I’ve had a clear vision, early on in my career. There wasn’t anything that I wanted to do aside from game development. Around my senior year in my art school, I wanted to make video games.  I was obsessed with playing video games at the time and I wanted to make a career out of it. 22+ years later, the passion never faded.

People that yearn to break into the game industry quickly find themselves disappointed. Whether it’s company politics, or the type of work they’re tasked with, very rarely are things logical or rational. If you can develop the mental strength to withstand the weird and the unexpected, and brace yourself for some anguish, you’ll survive.

Almost everyone in the industry overlooks the art of technical troubleshooting. This is probably the most valuable skill that you can have. Game development roughly consists of 40% asset creation and 60% troubleshooting/fixing things. If you can minimize your frustration and hone your troubleshooting skills, you’ll have a one-up against everyone else. 

Polishing is the most overrated skill. There are numerous artists and engineers who can polish game art and gameplay-relevant assets and mechanics, but the most crucial steps in game development is to put conceptual elements into motion and succeed. When doing so, one does not have to polish the items in question. For example, if we were to create a five-step fighting combo move for a character, we wouldn’t need refined animations at the start. We could first create animation assets that are at ‘rough’ stages and have them be incorporated into the game engine to obtain the general sense of the ‘feel’ and the timing.

There isn’t much of a comparison. Some of the AAA titles have a near-unlimited budget with a very generous time frame. FASTER did not have the luxury of hiring a dream-team consisting of all supervisor-level creatives, nor did we have abundant monetary resources that allowed for multiple time extensions. Many members of our team really had to step up their game (pardon the pun) to get FASTER finished. 

All creative blocks are temporary. There are more than enough resources out there to solve any kind of problem–you just have to push through it. 

Having the right talent is paramount. It’s an absolute prerequisite in creating a great game.

Having a team with a solid threshold for stress and willingness to troubleshoot, problem solve, and push through the rough trenches is what got us to the finish line. (No pun intended. I think. – ed.)

Of course hedonism has many forms, and Khorics tried it all before settling on play. Play offers a distraction from immortality because play can be structured to mirror what Khorics miss most of all: the ability to permanently die. Play offers a discrete beginning, middle, and end.

Play used to be what made videogames so much fun.  Death used to matter in videogames but when games became what they are now, death didn’t matter. Endless lives, endless save points, endless grinding–we players became immortal. And immortality became our curse, just like the Khorics.

So play is the only thing that keeps Khorics sane and they build their existence around it. The city of Khora is their playground. We hope it becomes yours.

Pompeii had the Amphitheater, Rome had the Coliseum, London has the O2, Ahmedabad has the Motera Stadium, and Khora has the Arena Perilous.

Every important game is held in the Arena Perilous, including our first game FASTER. The Arena is a mutable space capable of housing any type of game at any scale, from a single field to a self-contained sea to a vast urban landscape spanning hundreds of square miles. FASTER uses a track that weaves through the city of Khora. The Arena Perilous in this instance has knit itself to the Khorics streets, proof of its limitless forms.

One of the most common ways of simulating a jump is to put a force on the bottom of the character when a button is pressed. Couple this ‘impulse’ with some gravity, and it sure seems like jumping. Only it’s not. Jumping doesn’t only mean movement up and down. Nobody jumps from a standing position because a magical force suddenly lifts them skyward. So that’s not jumping yet, not really.

We could do the version where we define the distance a player can jump. Then we build animations that support that pre-packaged jump. A leg moving a certain way, arms flailing…thanks to Unreal, we can make these animations blend super well. You might even think it’s a jump. But it isn’t really. It’s the same canned response to a button press, now covered up by talented animators. Ultimately, what you can actually DO in the space has been reduced to a single motion. It feels systemic, but the jump is always the same jump. That’s still not really jumping, is it? More importantly, it still doesn’t allow for emergent gameplay, which is key to providing a thrilling, rewarding, and uniquely human experience.

A game with a high skill ceiling requires layers of systems interacting so people can’t quite predict what’s going to happen, forcing them to deal with a truly unscripted event. This is more like how the real world works: jumping may be something we take for granted, but anyone who’s tried to hop a turnstile knows it entails a whole sequence of intentioned movements. Every muscle in your leg engages in perfect order and in different ways, ankle, hip, and knee joints hinge or rotate appropriately, all while tubes in your head transmit readings to help you balance. So how closely can we really model a jump, and how does striving to do so enrich gameplay?

The real people who are best at jumping aren’t consciously operating all these mechanics. Instead, through practice, they’ve developed a trust in their body that makes what they do seem effortless. Someone who’s jumping a hurdle in parkour will put their hands out to brace themselves lightly, but they don’t catch themselves or think too much about what they’re doing. They just move through a flow of cues that trigger other cues, managing the whole thing based on physical feedback. That’s a pretty complicated way to think about jumping, but it’s also true to life – and more fun. That’s the feeling we want to convey, so that’s how complicated a system we need to begin with.

What does it mean to jump? Let’s try to get a fix on things by measuring them. How high do you think someone who’s good at jumping is able to jump? How far? How does that vary based on getting a running start or nailing the jump angle or push-off? We know folks who can get themselves up well over a yard in the air, so maybe that’s a good baseline. Of course, there are people with shorter legs, longer legs, different joint placements, a tendency to favor one foot or the other. In every case, we know they have to push themselves forward at some point in the jump, so let’s simulate that by having the player press W to go forward. That’s all, just W, and their legs and feet work automatically like in the real world. They don’t push different buttons to move different feet unless they’re playing QWOP, a game that actually proves the point of this blog post – virtual jumping is more complicated than we think.