Messages

1

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 28, 2013, 01:36:39 PM »

Chris, that's a really interesting suggestion. I played backgammon a lot when I was younger but avoided chess because I couldn't understand it very well yet. I haven't played go. I've been avoiding games with simple strategies so much that I just dismissed those as being simple games. How could a game with only a few pieces and a board of all squares with two colors be more complex than a game that offers armies and weapons etc? That definitely could be something I've matured into without realizing it. I'm going to check it out. I also only gave Civ a try ages ago, and I didn't spend much time with it. I should give it a solid shot.

2

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 28, 2013, 01:23:04 PM »

Ok so another slight refinement of what I'm looking for. It's definitely not casual games. They're way too simple. I'm not just looking for something to wind down with, though that was a good thought. The reason I'm not really looking for board games comes down to that I religiously play single-player games. I get my communal experiences elsewhere, and I like my games to be something I do by myself. I still want something that I can get into though.

I also do want an intellectual challenge, but I don't get anything out of mathematical challenges. They're just not interesting to me. That's why I like real-world strategy versus game strategy. Real-world strategy is hardly ever based on math. The technology is highly mathematical, but the actual strategy is based on "If we do this, what will happen on a strategic level?" So knowing the math of the tank-busting bullets is almost completely unimportant for both soldier and leader. What's important is having a good idea of what they will do to the tank and the people inside it. That interests me. When that's represented in solid mathematical variables, it doesn't interest me at all.

I can't find games that offer this kind of strategic thinking on any scale. I don't know if they exist. The games that come closest are games that offer real-time offensive gameplay like RF:G and Skyrim, but the combat in Skyrim is pathetically simple and the combat in RF:G isn't much better. The combat in Far Cry 2 doesn't offer much either. I don't like setting my own goals because that's not strategic. I'm not solving a problem. I'm just experimenting with the programming in the game.

So I stand by my previous refinement of what I'm looking for is real-time WYSIWYG improvisational strategic gameplay. I'm also amending that with I'd like it to be severely intellectually challenging but without using mathematical abstraction (thus becoming mathematically challenging rather than, I think, strategically challenging), and I don't want it to be something that's heavily simplified or can ONLY be played for half an hour. Finally, I do want it to be single-player.

With those amendments made, is that even really possible in games? Are games simply too mathematical in nature to be able to offer a real strategic challenge, not a mathematical one. The planning and execution of real-world strategy is mostly based on psychology, not math. It's not even really technology or weapons. Those are just tools. There have been some great articles written about how Al Qaeda is using incredibly low-tech bombs to beat our high-tech detection equipment. Every time we develop something to detect their new one, they remove that component. That's the kind of strategy that interests me. It's all about being clever with what you have in front of you, having a goal to achieve, and thinking through what the other side will do. Technology and weapons are just tools in those situations.

Chris, I think you're absolutely right that my taste has changed as I've gotten older. The issue is I fear it may have evolved out of what games are capable of offering me. When I was younger, I had simpler strategic and tactical needs. The combat and strategy in Morrowind or Red Alert 2 was more satisfying. As I got older and started learning about military tactics and strategies, I wanted to try them out for myself on the individual and larger scales (but not against real people). I started looking for that to be fulfilled by games, and I searched every genre to try and find games that would offer that on some level. However the games I found that even approached that kind of strategy were so simple that I felt like I was wasting my time (i.e. the more sophisticated FPS games). The more sophisticated strategy games changed out of real-world strategy and into very sophisticated math problems, which isn't what I'm looking for at all. So I guess my question is whether this is possible in modern gaming technology, or do I have to wait for virtual reality? No kind of real-world strategy that shows up in games even offers me a challenge.

3

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 27, 2013, 01:04:12 AM »

LT: I'm a man of many words as well. It's kind of amazing when an audience just doesn't like the show. I mean some productions crash under that pressure, but the only one I was ever apart of where that happened we all just kept it together. There was this unspoken moment where none of us cared about what the audience thought anymore. They already considered us hapless fools so we were just going to be bigger hapless fools and do whatever we wanted. It was a lot of fun.

Swells and dynamics is definitely on the right track, but as stupid cliche cheesy as it sounds, those swells and dynamics are in me. When I play a piece, even in practice, I just play it so it entertains me. If I'm going through a few measures and start feeling bored, I change it. Sometimes that means just a tempo change. Sometimes that means completely throwing out the rhythm and structure that's in front of me. In those instances 4 measures could easily become 14 or 1 or be subbed out for some earlier theme.

Singing and musical talent aren't as related as people think. Musical talent is an art. Singing is more like a sport. I'm not saying that to imply that singing isn't an art, but it requires a lot of innate physicality. You can't give yourself a different voice than the one you've got no matter how good your grasp of music is. Listen to some of Alan Menken's demo tapes sometime. I enjoy listening to him, but he wouldn't have made it in musical theater. Yet he's written some of the most famous hit musicals. So the innate abilities for composing versus singing aren't quite the same. You don't even need to understand much music theory to sing.

Somehow I knew you were going to allude to biological determinism if I brought up the everybody is equal and innate abilities thing. It's not so much not having control over what you do. That's sort of the typical free will mistake. There is no free will. I argue for human agency, but free will is nonsense. You can't sprout wings if you feel like it. Case closed. So in that sense you're always going to be a victim of some amount of biological determinism. That, to me, is where the talent lies. However a neuroscience study conducted on predicting how religious someone would be based on elements present in an fMRI said, "Even if we could predict how religious you'll be, we can't predict WHAT religion you'll be." I think that's the important part. Most people grow up to do things where they see similarities to things they were doing as a child. Part of this could be rewriting of memory, but I think the evidence is far too much of a landslide to think all of it is. So I think you have talents, but perhaps which ones of them you'll use and how you'll use them is more up to you (and environmental factors).

I don't disagree. I don't typically just keep music constantly running in the background either. Richard Williams printed a little comic of Milt Kahl in The Animator's Survival Kit that I'm fond of. Milt was one of Disney's Nine Old Men. A genius animator. By the end of his career, he could freehand draw the progressive frames of character animation without referencing them. Anyway Richard at one point asked him if he listened to classical music when he draws, and, as he put it, "Milt blew up. 'WHAT?! Of all the STUPID things I EVER heard. I'm not SMART enough to think of more than one thing at a time!'" So you're not alone.

Integrity of a performance is important, but dubbing a mistake 'happy' happens in retrospect. Every actor will do all of the things you mentioned at some point. The point is all of the happy mistakes I mentioned came out of very poor errors. Robin Williams talked about a performance in college where the set literally fell apart around him that he just kept going in. To me, that's acting. Acting isn't being prepared, having everything go well, and a few minor blunders create some spectacular moments. The artistic director of a theater company I'm highly involved with did a show where the back wall literally started falling onto the stage, and he had no choice but to stand there through scenes he wasn't even in and hold it up. Fortunately he was playing the bartender, but a lot of scenes had to be spontaneously revised. I've been highly complimented for a performance where my partner and I in a two-person show forgot half of our lines and ended it early. Nobody knew. It's certainly good to keep a personal sense of integrity, but don't let it get in your way. How you handle a lack of preparation is almost more important than how you handle the preparation itself.

You asked for it.

The two giants are Stanislavski and Michel Saint-Denis. It's really interesting to contrast their approaches. Stanislavski wants you to focus on internal work. Saint-Denis thinks internal work is stupid and wants you to focus on external work. They've created the best schools of acting around today, but I haven't seen anyone convincingly unite their theories. It's a bit of a pet project of mine.

Keith Johnstone wrote Impro on improvisation. The Second City Almanac of improvisation is also good. Harold Guskin does serious acting theory in a similar realm.

The Group Theater was the one that created Stella Adler, Sanford Meisner, and Lee Strasberg. Read all three of them, but it would be good to understand how Adler and Meisner felt about Strasberg first and why (they hated him). In a similar vein look at Uta Hagen. There's also a wonderful DVD of her classes.

In other Russians, Chekhov could be worth reading though I didn't find it personally valuable. Boleslavsky is fairly famous as well.

Larry Moss is a modern coach who's work is worth reading.

However for the broad overview, both volumes of The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods like I said before. That's very well-written and includes a lot of teachers from a more objective viewpoint (rare in acting). It helps to get some perspective on all of them and the evolution of the craft. Watch every episode of Inside the Actor's Studio you can find. I also found James Lipton's (the host) book Inside Inside to be an excellent read.

There are countless other books and teachers. Also, predictably egotistical, a great many actors have written memoirs or published journals. Some of those can be valuable. Interviews are better. The journals and memoirs are often proof of a story I have now forgotten the source of. It was someone on Inside the Actor's Studio. To put it in short, a famous actor is having dinner with another much older famous actor at the end of his career. The older actor turns to the younger one thoughtfully with a slight smile and says, "You know why we do this?" He beckons the young actor closer. The young actor, still early in his career, is intrigued by the potential revelation to come. He leans in farther and farther until the old man is right next to his year into which he yells, "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" Ed Hooks, on the other hand, would say actors are shamans. I think they're both right.

4

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 27, 2013, 12:22:22 AM »

Hey Chris,

Armageddon was such a disappointment. All anybody was waiting for was Guerrilla with new places and cooler toys, and then they changed the whole formula. I really don't understand what happened there.

I do feel like Far Cry 2 was getting close to what I wanted. I think the things I really couldn't stand were smaller like the constantly respawning guard posts, and the feeling that I was never changing anything no matter what I did. Also the pill popping business was awful. I did have some fun: like sneaking into an enemy base, hiding in a room off-center, throwing grenades outside and picking them off when they came by to investigate. There were definitely some cool things you could do with it.

Just Cause 2 had some similarly great moments of hijacking jets and slingshotting people into a gang. It was just such an easy game. So was Saints Row 3. There are all these articles going around about hardcore gamers playing shooters on easy because they never realized how much fun it was, and I'm sitting here like no please make them harder. It's just I hate the cheap ways of making them harder like the HP increase/decrease.

Skyrim was kind of a disappointment for me as well. Don't get me wrong. I think it is a great game. I'm really happy Bethesda is getting this much attention now with Skyrim and Fallout 3. They deserve it. However I just had these hopes for where the games would go. I haven't found the Morrowind feeling in a game since Morrowind. You could actually make a difference in that world. Guards didn't respawn. Quests didn't reroute. There weren't just lengthy loot dungeons, but there were actual stories. Kwama caves that were attached to mines, and the whole Dwemer civilization. The Kwama caves were always lit by the eggs, but the Dwemer ruins you had to have torches or it was pitch black. You could discover things about all of that stuff. There was the slave revolution to get involved in, but you had to figure that out. The assassin's guild was hidden in the most backwater ridiculous building in Vivec under 3 layers of sewers. However if you joined they would have you eliminating political figures and guild members. Those would get you permanently kicked out of the guilds.

There was so much life to Morrowind. No scaling leveling. I remember going exploring and sliding down a mountain straight into a gang of level 10 thieves at level 5. It felt like something a stupid young adventurer could actually do. Now it's all been streamlined and made easy. I was waiting for them to have the technology to make all of the abilities and weapons even more realistic in their function, to create deeper guild feuds, and a world you could have even more of a permanent effect on. They had so much more resources to create even more layers. Instead you can go anywhere and do anything easily. Only the greenest RPG player would ever need a guide. You can't really affect anything. I drove my bounty up to 20,000 in the first 7 hours of the game just to see where the boundaries were. It just feels like they took all of the life out of it. After Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls games stopped feeling like worlds and started feeling like games.

Anyway having gone way off topic in that rant, in some ways I'm looking for the sequels to Morrowind and RF:G that never happened. The ones where all of that dynamic tactical stuff was upgraded even further, and you could have an even larger, more intricate effect on a living world. It doesn't seem like any games like those are coming out though.

5

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 26, 2013, 08:09:12 PM »

Hey Chris,

Thanks for the quick list of recommendations. I think you're right in that I'm already getting my primary intellectual challenge from other pursuits, but I still want my relaxed challenge to be...well...challenging in a dynamic way. I just don't want to have to research it to do it.

PixelJunk looks like fun, but I don't have a PS. Triple Town actually looks like something I might really like so I'm going to have to try that one. 10,000,000 probably doesn't have enough of a challenge for what I'm looking for, but it does look like fun. Anyway I'm going to try out some of these, and thanks for all your help and recommendations. I think I'm at least on the right track towards the kind of experience I'm looking for now with more of an idea what directions to go in. I wish there were more shooters and RPGs like this (a Skyrim where I really could tactically use all the weapons and skills), but it doesn't seem as common. I'll keep an eye out though. I'm also thinking about at least giving Far Cry 3 a shot, but I've heard it's mostly still as repetitive as Far Cry 2 was. I'm still pissed they made Red Faction: Armageddon linear.

6

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 26, 2013, 07:55:05 PM »

LT: Large audiences have their own merits. The small audience can be intimate, or it can be downright hostile. It depends on a large variety of factors that are often out of your control. However the small audience is often the appeal of something like Black Box Theater. A large audience is great because of the energy. You can't get that level of energy from a small audience. Of course if there's an off-night, nothing will ever be more energy-sucking. So they both have their pros and cons. Music you have to be able to feel on the same level. I've seen plenty of people play piano well with no feeling. You have to be able to speak it as a language, not translate it as a mathematical system. So in performance, it's actually very similar to acting. Just change the language from verbal to musical.

Talent isn't about the amount you practice or the rate you learn. It's about ability. It took me up until my late teens to realize most people don't automatically hear all of the parts in multi-part harmony. I've been able to since I was a baby. Many artists discover the same thing. Other people can't see the same way they can in order to be able to draw something. Most people don't see the mechanics and mathematics of the world the way a physicist does. These professions tend to start with talent, an innate set of abilities that the person possesses.

I have many gripes with the movement in modern education towards pretending everyone is equal. Everyone isn't equal. You'd have to be incredibly naive to believe that everyone has the same potential to be a doctor as a painter. This sort of unspoken blank slate nurture theory is nonsense. So the idea of talent is basically saying utilize the abilities you have. Any great artist will tell you success is talent + hard work. Nobody by calling you talented is saying you aren't practicing. It's simply noting you have some abilities that most others don't. Furthermore, I've always found it obvious that people drift towards what they're good at. Don't be too quick to assume that others aren't practicing only because they're lazy. People often don't like what they aren't good at. I wasn't playing piano when I was 3 because anybody told me to. I could just remember stuff that I heard, and there was this interesting set of keys that when pressed in the right combination would reproduce it. If I had no musical recall, I never would have been doing that. I'm not trying to take credit away from your hard work either, but the best work is play.

You put a lot of pressure on yourself. Sometimes I sit down and consciously listen to music. Sometimes I have it on in background for a completely different effect. The reason I've grown away from music with words is because I can't really hear the words to begin with. I naturally listen to melody, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation, thematic and harmonic progression, and so on. Vocal music is, to be perfectly blunt, boring to me. The person's voice is just another instrument to me, and I'm just not impressed with what most rock bands can do with 5 instruments when any composer could do far more with just one. It comes down to what you're listening for. I can only casually listen to complicated music because when it's simplified down to just a melody line and a bass line that are repeated over and over with very little variation, it becomes monotonously distracting for me. I don't think that means I have more "refined" tastes than you, depending on your definition of refined. "Good" is subjective. I can't say classical is better than rock. That's subjective. Complexity is empirical, and I can definitively say classical is far more complex than rock. In that sense, my musical tastes may be more complex than yours, but that doesn't make them better. On a side note, Michael Giacchino listens to absolutely everything. So my musical tastes are more complex than yours and equally complex to but more limited than his. Funny how that goes around in circles.

Walter Murch wrote that you shouldn't ever tell a volcano to be a volcano or an iceberg to be an iceberg. He may have stolen that from Stravinski. I can't remember. The point being if someone is an iceberg, you should tell them to be a volcano and vice versa. You're an iceberg. Be a volcano. Don't read more of Stanislavski. It will confuse you. You'll go too far intellectually into it trying to be the best actor you can be. Read Harold Guskin and Keith Johnstone. They will free you up more. If you can't make mistakes, you're creatively screwed. I know, I know. Intellectually you're probably sitting there saying, "No it's not making mistakes I'm concerned about..." The point is you have to take it less seriously. The shark being underwater through most of the movie in Jaws was only because the animatronic shark rarely worked. The iconic scene in Raiders of Indy shooting the swordsman was because Harrison had a sprained ankle. Robin Williams isn't good because he's practiced. He's good because he will give freely in any direction. Acting is about learning to free yourself up, not constrain yourself to a system. Music is the same way. Don't look for a system you understand, either in profession or in approach to a profession. Look for what frees you up to do anything you want to. There's a mistake that a lot of beginners make thinking that learning to act is learning not to trip on stage. Learning to act is learning to trip on stage, not have so much as a second of intellectual analysis or self-conscious thought, and just go with it.

7

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 26, 2013, 07:03:39 PM »

Hey Chris,

I think you're on to something with Rebuild. It's helped me narrow down what I'm looking for a little more and understand why it seems so multi-genre while rejecting titles I feel I should like.

What it comes down to is a non-linear approach to a variety of challenges. I've been looking at Sandbox games a lot without realizing I was looking mostly in the wrong direction. I want an interesting goal defined for me, but then I want the freedom to pursue it how I want to. Simultaneously I want to be able to develop immediate approaches that aren't reliant on balancing a lot of mathematical variables.

So a few examples of what I'm referencing. I was right in that what I was looking for is a strategy of sorts, but it's not one I would find in most strategy games which focus more on larger-scale abstraction. I like dealing with the smaller elements in creative approaches best. Because of that, I started looking at sandbox shooters, but I got bored. I want a strategic goal, and I also want a variety of them with capacity to build on themselves. Opposition is also a crucial element. A few examples.

Just Cause 2 and Saints Row 3 both got boring for me because I don't want to define my own goals. I want the puzzle element where I have to defeat someone else's thinking in a clever way. I really like debate. The goals in most sandbox shooters are pretty simple and generally not the point of the game. Something like Crayon Physics is more fun, but it still only really offers challenged opposition in the manner of the player setting their own goal to beat. The same problem is true of open world RPGs like Skyrim where the goals are finishing quests and leveling up, neither of which require much in the way of strategy.

A game like Plants vs Zombies is fun because it sets up a series of progressive challenges with a few elements you can use in any non-linear way to beat the scenario. Most other tower defense games become too linear, and I would like to find something with a little more staying power than Plants vs Zombies; which was very easy. Red Faction: Guerrilla I think is successful for the same reason. There are a wide variety of goals (beating the sector, bringing up morale, bringing down control, and all of the mini-missions) which can all be approached completely non-linearly with the elements at hand.

The crucial part of both of those games is an open-ended WYSIWYG immediate strategy. When it abstracts out to managing the mathematical variables, I don't like it as much. I like the simple math of a gun kills a person if you shoot them in the head, rather than X upgraded cannon deals Y damage to Z ship when hull strength is A and shield strength is B. That's too much mathematical management for me. Far Cry 2 and open-world shooters/RPGs require too much of setting your own goals and not enough clever strategic situations. Dishonored and Homefront both provided a nice variety of fairly non-linear situations in the first run through, but they don't provide enough variety to last more than 6 or 7 hours of playtime.

Anyway that's my current clarification of what I'm looking for, and thanks for your recommendation. Based on that, do you have any other recommendations of games that might fit that profile? Particularly ones that would provide a varied and increasing challenge on that scale? Of course I've continued looking myself, particularly in indie games. I don't think Incredipede offers enough of the sustained kind of challenge that I'm looking for, but I was playing Demolition Inc this morning which I found a lot of fun.

Madcow: There was a point in time where I did start looking into board games. It's something I still have back burner plans to do more of. Most of the reason I don't do more of it is I tend to like games for their boot it up and play aspect. I tend to like things that are single player and things that I can just pick up and beat (or attempt to beat) a 30-minute challenge before going back to something else. I still want it to challenge me greatly, but needless to say from my other posts I already have a lot of creative avenues. I don't want a game I'm playing to totally dominate my time unless I'm taking an off day.

8

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 24, 2013, 10:07:56 PM »

Chris, Rebuild is really addictive. I spent a couple of hours taking the whole city just because I wanted to see what would happen. I was playing on "challenging" on a small city map. I'm definitely curious to see how the difficulty ramps up and how the larger maps play out. I brought five of my best survivors to a "seriously hard" "big" city, but I haven't played it yet. I met two win conditions in the first game. I did the 25 lots and chose to still find the city hall then I killed that gang. Then I kept playing and still took the city hall after that. The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do was the helicopter. I made the stupid choice in a trade early on where I was offered a part for it, but I never got another choice. I searched a bunch of buildings, but I never found any parts for it. I had both the builders ready along with the power tools. Anyway thanks for the recommendation. Hard to believe one of the better games I've played in a while is online for free though I can see why.

Anyway yea, since you mentioned it graphics programming scares the hell out of me. I'm always fine with nested loop hierarchies and that kind of thing, but sprite-based collision detection and even 2D graphics engines make me cringe. Perhaps I should take another stab at it though. Out of curiosity, I would imagine the AI in AI War wasn't actually the hardest part to program. Am I right about that? I would think figuring it out would be complicated, but once the approach was mapped out then it wouldn't be as hard to implement as some other features. Although, I would also imagine, since it is emergent, there was an awful lot of setting up corrections for AI behaviors that had to be done after the base features were in place.

9

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 24, 2013, 06:21:35 PM »

Wingflier: Yea, I understand the audience factor. The AI could need to be really complicated. It would definitely have to be dynamic and evolving, but I feel like Chris is on the right track with making AI emergent based on a smaller over-arching variable rather than hugely dynamic and complex in every conceivable area.

Obviously I haven't come close to mapping anything out yet, but much of what you're describing would create Spore-syndrome. Spore was a great concept, but they tried to execute every aspect of it. Ultimately it turned out to just be a bunch of games that already existed built around that one concept. So for instance a "grunt discovery" couldn't be anything more than a possibility with an associated notification (sort of like Crusader Kings), or you end up with a mini-game inside the game. I don't want a clever strategy with a rogue-like sneaking game built into it. In that sense, it may not have to be as complex as you imagine. The main layout of the game, whatever it is that forces you to think in the improvisational creative manner, would just have to work really really well on its own.

Of course I certainly see the merit to what you're saying, but I think stuff like this often gets blown out of proportion. There's a general rule in animated filmmaking of not adding detail that doesn't matter. I've had the same sort of discussions on using choices in games that actually affect the gameplay. I've had people argue the point that the choice-trees would be so large as to make it impossible to program, but to me that's sort of limited thinking. You don't have to make every tiny choice affect gameplay, but you have to set up a system in which you can make larger ones that do. To me, AAA titles have not done a good job of this. They create games where you literally feel like you're waiting to make another choice.

I was completely unimpressed with The Witcher because it was a lot of treking around killing stuff until you hit a dialogue piece. Then the dialogue pieces affected each other, but nothing else that you did in the actual gameplay had any impact. Dragon Age was even worse. Not only did you trek around linearly killing hallways full of monsters, but the choices didn't offer you any choice at all. They never changed the gameplay, and they always had the same results in that moment of gameplay no matter what your choice was (murder the wife and son of the ruler and he'll still just send you to kill the dragon). For some reason consensus seems to be you can't make the player feel like everything they do impacts the game, and you can't change the gameplay at the time. I think you can, but you have to be clever about it. Draw focus in exactly the same way a movie does so you don't notice you just skipped four hours of dinner in half a second.

Anyway I certainly agree that these things are complicated to figure out, but I've always had this innate sense that they're easier to implement than people think. They don't actually require military-grade super robot soldier AI or programming to function.

10

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 23, 2013, 11:18:53 PM »

Thanks Wingflier! I did get tired of Company of Heroes, finding it too repetitive for my taste. I definitely appreciate your recommendations. It's hard to explain what I'm looking for. I feel like Red Faction: Guerilla was close to what I'm looking for. It's just not quite difficult enough. The same was true of Homefront and Dishonored, but it's hard to explain what I mean by difficult. I'm looking for a very creative challenge.

For instance I enjoyed Plants vs Zombies because it set me up with a problem and gave me some freedom in how to solve it. Also it was just plain addictive. However I liked Crayon Physics a lot more because I could challenge myself to think up something way beyond the obvious solution. On a similar level I enjoyed SpaceChem and those inventor games where you're given a puzzle and parts and have to put them together with real engineering principles. The problem is eventually I get bored with the puzzles. I don't want to play that kind of puzzle anymore.

On the FPS front, I found Dishonored fun but didn't feel a desire to find a more creative way around after one playthrough. Homefront was the same way. I just don't want to play back through something where the guys always come from the same direction. It's also pretty easy for me on the hardest difficulty. RF:G was closest because of the versatility. I can find a variety of ways to achieve an objective including knocking down a building, setting up proximity mines, bailing out of a jeep at the last minute as it careens into an enemy base with mines attached to it, just snipe them all, etc. The only problem is eventually I feel like I've tried everything, and at that point it was never difficult enough to begin with. Changing the difficulty doesn't really alter the play strategy, just some base requirements (e.g. rush strategies become off-limits in favor of distance ones that I already used on lower difficulties).

I guess I could explain a potential in what I'm looking for as Scribblenauts for killing people. I like the concept behind Scribblenauts. I think it's an outstanding creation, but I want opposition. Simultaneously the Far Cry series, despite its open-ended nature, doesn't feel very creative to me. I feel like I always have the same mission and basically end up killing someone the same way. Not only am I not afraid of first-person, I prefer it, but I want something that really forces me to think creatively. I was just looking at Incredipede today which is a lot of fun. It demands a creative solution to its problems and rewards solutions the more creative they are. SpaceChem is the same way, but puzzles aren't what I'm looking for.

I like being forced to think on my feet. I like having to make a split-second decision, see immediate results, improvise, come up with a new tactic, etc. In that sense I like shooters and open world RPGs. It's just that the only strategy I think Skyrim really demands is basic weapon/shield or weapon/weapon. There's not much in the way of tactics so all my fancy ideas of using invisibility for a surprise attack and switching from a crossbow to the spell equivalent of a flamethrower once they figure out where I am just turn out to deal some damage instead of turning into the shock and awe combination I saw them as in my head. Furthermore that's all me. The game doesn't even really encourage that kind of thinking to me.

RF:G encourages more of that kind of thinking, but it doesn't take me too long to find the boundaries. Magicka is actually a game that did this really well with it's hundreds of element combinations that you could make on the fly. I'd still like to see it in more of a first-person weapons sense though. Just Cause 2 and Saints Row 3 seemed to be headed in that direction, but both of them turned it into a joke rather than a challenge. I want freeform highly creative first-person improvisational tactical gameplay, and I want it to be challenging in a creatively and intellectually demanding way. I'm not sure anything like that even exists. RF:G seems closest, and it barely scratches the surface.

It's also why I get so frustrated with strategy games. The kind of strategy I'd really like to play is the real-world kind. Where I have intelligence agencies, special forces teams, military, navy, etc. I have all kinds of technological equipment. However the goal is not anything to do with resources or land. The goals are dynamic based on the conflict and desired result. I want to be able to think up the absurd solution. Set up a low-level grunt in the enemy group to make it look like he killed the second in command. When the commander makes a spectacle of his execution to set an example for traitors, publicly release evidence that irrefutably demonstrates the innocence of the grunt and plant evidence saying the commander knew the whole time. Use a new uprising in the public to riot three of his primary compounds while sending a special forces team after his hiding place. This is how I think, but no game offers me the opportunity to think on this kind of tactical level. I just don't like variable-management strategy or shooting hordes of enemies while ducking behind barriers as a substitute.

P.S. LT I'm not ignoring you! I'll respond to your post soon. I just felt like making this one first.

11

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 23, 2013, 11:58:11 AM »

Hey LT,

That's great about the student showcase! Most of my performances have been pretty informal. I did my recitals back in the day, but other than that I tend to just play for groups of people here and there. I can rely on getting a good reaction. I started playing by ear when I was 3 and then started classical lessons when I was 7 so it's been a long thing for me. I think I wrote my first composition when I was 8 or 9. It was just some tiny minimalist piano composition, and it's evolved a lot since then.

As far as the Disney music goes, I'm a huge Alan Menken fan. Although my tastes have tended more and more away from words and towards exclusively orchestral as I've gotten older. My current favorites are John Williams, Danny Elfman, Howard Shore, Ilan Eshkeri, Joe Hisaishi, Hans Zimmer, and Michael Giacchino. In older composers I'm a fan of Beethoven and Tchaicovski. That's probably along the lines of the kinds of music I'd want to create. I'm so impressed with their work, and I have the rare pleasure with them of hearing something I never noticed before every time I listen to a piece of theirs (which is quite often).

Theater groups are ALWAYS tight-knit like that. Don't be too intimidated. It's a natural facet of the medium. You work with each other constantly. You're rehearsing. You go through all of the show's disasters together. You end up with a million inside jokes. Acting is tough though. I've nearly taught it a few times. There's so much to the profession, and there's so much unreliable information that floats around about it. For instance, method acting was a propagation of Lee Strasberg, which he only claimed is derivative of Stanislavski, but he never actually studied under Stanislavski.

To learn the basics, I'd recommend reading both volumes of "The Great Acting Teachers and Their Methods." That will give you a good idea of the essential different approaches to the profession. A personal favorite of mine is, following those two, "How to Stop Acting" by Harold Guskin. He trained Kevin Kline and Christopher Reeve, and I just really like his approach. Beyond that, Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler are both great reading. Meisner's focus on "live truthfully under imaginary circumstances" has definitely shaped the field, but I find his approach to emotions somewhat limiting. Then if you really want to get into it, read Michel Saint-Denis (Juilliard training is based on his work) and the new translations of Stanislavski's three books (the old translations are virtually indecipherable in content due to poor translating).

The making stuff approach is great. It doesn't really matter whether you end up a game designer, a composer, or neither, you'll still have a fun project. I've done lots of things that I ended up nowhere close to that profession. Sophomore year of high school I was a pre-engineering major in a vocational program, and we made a synthesizer from scratch. I'm nowhere near being an engineer, much to my grandfather's chagrin.

12

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 23, 2013, 11:36:25 AM »

Hey Chris,

Thanks for all of your input! It has mostly seemed to me that if I was going to do games, I would have to really want to do programming. That's why I've mostly ruled it out at this point. I wouldn't compose something and have someone else write the score. I wouldn't outline a book and then have someone else write it for me. To me, doing game development without programming seems rather similar. It's like trying to create something without actually speaking the language. That's not impossible, but it's not something I really want.

Man, being a musician in games sounds like a nightmare. Fortunately, when it comes to music I have a good amount of options. One of the things that I started looking at more recently is something I do naturally but that I feel there's always something to learn about. That's really important to me. I don't want to be doing something where I feel behind on the basics, but I also don't want to do something where my interest in it is so narrow that I feel like I've done everything I want to do in a few days. There are also certain things in terms of lifestyle that I'm looking for.

The reason that I've come down to music at the moment is it seems to offer most of them. I can play piano and sing at a high intermediate level. With a little more training I could do both of those at an advanced level. With a little more training than that I could be writing orchestral scores. I already have a good ear both for listening and creating. So it would offer me a lot of opportunities in the sense that I could do anything from piano accompaniment, playing in a bar or hotel, doing arrangements for a small orchestra, or composing for a film or a game. There are a lot of others besides, and I like the versatility of that. There's a lot I can learn, a lot of experiences I can have, and I'm not dependent on one small, probably unreliable, corner of the profession to make me money.

The list of game types is really helpful. I've gone in a number of these directions. I did push my way up to about 40 hours each in AI War and Crusader Kings 2. I know that's not much in terms of really grasping it, but the thing I kept coming back to was, even though I felt that they were great games, I just didn't have that sense of wanting to come back and play them when I wasn't. I've had similar experiences with a lot of great tactical games.

You mention experience games though, and it's funny as I just did a run through of my book collection to try to find the common trait that has maintained over going through thousands of books and keeping only a few. It turned out to be subjective experience. The ones I liked best in any field are the most insightful subjective commentaries (Feynman in physics, Sacks in psychology, Pelton in journalism, Tim Burton in film, and so on). It did occur to me to look for the most experiential games at the time, but I wasn't really sure where to look. My first thought was something like F.E.A.R. which may not have been quite as experiential as I was looking for.

I think I've avoided experiential games to a degree because I hated even the idea of them when I was younger. I wanted something with "gameplay." Now every time I play something with "gameplay" I find myself frustrated with the repetition of it and just want to have something intriguing to interact with. Minecraft I felt was too open for me because in that instance I wanted more of an experience, but when I play a lot of other games I start feeling like I've "experienced" the entire game in the first ten minutes just because I know how similar the rest of the gameplay will be to that. So that could definitely be an avenue to try. I'll have to look into that more.

Anyway thanks again for all your help, and it wasn't too depressing.

13

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 23, 2013, 12:46:21 AM »

Hey LT,

Boy do I ever understand loving things that won't provide a reliable income. I've taken writing classes, acting classes, directing classes, music classes, film classes, and a bunch of others. I did a youth program at the American Conservatory Theater, dropped out of a $100,000 art school, and did 3 terms at AnimationMentor. I've acted in 3 full-length plays and some short films, directed two plays and about half a short film, and even worked on some games here and there. How much did I get paid for all of this? Oh, you know, some transportation reimbursement, a few meals...

I'm actually fairly musical myself, but my career of the week is composer. I've played piano for about 20 years and my running theory is if I actually start training my ear and understanding of theory then I might hit a level of producing something. Other possibilities have included: acting (film, theater, and improvisational), directing (film, theater, and animation), game design (sometimes of the type you describe, sometimes programming myself), writing (novels, poetry, songwriting, musicals, games, etc), and music (film composer, game composer, just plain orchestral composer, pianist, singer/songwriter, etc). Of course, like you, I can't ever seem to drift onto an option that would actually make me money. Except neuroscientist. That drifts in there every so often. Philosopher is more frequent though, and we all know how much money they make. Turns out talking about the value of things has no physical value. Paradox or obvious?

I think if I was going to make games, I'd find a way to make them within my limitations. If all I can do is low-level programming, and I want to focus on complex character choice; then I'd make something as simple as possible in all the other elements. Though I can see how having a programmer friend could be extremely useful. I could go for one of those. However I do have the artistic front covered as my fiancee is an artist. Incidentally, I've heard Michael Giacchino talk about avoiding reading scripts because he starts seeing the film how he would direct it, and that hurts his eventual relationship with the director. Is this career-drifting thing where we like putting our paws in everything just inherent to composers?

14

Game Development / Re: My Love/Hate Relationship with Games

« on: April 22, 2013, 11:04:31 PM »

Hi Chris,

I was hoping I'd catch your attention with this one, and I had a feeling your response might start with 'it's why you started making games.' 

I've done the same thing a lot with not feeling the need to finish a game that I think is great. Limbo was one for me as well, so was Braid. I definitely don't read the same books now as when I was 13. When I was younger all I read was fantasy and science fiction. Now I tend to only read memoirs of the sciences, arts, and war. I just haven't found the gaming equivalent to grow into. I keep having the impending doom feeling that I'm not going to find another game I like, but that seems unlikely.

I've certainly considered making my own games, but the programming aspect seems a barrier to me. Being that I don't do so well with the high strategy, you can probably imagine I don't often find myself lost in the numbers that would make a mechanic work. Simultaneously, I do have a few ideas for games that I'm fond of as well a ideas for mechanics. I've done some programming. I think the farthest I ever got was low-level C#.

When it comes to making games, I tend to suffer from the syndrome of opening something like GameMaker, proverbially doodling with it, and immediately wanting to make it do something it's not capable of. Then the alternative of learning a massive completely open-ended programming engine looks fairly daunting. Unfortunately, I'm not a great artist either so the prospect of making it from the visual side also looks daunting, but now I feel whiny. 

Anyway that side of things comes down to I'm still at a very 24-year-old stage of having no idea what I want to do with my life and switching artistic careers on almost a weekly basis. Given AI War, I would imagine you never had a problem with advanced math in programming. Though I commend you quite highly, and you remain one of my favorite developers. AI War is the kind of innovation I'd like to be responsible for, just not in that type of game. I often use it as a benchmark in discussing emergent gameplay mechanics with people to prove linear or top-down events are not all that's possible.

So I won't lose heart and will continue the search! "Once more into the breach dear friends." Thanks for taking the time to respond.

15

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!