Advocates are calling for improved and updatable crediting technology
“How can we make this as easy as developing tooling for Unreal or Unity that we can just hand to developers and say, ‘Here. You just need a JSON file and to push a button, and then it'll shoot out a UI-based text format that then you can plug into your engine and scroll’?”
- Katie Golden, senior product manager chair of the IGDA Special Interest Group on game credits
The International Game Developers Association has a new special interest group (SIG) looking to update best practices at game studios for crediting developers who work on games. In a conversation with IGN reporter Rebekah Valentine, members of the group shared ideas for how studios can improve their crediting practices.
Why do these practices need to be improved? Many of our readers are sadly familiar with the fact that either through negligence or malice, a game's credits may not always reflect all the people who work on them.
Some companies (like MercurySteam) use arbitrary metrics to determine if someone's work is creditable, others will actively retaliate against developers by omitting their names or changing how they're credited.
Stories like this pop up on social media every few years, but as Katie Golden (chair of the new special interest group) noted to IGN, nothing ever gets done about them.
What she and her colleagues are proposing isn't just about equal treatment, it's about improving the development process. Game credits historically have been exported .mov files. Fancier credit scrolls will require hours to render, and just getting one character wrong could create an additional 6 hours of work.
That makes updating game credits costly and expensive. However, video games already render graphics and text by pulling data from spreadsheets—why don't
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