RE: 4Chan:  No, his posting style is nothing like that.  He would also be ripped to utter shreds if he posted there.  It is not a friendly place you go to try to get people to agree with you.

RE: Unified game vision:

I basically agree with Dramolion.  Let me put what I think in my own words as well though:

If one guy has a vision that everyone agrees with, that can work.  It may be difficult for his vision to be distributed to everyone else efficiently, though, and he can become a bottleneck if there is too much feedback.

If there are a group of people who cooperate on a vision and then split up the work of coordinating that with the rest of the team, that can distribute the load better and be more efficient as a result.  I personally have the most experience with this method and have seen it succeed more often than not, so I currently prefer it.

If people have conflicting, strong opinions which are not resolved quickly, I've seen the process break down every time.

If nobody on the team has a good vision, the project also tends to fail.

If I had to chart it, there would be several dimensions in play:

• Who wants to contribute their vision?
• Can the vision be clearly communicated in an effective manner?
• How much do they want to contribute?
• How much conviction does a person have in that vision?
• How accepting is a person of other people's feedback or alternate ideas?

There are many possible ways for things to succeed, but also many possible ways for it to break down, or even in some cases, catastrophically fail.

In part, this is an aspect of team organization.  Larger teams are harder to organize effectively, and this may be true for the vision aspect as well.  Smaller teams can often be more efficient, and I could see this being true with unifying vision, since with fewer people there are fewer conflicting opinions.

On 9.2.2018 at 3:37 AM, Nypyren said:

In part, this is an aspect of team organization.  Larger teams are harder to organize effectively, and this may be true for the vision aspect as well.  Smaller teams can often be more efficient, and I could see this being true with unifying vision, since with fewer people there are fewer conflicting opinions.

Probably this makes or brakes large scale project: wheter the larger organization is broken into small enough teams, and these teams get enough autonomy, with a good organization behind it to unify the many smaller teams into the larger organization (which I guess is a producer role, which I would have totally forgotten hadn't hodgman pointed it out).

If largescale game development organizations are anything like large scale business organizations in the financial industry, I wonder why any publisher would even want to build a game that needs many hundred people working on the project. Must be inefficiency itself.

Maybe going a little bit offtopic, but to people working in the industry: is there any talk about games becoming too big? And not just from the "we need to charge more", "we need more investment" side...

Is somebody in the game industry asking themselves if they can keep escalating project size, and thus cost and team sizes, when smaller games seem to be doing fine? When probably, taking what Nypren said above into account, the escalating teamsizes are not only driving up cost and inefficiency, but might also limiting creativity by diluting the vision (given that the more people are involved, the more different visions have the potential to collide), making development more impersonal thus leading to people feeling less connected to the team and project (which, arguably, is probably the case to some extent anyway with professionals doing development for a wage, but we all know that some task feel more personal than others at work, and how much impact a single person has on it is a boig factor), and also making limiting the amount of risks taken (would rogue programmers today still be able to sneak in a whole new mode into one of the big AAA titles?)...

Is this the reason why some big publishers experimented with smaller Indie-like expieriences in the last few years (as opposed to simply trying to cash in on a hype in the industry which I thought to be the case)?

On 2/7/2018 at 5:35 PM, jbadams said:

As a term, "vision" brings to mind images of a brilliant artist forming the perfect idea and bringing it to life.

I think I agree with swiftcoder that this isn't necessarily accurate to what happens with a great game; unless the game is very simple, it's likely the final product will deviate from the original idea.

 

I think what we're really trying to capture with talk of a unified vision is consistency in the final product.

For example, I recall Daniel Cool [Spry Fox] talking about designing Realm of The Mad God to be cooperative, with all the game systems designed to support that: everyone participating in a fight got XP, players buffed other players in proximity, etc.  However, they also included some sort of Rogue player class that was designed around playing solo, at it turned out these players were disruptive to the cooperative nature of the game. They were inconsistent with the vision for the rest of the game.

I think it was Braids' creator that once said 'there is an extent to which it would be true to say that the game designed itself'.

this is a common trend among masterpiece indie games from what I can tell, and it makes sense to me. You have an original vision, and if your 'Game Pillars' are strong, then the rest of the game follows suite (decisions get made based on the pillars, and were not necessarily pre-designed).

The end product differs greatly from the original vision, but the pillars remain largely untouched.