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Earlier this year, game developers across the industry weighed in on Twitter on a seemingly innocuous question: What's the problem with doors in video games?
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But it will probably not surprise you to learn that doors are far from the only seemingly simple feature that prove to be unexpectedly challenging in the development process.
A few months ago, I asked developers across the industry the question, "What is a thing in video games that seems simple but is actually extremely hard for game developers to make?" I received nearly 100 responses representing a wide breadth of industry experience, ranging from solo developers to those who had tackled issues within teams of hundreds.
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Getting from place to place
For instance, elevators. whether they're taking players up a single floor in a building or serving as pseudo-loading screens between two major game areas
"First off, you have to summon [an elevator] via a button or whatever. By calling the elevator, you open the opportunity for the player, objects or AI to wander underneath it and get squished or trapped. So suddenly you have to deal with that. It's an invitation to make your enemies or companions look dumb, for physics objects to go flying, or for quest items to get stuck.
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Opposing Forces
The team at Skydance Interactive, behind The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners, they were able to turn a challenging collision problem into a fun new feature:
"One of the bugs I had was when a walker was trying to get through the door at the same time that a player was trying to open it, this is sort of like a situation when two opposing forces come against each other.
"Our solution was every time the player would try to open the door and a walker was trying to go through that same door was to break the door. As a result, this actually created a jump scare moment."
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moving platforms.
Moving the player with a controller isn't hard; moving the player on a platform isn't hard, Putting them together you now have two things that want to dictate how the player should be moving.
What should you do if the platform pushes the player up into a ceiling? Push the player through the platform? Squish the player? Stop the platform from moving? Force the player to crouch allowing a little bit more time before squashing?
What about from the other side where the platform comes from the top down on the player pushing them into the ground? Should it behave the same?
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