons. Then again, the fact that there's probably a mod for this purpose already leaves the developers in a mess.



So what we have here is a "oversaturation" of game mechanics, a lack of diversity; too many substitutes that serve the same function that - in my opinion - has changed the game's "spririt" to the negative as it matured. For further thought, you may ask yourself when the point is reached to stop adding content to your game, or when a mechanic starts changing your game to the extent it's completely reinventing it.

It seems that similar circumstances apply to the game Don't Starve; since I unfortunately did not play the recent versions I cannot really judge; but just by the looks of the new trailers, this game seem to have a similar tendency. Let's hope it will not fall victim of the oversaturation.

So developers: Do NOT over-develop your game. Once it reached a certain "feature-saturation" it is not necessary to add anything more. Focus on one or two large gameplay themes and do them well!

Critical Analysis: Space Engineers

I want to get a bit more indepth with an analysis of SpaceEngineer's gameplay. If you don't know the game, you should check it out here, it's worth it.

It is possible that in the future some aspects described in this this article will not be applicable to the game as it's being developed. To clarify, this article applies to the 01.026 update released in April 16th 2014.

You may find some of the analysis offensive; in that case, don't get me wrong - I really like this game a lot and it's absolutely promising for an indie title in early alpha; I also realize a lot of what's there is in a very unfinished state. There are multiple things that are still a bit, let's say "uneasy"; on the other hand, other aspects make a good impression, and I'd like to uncover the causes and consequences of either.


What Space Engineers does is to provide a voxel-based sandbox world where you can build, mine and survive in an asteroid field in space. It's pretty straight forward the first time you play it, especially if you are used to other voxel-based games like Minecraft.

It's possible to build space stations, large spaceships and small spaceships from various - partly functional - parts. The latter use smaller voxels (first picture) while the former two make use of voxels twice as large (second picture).

Voxel Sizes

Larger voxels are nice for large scale ships and stations. You don't need to build more voxels in order to get the same size, compared to when using a small voxel size.
However here lies another problem: you cannot pull the same level of detail on large ships as you can with small ones. Larger ones will always look very "rough" with the low voxel resolution that is being used here.

The previously mentioned effect is especially noticable in interiors. Since each voxel is as large as your character, you cannot use voxels for more subtle details. Each level of your space station/large ship thus needs to be one voxel high, plus another voxel for the floor. This causes them to look rather chunky and also limits the player in the creative process.

This effect can be decreased by providing a variety of thinner plates you can walk on that are designed for interiors, instead of using solid blocks all the time. While there are already some thinner plates in game, they are not designed to be used as floors or ceilings, but rather grates or similar.
Another possible solution is to provide something like a "brush size" for voxels instead of just scaling up small voxels: Large spacecraft/stations created with a default brushsize multiplier of 2x, while small ones with a 1x multiplier.

Where to start building?

I felt kind of "lost" constructing my spacecraft, being not too sure what to do or why. This happens to me even when already being used to the game and possessing basic knowledge of the game mechanics. I am not entirely sure of the causes for this, and I can name the following possibilities.

1. The game lacks purpose for certain types of spacecraft or ship parts, i.e. combat is not implemented yet, thus turrets and combat ships are somewhat useless for now. (You also may end up building something you don't even need as the game currently has no real focus other than building and mining. Of course this will change in the future)
2. Voxel-based construction of objects gives full control and freedom over your creations and their design, but may offer confusion as well since new players do not know where to start (or with what)
   The interesting thing is: this is something I also encountered developing a ship editor prototype that imitates voxel behavior for StareFire. I guess it's safe to say that creating interior from scratch that also has a function to serve can be very challenging.
   
   A solution for this problem can be setting up a dynamic To-Do list for each ship that lists up the minimal amount of parts required to create a spacecraft or station. Another solution can be creating large and hollow 3D frame models that allow the player to better plan out interior design. (The players could make these frames on their own with the voxel engine, however they turn out chunky due to the voxel size on large ships)
 

 

Construction in Survival 

To the left you can see an optimized version of a small miner I created in survival mode, which took me ages to create from scratch. It's also my first legit spacecraft.

Construction in survival is tricky. Moving around large amounts of ore with an extremely limited inventory capacity is not nice at all and very time consuming. AND that is just for a very small ship. Limited inventory space also prohibits you from constructing large bases and forces you to somehow build a container close to the construction site first, then store all materials there. Larger objects take an enormous amount of material to construct; which in no way you can manage to manually gather as a single person. Construction time of larger spacecraft is not easier either seeing how welding the hull parts in order to finish them takes a lot of time also. The fact that a lot of resources are required to produce hull parts in the first place makes this worse (BUT it should be noted you can adjust production rates when creating the game or editing its settings).
The situation has improved alot with the recent introduction of conveyors and pipes. You can do large bases that hook up refineries to assemblers, and assemblers to a large storage and fully automate unit production. Even unloading and loading transports or miners can be fully automated. Still, starting from scratch remains a pain in the rectal area.

Additional solutions - especially for the problem of starting from scratch - can be the introduction of a tool or small machine, like a little buggy or "wheelbarrow in space", that allows you to move around larger amounts of cargo even if you don't possess a functional spacecraft. Another solution can be to adjust the default production/mining rates.

Destruction and Damage

What I really like about this game is the fact you can virtually destroy everything. Collisions deform spacecraft and asteroids alike, asteroids struck by missiles will crumble, and failing to decently dock to your space station has the potential to damage your spacecraft (or even destroy it).

The only problem I have with this damage system is that it becomes difficult to rebuild already destroyed structures and the fact you need a lot of resources to repair it. It may be of advantage if the ship saved the destroyed parts and enables you to replace them with ease, i.e. just by reconstructing them with the welder.


Other aspects that are slightly unbalanced exist, i.e. the production of solar panels (require many resources to build and basically not even worth using if you're starting out) or the fact you're doomed once you run out of Uranium in your base reactor.
But a lot of things are to come to make this game even better than it already is. Visually it's astoundingly simple yet nice to the eyes by providing enough detail to keep you interested. The fact I rambled a lot about its flaws should not hold you from getting it if you like voxel-based sci-fi games.

Reflection

There are a few events that made me stop and think. Like recently I got my hands on an UML modelling program called Enterprise Architect during courses, and also bought the game Space Engineers.
Both of these things made me pondering about the future of StarFire (which is at the moment a floating point of uncertainty for multiple reasons that I will not tell in all detail now). I am considering completely recoding it and make it a shining star in the indie game scene as it was supposed to be from the start.

The aspects I reflected upon are as follows:

1. Game architecture. StarFire was created to be modular. The development of it was slowed down a lot because of this additional focus on modularity. Another reason was the fact I wasn't very experienced with some parts of coding. A stark contrast to CamoTanks/CamoTactics, which is a game built on the fly (using extracted/abstracted code from the StarFire libs) and thus made huge progress in just a little less than a month.
   Besides this, the game completely lacked a decent specification. This is part of the reason why I still am not entirely sure what to do with it. I roughly know what the player should be able to do in StarFire, but am not entirely sure how it can be implemented or whether it can be implemented at all. In some aspects, SpaceEngineers is very close to what StarFire is going to be. Due to this fact it's a perfect playground figuring out what game mechanics are fun (or how they need to be in order to be fun), before even prototyping them. (I should add that the idea for StarFire was born before I even knew about SpaceEngineers). Like this I think I'm slowly getting a feeling what's best for StarFire and the content I want to display with it. And this is a good thing.
   
   
2. Game design. After playing Space Engineers some game mechanic parts I first wanted to add to StarFire now seem a bit unhandy/not fun enough in practice. This especially applies to gathering resources and crafting/production. On the other hand, some other game mechanics such as voxels I first didn't want to implement now seem more interesting and feasible.
   
   I have played other voxel based games, such as 7 Days To Die or Minecraft, and despite them using voxel engines they are completely different. First off, Space Engineers, 7 Days To Die and Minecraft differ greatly in the atmosphere and experiences they produce. You will find yourself sneaking around and avoid zombies in 7DTD and run like a pansy once they spotted you; in Minecraft, you'll explore caves, enjoy farming, animal slaughtering and breeding (...this sort of sounds weird but let's just leave it at that). In SpaceEngineers, you will spend hours mining asteroids and creating spacecraft accompanied with epic orchestral music.
   There are no Zombies going to tear down your house in Minecraft, there is not a chance you could tame a dog, farm, or get your house blown up in SpaceEngineers, there's no way you could build a functioning spacecraft in Minecraft with all the fancy space stuff around it.
   
   Long story short: even using the same technology, the results can be astoundingly different.
   
    
3. Workflow management. Dealing with Enterprise Architect made me realize that StarFire still had multiple architecture flaws that existed from the start. The code itself wasn't a downright mess, it was actually pretty clean and well-documented (considering I'm a bit chaotic), however, in some cases it was very inefficient. This was due to the fact I coded very "light-hearted" without any workflow tools such as an class/workflow diagram, except a TODO list and the occasional but lax diagram/sketch to depict more complex mechanisms. I made these sketches on paper, but I usually never looked at them ever again.
   
   Sometimes I missed out a flawful architecture in one subsystem because it wasn't depicted with the entire system and all other subsystems (just a small parts of it); as a consequence, I had to invest time coding on both systems adapting them to each other in order to work. That partially also involved recoding large parts of the system. Very ineffective!

I will continue my research, keep on coding smaller games; and when I feel it's time, recode StarFire to bring it to its fullest glory!