IRLPVPER

One fascinating thing we'll see fully realized in the next 5-10 years is that game engines will become insanely more accessible than they've ever been to the point where almost everybody who wants to make a game will be free to do so. In the past, it used to take quite a long time to even get a prototype of your next game going. Say you wanted to make a 3d Platformer: Well, first you had to figure out what kinda character the player would control. So you had to come up with a full design, have your artists concept it in Photoshop, then your 3d artists would make a model in an outside app, then do UVs and texturing, then it had to go to the rigging department, then to animation, then to the gameplay tech team to finally set up how that character can move within your world and then designers would take over and ask for plenty of changes... That process used to take weeks, if not months. Internally at Moon, we've already been working on some new tech that makes this entire process dramatically simpler to the point where you could do all of this within literally hours, if not minutes. And how? A lot of what Media Molecule did within Dreams was key to all this. Saying goodbye to polygons and using signed distance fields enables amazing new advancements. It's entirely possible that Sony shutting down Media Molecule instead of having them port their technology to PCs and making that stuff freely available might just be seen as a business mistake akin to Xerox giving their tech away when they could've become an entity like Microsoft back in the day. In the very near future, we'll see developers being able to paint and sculpt characters and environments directly within one engine without having to worry about optimization, then do full auto-rigs and auto-controller setups and have something playable immediately with designers then having plenty of dials to tune how the characters should control while the engine smartly adjusts the animations to adapt. I've been blown away again and again in recent weeks as to what insane technology is becoming available to all of us, but the thing that warms my heart the most is the sheer simplicity of it all. We'll see teenagers craft entire worlds and full games with relevant ease as ambitious little school projects, creating products that previously would've needed a 50-100 person team to accomplish. A new golden age of game development is clearly upon us - And I can't fathom what talented teams will be able to accomplish given that most of the mundane work of the past will actually become a thing of the past.