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As Twitter begins to crumble under the weight of the controversies around Elon Musk's recent purchase, game developers are using the resulting chaos as an excuse to admit their greatest "sins."
In a tweet last week, Danny Sweeney - senior character artist at Blizzard - said that "now that Twitter is actually going to die you legally need to admit your game dev sins." Kicking things off, Sweeney revealed that throughout his career, he'd hidden versions of infamous webcomic 'Loss' into previous projects. So cunning are these little easter eggs that Sweeney claims players will "NEVER find them."
Hundreds of developers have since contributed with a wide array of terrible deeds. Some are simple, like objects stapled together to dodge player perspectives, while others are too complex for me to wrap my little literature-grad brain around. A surprising number of others were different developers admitting to that same webcomic featuring in their own projects.
One of my favourites comes from Antoine Henry, who worked on Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 on the Nintendo Wii. Tasked with coming up with more minigames than the remaining development time allowed for, Henry says that the team "needed to find ideas that were very fast to implement." Some of those were simple twists on pre-existing ideas, but one game simply saw the developers reward players with "a random number of points to each player each second." That's not much of a game, so players were simply told to "concentrate" to earn those points. So successful was the ruse that some players claimed to have found ways to score extra points.
... with a visual reskin.But for one, we simply added a random number of point to each player each second. Wrote the game rules as "Concentrate to score points" and nothing else! Some players claimed to find techniques to master that mini-game! 🤣 https://t.co/erBWwK9vgi2/2November 19, 2022
Elsewhere, Martyna Zych, who worked on The Witcher 3, claimed that her sin was the submission of a ticket removing "15 second" boob jiggle from Triss Merigold. While the change was definitely needed, Zych says that "none of you saw this beautiful moment, probably because of me."
I submitted a ticket to reduce boob jiggle of triss in witcher 3tbh it was well needed because when she did 180 turn her boobs would keep on jiggling for solid 15 secondsbut still, none of you saw this beautiful moment, probably because of meNovember 19, 2022
Finally, Dana Nightingale, who has worked her way up to a director-level role at Dishonored and Deathloop developer Arkane Lyon, says that in the original Dishonored game, she drew up a sign to help players find their way to a specific location. Unfortunately, that sign was initially drawn in Microsoft Paint, and eventually made its way into a "release candidate" build of the game. Nightingale was forced to admit her sins to the game's lead environment artist, and thankfully a replacement sign was created in no time at all.
When I saw that my Microsoft Paint sign was in a release candidate I ran to the lead Env Artist's desk and confessed what I'd done. He whipped this sign, the one we shipped, up in like 5 minutes.And that's why we don't have an MS Paint sign in Dishonored.November 19, 2022
This kind of thread occasionally does the rounds (albeit often not against the backdrop of the imminent collapse of a major social network), but as ever there are plenty of excellent stories - and a few genuinely helpful tips - to draw from.
Want a prime example? Here's how Skyrim's opening scene was nearly ruined by a single bee.
