Vertical slice Puns

Last year Zyloh said he will be more open about squadron 42s development.

this year we got no substantial information about how far along sq42 is or how it is all coming together (the monthly reports are meaningless filler sentences).

400 million. 400 MILLION and the only real gameplay we saw was over 4 years ago. I think it is time to get an updated version of that so we can see what changed in almost half a decade.

It is absolutely a shame that "director of community management" is barely interacting with the heart of the community and /u/CaptainZyloh is rather chatting it up with popular twitch streamers..

I need a programmer to build a vertical slice for game idea I have. The vertical slice will consist of a single boss fight. Its a fast paced 3d isometric. The player mechanics are very basic, while the boss while have some varied attacks. If you have any published works in this field it would be great.

Engine: I prefer unity, but can do unreal as well.

Skill required:

• Knowledge on how to do good boss AI and implement abilities
• Ability to do (or import from the store) very basic placeholder animation, textures and user interface
• knowledge of how to import animations, models, and other textures from other artists that I will hire

Payment terms: I'm very flexible in this regard. Let me know how you would like to be paid.

Hi everyone,

as the title states i am looking for a 3d generalist proficient in UE4/5 to help me finish a vertical slice of my CORPG prototype.

I am an hobby developer from Germany working part time on a moba-rpg hybrid. Because of the complexity involved and myself being busy with programming and my main it consultant job, i would like to hire a freelance artist to help me.

I am looking for an passionate and talented individual, interested in creating a brand new world with a brand new IP. My ideal partner would be a generalist, who loves to get their hands dirty in all the disciplines. You must work well with others, enjoy and seek out collaboration, and to receive, act on, and supply constructively critical feedback. Making recommendations on how to improve both product quality and productivity

The project itself will be high poly with a fantasy setting for Windows and Linux.

Your responsibilities include developing content guidelines (define art style) and workflows to ensure best practices as well as integrate assets and prepare them for use in the engine. You should ensure the art content and features are easily integrated into the game while working with the latest techniques and technology.

This is a paid remote contract position (no rev-share) and part time. Please don't expect this to be your main income.

If you are interested please message me with a portfolio and we can discuss the project/budget further in a discord voice call.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day :)

Source (unfortunately in polish but you could translate it and understand the basic gist)

Edit: I translated the most important points of this piece and I'm too tired to compose TLDR, if someone is willing to do that I would be thankful. Cheers!

>At the end of 2019 (according to basic rules of game developement) a vertical slice was given for rating, such internal demo's purpose is to show the structure and mechanics of the entire game in a nutshell: missions, combat system, graphics, music...
>
>The result was shockingly bad - only 1% met set requirements.
>
>It was so bad that this result was NOT disclosed to the whole company. "This is the first time this has happend" - tells us one of the employees of the Quality Assurance department.
>
>This department has a whole list of so-called requirements, which are necessary and the game must meet them. Cyberpunk 2077 was made according to standard game dev life cycle in which successive stages followe one another: pre-alpha, alpha, beta and gold.
>
>If the project is 5 years old and it has a premiere in a few months it should be at least in the beta phase and have all the features. Alpha should have core features, beta has everything ready, only still underdeveloped.
>
>There should be 80%, not 1% that met set requirements.
>
>At this stage there should only be polish which is fixing any errors. Cyberpunk 2077 wasn't even close to that level then - at this point our informant is spreading his hands showing helplessness

Edit (where I will add additional information as I read):

>Bad state of the game in the beginning of 2020 was confirmed by outsourcing companies "Outsourcing companies said it was the worst build they've ever got" CDPR employees report.

>CDPR hired reviewers for so-called silent reviews. Those were the reviews of the game in its current state (April) which were made by 3 reputable journalists from the west who signed NDA and began reviewing PC version of Cyberpunk 2077.
>
>As Spidersweb found out, journalists didn't have good news for CDPR. They predicted that if Cyberpunk 2077 would be released in September (it was after 1st delay) then the game would get around 60/100 score on average.
>
>**They also rated graphics 6/10, RPG elements 5-6/10, gameplay 7/10 and music 8-9/10

Tldr: Everyone should do it. And if you want an in-depth view of mine, watch my video on youtube

A vertical slice is, at least what I've figured out, a small slice of your game. One scenario, one encounter, a piece of character creation, anything that you want to playtest. Then, you develop everything that is needed for that encounter to run, all the rules, tables, characters, etc. I even added formatting of the pages, artwork, all the works. In the end you get a fully finished product. A tiny one, but a finished one.

What's it good for?

For others to see a glimpse of what your finished product will be, and they can playtest to see if your game accomplishes what it's designed to do. If your Vertical Slice Edition has artwork full of galactic battles and space ships exploding, but your game rules don't invoke the same feeling, then you know you've done something wrong.

Figuring out what you've done wrong early on, makes it easier to make them right before you've invested too much time in the rules. It also makes you proud of at least becoming fully finished with 2% of your game, and gives you great confidence on the road ahead.

My game is called Explorers RPG, and it's a game that focuses on exploring Everhollow Castle. It's very specific, I know, but I like specific games, because it's easier to hone down on the experience you want.

My Vertical Slice Edition is 12 pages, plus 5 pregenerated characters. It contains one scenario, which I imagine would last an hour or two. It has everything you need to run the game, and I hope to reach a broader audience than just my friends. Watch the whole video if you want to have a thorough explanation.

If you're interested in becoming an "official" playtester, don't hesitate to contact me. I also have an itch.io page if you want to follow what I do.

Very very pretty graphics, but overall nothing much else to it. It seems like a "this is what the game's appearence will be when it's finished!" rather than a finished, shippable product.

You can even see this in the sub where outside of screenshots there is next to no content to be had, there is an absolute sea of "this is my V" posts but next to no "wow I just discovered [new gameplay mechanic/area/quests] and you should know about it!" Posts.

So for the past several months I’ve been working on this tool to scaffold out web apis (and eventually more) using a simple yaml or json file so I can stop wasting time and brainpower on boilerplate code.

I had started it out using a Clean architecture as that seemed like the gold standard in the industry. Then I came across VSA and it really spoke to me. I also posted a few weeks back asking about everyone’s thoughts on VSA and it was really well received as well.

So that solidified it for me and I decided to take some time to rework it to a VSA set up. I spent several weeks working on it and it was essentially a complete rewrite of the tool. It’s still pre-v1 so there are still several things to fix and new features to add, but I’m really happy with how it turned out so far!

Some of the highlights in the current set up:

• ❌🧅 VSA instead of Onion

• 🧪 Unit, Integration, and Functional tests OOTB

• 🐳 Dynamically generated docker databases generated for integration tests so you can test against a live db

• 🔐 Authorization and policy scaffolding

• 🔦 Advanced filtering, sorting, and pagination

• 📚 Detailed Swagger generation

... and a lot more. Check it out 🥳

So I did a lot of research last year on how I should be organizing my apps and landed on Clean/Onion as one of the best if not the gold standard of how one should be organizing maintainable and complex apps. I read books and blogs, checked out the eShop projects, saw jason taylor and steve smith's example projects, and tried a few POCs myself. It worked well and I liked it. I even made a tool that can scaffold out a Clean web api that works pretty nicely. Regardless of the below, I can pretty definitely say that a Clean organization is a solid approach.

With that said, I came across the Vertical Slice Architecture approach from Jimmy Bogard a couple weeks ago and it really spoke to me.

For those not familiar, the short version is that Clean Architecture aims to separate the business rules from the I/O with designated layers while Vertical Slice Architecture aims to separate the code by features, aiming to minimize code sharing between features.

Some things I've notice about VSA that I really like:

• It is feature based. This is how requests come to my teams in real life and it lines up really well with my app.

• Because of the feature base, everything is in one spot. Everyone from a senior architect to a new intern knows exactly where to go to find something.

  • This contrasts with Clean that has lots of layers, you have to know the right spot to put everything and even forces layers on you when you might not need them. I saw a good quote on this: "The object-oriented version of spaghetti code is, of course, 'lasagna code'. Too many layers."

• This feature organization also means that new features only add code. You’re also not changing shared code and worrying about side effects. This allows you to breath easier and work faster.

• A VSA setup is still very testable. Almost more so as I can directly test against my domain logic, my features, and make sure my controller status codes are working and call it a day.

• Speaking of domain logic, VSA still accommodates a domain based approach. I can establish a bounded context and abstract out domain logic as needed.

• Reusable code is writt

Say for example, I have an AddCustomer feature where I want to check to make sure the first name, last name, and DOB are unique before adding the new customer. I can go ahead and add that logic to the feature, but what happens when I consider my UpdateCustomer and PatchCustomer features? I can add the same logic in there before updating too, but then it’s theoretically triplicated across the features.

This could be fine since they’re technically unique to the features, but I want to make my domains as rich as possible and it feels weird not being able to push it down.

This issue is described pretty well here with another example. Also curious to see if Jimmy’s new blog series sheds light on something like this, but excited to see more examples of how he pushes logic into the domain regardless.

So where do you put validations like this and what has been your experience with it, especially around maintainability?

My last post was about how to make something short and actionable that wasn't so edited it lost meaning. Someone recommended I make a vertical slice, and I've been focusing on that ever since. I'd like the slice to double as a demo teaser thing to get story feedback.

I've set a <6100 words goal, and have it roughly outlined. The particular "chapter" I've selected is actually mid story, so there is a lot of lore/preamble and previous NPCs connections that won't be explained, cuz we skipped that part.

So to my question. I'm having the MC simply be at a major NPC's residence and start a conversation with said NPC. Should I try to exposition dump with the conversation to make up for all the skipped parts, or just write it as if the reader has all this information even though the reader actually doesn't due to this being a vertical slice? or include like, an intro page summary to bring them quickly up to speed, and then start the NPC conversation? What have you seen done or done yourself to make such a vertical slice work?

Spoiler alert: That's both in a good and bad sense.

I've only been playing for 2 months now after forgetting the game for 5 years so I missed a lot of Squadron 42's development and all of the trials and tribulations people would have experienced with that wait. Given that CIG went silent about it I had no real experience of what Squadron 42 was supposed to be but I guess the Vertical Slice is some representation.

The idea of a 'no compromises' cinematic experience/game is by definition unrealistic but by the seems that this is what it's supposed to be - no AI warping around (Old Man or whatever actually getting into his flightsuit after the conference, apparently), no AI sitting in fake rooms for cutscenes, as many interactions modelled as possible, having to manually load up your arsenal, and probably a lot of divergent paths in story as well. Plus, going from ship to battle to EVA to ground and back again. I honestly have to say that I don't know of any other developer that would be willing to try this...

...And yet I feel like this is both a blessing and a curse, because although it's a laudable goal to try to aim for an extremely wide experience with as little compromise as possible, game devs ultimately always make compromises for the sake of development time and cost. Additionally, a lot of compromises made like warping AI around don't really add any negatives - the player would never be able to see that - and actually preventing helpful dev shortcuts seems wasted like effort. I hope that's not the case throughout, or it may explain why the game is still not present in any major form (or may take another 5 years to complete...)

I'm also hoping that the pace of the slice is basically the 'E3 Effect' of people walking slowly around to show everything, because by god it was slow. Not specifically the cutscenes, but getting loaded up with new gear from the guy, waiting for permission to take off, travelling through the very empty Coil and surrounding space in the debris ring/planet, navigating the UI, etc. is probably like that partially because this was an earlier build, but also partially for immersion purposes that, again, are usually cut for player enjoyment - choosing a destination in a branching path should be as simple as picking out of two options on the screen, not fiddling with the destination menu in order to select the planet.

And to think that this hour is only one mission of 27, or perhaps even more! They say in the slice that they f

Two years ago Zyloh said he will be more open about squadron 42s development.

last year we got no substantial information about how far along sq42 is or how it is all coming together (the monthly reports are meaningless filler sentences).

400 million. 400 MILLION and the only real gameplay we saw was over 4 years ago. I think it is time to get an updated version of that so we can see what changed in almost half a decade.