Ask a Game Dev

NOVEMBER 1, 2023

I don't think that we'll ever see pre-rendered cutscenes go away permanently. As in-engine rendering improves, AAA games will likely move away from pre-rendered cutscenes but AAA games are far from the only games that use cutscenes and have engines that can render high quality cinematic visuals (e.g.

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Cutscenes Render Cinematics Engine 40

Game Refinery

NOVEMBER 30, 2023

A narrative can also help with pacing, building and releasing tension alongside key story beats while directing the players’ attention and emotions through them, all the while supporting other features and creating a meaningful foundation for retention.

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Mobile Gaming Mobile Mobile Games 94

The Bottom Feeder

SEPTEMBER 7, 2023

Being able to build a plane and cruise over the enormous landscape is a hoot. Each has a puzzle you have to solve, and the puzzles all use different abilities and parts of the engine. Each time you find a “Geoglyph," you watch a cutscene which shows a sliver of what happened to Zelda.

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Cutscenes Terrain Games Puzzle 81

Radiator Blog

OCTOBER 13, 2022

There's a Portal-like moment where you escape the puzzle. This isn't a big apocalyptic video game betrayal cutscene where a villain reveals himself and destroys a castle, instead it's a smaller deeper betrayal that instantly brought me back to being a teenager. After all, how many games offer you a "suffering musician" build?

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Indy Film Games Puzzle 52

The Bottom Feeder

DECEMBER 13, 2021

Art, since the Ancient Greeks/Forever, has always heavily dealt with the workings of the basic building block of human civilization, the family. But it's just pretty standard puzzle-solving and troll-dodging. You can’t put the nuance of human relationships in gameplay, and telling story through cutscenes kind of sucks.

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Art Point and Click Games Writing 52

Keith Burgun

APRIL 10, 2023

This concept of “secret” doesn’t really make sense in a strategy game, contest, or a puzzle. So technically, it may be more like a “bad puzzle”, but in any case it shares a lot in common with secrets. It also is kind of hard to do, practically, in tabletop games (although it is possible !).

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Fantasy Puzzle Content Cutscenes 52

Raph Koster

SEPTEMBER 1, 2022

There were creative worlds such as MOOs where anyone could build anything. But on a few Dikus, it led to making quests too, and it was actually a lot easier to build quests in a “quest system” than to one-off hand code them in an LP mudlib that didn’t implement a “system” for it. This, in fact, was what my signature design style was.

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Sandbox Simulation Content Scripting 64