"None of this is even getting into handling the doors and what happens when those open and close and trap the player or other objects in the doorway." Even then, the player is used to having things respond nearly instantly, so there's a good chance they'll get frustrated and call the thing broken. Suddenly you have to feed back that the elevator is busy. Now let's say you decide to get off on the second floor, then jump down and hit the call button again. "Then, if the elevator can take you to multiple floors, you have to feed back when an elevator is 'busy' or allow it to queue up floors to stop on. Well, how then do they avoid looking dumb as soon as you cross the threshold inside the elevator? They'll either stand there, or need some sort of custom behavior. "So let's say you try to solve the AI issue by excluding them from elevators. It's an invitation to make your enemies or companions look dumb, for physics objects to go flying, or for quest items to get stuck. By calling the elevator, you open the opportunity for the player, objects, or AI to wander underneath it and get squished or trapped. "First off, you have to summon via a button or whatever. Bill Gardner, creative director of The Deep End Games and lead level designer on BioShock and BioShock Infinite, explained the elevator problem as follows: Multiple developers told me about the frustrations of elevators, whether they're taking players up a single floor in a building or serving as pseudo-loading screens between two major game areas.
Getting from place to placeĪs the original topic of game development headaches focused on doors, it made sense that many of the developers I spoke to had issues with other methods used to connect a person from one place to another.įor instance, elevators. So if you've ever wondered why the maker of your favorite game didn't simply fix one of the myriad issues developers mentioned below, here's why those seemingly simple problems are hardly simple at all. Many noted that they’ve received angry player feedback about the topics they mentioned, with their audiences asking, "Why don't you just do X?" The answer is, almost always: because it's really, really hard. Those I spoke to described challenges in making games look and sound good, storytelling, movement and interaction with objects, menus, save systems, multiplayer, and all sorts of intricacies of design that are so rarely discussed outside of studios themselves. The pool of responses similarly included a number of varied problems, but also a number of similar issues popping up among many projects. A few months ago, I asked developers across the industry the question, "What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for game developers to make?" I received nearly 100 responses representing a wide breadth of industry experience, ranging from solo developers to those who had tackled issues within teams of hundreds.
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