So one of the questions that has been tossed around is "how could Kojima Productions make a game in such a short time?" Decima looks great, on that I think we can all agree, but a pretty engine means very little if it's tedious to use (*cough*Frostbite*cough*). This GDC talk from 2017 was just released publicly:
Really interesting if you're into subject matter at all, but a few choice picks:
- Prior to "Decima Editor", there was like an unholy trinity of three different programs, making rapid iteration pretty much impossible. It was decided by the tools team that a new toolset was required for a game large as HZD.
- The editor was developed along with the game, so not all features were used extensively.
- Decima Editor runs Decima, like really. Not only is there a copy of the game running with the editor, parts of the UI are rendered using Decima.
- It also uses Qt. Not really relevant at all, just makes me happy as a KDE user.
- If you felt some of the dialogues with non-important NPC felt quite artificial - it's because they were.
- There's an external API to the editor, with a Python wrapper for designers/mere mortals.
- At the time of the talk, not all of Guerrilla's workflow had been included in the editor. But this was three years ago.
It really looks like an awesome toolset, and I can see how that could speed up development speed considerably. But for me the most interesting part was at 9:15:
This is really surprising to me, given how heavily HZD uses GPGPU - but indeed, there is an OS layer at the very bottom in the engine. Perhaps a PC version of Death Stranding isn't so outlandish after all?