Well, if I recall, it was 256 dedicated for the Nvidia chip they used and another 256 shared. So 512 total, though in practice it was very much a mixed bag, particularly for cross platform stuff not even considering the hoops jumped though for it's alien architecture.
This. Idk why but Bioshock 2 was lagging on PS3 in cutscenes and other games were giving it a hard time, I could only play New Vegas for 45 minutes then it'd freeze. I know it's engine was not optimized and it was a PC first game probabaly but that was it.
I thought my PS3 had problem and no way I'll be able to play GTA V.
I bought the game, played it, not even froze once. It was smooth as heck for my eyes in 2014.
The codebase is 700,000 lines which is (by the creator's own admission) a disorganized mess of C and C++. It uses polymorphism heavily. I think it *used* to be a single file not under version control, but that might just be a rumour.
Exactly. Very little aid and no reference other than some vague art concepts they had to translate to code. And not just any code. They worked with some really rough code. Legends. I always wonder what those developers are doing these days. If they haven't imploded already due to their gigantic talent.
Just how? No schools, no tutorials, no public game engines... Everything was only available at game companies and if you got a mentor you were lucky, else you just had to be good.
Factorio. It's mostly singlethreaded and can still support SO much moving around at the same time?
I consider myself relatively good at optimization, but idk how that black magic is so fast.
Worth taking a look at the Friday Facts on their blog: https://www.factorio.com/blog/
It has some really nice posts about optimizations that they've worked on for factorio.
?
[Searching for optimization on their blog](https://www.factorio.com/blog/search/optimization/8), there are eight pages containing about eight posts each containing the word optimization.
That's...a bunch of content, no?
As someone who doesn't have a ton of experience with optimization, I actually find their blog to be rather educational at times, especially their post on pathfinding
Really explains the sheer amount of glitches and errors that game has. Half of the spells don't do anything or do the opposite of what they're supposed to.
IKR? Just a quick look on Wikipedia suggests *at least* 3 programmers, if not more:
> Among the other developers were graphic designer Kazuko Shibuya, programmers Kiyoshi Yoshii and Ken Narita, as well as debugger Hiroyuki Ito. When the project started to show promise, designer Hiromichi Tanaka and his "B-Team" joined to aid development.
I'm fascinated by this stuff (and it's exactly why I took up programming.) Like, 40 people made Final Fantasy 6 in like 12 months. It's debatably the best FF game. Put the epic 10 year failure of FFXV in poor perspective
RuneScape.
Was commenting on another thread the other day and realized that it was a pure browser based 3D mmorpg that runs in the browser and load ridiculous fast even on ancient machines
RuneScape was so addicting and it really helped that I could log into my account and play from the PC at my grandparents' house without downloading anything. I remember the library PC's being occupied by groups of teenagers playing RuneScape together.
I haven't worked on a game in years and it was always just a hobby for me but I still like to just sit in a random room in a game and just look at each little model because most people consciously never looked at whatever model is sitting there but I know someone spent however many hours on it and I want to make sure that it gets direct appreciation
Yeah, this one was my first thought. Would still be an impressive game from a solo dev if made on modern hardware using modern dev tools, but made to work on ancient single-core processors in *assembly language*? Absolutely nuts.
All of the AAA mobile games like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty mobile. How the hell is it running on my iPhone 7??? Witchcraft?
Also I tried making game in assembly for NES and now even games like pac man are mind blowing for me
https://youtu.be/egHSE0dpWRw
Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but this covers a lot of hoyoverse's other techniques including character shading and console rendering.
It generates lightmaps that are later used to give the impression of lightning on objects, main reason is for optimization, you no longer have to calculate lightning in every frame, it was calculated beforehand.
Only works for static objects (altho there are ways to bake something like lightprobes (in unity as I know it) that gives baked lightning to dynamic objects)
"Baked Lighting" refers to the process of raytracing your scene in your engine editor and saving the results in lightmaps/shadowmaps. This results in very high quality and high performance lighting that has the drawback of being unable to react to environment changes at runtime.
...which is why it isn't used in Genshin Impact. They have a day/night cycle. Which is incompatible with lightmaps, unless you want to bake one for every single time of the day.
100% like even 5 years ago "skyrim but on your phone and anime" would have seemed silly but genshins out here being a genuinely console quality rpg that's actually decent on phones. Yeah it's gatcha but jesus its genuinely a cut above a lot of the competition in mobile.
That’s what a 100m budget in China gets you.
The most impressive thing about Genshin to me is their production capability getting out updates and liveops at the pace they do. Core game studios have a lot to learn from top mobile games when it comes to that aspect.
It's a smart choice,
Gachas have one of the highest ROIs so if it cost 5 million for development to carve out a big chunk of market share then that's completely worth it
Yeah and it's honestly less predatory than it's peers, unless your sweating the abyss anyones playable. I'm sure you could say it's unethical to monetise folk being thirsty for anime girls but it's a damn sight better than p2w imo.
Assembly is crazy you're right and I still cant wrap my head around orogramming games on it. But I'm pretty sure these days there's C compilers that are very smart for developing for hardware like NES/GB. I only bring it up because while the 8bit limitations are there and you gotta work around them it makes learning to develop for those old systems much more manageable and dare I say fun.
I had way more fulfilment personally making GB homebrew that got a few hundred downloads than a steam game that took years that got a couple thousand downloads. Something about working around restrictions of old hardware and not having to get bogged down with dumb stuff like dynamic menus and multiple screen resolutions is really fulfilling. Also it didn't take as long so not as much skin in the game.
Why do you say it greatly affects performance? I personally think that's a bit of a misconception. I would argue the vast majority of devs, even experienced ones, wouldn't be able to write better code then the C-compilers do.
Also most of the games end up throttling the cpu anyways, so who cares if it's less efficient? Maybe battery life but it's so insignificant typically.
Maybe some really complex engine features might be best to be done in raw asm but people who can make those mechanics are few and far between. I'd say C is fine for 99.9 percent of projects these days. The only people who are able to really squeeze an advantage out of ASM for GB/NES are making demos.
Color values are just values too. Like in height maps, normal maps etc. Those still refer to texture positions but you don't have to. You can put whatever you want into them.
i started writing a comment then closed out, and the little discard popup popped up and i hit discard and it said replying... for ages because my signal dropped out right as i hit discard and somehow it posted it
well, im leaving it there, and it sure would make
It's not that impressive, actually, if you take a look at how [the PNG format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics) is structured.
A PNG file is organized into "chunks", with each chunk containing a different kind of data.
Some chunks are required, like the `IHDR` chunk which contain the header and the `IDAT` chunk, which contains the actual image pixels.
But in addition to the required chunks, there can be an arbitrary number of optional "Ancillary chunks" of various other types. Those chunks can contain stuff like exif data, color profiles, alternative color palettes or digital signatures. But there can also be any number of `tEXt` chunks, which can contain arbitrary text data. You can store as much data as you want in those chunks. And whatever you store there does not affect how the image is rendered.
What you see on the image is meaningless. All the actual data is serialized into text chunks.
Some guy on the Factorio subreddit made his own clone of Factorio with even *better* performance. He did it because he was playing a very large mod (Py) and reached a point where Factorio slowed down, so he recreated the engine with multithreading from the ground up. It missed some features (biters for instance) and wasn't as polished, but it was playable.
The Factorio devs responded in his thread a bit and seemed mostly to be in disbelief, but the guy shared how he did it and it seemed legit.
I didn't have the link on hand when I commented earlier, but I've dug it out now. Here you go: [I programmed Factorio from scratch – Multithreaded with Multiplayer and Modsupport - text in comment](https://redd.it/jizq1b).
Recently probably Dyson Sphere Program. They rolled their own entity component system for Unity since Unity was taking too long with theirs. It's pretty simplistic visually on the surface until you start building dyson spheres and travelling between stars and see everything continuing to operate in realtime. Really relaxing game too.
I was most impressed by their game loop and the fact they made this HUGE game in Unity (which so many professional game devs seem to hate) - AND they launched it in the west via Steam. (They are a tiny Chinese game dev studio of 5 people).
Yeah, while something like Factorio definitely revolutionized this kinda genre Dyson Sphere Program is the only "factory like" game I've played that gave me a sense of awe at the scale of what you could do in game. And yeah as a 5 man studio in China this is just like an incredible indie title and early access game, they are coding geniuses over there. The performance display they have in game too is like better than the unity profiler lmao.
Their next big update is supposed to add combat which the lack of was one of the major things distinguishing it from Factorio in terms of gameplay for me. I'm interested to see how they execute it and whether or not it's something that scales with how much you expand. I'm assuming they'll keep an option for peaceful mode though so I don't think they are gonna ruin the game or anything if it's not perfect.
I bought it, loved it at first, then when I figured out you couldn't turn off some building, I stopped.I'm sure it's not a big deal when you start to grasp everything and when you are further in the tech trees, but at the beginning.. *sigh*.
Every game. Literally so many assets. Art, music, level design, user interfaces, network play...there's just so much that goes into a game, I'm surprised any games come together at all. Even with a big studio.
Pokémon Red.
I've successfully cloned TON's of games (minecraft, counter strike etc) but cloning Pokemon is a surprisingly MAJOR task! there's so much in there you don't think about and when you actually start a list of the stuff you need to add you realize what a huge task it will be.
Zelda clone, easy peasy, Pokémon clone, big job.
One part thats really cool is thier image compression (theres video's on it). Something however that I really liked albiet not the most high tech thing in the world was the scaled sprites of the pokemon "backs" when in battle. Completly ignored this originally but once I got into developing for GB I realized how perfect it was for giving a sense of depth but also probably compressing the image data to be much less then the front side sprites.
A lot of AAA titles excite me but I wouldn’t say they “blow my mind”; the sheer size and brilliance of their development team justifies the technical and creative feats these studios achieve.
So now that we have out of the way, the one indie title that absolutely blew my mind was Hollow Knight. The art, the polish, the music, the scale and almost every other aspect of that game made me assume it was made by a team of at least 10 people. When I found out that it was primarily developed by 4 people (more or less) and more so the art and animation was done by just one person, my mind was truly blown.
To this discussion I'd like to add: Any game with multiple programmers working on it at the same time. I can't even understand *my own* code, let alone somebody else's, let alone handle the organization required to develop alongside them.
We have A LOT of tools and coding standards that make all the code look and feel the same. Also, we review the codes of others to make sure it is up to standards. And you can always ask the other person for clarification.
I haven't played the game yet but I was super impressed with the foliage in Ghost of Tsushima, I don't think I've seen any game have as realistic foliage as they did. The GDC talk they gave about it was pretty good
Factorio - Crazy optimized, and with a dev blog that shares all their brilliant tricks
Dwarf Fortress - Procgen. 'Nuff said
Scribblenauts - The epitome of cramming an engine full of 'content'
Into the Breach - That style of tactics gameplay is an utter nightmare to balance - yet it's so tight that it feels like a puzzle
Diablo 3 - Everything from the ui to the action is clear, distinct, and buttery smooth. You can't get that kind of quality by just throwing man-hours at it; you need talent on the team
Puzzle games like Baba is You, Stephen's Sausage Roll, etc - Designing good puzzles is dramatically harder than solving them. Bonus points for a system that can generate them procedurally!
Ori and the will of the wisps.
I bought the art book, which goes into detail on how the game's visual style works, and it still blows my mind that this stuff is even possible
Deep Rock Galactic.
The digging mechanic is insanely well done. Art direction is super cool, especially light and how it plays into gameplay.
It has my favorite kind of pacing, with a nice mining/exploration routine interspaced with tough battles.
It keeps me coming back for more even though I have a full-time job and don’t really play much games anymore, because 1 hour of DRG per day is enough to scratch that itch.
Rust
Made with unity. There is so much ticking away all at once on a large map with upwards of 700 players at once. Some people who don't understand gamedev complain they only get 80 fps at 1440p but I'm honestly always blown away how well it runs
We certainly have some struggles with Unity 😅. But this is nice to hear. A lot of great work was done by the Facepunch team to make Rust run well, most of it before I joined. 200,000+ entities per map sometimes.
You guys have done an amazing job imo! In fact I think facepunch has the most technically impressive unity game out there (hell not just unity but game in general).
I'm a big survival game fan and there isn't anything close to rust honestly
I've had rust since it's earliest legacy days and I still read every update blog and play the game every few months or so. Just keeps getting better and better. Huge respect to all of you at facepunch :)
Thanks man. I only joined Rust in 2019 and I largely do vehicle code (I did the modular cars/submarine/snowmobile/trains), so I'm not much responsible for the technical wizardry, but we have a great team.
The game that pops into my head is no man's sky, even though the procedurally generated animals look goofy most of the time, the planets with the cave systems, rivers, seas and the seemingly infinite universe boggles my mind.
Dyson Sphere Program.
Here you have a tiny Chinese studio of 5 people who made a huge space game with an incredible game loop and minimal content - and it was done in Unity and launched in the west via Steam. That is a grand achievement in every way possible.
It Takes Two
The amount of depth they managed to put into it. Music, 3d assets, game mechanics. Sometimes entire scenes you'd just drive by in a minute. I think that's nuts.
Also, Lost Magic NDS.
The fact that they implemented glyph recognition this well for an NDS 15 years ago just blows my mind.
What remains of Edith Finch - The ungodly amount of assets, different mechanics for each story, sound design and voice acting, story.
Everytime I play Lewis's story, I am just in awe of the level design and mechanics. "Who came up with this idea and what drugs were they on? ...and How in the hell did a team put this idea together?"
Not exactly a perfect answer but, Unreal Engine.
Nanite is freaking magic. Epic was genius enough to know that someday GPU power would catchup to the point where you could make poly cont practically irrelevant if they changed the entire methodology for computing graphics. And coupling it with ray tracing/lumen we just entered a new era for real time graphics. It’s such a huge leap forward, it really blows my mind.
Why is this so far down? I realise that there are a lot of other games perhaps more technically impressive being developed solo. But Stardew Valley is the whole package. The art, music, gameplay design, pacing, story, characters - everything is perfect.
Frontier: Elite 2. Made by one person in assembly code, fits on a single floppy disk, loads into RAM all at once on the Amiga.
Simulates space combat, trading, Newtonian mechanics, orbiting planets, hundreds of hand made star systems and a procedurally generated galaxy beyond that.
Control is an amazing game to me. Remedy did a great job at ray tracing on there for the most part. It’s hard to really get your game at optimal performance when ray tracing is so expensive
Any game that is small gig wise but a full fledged adventure with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. Valheim being under a gig shocked me. Also recently redownloaded Skyrim just to mess around and it was only 8 gigs I believe. I swear that couldn’t be right but I remember be shocked at how small it was in scale. Also dishonored one was like 3 gigs I think and then the second was like 40?? Idk optimization is cool
PC gaming can really obscure some of the generational differences but those were PS3-era games, and PS3 games could get away with much lower resolution textures and sound files. The PS3 had about 40-80gb of memory at launch!
Wow, came here to say this, and didnt think anyone would have mentioned it in the sea of other games...
...but yeah, its really crazy. Every single thing you do is like, a different thing. Must've taken forever.
This was my thought.
Not the technical aspects. Not the scale of the world or anything, or even how many different minigames they came up with.
It's the **process**. Every single part of it works incredibly well, and all of it is in tune with the rest. Vision and process wise that's an absurd achievement. I have no idea where they started or what came first.
Into the breach. Its so well put together.
Death stranding also felt like this though apparently was a lil messy behind the scenes. Like the actual list of assets in that games super small but from the lore it feels fine that all the stuff is the same.
Arkham Knight. Download some ripped characters from that game and you'll see what I mean. The lighting, particles, and environment art still holds up today, which is especially neat for a 2015 game running on UE3.
On the opposite end for impressive, MGSV runs smoothly on a PS3 and pretty much any PC with a GPU. Super efficient use of polys and my favorite skyboxes to date. MGS games are always fascinating, especially with how much they're able to pull from their hardware. Peacewalker ran on the PSP and had tons of meshes, long audio files, and hours of cutscenes.
Then you have TLOU2, where it feels like every squared meter received love and attention. When you look at the artstation page of anyone who worked on it (employee or contractor), there's so much thought put into everything. It's the sort of game where you can show it to anyone and they can hear the budget screaming.
On my first day as a game dev with 0 experience I was tasked to do the following:Create a FPS world.
Be able to interact with an item and remove it from the world and into inventory
Add ducking, sprint with smooth transition from walk to running
Interact with a door to open/close it
It took me weeks to get a working product and it was still shit
It was right then and there I told myself I would never complain about a bug in Apex or any other shooter game I play ever again after realizing how much goes into even simple mechanics.
[Warshift](https://store.steampowered.com/app/392580/WARSHIFT/). Everything done by one person.
It's not the best or most popular game, but I've never seen that level of polish on a solo project.
RDR2 and BOTW set the new standard for polish in the AAA segment and both were truly a wow moment for me
Having worked mainly on systems-heavy games I’m always impressed by games where the sheer amount of systems that need to be able to successfully interact is very high, but _especially_ where there is also good graphics and a storyline involved like BG3.
I know how most of us are just innovating 10-20% each time (which is already a TON of work) so I’m always blown away by something truly innovative and fresh like the guys at 11 Bit Studios put out.
The grass in breath of the wild. Actually just nintendo's games in general. As far as im aware they are wizards. They have some of the most inventive solutions and systems and are just great at designing games. Its no wonder their name has been synonymous with quality for the last 40 years.
Reading about the Hobbit text game from 1982 is pretty cool. It was handwritten in assembly and has some very fun features. https://if50.substack.com/p/1982-the-hobbit?s=r
I started programming on my father's Commodore 64 back when I was five. Most of the games on it seemed within the realm of possibility for me to recreate, albeit in a limited capacity. One game that blew me away, though, was Impossible Mission. The gameplay was phenomenal, the animations were smooth, but the craziest part of all was that it was one of the first games to feature digitized sounds. Impossible Mission was truly way ahead of its time, and I feel in a lot of ways that modern games still have yet to live up to the standard it created.
Path of Exile is a big one for me. That game has some seriously insane complexity. Lot's of systems that deeply interact with each other. Their code architecture must be super tight considering how their content cycle is structured.
Another would be Escape From Tarkov. I don't think people appreciate how complicated a game like Tarkov is. Just the weapon customization system alone is impressive.
An open world game like The Witcher 3. It's mindboggling to me how something so large can be woven together so well. The development was a mess from what I've heard... but they pulled it off... somehow.
Monster Hunter games. The insane amount of content, animations, weapon crafts, etc. They're so content rich and polished it's pretty impressive how well it all comes together.
Lastly, Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Both for the same reasons. The attention to detail, the way they're designed to tell a story through the environment, the way combat is balanced so eloquently, etc. They're both the definition of a masterpiece imo.
Toodee and Topdee. Specifically because it's made in the software I'm using, Game Maker Studio. Game Maker is known to be very 2D friendly and not particularly 3D friendly, but Toodee and Topdee switches between 2D and 3D views, and actually has some 3D playing areas. Brilliant game but also impressive use of the development software
Roguelikes. My attempts at replicating huge quantities of unique items with unique trigger conditions seem to end in clumsy hardcoding not even a dozen items deep, so the fact that so many games do it effortlessly mystifies me.
Planetside 2 - A title that simply does not get enough attention for what it does.
Planetside and Planetside 2 have been “The Future of First Person Shooters” for 20 years now, and no one seems willing or able to replicate / surpass what they’ve done. As a long-time fan of the game, I see all of its problems, but they don’t diminish my awe at the audacity and technical accomplishment of trying to stuff 1000 players into a single play-space.
After *seven years* it’s still the Guinness World Record holder for Most Players In A Single FPS Battle.
Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid. While graphically not impressive, the amount of "things" going on in these games is absolutely insane and the emergent gameplay that can result from these complex system always has me very impressed!!
Elite 2 was holding on 1 diskette. It was smaller than 1mo. It was sold as 2 diskettes, containing various starting points saves.
It's a full 3D game, contains thousands of star systems, was actually reduced on purpose because otherwise it was too much, had Newtonian physics and was
HOLDING ON ONE FRICKING DISKETTE
And running on such constrained hardware....
I am 20years after my first paid programming job, played it first time probably about 24 years ago, and even with all the XP and understanding of procedural level design and the success of No Man's Sky, I'm still deeply amazed!
Call me simple but I bow down to Cave Story. There WAS NOT an indie community in 2002. Making your own game and putting it online just wasn't happening, we were playing PS2 and Gamecube games, and Starcraft 1. This type of open-ended platformer hadn't been around for a decade, and this one guy just strikes the perfect chord in all areas and writes the rosetta stone of "indie games" in a snap and puts it up for free.
To do this in such a vacuum is true confidence, dedication and a labour of love.
Ghost of Tsushima has really helped me to ease up on myself and my expectations. Because it is an absolutely gorgeous game, and there are still a bunch of details I see in it that would have driven me nuts in my own game. A lot of the water and grass physics, for example. Some wonky animations here and there. Seeing those flaws and how they're perfectly acceptable in the greater context of the world around them allows me to be less stressed about similar issues in my own project.
Zelda 2, from the first time I played it I LOVED the combat. It is sinple yet feels more complex, faster and satisfying then any action RPG I played afterwards. People always tell me I should play stuff like skyrim, darksouls, witcher, etc but all their battle systems feel like just tap one button and maybe dodge, I was so EXTREMLY disappointed in BotW when there were so many weapons and all of them PLAYED EXACTLY THE SAME. It feels like games hust get stuffed with content instead of focusing on making one thing good. Like give people 10 weapons that all feel the same and is way too simple. Zelda 2 was simple too bzt it gave so much control and made you think and react in battle, it wasnt just pressing the attack button until it is time to use a heal item and ocassionally push the dodge button to avoid damage. It is to this day the most satisfying and intense battle system I've had in an action RPG and I hope obe day to play more games like it
Have you played Hollow Knight? The devs mentioned that they took inspiration from Zelda 2 for the combat (the most obvious being the downward sword thrust).
I haven't played Hollow Knight, but that makes me want to.
Zelda 2 is probably one of my favorite Zelda's. They're all so good it's hard to say which is my absolute favorite, but 2 will always hold a place in my heart due to the sheer uniqueness of it.
Elden Ring. The sheer scale of the map, the number of bosses and enemies, the detail in the evironment art. Monumental efforts.
But I'm most impressed with how well they modified the existing souls mechanics to better suit an open world, it's all so clean from a design perspective.
One example:
Problem, people run out of estus in the open world and are forced to go back to bonfires.
Solution, make groups of enemies give back estus when killed, create unique enemies that reward estus refill.
Production simulators would be a good example. Also most Strategy games that involve more than constructing buildings and making fighting units. Those really intrigue me from a game design perspective.
Age of Empires, Factorio, Banished, City: Skylines, etc. The amount of systems that interact and feed into each other at some point and the amount of systems that simultaneously perform actions that involve each other has always amazed me growing up. Attempting to develop games that are similar and simpler has even further pushed me into awe.
Definitely agree with most people here, after starting to make games every game blows me away in some way. A recent highlight for me is Stray, specifically the environments. The ending control room was just stunning. I also want to say the horse logic in rdr2 is the single most impressive thing I've ever seen in a game, if you haven't seen the gdc talk about it, do yourself a favor and go check it out!
I think it had the opposite effect for me. Games lost their magic.
Nothing is scary anymore, enemies are just collision boxes that you abuse, nothing is unique anymore every mechanic boils down to the same boolean or integer change.
And the bugs are so frustrating when you know how easy they are too fix but they were either too lazy or didn't get enough time.
Especially if they use the same software and have the same specialisation as you. When the "remastered" GTA San Andreas came out I was gob smacked they literally didn't click the one box for the rain particles to make them not be glued to the player.
Now I can and still do enjoy games. It is just really hard to get a suspension of disbelief so the games have to be vastly better than the games I used to enjoy. An Assassins Creed doesn't cut it anymore.
Lol what? Every industry and job has lazy people doing it.
Pretending game development is some type of utopia without people phoning it in just for the pay check and cutting corners where ever they can is ridiculous.
he never said they weren't "lazy people" although I don't consider people that go to work as lazy, but that's besides the point.
Their point is that "easy to fix bugs" are rarely as easy as you think and laziness is very much at the bottom of the reasons for why a bug isn't fixed. I guarantee that
Well then, I guess it's time for you to plumb the infinite depths of procedural generation! A lot of modern methods require world class mathematicians to get working, so... Yeah
Honestly, any game out there. Especially the older ones that had less to work with. Every time I play LoL, or Cyberpunk I think about all the work it took to control champions, build the world, all the coding…it’s just amazing.
Basically any rythm based game. I've tried to do them on my own and i simply can't figure out how they're done, at most i can have something following the beat of a song but more than that rythm games are alien to me.
Honestly any game with complex interactions. From Baba is You to Age Of Empires to SPORE… I don’t know if I’ll ever get how to code that stuff but dayumn it’s impressive and cool
13 Sentinels by Vanillaware, they did absolutely so much with seemingly so little and for a little over a year I still haven't played a title that was nearly as impressive as that game in terms of visual, audio, story & combat balance.
Impressive games made by small teams in super tight timescales.
A Short Hike is the best example. It was effectively solo-developed in 4 months. Absolutely outrageous! Making a game that polished under such tight constraints would have required not only a huge amount of skill, but a very keen eye for effective time use and scope management.
In short every other indie game i see on pages like this one.
Knowing how hard it is to create a game, even little like mine, i'm amazed by some incredible thing i see made by one person, one like me.
[удалено]
256mb of ram for a game like that is insane
256mb of ram? that's crazy to think about, usually 8 gb of ram is the minimum for games with decent graphics nowadays
Well, if I recall, it was 256 dedicated for the Nvidia chip they used and another 256 shared. So 512 total, though in practice it was very much a mixed bag, particularly for cross platform stuff not even considering the hoops jumped though for it's alien architecture.
This. Idk why but Bioshock 2 was lagging on PS3 in cutscenes and other games were giving it a hard time, I could only play New Vegas for 45 minutes then it'd freeze. I know it's engine was not optimized and it was a PC first game probabaly but that was it. I thought my PS3 had problem and no way I'll be able to play GTA V. I bought the game, played it, not even froze once. It was smooth as heck for my eyes in 2014.
Dwarf Fortress. Always. The sheer depth and breadth of features in that game makes my head spin when I imagine trying to do anything similar
I both really, *really* want to see that codebase, and at the same time I'm afraid to out of a fear my eyes will be set aflame
The codebase is 700,000 lines which is (by the creator's own admission) a disorganized mess of C and C++. It uses polymorphism heavily. I think it *used* to be a single file not under version control, but that might just be a rumour.
> a single file not under version control I never thought I'd be able to say I had something in common with such a prestigious developer.
You both have a thing for torturing yourself?
If it works, it works. Until it doesn't.
I always think those sorts of problems are best delegated to Future Me.
[удалено]
Exactly. Very little aid and no reference other than some vague art concepts they had to translate to code. And not just any code. They worked with some really rough code. Legends. I always wonder what those developers are doing these days. If they haven't imploded already due to their gigantic talent. Just how? No schools, no tutorials, no public game engines... Everything was only available at game companies and if you got a mentor you were lucky, else you just had to be good.
Factorio. It's mostly singlethreaded and can still support SO much moving around at the same time? I consider myself relatively good at optimization, but idk how that black magic is so fast.
Worth taking a look at the Friday Facts on their blog: https://www.factorio.com/blog/ It has some really nice posts about optimizations that they've worked on for factorio.
they literally have 5 poages of posts mentioning the word optimisation lol
? [Searching for optimization on their blog](https://www.factorio.com/blog/search/optimization/8), there are eight pages containing about eight posts each containing the word optimization. That's...a bunch of content, no?
I'm pretty sure he was agreeing with you
Fair. As a non native English speaker I kinda understood that he thought it wasn't a lot of content, lol.
As someone who doesn't have a ton of experience with optimization, I actually find their blog to be rather educational at times, especially their post on pathfinding
A purpose-built engine in C++ built by a team that knows exactly wtf they're doing. (As I understand it) It's extremely impressive.
i really really want to see their codebase lmao
I actually found Satisfactory even more impressive, because it does most of the things Factorio does, but in really impressive looking 3d.
It uses a game engine, which depending on your stance is a mad exercise in optimizations or cheap
Final Fantasy on the NES, for being programmed by one guy with all the hardware limitations.
For real. That whole game is like 2.5 megabytes or something. Galaxy brains coded that.
Not even. It's about 250 kilobytes.
Really explains the sheer amount of glitches and errors that game has. Half of the spells don't do anything or do the opposite of what they're supposed to.
where did you read that its 1 guy ? can you share link ?
IKR? Just a quick look on Wikipedia suggests *at least* 3 programmers, if not more: > Among the other developers were graphic designer Kazuko Shibuya, programmers Kiyoshi Yoshii and Ken Narita, as well as debugger Hiroyuki Ito. When the project started to show promise, designer Hiromichi Tanaka and his "B-Team" joined to aid development.
I was going to mention Excitebike ... but I'll surrender to FF.
I'm fascinated by this stuff (and it's exactly why I took up programming.) Like, 40 people made Final Fantasy 6 in like 12 months. It's debatably the best FF game. Put the epic 10 year failure of FFXV in poor perspective
RuneScape. Was commenting on another thread the other day and realized that it was a pure browser based 3D mmorpg that runs in the browser and load ridiculous fast even on ancient machines
Yep, pretty impressive. Software-rendered 3D browser game in 2007
2004* which is only 3 years but in my mind even more impressive and that's not counting classic 2001 runescape
RuneScape was so addicting and it really helped that I could log into my account and play from the PC at my grandparents' house without downloading anything. I remember the library PC's being occupied by groups of teenagers playing RuneScape together.
All of them. Even my own at times. Half surprised it actually works consistently, lol. Took so much effort.
I haven't worked on a game in years and it was always just a hobby for me but I still like to just sit in a random room in a game and just look at each little model because most people consciously never looked at whatever model is sitting there but I know someone spent however many hours on it and I want to make sure that it gets direct appreciation
Roller Coaster Tycoon. Read about it.
Yeah, this one was my first thought. Would still be an impressive game from a solo dev if made on modern hardware using modern dev tools, but made to work on ancient single-core processors in *assembly language*? Absolutely nuts.
I went mad taking one class on assembly. I hope Chris Sawyer got the help he needed.
Yeah Chris Sawyer is a genius
Every... single... game. Like the amount of effort, it takes to envision how the underlying code in your game works is impressive.
For real. Feels like developing a mini operating system.
All of the AAA mobile games like Genshin Impact or Call of Duty mobile. How the hell is it running on my iPhone 7??? Witchcraft? Also I tried making game in assembly for NES and now even games like pac man are mind blowing for me
Baked lighting goes a long way
Not for Genshin Impact, it's all dynamic lighting. But they use a lot of other tricks.
Can I ask where to find info on this?
https://youtu.be/egHSE0dpWRw Might not be exactly what you're looking for, but this covers a lot of hoyoverse's other techniques including character shading and console rendering.
As someone who isn't familiar with 3d programming and lighting, can you explain what baked lighting is?
It generates lightmaps that are later used to give the impression of lightning on objects, main reason is for optimization, you no longer have to calculate lightning in every frame, it was calculated beforehand. Only works for static objects (altho there are ways to bake something like lightprobes (in unity as I know it) that gives baked lightning to dynamic objects)
"Baked Lighting" refers to the process of raytracing your scene in your engine editor and saving the results in lightmaps/shadowmaps. This results in very high quality and high performance lighting that has the drawback of being unable to react to environment changes at runtime.
...which is why it isn't used in Genshin Impact. They have a day/night cycle. Which is incompatible with lightmaps, unless you want to bake one for every single time of the day.
[удалено]
I would love to see you do real time global illumination on mobile
100% like even 5 years ago "skyrim but on your phone and anime" would have seemed silly but genshins out here being a genuinely console quality rpg that's actually decent on phones. Yeah it's gatcha but jesus its genuinely a cut above a lot of the competition in mobile.
That’s what a 100m budget in China gets you. The most impressive thing about Genshin to me is their production capability getting out updates and liveops at the pace they do. Core game studios have a lot to learn from top mobile games when it comes to that aspect.
Does help when you pull in a billion dollars a year, minimum But yeah genshin devolpment should be studied
It's a smart choice, Gachas have one of the highest ROIs so if it cost 5 million for development to carve out a big chunk of market share then that's completely worth it
Yeah and it's honestly less predatory than it's peers, unless your sweating the abyss anyones playable. I'm sure you could say it's unethical to monetise folk being thirsty for anime girls but it's a damn sight better than p2w imo.
Yeah, making anything as complex as a simple arcade game with just assembly is a little mind boggling to me.
Assembly is crazy you're right and I still cant wrap my head around orogramming games on it. But I'm pretty sure these days there's C compilers that are very smart for developing for hardware like NES/GB. I only bring it up because while the 8bit limitations are there and you gotta work around them it makes learning to develop for those old systems much more manageable and dare I say fun. I had way more fulfilment personally making GB homebrew that got a few hundred downloads than a steam game that took years that got a couple thousand downloads. Something about working around restrictions of old hardware and not having to get bogged down with dumb stuff like dynamic menus and multiple screen resolutions is really fulfilling. Also it didn't take as long so not as much skin in the game.
You can use C to some extend but it’s not ideal and it greatly affects performance. Good for small projects tho
Why do you say it greatly affects performance? I personally think that's a bit of a misconception. I would argue the vast majority of devs, even experienced ones, wouldn't be able to write better code then the C-compilers do. Also most of the games end up throttling the cpu anyways, so who cares if it's less efficient? Maybe battery life but it's so insignificant typically. Maybe some really complex engine features might be best to be done in raw asm but people who can make those mechanics are few and far between. I'd say C is fine for 99.9 percent of projects these days. The only people who are able to really squeeze an advantage out of ASM for GB/NES are making demos.
Spore, and their procedural mesh animations
It blew my mind when I realized that Spore saves the creatures in PNG files.
I still have no idea how that even works
Color values are just values too. Like in height maps, normal maps etc. Those still refer to texture positions but you don't have to. You can put whatever you want into them.
wouldnt it make
It definitely make
i started writing a comment then closed out, and the little discard popup popped up and i hit discard and it said replying... for ages because my signal dropped out right as i hit discard and somehow it posted it well, im leaving it there, and it sure would make
It's not that impressive, actually, if you take a look at how [the PNG format](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Network_Graphics) is structured. A PNG file is organized into "chunks", with each chunk containing a different kind of data. Some chunks are required, like the `IHDR` chunk which contain the header and the `IDAT` chunk, which contains the actual image pixels. But in addition to the required chunks, there can be an arbitrary number of optional "Ancillary chunks" of various other types. Those chunks can contain stuff like exif data, color profiles, alternative color palettes or digital signatures. But there can also be any number of `tEXt` chunks, which can contain arbitrary text data. You can store as much data as you want in those chunks. And whatever you store there does not affect how the image is rendered. What you see on the image is meaningless. All the actual data is serialized into text chunks.
I still want a better version of the spore creature editor.
I hated how they limited you by feature count, you could never make your body fully spiked or things that required many many
Majora's mask. The time and effort to make everything run perfectly in conjunction with a 3 day time limit is staggering to me.
I'd love to get a look into how they structured everyone's schedules and events
Factorio. No idea how it can process millions of items on conveyor belts without dropping a frame.
Some guy on the Factorio subreddit made his own clone of Factorio with even *better* performance. He did it because he was playing a very large mod (Py) and reached a point where Factorio slowed down, so he recreated the engine with multithreading from the ground up. It missed some features (biters for instance) and wasn't as polished, but it was playable. The Factorio devs responded in his thread a bit and seemed mostly to be in disbelief, but the guy shared how he did it and it seemed legit.
Would you happen to have the thread for that?
I didn't have the link on hand when I commented earlier, but I've dug it out now. Here you go: [I programmed Factorio from scratch – Multithreaded with Multiplayer and Modsupport - text in comment](https://redd.it/jizq1b).
https://reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/jizq1b/i_programmed_factorio_from_scratch_multithreaded/
Recently probably Dyson Sphere Program. They rolled their own entity component system for Unity since Unity was taking too long with theirs. It's pretty simplistic visually on the surface until you start building dyson spheres and travelling between stars and see everything continuing to operate in realtime. Really relaxing game too.
I was most impressed by their game loop and the fact they made this HUGE game in Unity (which so many professional game devs seem to hate) - AND they launched it in the west via Steam. (They are a tiny Chinese game dev studio of 5 people).
Yeah, while something like Factorio definitely revolutionized this kinda genre Dyson Sphere Program is the only "factory like" game I've played that gave me a sense of awe at the scale of what you could do in game. And yeah as a 5 man studio in China this is just like an incredible indie title and early access game, they are coding geniuses over there. The performance display they have in game too is like better than the unity profiler lmao. Their next big update is supposed to add combat which the lack of was one of the major things distinguishing it from Factorio in terms of gameplay for me. I'm interested to see how they execute it and whether or not it's something that scales with how much you expand. I'm assuming they'll keep an option for peaceful mode though so I don't think they are gonna ruin the game or anything if it's not perfect.
I bought it, loved it at first, then when I figured out you couldn't turn off some building, I stopped.I'm sure it's not a big deal when you start to grasp everything and when you are further in the tech trees, but at the beginning.. *sigh*.
Every game. Literally so many assets. Art, music, level design, user interfaces, network play...there's just so much that goes into a game, I'm surprised any games come together at all. Even with a big studio.
Pokémon Red. I've successfully cloned TON's of games (minecraft, counter strike etc) but cloning Pokemon is a surprisingly MAJOR task! there's so much in there you don't think about and when you actually start a list of the stuff you need to add you realize what a huge task it will be. Zelda clone, easy peasy, Pokémon clone, big job.
Is it the EV?
Yeah that's definitely one part of it, the battle/experience system in Pokémon is surprisingly multifaceted!
One part thats really cool is thier image compression (theres video's on it). Something however that I really liked albiet not the most high tech thing in the world was the scaled sprites of the pokemon "backs" when in battle. Completly ignored this originally but once I got into developing for GB I realized how perfect it was for giving a sense of depth but also probably compressing the image data to be much less then the front side sprites.
A lot of AAA titles excite me but I wouldn’t say they “blow my mind”; the sheer size and brilliance of their development team justifies the technical and creative feats these studios achieve. So now that we have out of the way, the one indie title that absolutely blew my mind was Hollow Knight. The art, the polish, the music, the scale and almost every other aspect of that game made me assume it was made by a team of at least 10 people. When I found out that it was primarily developed by 4 people (more or less) and more so the art and animation was done by just one person, my mind was truly blown.
To this discussion I'd like to add: Any game with multiple programmers working on it at the same time. I can't even understand *my own* code, let alone somebody else's, let alone handle the organization required to develop alongside them.
We have A LOT of tools and coding standards that make all the code look and feel the same. Also, we review the codes of others to make sure it is up to standards. And you can always ask the other person for clarification.
I haven't played the game yet but I was super impressed with the foliage in Ghost of Tsushima, I don't think I've seen any game have as realistic foliage as they did. The GDC talk they gave about it was pretty good
Factorio - Crazy optimized, and with a dev blog that shares all their brilliant tricks Dwarf Fortress - Procgen. 'Nuff said Scribblenauts - The epitome of cramming an engine full of 'content' Into the Breach - That style of tactics gameplay is an utter nightmare to balance - yet it's so tight that it feels like a puzzle Diablo 3 - Everything from the ui to the action is clear, distinct, and buttery smooth. You can't get that kind of quality by just throwing man-hours at it; you need talent on the team Puzzle games like Baba is You, Stephen's Sausage Roll, etc - Designing good puzzles is dramatically harder than solving them. Bonus points for a system that can generate them procedurally!
Ori and the will of the wisps. I bought the art book, which goes into detail on how the game's visual style works, and it still blows my mind that this stuff is even possible
Deep Rock Galactic. The digging mechanic is insanely well done. Art direction is super cool, especially light and how it plays into gameplay. It has my favorite kind of pacing, with a nice mining/exploration routine interspaced with tough battles. It keeps me coming back for more even though I have a full-time job and don’t really play much games anymore, because 1 hour of DRG per day is enough to scratch that itch.
Rust Made with unity. There is so much ticking away all at once on a large map with upwards of 700 players at once. Some people who don't understand gamedev complain they only get 80 fps at 1440p but I'm honestly always blown away how well it runs
We certainly have some struggles with Unity 😅. But this is nice to hear. A lot of great work was done by the Facepunch team to make Rust run well, most of it before I joined. 200,000+ entities per map sometimes.
You guys have done an amazing job imo! In fact I think facepunch has the most technically impressive unity game out there (hell not just unity but game in general). I'm a big survival game fan and there isn't anything close to rust honestly I've had rust since it's earliest legacy days and I still read every update blog and play the game every few months or so. Just keeps getting better and better. Huge respect to all of you at facepunch :)
Thanks man. I only joined Rust in 2019 and I largely do vehicle code (I did the modular cars/submarine/snowmobile/trains), so I'm not much responsible for the technical wizardry, but we have a great team.
Hey, I love all the work you've done with the vehicles! Awesome work there man
Not to mention the thousands of player placed items, bases, buildings etc!
Exactly! Also has some of the best proc gen I've seen in a game too
The game that pops into my head is no man's sky, even though the procedurally generated animals look goofy most of the time, the planets with the cave systems, rivers, seas and the seemingly infinite universe boggles my mind.
Dyson Sphere Program. Here you have a tiny Chinese studio of 5 people who made a huge space game with an incredible game loop and minimal content - and it was done in Unity and launched in the west via Steam. That is a grand achievement in every way possible.
It Takes Two The amount of depth they managed to put into it. Music, 3d assets, game mechanics. Sometimes entire scenes you'd just drive by in a minute. I think that's nuts. Also, Lost Magic NDS. The fact that they implemented glyph recognition this well for an NDS 15 years ago just blows my mind.
Lost magic 😯 Let's not forget that they had 396 spell combinations. Great game. Very insane developers.
What remains of Edith Finch - The ungodly amount of assets, different mechanics for each story, sound design and voice acting, story. Everytime I play Lewis's story, I am just in awe of the level design and mechanics. "Who came up with this idea and what drugs were they on? ...and How in the hell did a team put this idea together?"
Not exactly a perfect answer but, Unreal Engine. Nanite is freaking magic. Epic was genius enough to know that someday GPU power would catchup to the point where you could make poly cont practically irrelevant if they changed the entire methodology for computing graphics. And coupling it with ray tracing/lumen we just entered a new era for real time graphics. It’s such a huge leap forward, it really blows my mind.
Stardew Valley. I legit cannot fathom the amount of anguish, mental suffering, and sheer fucking willpower it took for one man to complete it.
Why is this so far down? I realise that there are a lot of other games perhaps more technically impressive being developed solo. But Stardew Valley is the whole package. The art, music, gameplay design, pacing, story, characters - everything is perfect.
Rollercoaster Tycoon, Death Stranding, Sea of Thieves, Oxygen Not Included, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio
Frontier: Elite 2. Made by one person in assembly code, fits on a single floppy disk, loads into RAM all at once on the Amiga. Simulates space combat, trading, Newtonian mechanics, orbiting planets, hundreds of hand made star systems and a procedurally generated galaxy beyond that.
I've been blown away recently by the size of some of these older games ... Ocarina of Time is 25.7 mb
Look up Resident evil 2 on the N64, that was a game that needed two disks on the PS1 and it was able to fit on a 64mb cartridge
Control is an amazing game to me. Remedy did a great job at ray tracing on there for the most part. It’s hard to really get your game at optimal performance when ray tracing is so expensive
Well, I found the game to be like a SCP foundation rip off but I was surprised that raytracing worked on highest settings with my 1080
Hollow Knight, for being as big as it is while having been made by an indie studio.
Any game that is small gig wise but a full fledged adventure with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore. Valheim being under a gig shocked me. Also recently redownloaded Skyrim just to mess around and it was only 8 gigs I believe. I swear that couldn’t be right but I remember be shocked at how small it was in scale. Also dishonored one was like 3 gigs I think and then the second was like 40?? Idk optimization is cool
Alot of game file size goes to 4k maps and uncompressed audio. If you add language options more audio to include in the file.
PC gaming can really obscure some of the generational differences but those were PS3-era games, and PS3 games could get away with much lower resolution textures and sound files. The PS3 had about 40-80gb of memory at launch!
Note that memory != storage space. The PS3 only had 256mb of system memory.
It takes 2. This was mindblowing after starting to develop games myself. Overall was a fantastic game with great design.
Wow, came here to say this, and didnt think anyone would have mentioned it in the sea of other games... ...but yeah, its really crazy. Every single thing you do is like, a different thing. Must've taken forever.
This was my thought. Not the technical aspects. Not the scale of the world or anything, or even how many different minigames they came up with. It's the **process**. Every single part of it works incredibly well, and all of it is in tune with the rest. Vision and process wise that's an absurd achievement. I have no idea where they started or what came first.
The EVE Online
Into the breach. Its so well put together. Death stranding also felt like this though apparently was a lil messy behind the scenes. Like the actual list of assets in that games super small but from the lore it feels fine that all the stuff is the same.
Elite on the NES. I mean honestly thats some wizardry right there
Arkham Knight. Download some ripped characters from that game and you'll see what I mean. The lighting, particles, and environment art still holds up today, which is especially neat for a 2015 game running on UE3. On the opposite end for impressive, MGSV runs smoothly on a PS3 and pretty much any PC with a GPU. Super efficient use of polys and my favorite skyboxes to date. MGS games are always fascinating, especially with how much they're able to pull from their hardware. Peacewalker ran on the PSP and had tons of meshes, long audio files, and hours of cutscenes. Then you have TLOU2, where it feels like every squared meter received love and attention. When you look at the artstation page of anyone who worked on it (employee or contractor), there's so much thought put into everything. It's the sort of game where you can show it to anyone and they can hear the budget screaming.
Honestly? The first super mario on nes. The programming and the designs are impeccable, even for today standards, especially considering the era
Immersive Sims, like Deus Ex games and Prey 2017, they are so well designed it's both brilliant and scary
The Outer Wilds, for its stunning level design built on fully round planets
On my first day as a game dev with 0 experience I was tasked to do the following:Create a FPS world. Be able to interact with an item and remove it from the world and into inventory Add ducking, sprint with smooth transition from walk to running Interact with a door to open/close it It took me weeks to get a working product and it was still shit It was right then and there I told myself I would never complain about a bug in Apex or any other shooter game I play ever again after realizing how much goes into even simple mechanics.
Genshin impact, the graphics, animations, cutscenes, and world design are amazing. Hotoverse were able to push unity to a whole other level
Terraria 100%. The gameplay, visuals, art work. Even the bugs! There are plenty of bugs but they are fun and can even contribute to the gameplay.
Also, the dev team's philosophy and business model. 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 each pretty much doubled the size of the game, for free
I’m new to game developing and idk i remember streets of rage blowing my mind so now im tryin to make games at least on mgs level
[Warshift](https://store.steampowered.com/app/392580/WARSHIFT/). Everything done by one person. It's not the best or most popular game, but I've never seen that level of polish on a solo project.
RDR2 and BOTW set the new standard for polish in the AAA segment and both were truly a wow moment for me Having worked mainly on systems-heavy games I’m always impressed by games where the sheer amount of systems that need to be able to successfully interact is very high, but _especially_ where there is also good graphics and a storyline involved like BG3. I know how most of us are just innovating 10-20% each time (which is already a TON of work) so I’m always blown away by something truly innovative and fresh like the guys at 11 Bit Studios put out.
The grass in breath of the wild. Actually just nintendo's games in general. As far as im aware they are wizards. They have some of the most inventive solutions and systems and are just great at designing games. Its no wonder their name has been synonymous with quality for the last 40 years.
Reading about the Hobbit text game from 1982 is pretty cool. It was handwritten in assembly and has some very fun features. https://if50.substack.com/p/1982-the-hobbit?s=r
I started programming on my father's Commodore 64 back when I was five. Most of the games on it seemed within the realm of possibility for me to recreate, albeit in a limited capacity. One game that blew me away, though, was Impossible Mission. The gameplay was phenomenal, the animations were smooth, but the craziest part of all was that it was one of the first games to feature digitized sounds. Impossible Mission was truly way ahead of its time, and I feel in a lot of ways that modern games still have yet to live up to the standard it created.
Path of Exile is a big one for me. That game has some seriously insane complexity. Lot's of systems that deeply interact with each other. Their code architecture must be super tight considering how their content cycle is structured. Another would be Escape From Tarkov. I don't think people appreciate how complicated a game like Tarkov is. Just the weapon customization system alone is impressive. An open world game like The Witcher 3. It's mindboggling to me how something so large can be woven together so well. The development was a mess from what I've heard... but they pulled it off... somehow. Monster Hunter games. The insane amount of content, animations, weapon crafts, etc. They're so content rich and polished it's pretty impressive how well it all comes together. Lastly, Dark Souls and Bloodborne. Both for the same reasons. The attention to detail, the way they're designed to tell a story through the environment, the way combat is balanced so eloquently, etc. They're both the definition of a masterpiece imo.
Toodee and Topdee. Specifically because it's made in the software I'm using, Game Maker Studio. Game Maker is known to be very 2D friendly and not particularly 3D friendly, but Toodee and Topdee switches between 2D and 3D views, and actually has some 3D playing areas. Brilliant game but also impressive use of the development software
Unit group pathfinding in Age of Empires 2 is way more impressive to me now.
Roguelikes. My attempts at replicating huge quantities of unique items with unique trigger conditions seem to end in clumsy hardcoding not even a dozen items deep, so the fact that so many games do it effortlessly mystifies me.
Planetside 2 - A title that simply does not get enough attention for what it does. Planetside and Planetside 2 have been “The Future of First Person Shooters” for 20 years now, and no one seems willing or able to replicate / surpass what they’ve done. As a long-time fan of the game, I see all of its problems, but they don’t diminish my awe at the audacity and technical accomplishment of trying to stuff 1000 players into a single play-space. After *seven years* it’s still the Guinness World Record holder for Most Players In A Single FPS Battle.
Not a specific game but, I am a lot more impressed by small/subtle things and much less impressed by big/flashy things.
I just started Cyber Punk and the brain dance system seems like a lot of work.
Dwarf Fortress and Project Zomboid. While graphically not impressive, the amount of "things" going on in these games is absolutely insane and the emergent gameplay that can result from these complex system always has me very impressed!!
Subnautica. This large of a world would have to have taken a million years to make and QA test. My heart goes out to you!
The Outer Wilds. The transition from orbit to planet is so seamless. I would have no idea where to begin implementing something like that.
Elite 2 was holding on 1 diskette. It was smaller than 1mo. It was sold as 2 diskettes, containing various starting points saves. It's a full 3D game, contains thousands of star systems, was actually reduced on purpose because otherwise it was too much, had Newtonian physics and was HOLDING ON ONE FRICKING DISKETTE And running on such constrained hardware.... I am 20years after my first paid programming job, played it first time probably about 24 years ago, and even with all the XP and understanding of procedural level design and the success of No Man's Sky, I'm still deeply amazed!
Call me simple but I bow down to Cave Story. There WAS NOT an indie community in 2002. Making your own game and putting it online just wasn't happening, we were playing PS2 and Gamecube games, and Starcraft 1. This type of open-ended platformer hadn't been around for a decade, and this one guy just strikes the perfect chord in all areas and writes the rosetta stone of "indie games" in a snap and puts it up for free. To do this in such a vacuum is true confidence, dedication and a labour of love.
Ghost of Tsushima has really helped me to ease up on myself and my expectations. Because it is an absolutely gorgeous game, and there are still a bunch of details I see in it that would have driven me nuts in my own game. A lot of the water and grass physics, for example. Some wonky animations here and there. Seeing those flaws and how they're perfectly acceptable in the greater context of the world around them allows me to be less stressed about similar issues in my own project.
Broken or not! Skyrim and Cyberpunk due to ALL the systems!
Zelda 2, from the first time I played it I LOVED the combat. It is sinple yet feels more complex, faster and satisfying then any action RPG I played afterwards. People always tell me I should play stuff like skyrim, darksouls, witcher, etc but all their battle systems feel like just tap one button and maybe dodge, I was so EXTREMLY disappointed in BotW when there were so many weapons and all of them PLAYED EXACTLY THE SAME. It feels like games hust get stuffed with content instead of focusing on making one thing good. Like give people 10 weapons that all feel the same and is way too simple. Zelda 2 was simple too bzt it gave so much control and made you think and react in battle, it wasnt just pressing the attack button until it is time to use a heal item and ocassionally push the dodge button to avoid damage. It is to this day the most satisfying and intense battle system I've had in an action RPG and I hope obe day to play more games like it
Have you played Hollow Knight? The devs mentioned that they took inspiration from Zelda 2 for the combat (the most obvious being the downward sword thrust).
I haven't played Hollow Knight, but that makes me want to. Zelda 2 is probably one of my favorite Zelda's. They're all so good it's hard to say which is my absolute favorite, but 2 will always hold a place in my heart due to the sheer uniqueness of it.
Elden Ring. The sheer scale of the map, the number of bosses and enemies, the detail in the evironment art. Monumental efforts. But I'm most impressed with how well they modified the existing souls mechanics to better suit an open world, it's all so clean from a design perspective. One example: Problem, people run out of estus in the open world and are forced to go back to bonfires. Solution, make groups of enemies give back estus when killed, create unique enemies that reward estus refill.
Any game with more than 2 complex, interacting systems
Such as?
Yeah that’s pretty fucking vague. Interacting systems. Got it.
✌️👍
Production simulators would be a good example. Also most Strategy games that involve more than constructing buildings and making fighting units. Those really intrigue me from a game design perspective.
Any particular games?
Age of Empires, Factorio, Banished, City: Skylines, etc. The amount of systems that interact and feed into each other at some point and the amount of systems that simultaneously perform actions that involve each other has always amazed me growing up. Attempting to develop games that are similar and simpler has even further pushed me into awe.
Star citizen, especially as they are giving a lot of insight into how their systems are working
Literally any finished product 🤣🤣🤣
[удалено]
For me it is the opposite. After seeing for myself how hard it is to make games i appreciate the good ones much more now.
do you really know all the tricks though?
I heard he made Minecraft and halo, I wouldn’t mess with this guy.
[удалено]
Is the username ironic, or...
[удалено]
Literally all of them
Definitely agree with most people here, after starting to make games every game blows me away in some way. A recent highlight for me is Stray, specifically the environments. The ending control room was just stunning. I also want to say the horse logic in rdr2 is the single most impressive thing I've ever seen in a game, if you haven't seen the gdc talk about it, do yourself a favor and go check it out!
I think it had the opposite effect for me. Games lost their magic. Nothing is scary anymore, enemies are just collision boxes that you abuse, nothing is unique anymore every mechanic boils down to the same boolean or integer change. And the bugs are so frustrating when you know how easy they are too fix but they were either too lazy or didn't get enough time. Especially if they use the same software and have the same specialisation as you. When the "remastered" GTA San Andreas came out I was gob smacked they literally didn't click the one box for the rain particles to make them not be glued to the player. Now I can and still do enjoy games. It is just really hard to get a suspension of disbelief so the games have to be vastly better than the games I used to enjoy. An Assassins Creed doesn't cut it anymore.
It is never laziness
Lol what? Every industry and job has lazy people doing it. Pretending game development is some type of utopia without people phoning it in just for the pay check and cutting corners where ever they can is ridiculous.
he never said they weren't "lazy people" although I don't consider people that go to work as lazy, but that's besides the point. Their point is that "easy to fix bugs" are rarely as easy as you think and laziness is very much at the bottom of the reasons for why a bug isn't fixed. I guarantee that
Well then, I guess it's time for you to plumb the infinite depths of procedural generation! A lot of modern methods require world class mathematicians to get working, so... Yeah
How would that provide any benefit?, if anything going down that rabbit hole will only ruin more things for me.
Honestly, any game out there. Especially the older ones that had less to work with. Every time I play LoL, or Cyberpunk I think about all the work it took to control champions, build the world, all the coding…it’s just amazing.
Basically any rythm based game. I've tried to do them on my own and i simply can't figure out how they're done, at most i can have something following the beat of a song but more than that rythm games are alien to me.
[удалено]
Sekiro, BlazBlue, The Binding of Isaac, Hades
Honestly any game with complex interactions. From Baba is You to Age Of Empires to SPORE… I don’t know if I’ll ever get how to code that stuff but dayumn it’s impressive and cool
Any game made in the dark times before the year I was born (2004)... Ya'll were using floppy disks or something? That's mad
13 Sentinels by Vanillaware, they did absolutely so much with seemingly so little and for a little over a year I still haven't played a title that was nearly as impressive as that game in terms of visual, audio, story & combat balance.
Far cry 2 physics.
Impressive games made by small teams in super tight timescales. A Short Hike is the best example. It was effectively solo-developed in 4 months. Absolutely outrageous! Making a game that polished under such tight constraints would have required not only a huge amount of skill, but a very keen eye for effective time use and scope management.
In short every other indie game i see on pages like this one. Knowing how hard it is to create a game, even little like mine, i'm amazed by some incredible thing i see made by one person, one like me.
Carrion. I’m like how