Ingenious Secrets and Tricks of Game Developers

False models of objects and characters.

There are secrets that can be characterized by the expression: know less, sleep better. The developers justly hope that the average player will not dig into the game code or play with the camera perspective. So they go to various tricks to make the game work or simply reduce their own workload. The best example of this is the protagonist model in Bioshock 2.

Even more creativity was noticed by Bethesda during the development of The Broken Steel add-on for Fallout 3. If you have already visited the add-on, you probably remember the spectacular episode with train ride. It looked really good, and in spite of the fact that the game engine doesn’t have any vehicles. The developers did an ingenious thing – they just attached a model of a train to the character’s head, added some blue duct tape, then set the route of the character’s movement along the rails and voila, everything works! To repeat the classics: It Just Works.

Dynamic Level of Difficulty

The greatest minds among the game developers for decades have been wrestling with the eternal question: how to make the player stay longer at the screen? After all, it is necessary to throw him and the challange, so he did not fall asleep, but not to make the game too difficult, so he tearfully did not send the computer game in the trash. To solve the problem came up with a dynamic difficulty level, which automatically adjusts to the player’s skill. But even here the developers have a different approach.

For example, you can recall the first Far Cry, in which Kraytech has not invented the costume and as if they were telling the player, go and kill dozens of soldiers alone, there won’t be any problems. And the problems will really be to a minimum, thanks to the adaptive artificial intelligence. It calculates the number of player’s deaths and can lower its own marksmanship if necessary. God, that’s noble. Wait, not really, though. If you feel you’re too good to play, the artificial intelligence will take this into account and give you an aiming headshot from a hundred yards away.

Low big daddy in Bioshock

More than once I’ve heard the original Bioshock ranked as a game of the horror genre. And there are at least 2 reasons for that: the dark atmosphere of the utopian city of Delight hidden under the water, and the sense of loneliness where you are alone with the Splicers and with even more terrible secrets that every square meter of the underwater city holds. But I confess that the thing that scared me the most was the appearance of the big daddy.

Whenever I saw Big Daddy, with his horse health levels, jet speed, and deadly weapons, the first thing I did was turn my back on him and try to find cover. And as it turned out, this was the right tactic, since game designer Ken Levine programmed the big daddies so that their speed would decrease when they were out of the player’s line of sight. Another legitimate cheat, but in the case of the big daddy, it was a very, very good decision on the part of the developers.

Last Help

Surely you’ve had many occasions in games when your health level was on the brink, the screen was flooded with blood, but even despite the hail of enemy hits you still came out victorious. For such victories out of the last effort if you want to thank someone, it is only yourself and your god-like skill at the level of the best cyber-sportsmen. Maybe you play really well, but at the same time it is worth saying a few nice words to the developers, who in 24 on 7 mode take care of their players and reduce their damage from enemy attacks at critical health.

The creators of the shooter DOOM, Bioshock and Assassins Creed series were seen in a similar trick. And this list is not complete, because almost all the developers are of the opinion that gamers don’t need excessive hardcore and that the games should always entertain, and this is contributed by the decisions of the developers, albeit often at the expense of common sense.

But the creators of Shadow of Mordor were the ones who really stood out among the developers. They decided that gamers were too often pitied in other games and added a last resort feature for Uruk captains and chiefs. If you had problems with them, thank the developers, that intentionally lowers the damage from your attacks to prolong the combat and to squeeze the adrenaline out of the players.

The Visibility Pyramid Cutoff

I confess that before I bought the PlayStation 4 I was expecting to see games for the Japanese console with the familiar soapiness and drakefaces of the Peka Boyars. But reality has a way of surprising me: incredibly, on outdated hardware with a measly 1 and 8 terraflops we can see stunningly beautiful games in the open world. We can remember at least Horizon Zero Dawn or the recent Red Dead Redemption 2. But we should thank for high-polygonal landscapes with a technology called frustrum kalling or in Russian: “cut-off by the visibility pyramid”.

It is used everywhere in open-world games and allows you to reduce the load on the CPU and graphics card by rendering a detailed image only within the player’s field of view. But we have to admit that this technology is not always up to the task, and in some cases the developers deliberately take away the player’s ability to control the camera. For example, in RDR2 after a quick movement on the train the camera is frozen for a few seconds to imperceptibly load the surrounding world. Still, sometimes 5 years old outdated hardware does not forget to remind yourself.

Coyote time in platformers.

I am one hundred percent sure that the platformer genre is the main sponsor of mental disorders among gamers. Especially when you think back to the absolutely ruthless first games in the Mario series or the Crash Bandicoot trilogy. But time goes on, hardcore began to go out of fashion and developers began to look for ways to simplify gamer’s life. One of the most famous tricks is the so-called coyote time. With it the player like cartoon coyote Willie can run a few millimeters through the air and then make a saving jump. Tiny cheat and at the same time a real salvation in games, where the slightest mistake can lead to a restart of the level.

Developers use in platformers another trick to save the gamer’s nerve cells and create a winning emotion in the style of “Phew, I dodged it at the last moment!”. The essence of the following: the zone of defeat for the opponents is slightly smaller than their actual size. That is, there is a probability that the player will survive if he touches some turtle from Mario not with his whole body, but just casually touches it on the contour.

Hollywood-blind opponents

American blockbusters clearly prove that if another Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie hand in hand appears on the screen, they begin to miss on purpose when shooting, so as not to God forbid not to affect the main characters. A similar technique was used by Naughty Dog in the Uncharted series to create spectacular firefights and as an invisible aid to the player. Enemies will purposefully shoot past Drake within the first two seconds after he has left cover.

The creators of Red Faction Guerrilla went even further in terms of blind enemies. The enemies in this game you just want to feel sorry for. Contrary to the laws of logic, their shooting accuracy decreases depending on the distance to the player. The closer the main character is, the less accurate he is. Stupid? Yes. But another sacrifice of common sense is just right for a game where the pickaxe for short-range combat is the main weapon.

Game development is somewhat of a mastery of illusion, and the secrets listed above are far from the craziest ways developers deceive players. But should we complain if absurd solutions make games better in the long run?