How to get new ideas

hi, thank you for sharing this! #13 is especially relevant for right now lol

I covered this in my PhD thesis, please check it out and I'd love to hear your thoughts as someone working on this (relatively lonely) problem! https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/phd/

From what you've written so far, while the tech is cool, I'm not sure you're trying to solve a problem that actually exists. This is coming from someone who is bullish on both cloud gaming as well as decentralised architectures for gaming (esp VR) but for other reasons.

You seem to consider updating and rendering millions of players client-side to be a bottleneck; it's not -- human perception bottlenecks kick in long before that. Players can't -- and don't want to -- see all other players that are in the same area. And if they're not, then sharding by area is a much easier solution.

Even if it were a bottleneck, the solution is not to offload that rendering to cloud GPUs, it's many well-established LOD tricks. Game servers don't send millisecond updates of every player in a world to a client, the bandwidth they end up using for good UX is almost always lower than streaming video. You said networks keep getting faster, true, but client GPUs keep getting better and better too. Shard-less horizontal scaling sever-side has already been done btw (see SpatialOS (https://ims.improbable.io/products/spatialos) or WorldQL (https://github.com/WorldQL/mammoth)) or the many proprietary implementations (think Fortnite, Roblox, etc) but I don't think it's as useful as we think it is.

Besides this, I can tell you for a fact that "we have more players than we can handle" is an extremely rare thing actually, even on launch days, even though it might not seem like it to us. The biggest problem for games is getting players in the first place. The ones that do tend to have big budgets to spend on their servers, and it's usually not budgeting that's the bottleneck, but bad planning.

I would be curious to know if you've validated this idea with any studios, and if so, how? Or is the 10-20 hrs mainly focused on building?

Read Blue Ocean by Kim & Mauborgne. What is "really good" is that what shortens the distance between the problem of the consumer and the solution.

As an example, audiophiles might sneer at consumers buying "cheap" "digital" "crap" instead of having the good sense to appreciate what a high end speaker or vinyl system is capable of, but those consumers aren't upstream, they're trying to solve the issue of needing a sound system. People in the industry are for the most part audiophiles, so they're going to have an appreciation for things their consumer base is basically illiterate in. Still, the business is run on solving problems, and the problems of most are not the problems of the high-end user.

we're solving problems, or solving really hard problems, but either way can't deceive ourselves if we're just trying to solve the problem of making ourselves money, or actually of providing value to a variable population of problem-havers.

While I do have a VR device I've done the whole digital thing before (I have versions of some of my games on Tabletop Simulator, in fact one of them is downloadable on Steam Workshop right now) and it's just not the same as being able to handle things physically.

My brain doesn't catch things as easily without being able to physically manipulate objects. Like one example is I didn't notice how fiddly resource manipulation was when I only had a digital version of one of my games. It was only when I was manipulating it physically that I went "yeah that's not going to work".

Without playing with the physical bits, it's harder (for me) to come up with special actions or different ideas for mechanics. Not impossible, just harder.

Also my local playtest group and game designer conventions meet in person, so I better have something physical for those.

I do write simulation programs for some things though, like to help balance scores, determine if there's a first person advantage, how often do draws happen, etc.

However, I am interested in the recent push for sustainable game production, with people making roll and write games where the sheets you play on can be done on an iPad without printing anything out. I may have a design that's compatible with that, a concept that popped in my head recently that I'll start designing soon. One example[1] and another [2] and another [3] of these games on Kickstarter.

I reuse a lot of components anyway. I have a tub for wooden cubes, another for wooden meeples, a third for dice, a fourth for money chips, etc. and I have a few decks of cards that have six suits and numbers from 0 to 15 on them that covers a surprisingly wide range of games, that I can just grab and start using. But if I want to have special cards, then I use index cards (and eventually do graphic design and print card art for).

Also not sure why you think VR and E-ink is somehow not a consumable resource. They take an incredible amount of resources to make in the first place, probably far more than some sheets of paper, and eventually they'll need to be upgraded or replaced, which uses much more resources as well.

[1]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/postmarkgames/voyages/d...

[2]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/peterchayward/sunshine-...

[3]: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wayfarerstale/a-wayfare...

You can get improve the low hanging fruit through brute force ... but there is a lot of low hanging fruit.

Model architecture cleverness will eventually outpace more GPU time, but for now the roi on GPU time is higher than clever design.