Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail posed a fun question on Twitter this morning: “What is your favorite or most surprising “hack” solution to a game development problem you’ve personally used or implemented?”
As you might expect, the resulting answers make for a fun and enlightening read. Game makers from around the industry jumped into the thread to share their own improvised solutions, each of which shed a bit more light on how game industry projects survive the journey from concept to ship.
For example, veteran game coder Renaud Bédard jumped in to explain that Polytron’s Fez (which he helped program) generates a day/night cycle by slowly transitioning the sky through samples from a very small texture with a symmetrical spectrum from black (with alpha transparency so stars shine through) to bright blue.
And later in the thread, Ubisoft Montreal’s Gavin Young explains that while patching a “New Game+” mode into Assassin’s Creed: Origins after launch, he tried to ensure that New Game+ players would keep that status if they loaded their save game on an older version of the game by making the NG+ “token” an inventory item that was never used in the game but was in the baseline 1.0 version.
The full thread is an enjoyable read (we’ve taken the liberty of embedding a portion below) and makes a great addition to the ever-growing library of game dev trick tell-alls available online.