Twitter is home to so many interesting threads that just offer a never-before-seen (or read-about, rather) viewpoint on certain topics. And this one might make you want to appreciate the work that game developers do even more, especially if you're a gamer.
This particular thread was started by game developer Rami Ismail, who, according to GameSpot, works at the indie studio Vlambeer. The studio is responsible for great indie titles like "Serious Sam: The Random Encounter" and "Nuclear Throne," to name a few.
Ismail started his Twitter thread with a single concept: imagine making dice inside a video game:
Let's imagine making dice in a game.
— Rami Ismail / رامي (@tha_rami) January 10, 2022
Eventually, he would describe the nitty-gritty aspects of making that dice work in a game as it does in real life. It has to fall to a floor, spin around, sometimes even bounce, and reveal a specific number of dots at random. And as his description of the work required to make the dice behave as it should is any indication, it requires a ton of game development work to get things right.
Among the most interesting details he mentioned is coding the gravity simulation within the game engine. Ismail mentions that the dice won't even fall to the "floor" if you didn't put gravity there.
Let's get the die working! First of all, we'll need to make a floor, so we'll take another gray cube without texture, and stretch it flat in all directions & move it down a little. Now we have a die & floor. If we'd run the game now, nothing would happen - there's no gravity!
— Rami Ismail / رامي (@tha_rami) January 10, 2022
However, that's not the only thing you must take care of. Ismail says that even if you put gravity in there to make the dice fall, the floor will also fall too because you didn't make it immovable:
Now: what will happen when we run the game? Exactly: the die will fall, but so will the floor. Let's make the floor immovable, and let's try again - depending on your engine, the die will fall through the ground or not. Let's say it does, so we turn on collision.
— Rami Ismail / رامي (@tha_rami) January 10, 2022
It is these subtle details that show just how complicated game development is. It basically explains why all of the biggest AAA games out there take years upon years to make, and why most of them can never really ship out in a perfect, bug-free state with all these complicated moving parts.
Ismail's Twitter Thread On Implementing NFTs In Games
Ismail also mentioned in passing the fad of putting NFTs into games, saying that they'll not work as they're intended:
I am a firm believer in not saying something 'cannot be done', but the odds of 'NFT interoperability' ever working anywhere like people seem to be imagining are closer to 0 than Half Life 3 being announced as Nintendo Switch exclusive.
— Rami Ismail / رامي (@tha_rami) January 10, 2022
According to him, making NFT technology work in these games is almost as impossible as "Half Life 3" being released. For the unaware, "Half Life 3" is a long-running gaming joke poking fun at Valve's apparent aversion to creating trilogies, specifically with "Half Life" and other franchises like "Portal."
Furthermore, gamers are also seemingly rejecting NFT implementation in games left and right. This is already evident in the insane backlash Ubisoft received when they announced the arrival of NFTs in "Ghost Recon Breakpoint."
Their announcement video on YouTube gained infamy as the one with the highest dislike-to-like ratio at a dismal 96 percent (31k dislikes compared to 1k likes, as per PCGamer). They were essentially forced to take the video down.
The thread itself is a worthy read if you find game development interesting as a whole. Maybe after reading it, you'd be far kinder to developers who pour so much time and effort into making the games that you love.
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Written by RJ Pierce
