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Twitter Thread Highlights How Complex Game Development Is

The thread highlights how much work goes into a game--and why promises of NFT integrations in games won't work in practice.

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As more companies look for ways to try and implement blockchain technology into video games, many NFT advocates have imagined a system where gamers can buy an asset like a skin or an item in one game, and transfer it endlessly into any other game they play. While some game devs have explained in simple terms why this idea is unfeasible, indie developer Rami Ismail has put together an epic 45-tweet thread on Twitter, running through all the fail points a system like this would encounter.

Ismail, who was one half of indie studio Vlambeer and created games like Nuclear Throne, Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, and Ridiculous Fishing, started the thread with a relatively simple proposition: "Let's imagine making dice in a game."

The thread goes over all the different elements involved in creating something as simple as a six-sided die--not just the physical asset and its texture, but also the animation involved in rolling the dice, the surface the dice are being rolled on, the simulated gravity and force that will cause the dice to fall in a realistic way.

The thread then goes into extra details such as adding sound effects on hitting the ground, and extra visual effects that make a dice roll more interesting--and most importantly, writing code that lets the game make sense of whatever number the dice landed on.

After all this, Ismail poses the question: "how the hell do you take this die to another game through NFT?" In the context of the theoretical development project, Ismail runs through all the ways the newly-created die could be catastrophically incompatible when put into a different game.

After running through a number of potentially insurmountable issues for porting assets from one game to another, Ismail concludes that such a system wouldn't be workable, even between two games made by the same developer.

The full thread is worth a read for anyone interested in the complexities of game design. Ultimately, Ismail concludes that the amount of work that would be required to implement such a system isn't even the biggest obstacle, as in the end "there's no reason for it to get done." Letting players use assets in-game that were purchased from competitors isn't attractive to game developers, Ismail adds, while the benefit for the player amounts to little more than a gimmick.

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