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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij
@obbevermeij.bsky.social
1.4K followers 31 following 86 posts
I make games. SpaceStationSV, War the Game (steam), Learnia, GuideApp and Plentiful (steam). Also: gta3, Vice, SA & IV
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Nov 15
Came across this rare photograph of the dev team behind gta3.
This would have been taken in 2000/2001 in Leith, Edinburgh, Scotland.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · 12d
You could do worse than giving the 'Plentiful' demo a shot this weekend.
It's like a 90s god game but with modern world building, dynamic water & visuals.

Demo & wishlist on steam:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...

#Indiegame #Indiedev #godgame
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Aug 30
I don't remember why we chose not to affect driving. Yeah, it's a pill because certain drugs speed you up.
obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 28
Yes it was a blast.
We probably couldn't have gotten away with it. It was a little glitchy sometimes but still very impressive for a mod.
obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 28
I did hear about those but never played them. R*Leeds went and did their own thing and did it well.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
GTA4 is when we finally nailed it. 4 programmers and several level designers worked full-time.

We’d always envisioned a two-game strategy:
First: Basic multiplayer
Then: Online experience

Both North and NY had wanted to make this happen since the gta3 days.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
We pushed for multiplayer again in Vice City. Even hired a couple of network coders. But with tight deadlines, it was abandoned once more.

For San Andreas, we didn’t even try. It was the final PS2-era game — not worth the effort. We added local co-op instead. But yeah... not the same.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
…but we ran out of time. We needed lobbies, scripts working over network etc. We decided to cut the effort.
#ifdef GTA_NETWORK in the source code is a leftover.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
For GTA3, I prototyped a simple deathmatch. Players could kill each other, drag each other from cars, and respawn around the city. It was promising...
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
In practice, this wasn’t always reliable. I remember a test match where everyone thought they'd won. Turns out all the games had drifted out of sync. This wasn’t how multiplayer would be built in the future.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 19
GTA1 and 2 had LAN multiplayer. To save bandwidth, they only sent keypresses between machines — assuming the game state was 100% deterministic. That meant every game had to run in perfect sync, at the framerate of the slowest PC.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 6
Wishlist & Demo:
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Jun 6
Hey #PitchYaGame,

Plentiful is a wholesome nature sim.

- Shape the landscape by stacking stones.
- Capture water in lakes and ponds.
- Grow fruit and vegetables to feed your people.
- Chill
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · May 7
store.steampowered.com/app/3044790/...
Plentiful on Steam
Stack stones to shape the world. A relaxing game about harnessing nature.
store.steampowered.com
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · May 7
The other massive trailer released today.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
Also:
If it was my call I wouldn’t release any additional trailers.
There is more than enough hype around VI and the element of surprise is going to make the release only bigger as an event.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
I’m guessing decision-day for VI will be similar. Fingers crossed for Take2’s August earnings report.
(Before you ask; I have no inside info)
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
The original release date was October 16th 2007, in time for Christmas. We made the decision to delay the game in July 2007. Only at that time did it become clear we were going to miss the deadline.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
We finally realized the 32 player network game which later evolved into gta-online.

I left R*North 9 months later. With the project and team getting bigger I didn’t enjoy work as much as I used to. I also thought the game would continue to get darker and more serious. gta5 proved me wrong there.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
The missions were designed to suit the story. Previously it had been the other way around.

The ps3 was difficult to work with so the 360 became the lead platform.

R*San Diego produced their Rage engine to replace the discontinued RenderWare engine.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
17 years ago, on April 29th 2008 we released Grand Theft Auto IV.

On order to focus on making the game truly next-gen, we dropped a ton of game features from San Andreas.
Stats (fitness, weight), Multiple cities, Stealth, Underwater swimming, Jet packs, Tanks, Bicycles, Monster trucks, Car modding
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Apr 29
No, I just used English phrases. It's just that because of the hash key bug, random sequences also triggered the cheats.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Feb 14
Map artists just placed the lights, ran the game, and it all worked—no extra setup needed.

Simple, but it still worked this way in IV.

During gta3, I gave players a 1-star wanted level for running red lights. This was not popular with the team. I quickly removed it.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Feb 14
In gta3, traffic lights cycle through 3 states:
North/South
East/West
Pedestrians

The traffic light’s model orientation determines its cycle, and at startup, my code stored the cycle in the road nodes. This is why, even if the light was knocked over, cars still obeyed the light.
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obbevermeij.bsky.social
Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Feb 6
Not sure why that got lost. Could be a bug/oversight.
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Obbe Vermeij @obbevermeij.bsky.social · Feb 6
There must be a misunderstanding. The PC and Xbox version of gta3 and Vice weren't forked. The codebase moved forward as one.
(It may have been different for SA as we didn't do that pc version)
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