this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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EDIT: Fake screenshot about some facts from the Palworld development, very loosely based on a really interesting blog post from the dev that's linked in the post body. (programming.dev)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Mikina to c/gamedev
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UPDATE: So, apparently it's mostly fake, taken from this article [translation] (where they even mention some kind of VCS).

However, even though it's not as absurd, it's a great read and a pretty wholesome story, so I recommend reading the article instead. And I'm even more convinced that this studio really does not deserve any of the hate they are getting.

Here is my summary of some of the interesting points from the article:

PocketPair started as a three man studio, passionate about game development, that couldn't find an investor for their previous games even though they've had really fleshed out prototypes, to the point where they just said "Game business sucks, we'll make it and release it on our own terms", and started working on games without any investor.

They couldn't hire professionals due to budget constraints. The guy responsible for the animations was a random 20-yo guy they found on Twitter, where he was posting his gun reload animations he self-learned to do and was doing for fun, while working as a store clerk few cities over.

They had no prior game development experience, and the first senior engineer, and first member of the team who actually was a professional game developer, was someone who ranomly contacted them due to liking Craftopia. But he didn't have experience with Unity, only Unreal, so they just said mid-development "Ok, we'll just throw away all we have so far, and we'll switch to Unreal - if you're willing to be a lead engineer, and will teach us Unreal from scratch as we go."

They had no budget. They literally said "Figuring out budget is too much additional work, and we want to focus on our game. Our budget plan is "as long as our account isn't zero, and if it reaches zero, we can always just borrow more money, so we don't need a budget".

For major part of the development, they had no idea you can rig models and share animations between them, and were doing everything manually for each of the model, until someone new came to the team and said "Hey, you know there's an easier way??"

It's a miracle this game even exists as it is, and the developer team sound like someone really passionate about what they are doing, even against all the odds.

This game is definitely not some kind of cheap cash-grab, trying to milk money by copying someone else's IP, and they really don't deserve all the hate they are receiving for it.

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I think the lesson is not that bucket-o-flash-drives is a better way; I think the lesson is that you can make a not-ideal process work completely fine if you just keep focused on the main point. People made successful software way before version control existed. It just makes it easier but that's all it does.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Romero talked about how they would just pass floppy disk to each other. It's just bigger disks now.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Linux was written up to about version 2.2 or 2.4 or thereabouts with no version control, just diff and patch and email. They invented git because at a certain point they wanted automated tools to make easier and more automated their way of working (which none of the suitable VCSs of the time were capable of), but it wasn't like they couldn't do the job until the tools existed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Emailing patches is shockingly similar to git tho

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago

Exactly. They did what we all wish we could do, they took a process that worked for them and automated it.

Thankfully they shared it with the world, and it works for most of us, too.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Project zomboid had to start again after flat got burgled and laptop gone. Offsite backups are key for theft and fire. Version control is the easiest and cheapest way.

Someone always knows someone that drinks, smokes and eats crap and lives until mid 90s. Doesn't mean it's good health advice.

Beware anecdotal evidence.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Madness, if you ever have multiple devs touching the same files, this will lead to nightmare scenarios integrating code.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As someone who inevitably gets thrown into the "devops" side and the like:

The vast majority of developers can't integrate code or even resolve a merge conflict (and god help you if someone convinced the team to do rebasing instead...). They just stop working and then whine three weeks later during a standup that progress is halted on their deliverables. And, because of the stupidity of "devops" as a job role, there is an increasing culture that development should not have to worry about this kind of stuff.

So good project management becomes splitting up files to minimize the chance for conflicts and spreading tasks out to minimize the times people will be in the same file, let alone function. And if they do? Then you do whatever the latest buzz word is for "peer programming".

[–] Tamo240 15 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I will never understand the idea that rebasing inherently causes problems. Rebasing gives a much cleaner history and reduces the number or commits with multiple parents, making it approximate a simple tree rather than a more complex graph.

The simple rule is branches that only you work on can be rebased, shared branches must be merged.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I've never understood the complaints about rebasing. Just make sure you merge if it is complicated

Jokes aside: It honestly isn't THAT much worse. But if you don't "understand" git, you can fuck up your history and it is a real mess to recover from a "failed but technically not" rebase. Whereas merges just result in a shitfest of a history but everything gets reconciled.

Although, a bit of a rant: I do still think rebasing is fundamentally "bad" for long term debugging. As a simple example, let's say that you changed a function signature on branch A and merged it in. Branch B uses that function and started before A. After a rebase, there is no indication that those previous commits would not have worked or were counting on a different signature.

Generally speaking, you can avoid this so long as you always add a merge commit to go with the pull requests (or futz around a bit to identify the known good commits). You assume that those are the only valid commits and move from there. But when you are debugging a bug that silently got added two years ago and think you are clever because you know how git bisect works? You suddenly have a lot of commits that used to work but don't anymore.

It doesn't come up often (especially since so many workflows these days are "throw out the old code and redo it, but right this time") but you only need to run into that mess once or twice to no longer care about how clean your history is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This feels like a problem I just had a complex enough code base to worry about. I like rebasing because it feels more like I am committing when I intended, but if the deltas were too great it would be a huge issue.

The small more frequent changes not solve this too?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

If your project/code base suits itself well to being nothing but small feature branches, sure.

But reality is that you are going to have the "long living feature" branches where it doesn't really make sense to merge any of the code in until "it all works"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The “long lived feature branch” approach is kind of the entire problem that leads to merge hell though. Having long lived branches is at odds with the rebase centric style and that’s intentional. Rebasing incentivises keeping branches small and getting stuff into main as often as possible. Basically it’s about using git in a “trunk” style.

The next question is “what if I don’t want this code to go live yet” to which the usual answer is “feature toggles”

People get very dogmatic about this stuff haha. I’ve worked in teams that were very hype about using rebasing and teams that could easily handle long lived feature branches. The difference is the latter kind of team weren’t all trying to edit the same files at the same time. Hmm. So yeah I guess what works best is situational!

EDIT: I just realised this is a gamedev community whereas the above comment is based on my experience in the “enterprise business factory” dev world. Might be a bit different over here, not sure!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Pure ideologies work until you have tight deliverables. And "feature toggles" become problematic if you need to do a "release" and don't want to have undocumented (possibly unfinished) functionality that is one malformed configuration file away.

At the end of the day, it is about balancing "clean" development with acknowledging thjat you are going to need to cut corners. Generally speaking, "open source" projects can get away with a strong focus on ideology because they don't have deliverables that can mean the difference between being rockstars and being this week's tech layoffs.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Agreed.. also, working with nested ancient feature toggle hell made me miss giant merge PRs haha.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Where you are... I've never seen an example of this yet in the UK.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

But it has guns.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I think they’ll get over their nightmare with the hundreds of millions of dollars they’ve made so far lol

[–] asyncrosaurus 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Our last major college project that spanned multiple semesters was worked on by 5 devs all editing the same source files over Dropbox. The school had servers for svn, but no one knew how to do source control. It was exactly the type of shitshow you would expect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

You know what they say, if it's stupid but it works...

[–] Mikina 13 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I love this so much :D That reads like something I'd expect from ZA/UM, but it also thankfully alleviates most of the major issues I had with the game, which I've already talked about here on Lemmy. I really liked the game, but there was a lot of red flags point to it being just a quick corporate cash grab, where they decided to basically re-skin heir previous game based on with as low effort as possible, to quickly sell it and cash in on the Pokemon thing. It just smelled with corporate greed, and that they did not really cared about the game too much.

But assuming this screenshot is true, I'd say that it's clear that it wasn't development driven and pushed by corporate greed, but really just a few of guys trying their best.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago

As a craftopia player palworld definitely feels like a bit of a reskin, but one that gives players a lot of what they wanted (mainly being able to explore freely in multiplayer mode which is severely limited in craftopia).

One element palworld leaves out is being able to create your own automated processes (like automating a farm with a series of conveyer belts, chests, and various machines). They say they’re still planning to develop craftopia so I am pretty excited to get the elegance of the pal world pets (which craftopia had too, but not as shiny) and the fun of automating your own homestead instead of setting up prefab stations.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I guess I'm a little confused, because wasn't their previous game Craftopia? I'm fairly certain that game sold relatively well for an indie game, at least 25,000+ copies if you base it off the All Time Peak Players on Steam Charts. For a small team of just a few people, that's a decent chunk of money (I think it sold at $30 around launch, so roughly $750k for 25k copies sold before Steam takes its cut). Craftopia came out in 2020, so they're saying they've learned virtually nothing in 4 years, not counting the dev time Craftopia had?

I enjoy Palworld, I think it's a fun game that has a lot of potential, but I'm not sure I'm fully buying into some of these responses.

As a side note, a lot of Craftopia people complain they abandoned that game, but looking on Steam it shows several recent updates across the last year, with one even coming out just yesterday and a huge one in November 2023 and a new roadmap posted in December 2023. So, I'm not really sure where those players are coming from regarding that.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to what Palworld grows into, as I really do think they have something rather special here. It's got a lot of rough edges and a couple core design problems, but those can eventually be addressed with some hard work. Hopefully they use the massive cash influx they've achieved with their recent success and hire some competent, seasoned developers to come in and get their shit in order. I'm not holding my breath too much, though (remember when we thought Valheim devs would spend their game success lottery money to massively boost that game's content and polish?).

[–] Mikina 3 points 11 months ago

It turns out that most info from the screenshot is false, there's a better article that's written by the actual developer linked in the updated post.

He did talk about them not having a budget plan, which was a fairly long part of the article, but can be summed up like this:.

Figuring out budget is too much additional work, and we want to focus on our game. Our budget plan is “as long as our account isn’t zero, and if it reaches zero, we can always just borrow more money, so we don’t need a budget

He also further down mentioned actual numbers of how much went into the development:

Judging from Craftopia's sales, it's [the budget] probably around 1 billion yen... Because all those sales are gone.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Agreed on both points - I am skeptical they are such "amateurs", and it also doesn't necessarily seem like a cash grab considering how Craftopia is faring. It does seem like there's way too much buzz currently going on however, it's hard to say what is true or what is just an outright lie... hoping to learn more and see how this progresses in a few months. Also hoping they stay dedicated to improving palworld more than the valheim devs did (meaning barely anything, thank god for the modding community there doing what little they can to keep the game alive).

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Next big game: Digimon, but with guns

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

They already have guns, looking at you Gundramon

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

They didn't already do that? 🤔 Pretty sure I remember a digimon that was like a little cowboy with revolvers.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

5M copies sold, anyone who learns git is a schmuck!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I'm a DevOps person by trade, and I have been playing a lot of Palworld. This is my worst nightmare and I have no idea how any team bigger than one person could have done anything without basic source control. Guess it just goes to show that nobody cares about the details as long as you ship.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

My realisation long ago is that the games industry just doesn't work like the rest of the software engineering industry. The most cowboy engineer you've ever worked with is a voice of reason in the game dev industry.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Games industry is mostly binary files. Especially in Unreal. Perforce is popular from what I've heard from those in the field.

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[–] Mikina 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

It turned out it's not true, they did use VCS. However, they mention a pretty horrifying story about VCS nonetheless.

They were a team without prior or professional gamedev experience, and they were using git. The first senior engineer, and first member of the team who actually was a professional game developer, was someone who ranomly contacted them due to liking Craftopia. But he didn't have experience with Unity, only Unreal, so they just said mid-development "Ok, we'll just throw away all we have so far, and we'll switch to Unreal - if you're willing to be a lead engineer, and will teach us Unreal from scratch as we go."

And then, they also mention this:

Surprisingly, [the new engineer] had no experience using the version control system git.

According to him, Perforce seems to be a better match for Unreal Engine.

But Perforce is too expensive. This is not the amount that a company like us would pay.

If you can't use Perforce, you should at least use svn instead of git.

Fully trusting his words, I also migrated my version control system from git to svn.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

God, I need a drink or two after reading that. Just chaos.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

This is probably an epic troll by the devs.

[–] NostraDavid 6 points 11 months ago

I don't have a creative vision. I just want to make a game that people like

Unironically a good take.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is this a dev? Theyre sayin a lot of "they" and not "we"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

They're translating from an interview that was being given in Japanese.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

What does VCS stand for in this case?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Version Control System

At this point: That should be a synonym for "git" unless you REALLY have a good reason not to.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (3 children)

You underestimate how many companies with legacy code still run Subversion. Help.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

Even legacy codebases get migrated easy. SVN etc. belongs in a museum. Best red flag for dead end dev job.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

I got stuck organizing the migration at multiple companies. Believe me, I know how many people still use SVN (and CVS...)

And, in some cases, that is your "good reason not to" because of the disruption to development and needing to retrain devs. But it is also a migration that is well worth doing, if only because of how good Gitlab is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You dont typically use git for VC on game files, git sucks a lot for binary files as it tries to diff them. You can use it for your codebase though.

You usually use SVN for game files like models, sounds, etc etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Version Control System - something like Git, Subversion, Unity Teams' VCS, etc.

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