The Horizontal Slice
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 19 พ.ค. 2024
- I go into detail about the "horizontal slice" stage of game development, and how it can be used to make estimates for main and side quest lengths and locations.
Videos I reference:
Game Production Stages: • Game Production Stages
How To Give Experience Points: • How To Give Experience... - เกม
Im going through every Tim video right now. It feels like im having a really long conversation with a mentor who is doing most of the talking its been amazing. Learning a lot of great stuff so far
The concept of “horizontal slice” as you describe it reminds me of storyboarding in movies
Vertical slice is for demonstrating purposes (basically building up the end product), horizontal slice is for devs (estimations, experimenting, communication with different departments).
That's about the most correct response, vertical slices are intended to demonstrate how the game would look and feel they are intended for external consumption either by publishers, press or these days even players with "early access" games. Horizontal slices are purely a development tool which allows you to test large scale systems either frontend game loop ones or backend ones.
Interesting to think about that 80/20 rule in conjunction with Todd Howard's rule of open world design that you want to remember how "some players are going to do *everything* *but* the main quest, and some players are going to do *nothing* *but* the main quest." While those two rules might superficially sound contradictory, I actually think they might be able to be complimentary.
I have a very close friend who never, EVER finishes main quests in the game. He'll play 90-95% of the main quest, do every side quest and never finish the game. It makes no sense to and infuriates me to no end, but that's how he does it.
I feel like its a bit of a cop out to say "no one plays the story in open world games". I think this approach limits how much investment you put into your story as you focus on other areas. Its sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy already stating no one will be interested in your story. If a team aren't invested in your their main story then how can they expect players to be interested in it? Plus it has the added benefit of allowing to create a core theme to the specific game's story that other side quests can then follow from. I feel like New Vegas is an excellent example of this. The main story is a big focus in that game. As a result, people were interested in completing every side quest/ replaying the game 1000 times out of fear they may miss one more quest. It's not the only reason, but I thought it was interesting to think about.
I made and shipped a game myself, (as an indie dev), and the vertical slice was absolutely essential to getting the game published. From there, I did indeed build the game out in kind of a "horizontal" way initially. I worked to get the entire game world (my game is one where you can explore a big world, it's a "metroidvania") linked up and in place and working in a very visually simple way as soon as possible. This provides a framework to get the game going and make some judgements about what it's like to play through, particularly as it pertains to spacing and pacing.
I have done this on my own games without having a name for it, so thank you! I will now think more critically about how I have done it in the past and how I can address it better moving forward.
I might have a strange preference here, but I think some games benefit from a lot of empty space in between the hot spots of in game activity.
Sometimes you want to impart in the player that they felt like they made a long journey to reach a destination for example.
Other times you want them to feel a sense of desolation, being surrounded by a lot of emptiness, making them yearn for getting back to some kind of "civilization".
An example that comes to mind is wormhole systems in the MMORPG Eve Online.
It's hard to imagine that a game where you always just play as a space ship can suddenly turn into a horror game experience.
But I can attest that there have been moments, when that wormhole you came into collapse behind you and you're forced to probe for a way out to get back to known space, sometimes requiring several jumps through different wormholes while constantly scanning for enemy players that could be lurking out there in the void looking to get you.
It really gave a sense of swimming with sharks during a night dive.
I always admired those moments in that game in how they made empty space into such an impactful thing.
As a pretty-much-daily EVE player from 2013 to 2023, that's a great thought / example there. WH space is indeed very spooky.
And the feeling of the expanse of space (even warping from stargate to stargate at crazy AU/s speeds... Leopard shuttle with ascendancy implants, anyone?) in just about every system in HS, LS, NS, and WH space is palpable. But the flavors of space are varied due to how each area's rules work, like you described with the WH space vibes. I'll bet your OP gets someone to check out EVE, btw. ;)
@@gfox9295 Yeah, travelling in known space can be tense too. But you have a much better situational awareness there, even in nullsec due to being able to see every player in the system in local chat, as well as looking at star maps to see who controls which systems.
WH systems get spookier since the usual bag of tricks doesn't work since you only have probes and directional scanners to rely on.
@@sevenproxies4255 I wasn't in nullsec at the time (other than on a few roams or popping into it from WH space), but what you just said is why the blackout CCP did a few years ago during one summer was so interesting. When local turned into WH local in nullsec for... a month or two, I think it was? 60 days sticks in my head for some reason.
Anyway, I'm sure experimentation will continue with modifying or blurring the distinctions between the spaces within EVE, but one's thing for sure... they will continue to feel like actual SPACES. Which is cool. ;)
This was my biggest complaint with BG3: too much density, not enough traversal, unlike BG1&2.
@@mattcat83 Yeah, I thought that Skyrim had a bad case of density too.
It seems like you can't go anywhere in skyrim without tripping over some hand-crafted, multi leveled cave or dungeon with monsters and treasure in it.
I get WHY they put so many locations in there, but I think game devs could benefit from really sitting down and think of how to make travelling across a vast expanse of open landscape more fun instead of shoehorn a bunch of stops and detours in along the way.
One idea that springs to mind would be mounted bandits and more mounted combat.
You never see mounted bandits trying to chase you down from horseback in Skyrim, but one can only imagine how much more exciting travelling would be when 10 armed guys on horses come charging out of a treeline towards you.
As a designer, I've felt the need for a horizontal slice so many times but was never able to put into words so effectively why and how. Thanks Tim for yet another brilliant video.
The 80/20 rule is really intuitive. I’ve never heard someone mention it before but that’s a great baseline to start from.
The horizontal slice definition given here by Tim is quite different from the one I have heard from industry people over the past years. The horizontal slice definition I know is not "some levels are done, some are greyboxed, some mechanics are just faked" but more like "Almost everything is greyboxed, every core feature exists and can be tried out in minimal form, most additional mechnics also exist in rudimentary form (not faked with some texture on a lock that tells you what you can do later). The whole "some levels and content exist fully, some not at all, some mechanics exist fully, some not at all" is more like a random snapshot of an early state of the game rather than a targeted development of a horizontal slice, the way it sounded to me.
I have never heard anyone else in the industry talk about a horizontal slice for game development (there is something for it in programming, though). I never even had a name for it until The Outer Worlds. I just liked to get all of the maps done early to determine scope, size, time, and other parameters of the main and side quests. I suppose it's not a standard definition, and different companies do different things.
Yeah, interesting, the vertical slice I have heard is what Tim is calling Horizontal Slice here. In simple context, using the Hamburger analogy, vertical slice would be sharing a piece of a hamburger vertically, so the person receiving the piece of the hamburger would get a small slice of each of the top bun, mustard, tomatoe, pickle, burger meat, bottom Bun each together for the combination of the flavors together. While Horizontal Slice would be giving someone only a large slice of one aspect, so just sharing the Hamburger meat or only sharing the top bun.
Vertical slice in programming is used for prototyping, this would include having the developer work on creating 1 zone that all content will be built for in our prototype, creating the 3d models for the zone, animating the 3d models only for that zone, having skills only for that zone, having monsters only for that zone with animations completed, creating the quests mainly for that zone.
In vertical slice, you're attempting to get enough done to give the illusion of a completed experience that you could have testers test or investers see the vision in person. Testers can test how all of these mechanics work together early on in development because all of the core mechanics have been built as the overall experience has intended through vertical slice.
While Horizontal would be creating all zones or multiple zones before the content in-between. Working in more focused development stages, where a stage could have the team create 3d models for intended use in many zones, a stage where only quests are made, etc.
Horizontal slice gives the developer a lot of practice in 1 skill because this is all they would have practiced for days to weeks, until that stage was completed. Vertical slice in this case would be considered creating depth of combined mechanics for a complete small scale experience of a game/software, while horizontal would be creating bulk of similar content through each stage without testing and prototyping in mind.
Vertical slice = depth content creation
Horizontal slice = wide content creation.
My understanding of this concept comes more from a career start in software development, so there could be a difference because of this. I am not saying Tim is wrong in any way.
@@MalikFrost12 For me, I picture a "timeline" analogy, rather than a "hamburger".
So a "vertical" slice is a small slice of the timeline (i.e. a few minutes of playtime), but includes all of the layers. It's high fidelity.
And a "horizontal" slice includes the whole timeline, start-to-finish, but only enough fidelity to support the structure of the game. It's not that it necessarily focuses on only one "layer", and you likely wouldn't produce a separate horizontal slice for art (bun), one for audio (meat), one for gameplay (cheese) etc. Generally it's focused on core gameplay / mission / quest structure.
Recommend folks also check out the GDC talk, "The Vertical Slice Challenge", from Volition (formerly of Saints Row fame). Talks about some of the insights to be gained, like checking art/pipeline vs target performance. There are also level design vids that discuss something like Tim's h-slice, using labeled greyboxes for sanity-checking scope and pacing curves.
This is awesome. I would have never even thought of something like this. Thanks for the amazing insight, Tim!
I have just finished a miniature horizontal slice for my 5th game. I basically laid out all the maps together. While learning a new engine and seeing how it works at 4k resolution. I did rush through it and know mentally where things will go eventually. It's super nice to see all the areas connected
Must be so satisfying to see it all together and "working". Good luck!
My distinction between vertical and horizontal slice is a bit different. Where a vertically slice contains "a few things at a high level of completion", a horizontal slice contains "many things at a low level of completion". A bit of more abstract, but perhaps easier to apply to a wider range of games.
For horizontal slices I also don't stop at the critical path. I'd actually want to make a side mission and/or optional content too, just to get a sense of how it all meshes. I do find that working horizontally is superior from a developer's point of view.
The reason vertical slices are still so prevalent in the industry is that they aren't there to solve a development problem, but rather a political one. And that problem is that the shot caller with the power to greenlight or cancel your game is a moron who has to be impressed the same way you would the most entitled end user imaginable.
are they always a moron? i dont work in the industry
That's a gross oversimplification not to mention quite infantile towards the end. At least currently vertical slices are used to validate the feel of the game, they are primarily used as pitches or proof of concept milestones as well as for market testing.
They allow you to experience the the core elements of the game in a complete manner, a good example of an internal vertical slice that we've seen recently would be the CP2077 demo and as far as public verticals we have early access games which very much release as a vertical slice and expand from there. Horizontal slices are far more useful for development and testing of secondary mechanics and elements, meta testing as well as world planning, for online games especially MMOs they are also quite useful for load testing and testing your backend.
As far as your remark about the "moron" at the end of the day that "moron" is the one footing the bill for the development, and like it or not they often know more about selling games than you. I also find it quite ironic that you claim you need to treat them as the most entitled end user ever since that is the most condensing comment I've seen on this channel that couldn't come from anyone but an entitled user that had their favorite game cancelled or "ruined" and are now crying about it like a baby.
New to your channel and can’t get enough of your videos. Great info and perfect to listen to when i need to work
When i think back to the old JRPG's, it was all different with xp from quests or fights - like "here, you'll grind for X hours and then you can proceed in the main quest", i'm happy that this is not the same in the western RPG's and outdated today. Nothing good comes from grind, killing the same mobs over and over again just to be able to defeat a boss in the questline. It was even worse with the old JRPG's when they had random encounters, like every 3 or 5 steps you made on the map had this chance for a random encounter of enemy mobs, oh my god...
I see your point and agree that the classic FF model seems a bit dated today. But part of what you missed in that is it leads to a sort of "death from a 1000 cuts" mechanism that I enjoy in long dungeons anyway. Not only have to defeat whatever big boss but get there in a condition to do so.
yeah, 1980s/1990s JRPGs had a very different feel to them than western CRPGs, but... personally, I was a fan of both. Mostly JRPGs on consoles, mostly CRPGs on PC. They both scratched a game-playing itch for me and I'm not much of an offline RPer.
@@Esquarious Often the boss was easier than many of the enemies in the dungeon too, just because the devs expected you to already be pretty worn down by the time you reached it. Those early Dragon Quest games were a lot of fun for this kind of experience and are probably the reason I'm such a big fan of resource management games today.
Good morning Tim! This video is coming at the perfect time for me. Thank you again for another grat video!!
Hi Tim, thank you for the great channel. When you are speaking about Fallout development, you often say that many features were born out of « rule of cool » rather than meticulous planning and balancing. I wonder if, during the map creation for Fallout, there was there any « level design theory » or « best practice » that your team used for layout and to place items/routes/encounters, or you were just following your gut feeling? Also, how the layout design process changed in your games after that, for Arcanum/Temple/Bloodlines/The Outer Worlds?
Hey Tim, as a solo dev, when do you think it's a good time to split from the Horizontal slice and just start making the game?
I'm in a position where I have all the scenes mapped out, but I'm working on new content in a vertical slice fashion. Should I keep working on the "castle to cave" design decisions? Or work at my own pace? My last game I worked at my own pace, but now I'm presenting a growing demo and playable build for public eyes, so I'm not sure where to focus.
You should make the horizontal slice to answer questions about your game: are there enough areas to handle the scenes in my story, are the maps big enough to handle combat, is there room for exploration, how is the pacing, do I have the right artwork planned to create all of these maps, etc. Once you have those questions answered, you're done with the horizontal slice.
Where can we follow your development?
Now I wanna se a finished game where you have an area of people who at just delusional. Standing and saying "I'm a building". You have a guy named Door who you need to get to move before you can get to the merchant, who has a buddy named Cupboard who holds the actual merchandise.
Hmm, actually, if you make that the whole game, and in the end you get to drink something that turns the people village into a normal village, it can be an interesting ambiguous ending. Did the PC go crazy with the rest, or did they just drink the cure to their own delusion?
What are your happiest moments and/or stories from being a game developer?
Hi Tim, was wondering what your thoughts are on Bioware style RPGs, and how your philosophy/creative process compares. I love your videos, keep them up!
Tim's 80-20 experience rule makes me think of Skyrim which is more like 5-95.
For a game developer It's really fortunate to have been born in the 80's or the early 90's and have been playing games since you were young. It's likely you had the opportunity to experience most of the history of video-games, I did, I played the ATARI 2600 and all the MS-DOS games. It's also likely you have experience the best of of video-games history, that I would argue is from the SNES to the end of the PS2 era, in PC the late 90s and early 2000s. Imagine being a game developer and not having that repertoire, you would be really missing out.
Tim... We gotta talk about that tumbnail lol
What are your thoughts on large mod projects? Like project Arroyo or fallout London?
Hey, Tim, I've got a quick Arcanum question but I feel like it may be one you've answered before (apologies if so): what's the deal with halflings? They really stick out as the race that doesn't have any kind of home territory in the map, or backstory or questlines attached, etc. I was wondering if there was some halfling content that needed to be cut, if they were a late addition to the game, or if there's something else behind their orphaned status in the story.
Halflings were in the game from the beginning, but we always imagined that they avoided “bigger folk” as much as possible, so they didn’t actively engage in politics, culture, and bigger society. I always wanted to create a detailed halfling town to express that, but there wasn’t time.
The horizontal slice. I wonder if you could do that with pizza. Put it on the table and proceed to divide the pizza horizontally.
I wonder how different horizontal slices are for games more focused on levels over open worlds. It feels like one of the perks of different levels is that if the scope or budget increases or decreased it's easier to pull focus from a level that's not working or add new ones, but even then, you'd ideally have a minimal level to explore.
Hey Tim! Interested do you play your own games or have completed them after shipping them? It’s always interesting hearing if devs have actually played their own games, especially if they’re considered masterpieces.
Insightful!
I've found that a horizontal slice has really helped me with my own development. It makes planning significantly easier and helps you work out what the game is going to be. But I can see how it's really weak from a marketing perspective.
Seems like a good opportunity for 'literally who' developers who just need to finish a project or developers who are so confident in their projects ability to sell that they can just delay the marketing until it's close to release. I doubt it's a great idea for those in the middle who need a reasonably long marketing campaign though.
It's nothing to do with marketing, though. More like a game version of a storyboard. In TV/film, you start with the script [design document], then work out the key locations, characters, scenes needed, and finally sketch out those scenes via storyboarding. Those are used internally to get all production depts - set design, cinematography, stunts, audio, later, editing & VFX - on the same page, identifying any challenges before you start shooting.
Usually no one outside production ever sees the storyboards, and I imagine no one outside the dev team would ever really see the horizontal slice, as described.
This is kinda similar to how I started making a system of something. For example, damage system. It'd be printing which section this code is in and to see if the entire system is cleared before start implementing the detail one by one until it's finished. Maybe it's like using abstract functions to block out your system flow before override them.
Hi, Tim! A question:
what do you think about sense of measure/limits in game production? Why most of devs focus on more content even though it might be a bare space or rethread rather then on perfecting what's already there? It's understandable when you're a beginner. But even experienced studios consistently overload projects and the opinion is always unanimous - take later parts of even greater games like rdr2, witcher3, elden ring, i had to finish them almost just because of respect rather then pure joy and freshness.
It is quiter strange that literally every time there is no time to polish, to test all features, delays, and yet studio with decades of experience cram weaker stuff.
I'd say even indies are 'guilty' - like hades which was already massive but the sequel is already looking bigger. witness, outer wilds, 99 percent of metroidvanias....
Hi Tim, I was curious to know your thoughts on rpg subgenres (I don’t believe there’s a video on this already, but I could have missed it). Like action rpgs such as the outer worlds, tactical rpgs like fire emblem, isometric like fallout, jrpgs like final fantasy, etc. It might be a bit too in the weeds, but I was specifically wondering about how you think of it in terms of design pillars, and if there are specific instances where you think one sub genre might be better than another
Every flavor of RPG is like flavors of pie - folks have preferences, and you could maybe say some are more or less expensive, or easier to make. But they all involve the same core elements (crust & filling = characters, story, gameplay) with variation.
Might need to clarify "better" for whom, or in what way?
@@mandisaw the video Tim put out today on mechanics and story actually covered quite a lot of this. But specifically, I was curious on Tim’s opinion, which is why I directed the question towards him
@@sophiagibson7326 Fair enough! Although lots of vids where Tim has said good/bad is subjective when it comes to games. No one can say what's better for someone else to make or play, esp without knowing what the criteria are.
Hi Tim. When you get time. I have a call Fallout 4 Vault 88 build. You’ll love the inspirations I took from fallout 1 & 2
Hey Tim, could you expand the subject of how to decide if you should do a vertical or horizontal slice. Perhaps there is a way to mix both approaches? Cheers!
I think you should always make both. They answer questions about your game, both questions you have and questions the team or potential publishers might have.
Are the old demos one could get off the PC magazine cd-roms examples of customer oriented horizontal slices?
I used to play the heck out of those as a kid. It was free games, even if very short.
I also heard horizontal slice as a protoype. and not all games rely heavily on the map when its randomized or infinite
Do you have any involvement with Fallout Tactics? I just found out about it and was shocked I had never heard of it. Not much information on it or at least the development of it. I think you had left Interplay by this point and some forum posts say that Activision worked on Tactics. Some say no it was all Interplay. On the box it says developed by Micro Forte so maybe Activion owns them. 🤷♂
The horizontal slice topic is quite frustrating, as I really see the value in it, but not only don't publishers have the ability to see through things like greyboxing, you'll find it inside the team as well. Our current project almost failed, because our artists were not able to understand concepts and visions and were only able to work on vertical slice ways, one at a time. Which is a catastrophe, if you planned with procedurally generated levels and they even can't think in modules for the generation. We ended up in letting them make all mission maps by hand, which took almost a year longer. But everything else didn't work out with them. So frustrating...
This is really helpful as I just started on my own project and forward planning sound like a big help with it.
What are your thoughts on Fallout: London??
Hi Tim, this is probably a naive question, but this video made me wonder: Why even make level caps at all? If I've been playing an RPG for 120-200 hours for the past, I kind of want to be ridiculously over-buffed. Is it just for realism and making it easier to play test?
When you remove level cap, you remove late game challenges. Without challenge, game is boring.
Would you call early access for BG3 Act 1 a vertical slice? Or was that too big for that
Nah, if you figure it was 30% or more of the game, then it's pretty big for a "slice". I've heard your slice should be as big/small as it needs to be to answer your questions & needs. So if you need to see how your gameloops/systems work together, it has to be big enough to demonstrate that.
Tim I hope Ubisoft hires you cuz they definitely doing 40/60 on quest
lol the thumbnail is... i'm perverted
I wonder what Tim does for hobbies...
Hey Tim by any chance are you aware of the Wildstar - Nexus Forever team? They are manually reverse engineering everything to get the game playable again, it'd great if NCsoft could throw the team (and the people that loved the game so much) a bone. Everytime you mention Carbine Studios it makes me so sad that an amazing game will remain unplayable for so long. You are great!
Knowing how 'jealous' publishers are with any IP they have their hands on, the most that this fan group can expect is a cease and desist letter. They're probably better off doing their thing in silence, and then releasing the code online, so that it can't be stopped, and someone will always pick it up and run a bootleg Wildstar.
It's a case of "We OWN the IP and maybe we could spare a passing thought about potentially considering a supposed revival of the IP, in about 10.000 years, so you don't touch it, filthy peasant!!!".
@@KubinWielki I only think differently in the case for Wildstar because of the fact they are cool with the City of Heroes private server
@@feragon430 Ah, in that case, hopefully it can extend to Wildstar as well.
Its kind of sad that people have to make a vertical slice in the first place. I mean, I could see it for like demos, or trailers, but having to make a vertical slice to make sure they don't drop your game is crazy. I guess I always sort of assumed that most games were done in a horizontal slice, or at least a diagonal slice.
Where did you get the idea for power armor? If you would make a new model, what would it be like?
Think you've misunderstood. Both the v-slice and h-slice are development tools. They're used to answer questions that the dev team has about the game - How will these systems work together? What's the scope supposed to be? Is our pacing fun? etc.
The vertical slice can *also* serve as an important milestone & communication tool when working with multiple entities, whether that's larger teams, or external stakeholders, like publishers (or platforms).
So saying it's a shame that they're needed is like saying it's a shame outlines, sketches, or blueprints are needed. Yeah, it can be annoying to take that step before the main build. But there are questions that just can't be answered otherwise, and/or that would be way more expensive to answer later in production.
Hi Tim
English?
@@renaigh Gemini hard at work lol
How is there an Outer Worlds 2 when I flew everyone into the sun/star?
Me, Tim, Hi.
Ah, so a vertical slice is a „watch the first 12 of X NOW!!“ kinda deal, whereas a horizontal slice is like that bootleg of „Wolverine Origins“, that made the rounds, back in the day.
I think I'd prefer a set-up with more like 10% to 20% XP in the main quest and 80% to 90% in side quests; then I like games that are exploration heavy with the main quest not making the bulk of play.
Mmmmm...makes me think of a slice of pizza...
I want to see a vertical slice
We included the vertical slice as one of the areas in The Outer Worlds. It’s Roseway.
@@CainOnGamesit would be interesting to know how different is the roseway that shipped to the vertical slice roseway? In my experience even a vertical slice becomes trashed as you get deeper into development and have to readjust tons of things and add support for systems that got feature creeped along the way. And related, is it a failure if the vertical slice had to change a lot once on production?
@@gourdboxNo, it's a success of a vertical slice reveals changes you need to make, and the game is better off for them. I think I might have a video of the original state of Roseway. Some art, lighting, and UI changes were made afterward, and a balance pass might have changed some of the creature types, but it was easily recognizable as what we shipped.
I will try to get permission to show the video.
You damn kids and your weird dance names!
I prefer the triangular slice with stuffed crust
Everyone Tim me hi it's.
I love this. 😆
NEIN
Yoda, go back to bed.
You're giving people dyslexia.
Whoaaa
Have you ever considered making a game that does the things you wanted fallout 1 to do? Either a fan game or a one off unique idea?
At this point, he probably did. Arcanum is filled with all kind of crazy design ideas, and it's not like Fallout 1 had a ton of cut ideas already
Unfortunate thumbnail Tim
Thank you for also noticing that this was a horrible day to have eyes.
What are your thoughts on Fallout collaborating with other franchises like Fortnite and possibly even Call of Duty (according to dataminers)
Speaking about side quests and exp.
Have you read Van Buren (that Fallout 3, which didn't happen) design document?
I've noticed it has too many "prizes" - lots of opportunity to get exp.
And it made me think how robust should be RPG system to be not broken with so many points from almost everywhere?
How do you expect people to last more than 10 seconds on your boring videos ? No visual elements , all talk and only talk....we don't have that much time Tim.
You forgot the /s
And if not. People with greater attentionspans than a golden retriever clearly find the format engaging enough as there are plenty of views as well as responses in the comments.