Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
pixelatedplaygrounds.com
Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
1–10 of 63 posts
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#2Great art. I'm a game developer too. I use Unity C#
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#3My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game:
High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few.
You can have a great game, but if it's unstable, has annoying sound effects, or constant monetization related nagging, or a toxic community or some cringy voice actor or soundtrack or excessive unskippable cutscenes with irrelevant stupid dialogs... the magic in the experience goes away. Everything counts.
If you go to a 5 star hotel where everything is perfect but when you try to use the shower it doesn't work, your overall rating will be 1 star. For a experience to be gratifying, everything needs to work together.
I've read countless articles and postmortems of the style "why X is successful", and then seen games that follow those documents closely and produce a horrible game. Because they are unable to capture the whole experience.
Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#4Variety? Now do rimworld.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#5My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game: High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few. You can have a great game, but if it's u…
To apply what you're saying to a different media.
I was a big star trek fan growing up. Around the time of enterprise, then going on to the reboot and new series i'd lost interest in star trek.
The series changed in ways I didn't enjoy. Not to bash on them in any way and getting to my point.
I've been recommended The Orville a bunch lately. After hearing what it was, I wasn't really interested, but finally i was pushed into watching it and I was immediately hooked and finished the first two seasons in a couple days.
This is the reason why:
>Lately I played a game, Ex-Zodiac, which is a StarFox clone. Only the demo is available, but the author really captured every single aspect that made StarFox great. That attention to detail is what makes games fun.
You can tell the people that made the Orville loved the hell out of the earlier star trek series and put a lot of care into small details that really made it feel like star trek, moreso than most newer actual star treks. Despite being somewhat of a comedic parody, like you say, they 'really captured every single aspect' that made star trek great.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#6My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game: High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few. You can have a great game, but if it's u…
I get the point you're trying to make but regarding the hotel analogy, I expect a lot more from a hotel than a video game. The trappings of a dodgy hotel are more universal than the subjective shortcomings of games whose tropes align to specific genres. For example, I have a soft spot for the aesthetic vision of the original StarFox but the game itself is incredibly linear, repetitive and one dimensional. According to your criteria it would ruin the magic, but I don't really see it that way.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#7My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game: High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few. You can have a great game, but if it's u…
Nobody really doubts that some art fails because its just not good. Differentiating art that is technically superb to art that really resonates is a more interesting conversation.
I do game dev. It's very easy to think "this animation could be better". It's a lot harder to figure out "could this be made more fun". Tactics vs strategy.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#8Variety? Now do rimworld.
Rimworld has had so many wonderful moments that have stuck with me even though I haven't touched it since the alphas. Because one of the mechanics of the game is the colonists can lose their minds due to stress, where usually they strip naked and grab a gun and start shooting people or run toward the nearest living thing and try to beat it to death, managing that is important.
Anyway, one of the early builds had this bug where sufficient terror/horror stats were enough outweigh any degree of stress. So the solution to a happy colony was hundreds of occupied gibbet cages placed in rows as a sort of path guide to/from the entrances to the cafeteria, bunk houses, etc. so colonists would constantly be exposed to them.
If you filled them with barbarians or whatever you could catch (sometimes your own people if the headcount started to get above your food production...) you'd have a nice "happy" colony.
I'm sure this is long removed or fixed, but it just struck me as amazing at the time...
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#9My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game: High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few. You can have a great game, but if it's u…
I get the point you're trying to make but regarding the hotel analogy, I expect a lot more from a hotel than a video game. The trappings of a dodgy hotel are more universal than the subjective shortcomings of games whose tropes align to specific genres. For example, I have a soft spot for the aesthetic vision of the original StarFox but the game itself is incredibly linear, repetitive and one dimensional. According t…
StarFox is not so linear or repetitive if you pay attention to it. If you just want to pass levels and see an ending, the game can be somewhat mediocre... but if you want to master the game, it has a lot more to offer. And this is even more true for StarFox 2.
Re: Game Design Perspective: Stardew Valley (2020)
#10My criticism towards game designers is that they often analyze games from an abstract perspective, leaving out important details that contribute to the success of the game: High frame rate, stability, good quality animations, color palette/art style/fonts that are consistent with the game fiction, UI usability, soundtrack, community, abscence of cheaters... just to name a few. You can have a great game, but if it's u…
The thing is unless you are a small shop like the Vlambeers of the world(rip) there's so much work to put together a game that clicks.
You have to trust that your art, animation, gameplay programmers, etc are experts in their own way and there's usually at least one or two people making sure those things are all coehesive.
Honestly that's the thing I think we lost in the 90s/00s was that the scope of a game was within the grasp of a team of 8-12 people. This is now making a resurgence in the indie space(latest example is Everspace 2 which just nails the feel of Freelancer and Escape Velocity).