From rabbit slaves to entirely new dimensions created, here are 5 black magic tricks game devs used to make your favorite games

Making video games can seem like magic from the outside looking in. It turns out that developers really do sometimes have to pull off some nearly mystical stuff to make many elements of your games work.

Everything in WoW works because of tiny bunny NPC operators

It turns out that programming objects is complicated. The solution? Well, why not just fit a very tiny bunny NPC inside everything that players can destroy? Now, instead of programming the new model to cast spells anew, they sneak a small asset inside it that already knows the drill. The downside? Whenever you obliterate an enemy turret, you’re also frying the innocent bunny that Blizzard forced to work inside.

The piece that explained the secret behind every WoW contraption made me chuckle and go “well, the people at Blizzard are messed up” way back in 2017. Welp, little did I know.

The dogs in Fable 2 are made more realistic via bad code

At some point during the development of Fable 2, the developers found the dog companion acting up by not being able to turn on the spot, or getting stuck in a loop where he got stuck running in circles after himself. That’s a big problem, as the dog was one of the main new selling points of Fable’s successor. That’s actually something dogs are known to do! So, to fix the issue, the devs simply did nothing, and the dog was all the more realistic for it. As the dev who told this story says, not even one playtester found anything strange about it.

Reflections are sometimes entirely new realities made just so your fake reality looks more real

Ever looked in the mirror and wondered if you were looking not at a reflection, but at a whole parallel reality made solely to help you see what you look like? Or, worse, if your own reality is the fake one, and you’re forever bound to the whims of your doppelganger? Well, that’s true in some games!

Turns out real-time reflections are a big deal to make, and back in the day, developers had to make full use of their ingenuity to make it happen. For the puddle reflections on the legendary Conker’s Bad Fur Day, the devs created an upside-down parallel world right under the character’s feet, and they did that just so the puddles would have cool reflections. Those aren’t puddles; those are actually windows to another dimension that exists solely to add a bit of realism to a game about a cartoonish squirrel.

Don’t take pausing for granted

If you’re not a Souls-only player, chances are you love knowing you can pause your game. Good, because, as Kotaku found out, many games have to pull all sorts of tricks to allow for such a supposedly simple feature.

In some games, pausing merely slows them down to 0.000000001 times the normal speed. In Waves of Steel, for example, wait for three years while on pause, and an actual second will go by! Some games just show you a screenshot of the game at the time of the pause, sending the character to rest in an empty room with everything deactivated so that nothing goes wrong.

To make it more complicated, developers explain that there are different kinds of pauses, meaning that the pause from pressing start isn’t the same as, for example, the one we used to get from disconnecting a controller, so try to wrap your mind around that.

Morrowind for the original Xbox was a masterful showcase of smoke and mirrors

The first time I saw the previews for The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, I was sure it wouldn’t run on my middle-of-the-road PC of that time. Then, a few years later, it was announced for the Xbox, and I laughed my ass off, fully aware that there was no way the little old Xbox would be able to even load that massive world. I was completely wrong, as you probably know, but also right, as it turns out.

Even as a kid who didn’t know much about what RAM even was, I knew that it was a crushingly massive experience intended for the PC. The original Xbox didn’t have enough RAM to run Morrowind as you’d usually expect, so the devs had the game reboot the console without you noticing, slyly showing players a completely normal loading screen to conceal the evidence. How’s that for a massive trick?

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There’s a host of different stats in Vampire Crawlers that will define your chances of completing a specific stage. If you’ve played Vampire Survivors, you’ll be well familiar with most of these stats. If not, then you can refer to the following section to understand what each attribute means.

Vampire Crawlers stats explained

The table below briefly explains what every stat means so that you can always stay on top of your deck’s strength and prowess.

Stat	What it Does
Max Health	It raises your Max Health by 10% per rank. You’ll still need to heal and restore your health after increasing the cap.
Recovery	Heals 1 HP per rank after each encounter. Extremely useful to passively restore your lost HP after every completed battle.
Hand	Determines the number of cards you’ll pull when a fresh turn begins.
Mana	Raises the max mana available for you to use.
Armor	Nullify all incoming attacks. You gain +1 Armor per rank, and also increase it by playing Armor cards.
Might	Raise the base damage of all weapons by 10% per level.
Area	Dish out AoE damage from your attacks, which increases by 10% per rank.
Amount	Adds extra projectiles for your weapon cards.
Duration	Allows you to increase the duration of your Crawler’s stay by one per rank.
Magnet	You can draw extra cards per turn.
Revival	Get extra lives.
Luck	Raises all positive stats, along with increasing the quality of your drops. It increases by 20% per rank.
Growth	You can get extra XP.
Greed	You’ll get 10% extra Gold Coins per rank.
Reroll	You can reroll your draw to try and get other options. You get +2 reroll choices per rank.
Skip	You can skip level-up rewards to get extra XP and Gold.
Banish	You can banish cards that you want to avoid from showing up on your run.
Curse	A negative stat that will amplify the damage of your enemy’s attacks. However, you’ll get more XP and Gold.

Typically, the Power Ups you use will have a direct impact on the stat values of your current run. When you upgrade a Power Up, it will permanently raise the applicable stat for your character (the buffs will be available across all runs). However, your attributes will also depend on the cards you draw and the crawler(s) you use.

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