What is a Skybox?

Most video games benefit from having a sky to increase a feeling of immersion and most of those skies are in the form of a box, a skybox. The way the sky looks can greatly alter the feeling of a game from bright and happy to cold and gloomy. Just picture Katamari Damacy with overcast or Dear Esther during golden hour – it would change the feeling of the entire game.

The skybox is essentially anything beyond the immediate environment that the player will see: it can include the horizon, the sky, and even the ground.

Over at GamesRadar they have a very subjective take on what they consider to be the best skyboxes in video games. I just like the fact that skyboxes are being evaluated in this way.

The design of the skybox can literally change the atmosphere of the game. It can quickly establish if the player is on a different planet like in Mass Effect or if magic is twirling in the air.

Most skyboxes are done in 2D, and can be made realitevly easily in your image editing software of choice. Unity3D has a good writeup on how to create a skybox and use it in their engine. It is possible to make 3D skyboxes and Valve has implemented such a feature in their engine, on their developer wiki you can see how they work and how to make a 3D skybox.



March 28th, 2013 by Adam

Insight into Games and Business from Gabe Newell

Gabe Newell of Valve fame is one wise fellow – particularly when it comes to his day job: making games and running one of the best companies out there. Recently I’ve listened to a few interviews with him about nearly everything.

In a talk he gave to The LBJ School he reveals Valve does not have QA department but they do a ton of play testing. I also love how hat selling in TF2 was happening so quickly that it broke PayPal!

In December he sat down not once but twice (the second time with coworkers) with The Nerdist. Both interviews are worth listening to and can be found here.

The Valve handbook for new employees is referenced a bit in the Nerdist interviews and is worth looking through (PDF).

EDIT:
Here’s what Gabe said at the DCIE Summit:



February 2nd, 2013 by Adam

Must Read: The Verge Interviews Gabe Newell

Valve CEO Gabe Newell was interviewed by The verge and it’s an excellent read. Gabe discuss the Steam Box gaming console/computer that Valve is making (the article has pictures of prototypes) and how they don’t want to replicate what’s already out there.

Controllers have their advantages and their disadvantages it looks like at Valve they have spent a lot of time thinking about how to best use a controller. This is great as they are even thinking of using biometric and gaze tracking to help make games better. They are looking beyond the gimmick:

I think you’ll see controllers coming from us that use a lot of biometric data. Maybe the motion stuff is just failure of imagination on our part, but we’re a lot more excited about biometrics as an input method. Motion just seems to be a way of [thinking] of your body as a set of communication channels. Your hands, and your wrist muscles, and your fingers are actually your highest bandwidth — so to trying to talk to a game with your arms is essentially saying “oh we’re gonna stop using ethernet and go back to 300 baud dial-up.” Maybe there are other ways to think of that. There’s more engagement when you’re using larger skeletal muscles, but whenever we go down [that path] we sort of come away unconvinced. Biometrics on the other hand is essentially adding more communication bandwidth between the game and the person playing it, especially in ways the player isn’t necessarily conscious of. Biometrics gives us more visibility. Also, gaze tracking. we think gaze tracking is gonna turn out to be super important.

He also offers some design decisions about Half-Life and Valve’s overall appoach to making games that are fun to play:

One of the things that started to drive me crazy in video games is that when I walk into a room, I’m covered with the gore and ichor of a thousand creatures that I have slayed, and the monster in there reacts to me exactly the same. So in Half-Life there’s this whole progression depending upon what you do and how scary you are [to enemies]. Eventually they start running away from you, they start talking about you, and that was just another example of having the world respond to you rather than the world kind of being autistic and ignoring everything you’ve done. So then we did Counter-Strike, [and found] the rule we used for Half-Life doesn’t work in a multiplayer game. We got all this weird data, like you put riot shields in and player numbers go up. Then you take riot shields out and player numbers go up. Fuck! It’s supposed to go the opposite [direction], right? So we had to come up with a different way.

You really should read the full interview.



January 9th, 2013 by Adam

Economics in Video Games

“For all intents and purposes, this is an economy that has activity equal to a small country in real life,” Guðmundsson says. “There’s nothing ‘virtual’ about this world.”

A recent article in the Washington Post on economics in video games is a great read. The way economists and video game makers can work together is fascinating. It’s a perfect cycle from the digital into the physical as economists can learn from game worlds while game makers can learn from economists. The thing is, as the author points out, the two groups of people don’t always get along.

Some companies like EVE, Valve, and ArenaNet have already hired economists as these companies have realised the importance of in-game economies. I’m often shocked when I see things like how smaller companies can really mess up their business plan because they don’t know basic economic theory (although the Wired article is on freemium, you get the idea).

In Eve Online, Guðmundsson oversees an economy that can fluctuate wildly — he says it expanded 42 percent between February 2011 and February 2012, then contracted 15 percent by the summer. His team will periodically have to address imbalances in the money supply. For instance, they can curb inflation by introducing a new type of weapon, say, to absorb virtual currency — not unlike the way a central bank might sell bonds to shrink the money supply. (In theory, Eve Online’s currency has real-world value — the highest-level spaceships, the Titans, are worth the equivalent of $5,000 to $8,000.)
…
“We’ve even seen large alliances trying to manipulate aspects of the market to control the supply and affect prices,” Guðmundsson says. “It’s a lot like OPEC.”

One of the great things is that the in the digital world a lot more can be recorded than in the physical world. As a result, economists can perform more detailed analysis to help our understanding of both virtual and physical economies.

“In real life, if you want to know what’s happening with car sales, you might call up a handful of car dealerships and ask what their sales are like this month,” says Dmitri Williams, a researcher at the University of Southern California. “In a virtual world, you just know everything. There’s no sampling, there’s no error. It’s perfect information.”

The article also mentions at the work Yanis Varoufakis is doing at Valve, lucky for us he keeps a good blog on the economies Valve is currently running.



October 17th, 2012 by Adam

Valve Announces Steam Greenlight

Fresh on the heels of releasing Filmmaker, Valve has announced a new way for independently released games to get on Steam. Greenlight is a fundamentally new approach for how games get on Steam based on how much the community wants the game to be released on the distribution service.

How does this differ from other store’s submission processes?
The prime difference is the size of the team that gets to decide what gets released. For many stores, there is a team that reviews entries and decides what gets past the gates. We’re approaching this from a different angle: The community should be deciding what gets released. After all, it’s the community that will ultimately be the ones deciding which release they spend their money on.

Basically, once Steam OK’s the game from a technical standpoint it’s up to the game to get itself green lit by Steam users at large. The idea is to get more diverse games on Steam faster, and more openly.

This could mean that developers will have to spend more time promoting their game (which would likely be still in development) instead of making the game. Overall, this new approach makes me worried that only teams with vast social reach will succeed on team.

Ironically, couldn’t that actually increase the barrier to entry for startup studios?



July 10th, 2012 by Adam
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