Topics

1

Game Development / My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 22, 2013, 10:15:42 PM »

I thought I would post this here because this is one of the most intelligent game communities I've encountered in my forays into gaming. It's partially development related and partially not, but on with the show.

Despite the seemingly vague nature of the thread title, it's a fairly accurate description of the problem I'm having. I'm a long-time gamer. I grew up with games. I'm 24 now so I was about 11 when Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind came out. I was enthralled. The open world with the ability to kill anyone and make an impact on the game. I thought it was amazing that you could actually screw up the game by killing someone you'd need later. Being able to get kicked out of one guild because of their rivalry with another and on and on.

I remember Starcraft becoming popular. I spent hours on Red Alert 2. I rushed to buy Age of Empires 2. I enjoyed finding the Baldur's Gate series and discovering Might and Magic, Wizardry, and Summoner. I remember hours spent with Sonic on Sega Genesis, and Paper Mario and Goldeneye on N64. I started playing games when I was 3 years old on Windows 3.1, and I remember the release of most of the major consoles. Now I'm sure my history barely rivals some folks here who remember buying their first Atari and playing every Ultima as they came out, but the point is simply I've played a lot of games.

When I was 17, almost out of nowhere, I got bored. I could look at the box of any game and simply not be interested because I knew what the gameplay would be. All of these subtle tweaks to mechanics weren't as revolutionary to me as they seemed to be to the rest of the gaming world. I mention this now because I still haven't really recovered. I'm in a state of confusion as to what feels like a love of the medium to me, despite ending up hating most things produced in it.

Now of course I don't actually hate them, but I'm just not interested. I was disappointed with Skyrim. I know this game. I know the routine. There's no clever strategy to be had here. It's just go in the cave, kill monsters, get better stuff, kill more monsters. The writing really isn't that much better than Morrowind, and if all I wanted was great writing, I'd pick up a book.

In the lower strategy games, I'm bored by repetitive situations and gameplay. The higher strategy games (Paradox titles and AI War here) end up confusing me. I have a pretty good grasp of logic, but I've never been a huge math person. As soon as I boot up something like Europa Universalis 3, Sins of a Solar Empire, or even AI War, I feel like I'm playing a math problem. Learning the variables of certain ships so I can figure out which variables they impact on other ships just isn't appealing to me. I think it's brilliant, but it's not the kind of experience I'm looking for. I just don't have much fun trying to properly balance an open-ended algebraic equation.

My inability to deal with the math of high strategy pushed me to look for a more immediate form of strategy in FPS games. Red Faction Guerilla was fun. Homefront was enjoyable as was Dishonored. They don't merit a second playthrough though, and I don't find myself particularly challenged by them. It comes down to learning the enemy mechanics and how best to manipulate them. So even a game like Far Cry 2, I feel that once you've beaten one enemy, you've beaten all of them. I keep looking for an evolving creative gameplay experience, but I'm finding it difficult to find. Just Cause 2 and Saints Row 3 I found painfully repetitive and easy.

RPGs, as mentioned before with Skyrim, I have the same problem with. I also don't like the feeling that I'm just being driven forward by some Skinner reward mentality where I receive more brightly colored flashy things for doing more, but ultimately no better of an actual experience. Adventure games I tend not to like because I like to really 'play' the game if you know what I mean, and I don't tend to be that big a fan of stationary puzzles.

Planescape was great back in the day, but I have a hard time playing through it now. Half Life 2 was fun once for the introduction of the gravity gun. I've been told by a few people that I simply don't like games, but how could that be true when I remember so many so fondly?

Am I crazy? Have games just plateaued and are repeating the same design elements over and over in slightly different forms? Is there an obvious reason to anyone else why I can't find a satisfying gaming experience seemingly anywhere? Is there a game, or even a genre, that I'm missing? I feel like I've tried everything. I know it's an odd problem to be asking others to find games I like, but I miss feeling creatively inspired, intellectually satisfied, or just thoroughly enjoying a gaming experience. I figured if I was going to ask anyone, who better to ask than a group of game develops on this site? At the very least, it might inspire nothing more than an interesting discussion. Thanks for reading!

2

Game Development / Simple but Dynamic RPG

« on: April 05, 2012, 11:24:15 AM »

Hi everyone,

I'm a big fan of RPGs. Obviously I really enjoy strategy games too, but it's the RPG where I have a desire to make games myself. I've largely had a frustration with the story and mechanics of most RPGs. There are a few I have yet to play that I think sound more along the lines of what I'd like to do: Fallout 2, Arcanum, and Planescape.

I'm a fiction writer amongst other things, and I study both philosophy and narrative theory.

There's a distinct lack of great characters in RPGS. In literature of course there is good and bad depending on your taste, but you can see the influence of Socrates, Descartes, Newton, Einstein, Galileo, Napoleon, and all of these fascinating individuals throughout history in many characters. In games most characters seem to be what would come directly from the mind of a 13-year-old boy. The brute, the businessman, the strong woman who's still feminine, the wizard, the king, and so on. Pretty much all of them are stereotypes and caricatures even in the better games.

I loved Morrowind. I thought the atmosphere was fantastic despite the abundance of sandstorms. I really enjoyed that monsters didn't scale with your level so you started out as a pathetic weakling and ended up strong. I also liked that the world didn't feel like it revolved around you at all. Guilds had feuds, and you could be kicked out of one or the other because of them. There was only one method of transportation, and other than that you could get lost. I just felt like nobody cared what I was doing (until the end obviously), and I liked that. Exploring the mountains and accidentally sliding into a den of thieves twice my level. Doing a quest to find a lost gem, getting the reward money, and then killing them for the gem anyway. All of that stuff was fun and made it feel like a bit of a real world.

I felt that they ruined all of that in Oblivion. None of the guilds affected each other anymore. The world was obviously structured so that you could do anything you wanted to without much trouble. They added the fast-travel system which killed any sense of exploration. They turned what felt like a living world (or close to it) in Morrowind into the RPG equivalent of whack-a-mole (get quest, fast travel to location, fast travel to other location, fast travel back). I haven't played Skyrim yet because I need a new computer first.

Dragon Age was fun for a little bit. I have an issue with any RPG where the focus becomes killing monsters. Dragon Age was mostly just linear maps of monster killing with scattered story. Then it claimed player choice. In any game that claims player choice I always test it on the first run-through by picking all the dialogue options I'm obviously not supposed to. From the beginning they all just led back to the options I was supposed to pick. Even when I could vaguely influence an event it didn't matter. My favorite example was going to visit the Count/Earl or some title like that. He had a village that was going to be overrun by zombies. You could help fight or leave them there to die. So I left them there. Then I came back, and the village was destroyed. I thought maybe this was actually going to be a real decision. You get into the castle, and you can either save his family members or kill both his wife and young son. So I killed them both. The whole thing ends, and he wakes up from the coma he's been in. He's grief-stricken about the loss of everything, says I forgive you, and then gives the same please go kill the dragon for me speech that he would give had you done everything right. No choice.

The Witcher was just a story with choices in between a game. The game was going places and killing things. Then every so often you hit a conversation or something that influenced the story, and that was the story part. The only way they really influenced each other was in where you ended up going. Separation of story and game doesn't count for me as a real RPG.

So what I want, and what I've wanted for a long time now, is a game you can have a real impact on. I don't want a totally open game because I think that defeats the purpose to some extent. If you have too many options then there's no impact anymore. I don't want the game to be linear though. I want it to be so that you start out, and there are genuine different directions you can go. Different choices will end you up in different places doing different things. Everything will center around this major storyline that is happening in the game as well as the setting, but the story isn't happening without you. You're not just a pawn moving from place to place to allow the next scripted event to happen. When you come to the end, it's your fault that it ended that way. Not just in the six different endings summed up in epilogues or ending dialogue, but you actually made choices along the way and watched the story change as a result. I want real characters, developed ethical decisions (not good or evil), and a game that changes to some extent along with the story.

I don't draw particularly well, and I'm not a great programmer. I could use some sort of basic scripting engine, but I'd rather limit the amount of programming I need to do. I also want to limit the amount of visual work I need to do. I really want to be able to focus most of my time on developing story, characters, dialogue, and what happens in the game. I'd like control over RPG game mechanics as well (not things like physics or AI but things like if you have to eat or that shops lock up at . I was thinking about using Flash and just doing the whole thing top-down using the arrow keys for movement. I thought that would really simplify any visuals and scripting needs so I could focus on other things. I don't really want to use a mod-engine for two reasons. The first is that I want the control over the game mechanics. The second is I would like to be able to sell the final product for a small sum.

So I'm looking for recommendations. This is something that would happen gradually over a decent length of time, but what would you recommend I use to do it? What will minimize visuals and programming to allow me to focus on story and the game itself? I want to create vivid and compelling characters and game world. I don't need them to look that way. I can worry about that if there was ever enough interest to produce something like this with a team. I don't need complex AI either. Ideally some kind of path-finding would be taken care of for me, or I could just simplify it in some way. It shouldn't be too hard in top-down. The only AI would likely be basic things like if someone attacks, engages in conversation, ignores you, and some basic path-finding. I also might even like to add some simple daily routines for people, but I don't know how hard that would be. It's not necessary if it's too difficult. Then there would be basic collisions like walls, trees, and other people. It would be really nice if that sort of thing would be mostly taken care of for me as well. I've never used Flash before so I don't know what it does or if there's another program that does it better. I have used Maya so I'm comfortable with software though. The world as a whole would be mostly different areas and terrains. Perhaps a forest and then villages and cities. Some kind of area transition would probably be necessary. Also I'd like to have the capacity for some changes to the world. For instance if the world starts to become more dangerous (for reasons happening in the story) then people begin to leave town, more guards show up at cities, people start locking doors during the day, etc. Just a good amount of freedom in the way that I can create certain mechanics to vary the game.

Any thoughts on whether top-down in Flash would be a good idea, how complex that would actually be, or if something else might be better would be appreciated. Thanks!

3

AI War / Learning the Game

« on: April 03, 2012, 01:27:59 PM »

I started playing AI War about a month ago. Since then I've gone through the first three in-game tutorials and some of the fourth. I read the entire wiki, and I've watched every video tutorial I can find.

The problem is I really learn best by watching or by reading about what someone does and why in a narrative form. There is no material I can find that covers any of this.

The fourth tutorial didn't really work for me. I would do much better off of being able to watch a game being played (or at least the major points sped up and summarized in how they work) and then being able to just go off on my own and do it. With the whole system of trying to read about something and do it at the same time, I didn't really feel like I was learning much. I know there will definitely be players for whom the tutorial is exactly what they need, but I just don't really learn best that way.

It's a complicated game, and I think there should be more resources to help a player to learn it than there are. Every video tutorial covers maybe the first hour of the game at most, but that's not what I'm confused about. What I really need to understand is how the game lays out in the long run. If I do this in the beginning, what happens later? Why did someone prioritize doing this instead of that?

I feel like the tutorial doesn't really say as much as people are saying it does. It certainly guides you step by step through a game, but I want to see someone's strategy play out over time and how they handle everything. That's what would help me actually learn it. As I mentioned, the video tutorials only cover the beginning except one video on youtube about 3/4 player mid-game which just runs a huge amount of stuff off in 8 minutes. All of the wiki articles are just about individual things and how they work but doesn't really talk much about how they all fit together. The only one that really covers the game as a whole is the one that compares it to chess which is along the lines of what I'm looking for but is too abstract to really be helpful.

I think this seems like a great game, and I hope no one feels like I'm attacking it. I just think there should be a little more in the way of resources to help learn the game than there are. Maybe some articles that are 2-3 pages which each lay out how a different strategy would play out over the course of a game. A series of video tutorials that covered an entire solo game and summed up each hour of gameplay in about 10 minutes would be hugely beneficial just to really get to see how things play out and how an experienced player plays.

I know these aren't things that would take just an hour to develop, and I don't know if I'm the only one who has this difficulty. In that case it probably wouldn't be worth it to produce just for one player. However if there are more who are having or did have similar difficulties then more varied introductory resources might help the new players learn the game. It might even attract more  potential players to buy the game if they could get a chance to see the strategy of the game playing out in those ways.