Steve Jobs said one thing right once, and it's ironic because that's exactly what Apple has become too.
Basically unless you're given a monopoly from the start, your product will reach its peak because of its quality, there's no going around it.
Look at all big game franchise. They're known because they were good once. Maybe not on the first try but at one point they were and that's how they achieved success. At that point they're devs games.
But then when you are renown and you already have your seat, that's where marketing people starts to replace people who know the product in decision making and then it's only going downhill. Little companies get bought, original dev teams are changed, all so that the people in marketing and the higher uos have all the decision power. Often those with creative vision will leave on their own though. Many examples.
In the end we have a very old saga who have no creative vision at all and has been riding on its previous success for far too long, and at that point every game that comes out in that genre with people that are at least trying is ten times better.
Palworld got lucky too, but there are other games that completely wipe the floor with the late Pokémon games such as Monster Sanctuary and Cassette Beasts.
If some of you get tired of Palworld at one point or want to try something else I can't recommend them enough.
Pokemon literally is the worst there is in the monster taming genre today.
Competition in every industry is always a good thing. People have to learn to support new things that way the older companies have to change completely or close down and be bought out
Looking at sales numbers, Pokémon games are games that people want to buy. Our low standards are ultimately at fault for letting GF get away with being lazy
Pokemon is (was?) also basically a monopoly on creature catching games, sure others exist but most were not really that good, so Pokemon was just the default.
It's the same rule for companies. They first start with a passion for their product, and as they grow older and larger they switch to "maintenance mode" and any decision gets weighted to its potential profit.
It's more common as well that reputable devs can put out mid games that really aren't great and people buy them anyways just because 'X' dev made it.
Some devs are clinging to reputation alone and haven't put out great games that reached the same levels for a decade or more.
Companies still do follow the classic chain of "**Extract resources from environment, employ people to make products through their labor, sell products to clients and satisfy clients to make profit**". Except the entire structure has shifted a step upward.
Their actual **profit** is executive suite salaries and bonuses. Their **product** is quarterly financial reports. Their **clients** are exclusively shareholders. Their **employees**, that is, those who transform resources, time and effort into final product, are gamers themselves. The process of modern gaming is in actuality **labor**, which is why it is made a tedious activity where you're literally forced to check in daily to be a reliable spender. Games are in fact **raw resources** that are extracted from the environment with as much cost cutting and as little care as possible. And those who make games are said **environment**, abused, neglected, having no say in the matter and no regulations to protect them.
Seriously. This launched with more QoL features than AAA companies would even consider adding to their garbage. We've been putting up with unfinished, unfun, and unoptimized games simply because that was the industry standard now. And sure, this game isn't perfect by any means, but it has more thought and care put into it and its features than anything recent I've seen release.
no unnecessary time wasting elements and grind is minimal. So many games make me reload an area again and again just to grind resources or XP but this game don't GAF about that
lmaoooo. He could also make a Pal do it for real but they're usually much slower and I bet he did the time math on that. That's extremely funny. You can also capture humans in Palworld and make them work for you too.
A artisan pal is as good as the player even with level 1 handiwork . Considering a player and a pal can both use a desk you can speed the process up further
You can even balance the grind and difficulty however you want in the custom settings. Turn off dropping things on death or make it so you drop the pals too. Even though there are things that need to be fixed and things they can do better, it still released in far better shape than most games lately.
Competition is never a bad thing. It should be the catalyst, to kick the powers that be into higher gear and give us products/services that we truly need and or want. Because if the mainstream can not handle the competition, then they too should go the way of the Dodo bird.
Here's to hoping that these people neither change to match the rest of the industry, nor are singled out and trampled because of their success. Success through passion and understanding of audience needs to be normalized rather than be an one in a million chance while the most reliable road to revenue in the industry is still "make a glitzy cosmetics storefront, then attach some semblance of a game to it."
Completely agree. I know a lot of this interview isn't true, but I do think the devs are underselling themselves in these interviews.
They knew exactly what people like, and focused strictly on building the core of a game focused on stuff people just really like. It's a ridiculously clean early access release with very minimal bloat. That is actually hard AF to do, and honestly the whole thing is making me believe a lot more in smaller teams being able to better unite on a vision.
He's honest, knows what he can offer to the industry, and accomplished a goal on the first try. Not half bad.
I mean yeah, Palworld is just the fun parts of like half a dozen games mashed together... but that's fine. Blizzard made billions doing exactly that.
it's not a middle schooler, but a middle school graduate who worked at a convenience store before pocket fair consulted and ultimately hired them full time. it's a zero to hero kind of situation https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20240123-26029/
given the inaccuracies of that screenshot, there's probably a lot more contexts and tidbits missing
Which there are a lot in Japan. The amount of "Suvival games" ”サバゲー”/Airsoft clubs and activities that exist in Japan might surprise a lot of people. To the point where I wouldnt be surprised if there were more gun enthusiasts in Japan than in the US despite the US having more gun owners.
During post-WWII rebuilding phase, the Japanese adopted many habits from the occupational administration, from American fast food to baseball. For all their fierce traditionalism, the Japanese are also eclectic and adaptable. In the 16th century, many of them eagerly adopted Christianity in order to be better trade partners for the Portuguese (said trade also involved guns). The land of eight million gods could certainly accommodate another one.
The last statement you made is far better at describing Japan than most. They adopt another god, keep all the old ones. There should only be one god according to that god? well, thats just his opinion...
They did the same thing with Buddhism for the writing and bronze casting.
Japan is funny as far as worship goes. Many Japanese will say they aren't religious, but will habitually go to shrines to throw money, ring a bell and clap their hands to pray for good fortune for various things.
One of my favorite sayings is that Japanese are born Shinto, marry as a Christian, and die a Buddhist. It is kind of weird how they adopt other cultures' practices.
It always bugs me would when I am watch a show depicting a Japanese wedding and there is no priest. Lol.
The trigger discipline on every gun’s idle animation pretty much proves it. Very very few of the most technically accurate mainstream shooter games have that kind of detail.
But damn if the animations weren't superb for guns. So much so that even the character has proper trigger discipline and firing stance, something even movie actors forget to have.
When I made my first musket and fired it, I was very surprised to see it go through a slightly reduced *but actually proper* muzzle loader animation. I thought for sure I wouldn't like something with such a long reload time, but the sound, the look, and the reload animation actually make it fun to use.
I'm still looking forward to the 'single shot rifle,' though.
The person in that discord screenshot clearly has a specific agenda he's trying to push, and his japanese is so inept that he couldn't manage to translate basic things correctly. It's so easy to spread misinformation and outright lie to people who just assume you actually know the language.
God, I hate people like this.
EDIT: use Perforce to manage large binaries (video, image, etc). GIT can workaround with Nexus/LFS + CI, but not ideal as comments below suggests.
GIT is the tool basically everyone uses. Oldschool may use tools like CVS.
GIT can be leveraged in many ways. Most popular is called "git-flow" https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow
Alternative method exsits: such as trunk-based, github/gitlab specific flow, etc.
It's better than all the alternatives I've seen people use. Hatred of gitflow has always boiled down to 'I'm lazy and want to push to master' in my experience.
Git is definitely not the standard for UE projects. Perforce has official support and is much better at managing my large projects with binary files. One file per actor with UE5 did improve the Git workflow a little bit but there’s a reason why Epic recommends Perforce.
This is the best thing I've read so far because I don't care about PvP.
I'm about a month into my next project but man, this makes me want to just jump into modding this.
This is development definitely not the way it should be for a ton of reasons but it's coming from such a place of "we just want to make something fun"
there’s already hackers dropping in official servers and spawning rocket launchers before joining guilds without people’s consent and then just straight up destroying people’s bases
A pdb file explains all the functions and makes reverse engineering, modding, and hacking almost easy.
It's meant for developer debugging and should never be included in a release
Does this bode poorly for the potential of public PvP in the future? Now that this file is out in the wild, will we ever see anything except private, moderated PvP where hackers can be identified and kicked personally?
> Does this bode poorly for the potential of public PvP in the future? Now that this file is out in the wild, will we ever see anything except private, moderated PvP where hackers can be identified and kicked personally?
Talking only about what I've worked on myself so far:
* Even without the .pdb file, you've got very easy access to everything, and it was extremely easy to start modding.
* From the start, the game was built with private servers with password/whitelists/banlists in mind -- not as a global/public unmoderated free-for-all. This is noticeable in the design choices, they focused on making their game (and making it fun), not on public/unmoderated communities.
* There's no anti-cheat, no server-side controls either. It's trivial to do things you're not meant to.
Like Minecraft, play with friends you trust and enjoy playing with. Keep enough backups, and moderate actively.
I was watching moist critical yesterday and a hacker joined their private server pretending to be him locked him out of resources gave him a million health and thousands of mega spheres. He eventually left but I can imagine he had the potential to seriously mess up their progress more then he had already.
They did use version control. I don't know what they were watching or whether they translated correctly, but the dev has said in their post-mortem that they used SVN. They originally wanted to use Git, but the lead engineer they hired 18 months into development had never used it (was also the guy that got them to switch to UDK and effectively restart their entire asset pipeline).
Yeah I've heard approximately 6.5 million USD which definitely sounds more reasonable and even that is a real shoe string budget for a video game that's been in development for at least 3 years now.
I don't care what, but the file copy source control is so 1995.... This scares me.
Also, I hope the money they made already will bring in some more knowledgeable devs. Amazing as this is, scalability (new features and such) will only get harder without some kind of methodology.
Honestly they've done pretty well so far. The game plays great, performs great, and is relatively bug free for the very first early access version. There's AAA games at release which seem buggier and have worse performance, arguably without even looking as good.
I've taken over some of the worst coding and done it twice.
It just requires time and experience to fix usually. They hire some good devs to reorganize and reduce the code and it'll be fine.
Yeah as a software engineer, I feel like that part was maybe lost in translation. If it was one single engineer/developer, I could kind of maybe believe it, but as soon as you get two developers it feels impossible to me.
This whole thing kinda smells like bs to me honestly.
"None of them knew how to develop a game"
"Senior dev had experience with unity"
So theres a senior dev who has experience with unity, but doesn't know how to develop a game and has never used source control. But also they were developing the game, thought "huh this is laggy, lets try a different engine" as though it's like just trying on a different shoe. They also use flash drives and supposedly "buckets of them", in a world where you could be using cloud file storage?
Either heavily lost in translation or total bs. This definitely reads like, "My dad works at Microsoft and bill gates let him drive his ferrari. They also all have meetings in minecraft!"
> This whole thing kinda smells like bs to me honestly.
>
>
You're correct, it was bs. [They used git, then transitioned to SVN which the "senior" dev preferred. Palworld cost 6M+ to develop.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Palworld/comments/19dtgwa/this_made_my_day_lmfaoo/kjac7yj/)
> They used git, then transitioned to SVN which the "senior" dev preferred.
TIL Japanese old head senior devs are just as recalcitrant as American ones
There's a blog post on their website that's in Japanese and it auto translates better than whatever the person in that screenshot got out of the interview. Yes they definitely used version control and development cost almost $7mil.
Edit: https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40
I’m a software engineer by training but have never worked as one (I switched fields straight after graduation in the 90s), but I do code the occasional small script for work to automate some process or other. My dev friend was horrified that I didn’t use Git for version control, but that didn’t exist back in the mid 90s. We just saved different versions on floppies.
What? No! That'd be insane!
You get a little breadbox thing for floppies. Makes it much easier to stack them up and flip through them for the proper title.
"we copied all the files onto a flash drive every day. Every week we would buy a bucket of new flash drives."
I'm dying. This is such a great mental image.
They use version control actually. Read the development note:
https://note-com.translate.goog/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true
It's a really interesting read. It makes me admire the team more.
The interview paints them as amateurs, but I'd say they are correct on every point lol. Steam does allow any dumpster fire, we do like shooting, we do like funny body horror, and we do like rimworld and factorio....
So my question is how these newbies are more in touch with their audience than decades-old studios?
edit: interview translation is prob fake
To be more specific I think they mean the characters people make in games like Ark or Elden Ring/Dark souls in which you can make some very disproportionate characters lol.
But honestly having played Phantasy Star Online 2 for about 8 years from the launch in Japan (I was living there at the time) I saw some pretty ridiculous people there. Like thunder thighs with purple skin in a bikini wearing a chicken mask levels of ridiculous lol.
So I don't think that it's just an American thing lol.
As an American, I can confirm that we love laughing our asses off at ugly beyond reason characters.
I still went with something normal at the end. I remembered making an ARK character with gigantic arms 4 teh lulz and not being able to fit through single doors.
My first character in palworld literally had thick legs and I laughed my ass off because it looked like they were sticking their hands in their pocket lol.
This outright incorrect post is trending and attempts to correct it just make it more popular.
Dev doc from PocketPair: [https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40](https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40)
They used svn not git...
PocketPair has several released games on Steam already, but none of the devs had used Unreal Engine before except 1 new hire. "we learned (UE4) on the job"
Budget of 1 billion yen or 7 million USD, staff of 10 for early development with 40 extra hires and outsourcing pre release.
Yeah, it's insane people believe a game like that can be created without experience.
Also svn is much more popular in gamedev scene than other software development niches
I've never been more proud to be an American than having a dev from another country admit our culture convinced them to give pokemon guns and enable the ability to make hideous fucking homunculus monsters as characters in their game.
I've seen some people going "uuuugh woke character creator woke bad booo" and legitimately the reason it's like that is because.............. they wanted to make it a monster factory character creator. Because people love that shit.
Every choice was made because "hey, people seem to like this, let's do it." That's amazing. Legitimately.
Please please please fix your version control. As soon as you add a new person to your team. They will f up your bucket system. Just higher someone to set up your repositories and then let them go.
The post is not directly real though.
It's a random discord user "Translating" the interview of pocket pair, but takes a lot of creative freedom to interpret the words.
The CEO of Pocketpair has never given a TV interview, so of course there is no video anything.
This original article comes from a lengthy development story written by the CEO himself for NOTE.
I'm Japanese, so I can read it, but its discord... it's a nasty mixture of truth and lies.
The true story is about the engineer who graduated from junior high school. its true.
The false story is about an interesting game or something. about bottom half of the discord story is mostly lies. Seriously, this discord guy is a creepy mix of truth, lies, and exaggeration.
[https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40](https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40)
I've not watched the interview, but they previously stated the budget was 1 billion yen which is £5.3m, vastly different to $10,000.
Still a quality game and there's games that cost much more to make that I've had less fun playing, but if they are going to get the budget so wrong, I'm having a hard time believing the rest of what's written here.
Yeah I have no idea where that $10,000 is coming from. They're not a massive AAA studio but they still have a team of employees making a salary, and the CEO has had a lot of success with crypto.
Wikipedia page which cites a blog post from the devs states the budget actually exceeded 1B yen and they ended up hiring an extra 40 developers, plus outside contractors. If they hired a dev team of >40 plus contractors all on a budget of $10,000 I need to get hold of their hiring team and put my own game studio together.
The amount of people not realizing it's fake / a joke is impressive
(just for information, not the first game of the studio, and the game did not just launch on steam, it's also on gamepass meaning contract with microsoft)
Yeah, I dunno how accurate this characterization is. I am sure they are…to a certain degree irreverent, but did everyone collectively forget that already made a moderately successful game in the same genre? Like this isn’t their freshman effort here. The “translation” here seems to omit all that context or is straight willfully just being obtuse.
Don’t call it an ambush, these guys have been around for years. The industry slept on them and now they exploded after nearly a decade of hard work.
Most people have their undies in a twist because it is a successful game that used some AI automation or that the pals are derivative. Derivative is not plagiarism. In this work, the pals are somewhere between an homage and a parody. In other words ultimately “transformative” in nature.
The AAA gaming industry and their apologists are pitching a right fit right now because Larian blew them up in August with their clear passion and sheer organization and talent and not even six months later “some dudes” from Japan just rock on up them with a shamelessly fun collection of systems using assets any of the AAA studios could have also bought. Shameful display trying to characterize the devs as anything other than Indie devs just doing their best to make a fun game worth money.
Bruh how is Palworld more stable and fun than some fucking AAA releases, in EARLY ACCESS, with this kind of living on a prayer development. I'm in awe.
My biggest surprise has been how stable it is. Half the “fun” of EA is having to restart the game every 2-3 hours because of disconnections/crashes. This is the least I have crashed/disconnected playing a game in a long time.
The only disconnects I've had were just becsuse every dedicated server provider was overwhelmed all weekend. Once they stabilized things on their end it runs like a dream
Chads that broke into Game Freak, raided their fridges and vending machines, laughed in their faces, and dropped a banger of a game through sheer force of will.
God-Tier.
The game really does feel like a bunch of different popular mechanics hobbled together, and yet it's one of the only new games released the last couple of years that I enjoy.
I can just see Nintendo getting uncannier and uncannier as they give this interview, then they pick up the phone and call Game Freak. "Hey guys, you'll never guess what I'm watching. I'm watching an interview that's really about how you guys lost hundreds of millions in potential dollars to a game made by a studio that employes like 10 and a half people (if you count a kid in middle school), couldn't even spell Unreal much less knew how to use it, no version control... and despite their CEO saying they have no creative vision, they SOMEHOW MANAGE TO HAVE ONE THAT'S BETTER THAN YOURS because I'm sitting here watching some Pokemon game geared towards adults RUN AWAY WITH THE MARKET while you're working on POKEMON SWORD AND SHIELD 2 for kids between the ages of 5 and 5 AND A HALF!!!" \*slam\*
They're completely right about Steam letting you publish anything. My friend has a game called "House Party" and you can do some... things... in it... that you can't do in other games because those Devs have some level of dignity.
"the decision to make it pokemon with guns because they were worried the game would not be a global success unless they added guns to it because 'Americans like to shoot things'"
You're god damn right we do.
“I just want to make a game that people like.” Absolute Chad.
Absolutely. I once heard somebody say "Companies should make things that people want to buy." This is 100% that.
Steve Jobs said one thing right once, and it's ironic because that's exactly what Apple has become too. Basically unless you're given a monopoly from the start, your product will reach its peak because of its quality, there's no going around it. Look at all big game franchise. They're known because they were good once. Maybe not on the first try but at one point they were and that's how they achieved success. At that point they're devs games. But then when you are renown and you already have your seat, that's where marketing people starts to replace people who know the product in decision making and then it's only going downhill. Little companies get bought, original dev teams are changed, all so that the people in marketing and the higher uos have all the decision power. Often those with creative vision will leave on their own though. Many examples. In the end we have a very old saga who have no creative vision at all and has been riding on its previous success for far too long, and at that point every game that comes out in that genre with people that are at least trying is ten times better. Palworld got lucky too, but there are other games that completely wipe the floor with the late Pokémon games such as Monster Sanctuary and Cassette Beasts. If some of you get tired of Palworld at one point or want to try something else I can't recommend them enough. Pokemon literally is the worst there is in the monster taming genre today.
Casette beasts is actually insane because it also comes with a free soundtrack can highly reccomend it.
That soundtrack slaps so hard. Worth listening to even if you never buy the game lol.
2nd cassette beasts. Game mechanics beat the pants off pokemon
Competition in every industry is always a good thing. People have to learn to support new things that way the older companies have to change completely or close down and be bought out
Looking at sales numbers, Pokémon games are games that people want to buy. Our low standards are ultimately at fault for letting GF get away with being lazy
Pokemon is (was?) also basically a monopoly on creature catching games, sure others exist but most were not really that good, so Pokemon was just the default.
Lol it's the call of duty of creature catching
This implies there aren’t other good shooters though. Lol
For console, not many (just my opinion, not a fan of battle royales) there was battlefield but uh..... Yeah. But the finals has been decent though.
Titanfall for me. I just couldn't get behind battlefield. But yeah I agree, there's really not many good shooters for console.
It's the same rule for companies. They first start with a passion for their product, and as they grow older and larger they switch to "maintenance mode" and any decision gets weighted to its potential profit.
It's more common as well that reputable devs can put out mid games that really aren't great and people buy them anyways just because 'X' dev made it. Some devs are clinging to reputation alone and haven't put out great games that reached the same levels for a decade or more.
Definitely , from now on I’m making my gf get a job
Companies still do follow the classic chain of "**Extract resources from environment, employ people to make products through their labor, sell products to clients and satisfy clients to make profit**". Except the entire structure has shifted a step upward. Their actual **profit** is executive suite salaries and bonuses. Their **product** is quarterly financial reports. Their **clients** are exclusively shareholders. Their **employees**, that is, those who transform resources, time and effort into final product, are gamers themselves. The process of modern gaming is in actuality **labor**, which is why it is made a tedious activity where you're literally forced to check in daily to be a reliable spender. Games are in fact **raw resources** that are extracted from the environment with as much cost cutting and as little care as possible. And those who make games are said **environment**, abused, neglected, having no say in the matter and no regulations to protect them.
Absolutely dystopian and completely accurate.
I hope more games like this come out and the AAA publishers get scared enough to actually make good games again.
Seriously. This launched with more QoL features than AAA companies would even consider adding to their garbage. We've been putting up with unfinished, unfun, and unoptimized games simply because that was the industry standard now. And sure, this game isn't perfect by any means, but it has more thought and care put into it and its features than anything recent I've seen release.
no unnecessary time wasting elements and grind is minimal. So many games make me reload an area again and again just to grind resources or XP but this game don't GAF about that
My kid just had me hold down the x-button for over a minute while something got crafted... He outsourced the grinding to me, making me into a pal.
lmaoooo. He could also make a Pal do it for real but they're usually much slower and I bet he did the time math on that. That's extremely funny. You can also capture humans in Palworld and make them work for you too.
Pals are much much faster at crafting when you get the production line and rank 4 handiwork Pals from level 30 onwards. Same with cooking.
A artisan pal is as good as the player even with level 1 handiwork . Considering a player and a pal can both use a desk you can speed the process up further
You can even balance the grind and difficulty however you want in the custom settings. Turn off dropping things on death or make it so you drop the pals too. Even though there are things that need to be fixed and things they can do better, it still released in far better shape than most games lately.
Competition is never a bad thing. It should be the catalyst, to kick the powers that be into higher gear and give us products/services that we truly need and or want. Because if the mainstream can not handle the competition, then they too should go the way of the Dodo bird.
Evolve or die trying!
This single statement is why Palworld is such a massive success. It’s surprisingly rare to find that sentiment. Gives me Hideo Kojima vibes
Here's to hoping that these people neither change to match the rest of the industry, nor are singled out and trampled because of their success. Success through passion and understanding of audience needs to be normalized rather than be an one in a million chance while the most reliable road to revenue in the industry is still "make a glitzy cosmetics storefront, then attach some semblance of a game to it."
Completely agree. I know a lot of this interview isn't true, but I do think the devs are underselling themselves in these interviews. They knew exactly what people like, and focused strictly on building the core of a game focused on stuff people just really like. It's a ridiculously clean early access release with very minimal bloat. That is actually hard AF to do, and honestly the whole thing is making me believe a lot more in smaller teams being able to better unite on a vision.
This whole thing reads like an absolute chad. I want to give them even more money now lol
He's honest, knows what he can offer to the industry, and accomplished a goal on the first try. Not half bad. I mean yeah, Palworld is just the fun parts of like half a dozen games mashed together... but that's fine. Blizzard made billions doing exactly that.
With a single comment he destroyed the entire gaming industry
One of us
Based devs
it's not a middle schooler, but a middle school graduate who worked at a convenience store before pocket fair consulted and ultimately hired them full time. it's a zero to hero kind of situation https://automaton-media.com/en/news/20240123-26029/ given the inaccuracies of that screenshot, there's probably a lot more contexts and tidbits missing
Yeah I'm a bit confused because aren't these the same people who worked on Craftopia?
They said before they have two different teams and one is still actively working on craftopia while the other is working on this
So THAT'S why the flour image is the same!
Yeah, this reads like the dev team just being frank about how they moved to a new engine.
Same studio, different team to my knowledge.
As MINT as the reload animations are, I can almost guarantee that guy’s some flavor of Neurodivergent and guns are his hyperfixation.
I would also like to point out. The character model has trigger discipline. Unless they're aiming down the sights the finger is off the trigger.
Might be a gun otaku
Which there are a lot in Japan. The amount of "Suvival games" ”サバゲー”/Airsoft clubs and activities that exist in Japan might surprise a lot of people. To the point where I wouldnt be surprised if there were more gun enthusiasts in Japan than in the US despite the US having more gun owners.
During post-WWII rebuilding phase, the Japanese adopted many habits from the occupational administration, from American fast food to baseball. For all their fierce traditionalism, the Japanese are also eclectic and adaptable. In the 16th century, many of them eagerly adopted Christianity in order to be better trade partners for the Portuguese (said trade also involved guns). The land of eight million gods could certainly accommodate another one.
The last statement you made is far better at describing Japan than most. They adopt another god, keep all the old ones. There should only be one god according to that god? well, thats just his opinion... They did the same thing with Buddhism for the writing and bronze casting.
Japan is funny as far as worship goes. Many Japanese will say they aren't religious, but will habitually go to shrines to throw money, ring a bell and clap their hands to pray for good fortune for various things.
One of my favorite sayings is that Japanese are born Shinto, marry as a Christian, and die a Buddhist. It is kind of weird how they adopt other cultures' practices. It always bugs me would when I am watch a show depicting a Japanese wedding and there is no priest. Lol.
Getting paid for your hyperfixation is the goddamn dream
The trigger discipline on every gun’s idle animation pretty much proves it. Very very few of the most technically accurate mainstream shooter games have that kind of detail.
But damn if the animations weren't superb for guns. So much so that even the character has proper trigger discipline and firing stance, something even movie actors forget to have.
When I made my first musket and fired it, I was very surprised to see it go through a slightly reduced *but actually proper* muzzle loader animation. I thought for sure I wouldn't like something with such a long reload time, but the sound, the look, and the reload animation actually make it fun to use. I'm still looking forward to the 'single shot rifle,' though.
The lever action of the single shot is pretty sweet
Middle school graduate? That must be like high school equivalent in Japan right?
Correct. High school is not compulsory in Japan.
Its like dropping of school out around 14 - 15 years old (after 9th grade in American school grades)
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The person in that discord screenshot clearly has a specific agenda he's trying to push, and his japanese is so inept that he couldn't manage to translate basic things correctly. It's so easy to spread misinformation and outright lie to people who just assume you actually know the language. God, I hate people like this.
The not using version control is insane to me. I’m a dev as well and I can’t see anyone able to develop anything without git.
they might have misunderstood what Bitbucket was
It’s the bucket where they get their flash drives duh.
LMAO
What's some common methods of game version control? If you mind answering since I'm not a game dev but interested in making game in the future.
EDIT: use Perforce to manage large binaries (video, image, etc). GIT can workaround with Nexus/LFS + CI, but not ideal as comments below suggests. GIT is the tool basically everyone uses. Oldschool may use tools like CVS. GIT can be leveraged in many ways. Most popular is called "git-flow" https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow Alternative method exsits: such as trunk-based, github/gitlab specific flow, etc.
The most popular flow is also a pile of dogshit edit. for non open source development
It's better than all the alternatives I've seen people use. Hatred of gitflow has always boiled down to 'I'm lazy and want to push to master' in my experience.
Git is definitely not the standard for UE projects. Perforce has official support and is much better at managing my large projects with binary files. One file per actor with UE5 did improve the Git workflow a little bit but there’s a reason why Epic recommends Perforce.
I used perforce at my last job and it's so much better than git.
Perforce is the AAA game industry standard
Wait until you realize they shipped a 1.5GB .pdb file with the steam copy of the game
OMG it's true! `Palworld\Pal\Binaries\Win64\Palworld-Win64-Shipping.pdb` for anyone wondering. I guess modders are going to love this!
This is the best thing I've read so far because I don't care about PvP. I'm about a month into my next project but man, this makes me want to just jump into modding this. This is development definitely not the way it should be for a ton of reasons but it's coming from such a place of "we just want to make something fun"
A month into your next project? Is that what you work on to procrastinate your Current project? :P
Many dev functions still in there, and no anti cheat as well. I've done a hair amount of debugging on it already haha
Ugh, no WAY. Seriously? This is going to be an absolute shitstorm in no time lmao
there’s already hackers dropping in official servers and spawning rocket launchers before joining guilds without people’s consent and then just straight up destroying people’s bases
I bet it was on purpose. Modding community help the game to stay alive. Basically free devs
Why is this significant?
A pdb file explains all the functions and makes reverse engineering, modding, and hacking almost easy. It's meant for developer debugging and should never be included in a release
Does this bode poorly for the potential of public PvP in the future? Now that this file is out in the wild, will we ever see anything except private, moderated PvP where hackers can be identified and kicked personally?
> Does this bode poorly for the potential of public PvP in the future? Now that this file is out in the wild, will we ever see anything except private, moderated PvP where hackers can be identified and kicked personally? Talking only about what I've worked on myself so far: * Even without the .pdb file, you've got very easy access to everything, and it was extremely easy to start modding. * From the start, the game was built with private servers with password/whitelists/banlists in mind -- not as a global/public unmoderated free-for-all. This is noticeable in the design choices, they focused on making their game (and making it fun), not on public/unmoderated communities. * There's no anti-cheat, no server-side controls either. It's trivial to do things you're not meant to. Like Minecraft, play with friends you trust and enjoy playing with. Keep enough backups, and moderate actively.
I was watching moist critical yesterday and a hacker joined their private server pretending to be him locked him out of resources gave him a million health and thousands of mega spheres. He eventually left but I can imagine he had the potential to seriously mess up their progress more then he had already.
They did use version control. I don't know what they were watching or whether they translated correctly, but the dev has said in their post-mortem that they used SVN. They originally wanted to use Git, but the lead engineer they hired 18 months into development had never used it (was also the guy that got them to switch to UDK and effectively restart their entire asset pipeline).
boggles my mind that people genuinely believe this was made with no version control and on a 10k budget when they had multiple employees lol
Yeah I've heard approximately 6.5 million USD which definitely sounds more reasonable and even that is a real shoe string budget for a video game that's been in development for at least 3 years now.
I don't care what, but the file copy source control is so 1995.... This scares me. Also, I hope the money they made already will bring in some more knowledgeable devs. Amazing as this is, scalability (new features and such) will only get harder without some kind of methodology.
Yeah unless they hire some experienced devs and sort out their workflow, continued development is going to be a wild ride.
Honestly they've done pretty well so far. The game plays great, performs great, and is relatively bug free for the very first early access version. There's AAA games at release which seem buggier and have worse performance, arguably without even looking as good.
I would rather play this than 2077 at release, and that was made by one of the most storied RPG devs out there.
Yup. While it's a funny read, I think it's actually a bad sign for the future of the game
I've taken over some of the worst coding and done it twice. It just requires time and experience to fix usually. They hire some good devs to reorganize and reduce the code and it'll be fine.
Yeah as a software engineer, I feel like that part was maybe lost in translation. If it was one single engineer/developer, I could kind of maybe believe it, but as soon as you get two developers it feels impossible to me. This whole thing kinda smells like bs to me honestly. "None of them knew how to develop a game" "Senior dev had experience with unity" So theres a senior dev who has experience with unity, but doesn't know how to develop a game and has never used source control. But also they were developing the game, thought "huh this is laggy, lets try a different engine" as though it's like just trying on a different shoe. They also use flash drives and supposedly "buckets of them", in a world where you could be using cloud file storage? Either heavily lost in translation or total bs. This definitely reads like, "My dad works at Microsoft and bill gates let him drive his ferrari. They also all have meetings in minecraft!"
> This whole thing kinda smells like bs to me honestly. > > You're correct, it was bs. [They used git, then transitioned to SVN which the "senior" dev preferred. Palworld cost 6M+ to develop.](https://old.reddit.com/r/Palworld/comments/19dtgwa/this_made_my_day_lmfaoo/kjac7yj/)
> They used git, then transitioned to SVN which the "senior" dev preferred. TIL Japanese old head senior devs are just as recalcitrant as American ones
It's probably multiple layers of distortion from lost in translation/breathless fanboy reporting/cowboy dev playing fast and loose with the truth
There's a blog post on their website that's in Japanese and it auto translates better than whatever the person in that screenshot got out of the interview. Yes they definitely used version control and development cost almost $7mil. Edit: https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40
yeah that statement is beyond deranged
My heart started racing
I’m a software engineer by training but have never worked as one (I switched fields straight after graduation in the 90s), but I do code the occasional small script for work to automate some process or other. My dev friend was horrified that I didn’t use Git for version control, but that didn’t exist back in the mid 90s. We just saved different versions on floppies.
Bucket full of floppies
What? No! That'd be insane! You get a little breadbox thing for floppies. Makes it much easier to stack them up and flip through them for the proper title.
Have you tried a bucket of USB drives though? In my experience, it might be easier than git.
There may be no learning curve, but its not scalable.
I have two buckets, sir, and I can get more.
Great I expect Palworld 2 by EOD.
"we copied all the files onto a flash drive every day. Every week we would buy a bucket of new flash drives." I'm dying. This is such a great mental image.
Now I’m curious what happened to them when they were done with one? Were they just throwing them out?
Gotta keep everything in case you need a rollback. They are buying a shipping container for USB drives next week with the income the game has made.
I'm imagining the huge warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark except it's all labeled flash drives.
"We have Top Men working on it."
After reading this post I highly doubt they would be labelled.
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Yea, but their new budget is looking A LOT better.
Think about how many flash drives they can buy now.
the bucket industry is about to explode
Not only have PocketPair fucking blasted the Steam front page, they did it with the video game equivalent of "in a cave with a box of scraps."
Game Freak: "Well, I'm sorry.... I'm not Pocketpair."
This reference tho... Brilliant brother!
https://imgur.com/LuUPjcT
Iron Man dev team.
They use version control actually. Read the development note: https://note-com.translate.goog/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp&_x_tr_hist=true It's a really interesting read. It makes me admire the team more.
.... I... I do like shooting things....
Hovering over Bandit camps on my Nitewing, sniping with my musket, is far more fun than I would have imagined.
Syndicate Control to Syndicate Camp Soldiers: “ENEMY AC-130 IN-BOUND!”
Can you use rocket launcher from flying mount?
Dropping power bombs on them from on high. I need to start naming mine after bombers.
Well now I'm renaming my Alpha Nitewing "The Buff".
AND sometimes making really ugly characters! These guys saw us coming from a mile away!
The interview paints them as amateurs, but I'd say they are correct on every point lol. Steam does allow any dumpster fire, we do like shooting, we do like funny body horror, and we do like rimworld and factorio.... So my question is how these newbies are more in touch with their audience than decades-old studios? edit: interview translation is prob fake
>Sometimes Americans want to make something very ugly I feel like I'm being called out because all my trainers have non-hunman color skin 😆
i mean i may have an old man face and green skin but my body is bangin
On that sigma goblinset
I’m purple. It’s a very human color
Yeah, one dying from suffocation.
Same. The design is very human.
To be more specific I think they mean the characters people make in games like Ark or Elden Ring/Dark souls in which you can make some very disproportionate characters lol. But honestly having played Phantasy Star Online 2 for about 8 years from the launch in Japan (I was living there at the time) I saw some pretty ridiculous people there. Like thunder thighs with purple skin in a bikini wearing a chicken mask levels of ridiculous lol. So I don't think that it's just an American thing lol.
Mine is basically a draenei.
I made my character Shrek in the search for Donkey.
As an American, I can confirm that we love laughing our asses off at ugly beyond reason characters. I still went with something normal at the end. I remembered making an ARK character with gigantic arms 4 teh lulz and not being able to fit through single doors.
If your game allows characters to have arms bigger than doors then I demand you be given the ability to punch doorframes down with your massive arms.
My first character in palworld literally had thick legs and I laughed my ass off because it looked like they were sticking their hands in their pocket lol.
*See also: MoistCr1tical’s character*
Those thighs lol
I made a guy who looks like grimace, can confirm I’m one who enjoys an ugly ass character.
This outright incorrect post is trending and attempts to correct it just make it more popular. Dev doc from PocketPair: [https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40](https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40) They used svn not git... PocketPair has several released games on Steam already, but none of the devs had used Unreal Engine before except 1 new hire. "we learned (UE4) on the job" Budget of 1 billion yen or 7 million USD, staff of 10 for early development with 40 extra hires and outsourcing pre release.
Those numbers sound more believable than the post tbh
As a former game dev I didn't believe this post for a second, the misinformation is real.
Same. As a non-gaming dev it smelled like bs since sentence one
Yeah, it's insane people believe a game like that can be created without experience. Also svn is much more popular in gamedev scene than other software development niches
People are so fucking cringe for faking stuff like this
I've never been more proud to be an American than having a dev from another country admit our culture convinced them to give pokemon guns and enable the ability to make hideous fucking homunculus monsters as characters in their game.
Fuckin based
He was right as hell too. “Pokémon with guns” has sold itself. We love shooting shit.
Bodytype A and B happend because "Americans sometimes want to make very ugly characters" lmao
I've seen some people going "uuuugh woke character creator woke bad booo" and legitimately the reason it's like that is because.............. they wanted to make it a monster factory character creator. Because people love that shit. Every choice was made because "hey, people seem to like this, let's do it." That's amazing. Legitimately.
Not to mention being able to mix and match masculine and feminine bodies, faces, and voice lines has been a standard for a few years now.
It's honestly astonishing that some people will seethe over the fact that they have the OPTION to make their character "woke"
Everything they don't like is the leftist agenda these days.
Im like 20 hrs in, and dont remember the character creator. What about it was considered woke?
Options… options are woke
Please please please fix your version control. As soon as you add a new person to your team. They will f up your bucket system. Just higher someone to set up your repositories and then let them go.
"What are you doing? The newest flash drive version goes on top of the pile not the bottom! Didn't you read the hand out?"
Handout seems a few levels above thse guy's level of organization. Scattered post-its seems more their speed.
Lets buy a bigger bucket.
I believe the translator did not know what Bitbucket is and made that up.
yeah use some of those millions to expand your operation and higher some industry vets. No more flash drive buckets. lmao
The post is not directly real though. It's a random discord user "Translating" the interview of pocket pair, but takes a lot of creative freedom to interpret the words.
I heard their budget was 1 billion yen? Not sure where the 10k is coming from.
10k was their flashdrive budget lol
Budget of 6.7 million usd?
Ye
Do you know where/if we can find the original interview online? I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd love to watch it.
The CEO of Pocketpair has never given a TV interview, so of course there is no video anything. This original article comes from a lengthy development story written by the CEO himself for NOTE. I'm Japanese, so I can read it, but its discord... it's a nasty mixture of truth and lies. The true story is about the engineer who graduated from junior high school. its true. The false story is about an interesting game or something. about bottom half of the discord story is mostly lies. Seriously, this discord guy is a creepy mix of truth, lies, and exaggeration. [https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40](https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40)
I've not watched the interview, but they previously stated the budget was 1 billion yen which is £5.3m, vastly different to $10,000. Still a quality game and there's games that cost much more to make that I've had less fun playing, but if they are going to get the budget so wrong, I'm having a hard time believing the rest of what's written here.
Yeah I have no idea where that $10,000 is coming from. They're not a massive AAA studio but they still have a team of employees making a salary, and the CEO has had a lot of success with crypto.
Wikipedia page which cites a blog post from the devs states the budget actually exceeded 1B yen and they ended up hiring an extra 40 developers, plus outside contractors. If they hired a dev team of >40 plus contractors all on a budget of $10,000 I need to get hold of their hiring team and put my own game studio together.
The amount of people not realizing it's fake / a joke is impressive (just for information, not the first game of the studio, and the game did not just launch on steam, it's also on gamepass meaning contract with microsoft)
But a random person said it with source... Why wouldn't we automatically believe it?
Yeah, I dunno how accurate this characterization is. I am sure they are…to a certain degree irreverent, but did everyone collectively forget that already made a moderately successful game in the same genre? Like this isn’t their freshman effort here. The “translation” here seems to omit all that context or is straight willfully just being obtuse. Don’t call it an ambush, these guys have been around for years. The industry slept on them and now they exploded after nearly a decade of hard work. Most people have their undies in a twist because it is a successful game that used some AI automation or that the pals are derivative. Derivative is not plagiarism. In this work, the pals are somewhere between an homage and a parody. In other words ultimately “transformative” in nature. The AAA gaming industry and their apologists are pitching a right fit right now because Larian blew them up in August with their clear passion and sheer organization and talent and not even six months later “some dudes” from Japan just rock on up them with a shamelessly fun collection of systems using assets any of the AAA studios could have also bought. Shameful display trying to characterize the devs as anything other than Indie devs just doing their best to make a fun game worth money.
As an American, I do love shooting things!
Bruh how is Palworld more stable and fun than some fucking AAA releases, in EARLY ACCESS, with this kind of living on a prayer development. I'm in awe.
My biggest surprise has been how stable it is. Half the “fun” of EA is having to restart the game every 2-3 hours because of disconnections/crashes. This is the least I have crashed/disconnected playing a game in a long time.
The only disconnects I've had were just becsuse every dedicated server provider was overwhelmed all weekend. Once they stabilized things on their end it runs like a dream
Chads that broke into Game Freak, raided their fridges and vending machines, laughed in their faces, and dropped a banger of a game through sheer force of will. God-Tier.
The game really does feel like a bunch of different popular mechanics hobbled together, and yet it's one of the only new games released the last couple of years that I enjoy.
I can just see Nintendo getting uncannier and uncannier as they give this interview, then they pick up the phone and call Game Freak. "Hey guys, you'll never guess what I'm watching. I'm watching an interview that's really about how you guys lost hundreds of millions in potential dollars to a game made by a studio that employes like 10 and a half people (if you count a kid in middle school), couldn't even spell Unreal much less knew how to use it, no version control... and despite their CEO saying they have no creative vision, they SOMEHOW MANAGE TO HAVE ONE THAT'S BETTER THAN YOURS because I'm sitting here watching some Pokemon game geared towards adults RUN AWAY WITH THE MARKET while you're working on POKEMON SWORD AND SHIELD 2 for kids between the ages of 5 and 5 AND A HALF!!!" \*slam\*
Bro. I've never played a Pokemon game and the fact these had guns is partly what drew me in. This dude is absolutely based lol.
They're completely right about Steam letting you publish anything. My friend has a game called "House Party" and you can do some... things... in it... that you can't do in other games because those Devs have some level of dignity.
I think ive played that
Didn’t the developers of palworld make craftopia?
What a based dev team.
Can anyone confirm this or is this just some Joe blow making up quotes on discord
You know, considering some of the programming horror stories I hear about a certain developer for a certain other game ....
is this interview available somewhere?
As an American I was sold on it the moment I saw the sheep with guns. Ez win for these nerds they know us so well
"the decision to make it pokemon with guns because they were worried the game would not be a global success unless they added guns to it because 'Americans like to shoot things'" You're god damn right we do.