121–130 of 186 posts
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I wouldn’t say A Theory of Fun is “the book.” It’s more a coffee table read. “The book” is Jesse Schell’s The Art of Game Design
I've come across this kind of comment elsewhere, and the recommendation was that "the book" is Designing Games by Tynan Sylvester (the author of Rimworld) https://tynansylvester.com/book/ Haven't read it yet myself.
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I think for both contexts its far too simplistic to be more than a generalization and certainly for fun its a very local definition to serve Raph's ideas about what constitutes a game rather than encompassing enough to define it fully. For intelligence for example you could have a PID controller where there is automatic tuning which would fit the definition of learning and application. But I don't think we'd call it…
A PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.
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A PID doesn’t get better at learning and applying predictions. I’d argue that to do that essentially indefinitely requires intelligence.
Hence mentioning a PID controller that has autotuning. Drop it in a new environment and it'll adjust. Drop it in another and it'll reconfigure itself.
One thing that gets me is how there hasn't really been a language made solely for gameplay logic.. Almost every other domain has its specialized language: SQL, Julia, even HTML/CSS/JS.. but game developers still have to trundle on with general purpose languages invented 500 years ago by people who had nothing to do with games.
Game development and game design are completely separate domains. Game development can be generalized to algorithms and languages targeted to specific processors and architectures because it's a subset of programming and computer science. You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it. Unless y…
Gameplay and game mechanics are fairly different from making other types of programs. Things like stats, buffs/debuffs, conditions, and their dependencies on each other.
It's all sort of a vague middle ground between typed vs untyped, static vs dynamic, inheritance vs composition, sequential vs asynchronous, and other oddities that make it distinct from other domains.
> You can't have a DSL for design because the domain is the human mind. The design of a game like Undertale has absolutely nothing to do with the language used to develop it.
But what if coding could correspond almost 1:1 to the design?
I've been attempting some of it here: https://github.com/InvadingOctopus/comedot
with stuff like abstracting the idea of "Actions" that could be anything from a verb like "Look at" in a text-based adventure, to clicking on spells/weapons buttons in a turn-based strategy game, or a Dash move in a platformer etc.
Fantasizing about elevating those concepts to being core keywords in a hypothetical language is my equivalent of counting sheep to fall asleep :)
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Game was SWG, not SWTOR. Launched in 2003 and was sunset in 2011 when SWTOR launched. SWG set out to be something like Dwarf Fortress in terms of depth to the worlds physics; for example, gunsmiths could tinker on all parts of a gun and maybe get a lucky roll to unlock +N more damage or -N recoil. Same with land vehicles and bioengineered animals, droids. Parameters to noodle all the way down. Some under user control…
Oh wow it was SWG? It truly was ahead of its time, I don't think any one game has come close to implementing such a rewarding group of systems and economy in an MMORPG, except maybe EVE but that is a very different game and admittedly I did not find EVE fun. The most exciting systems to me had very little to do with combat, but especially as it pertains to this article, also couldn't be as rewarding without it. It wa…
This reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space. If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt. Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
But let's simplify this. What are your favorite games, and in what way do they sidestep having any repeated challenges? Do they have one single challenge, after which the game is over? Is that fun?
Sure, RPGs tend to have "repeated" battles or harvesting. Racing has repeated laps. FPS have repeatedly finding someone else to shoot. Coding simulators like Factorio have you repeatedly add automation, and repeatedly replace them with better automation. Platformers have you repeatedly move through platforms.
This is all illustrated and explained in the article, though.
> crazy juicy, so that players are captivated by spectacle, well beyond the needs of feedback from a UX perspective What a great phrase to describe an aspect of game design to strive for. https://www.raphkoster.com/2015/06/29/game-design-ux-design/
I feel modern game design as the exact opposite problem: It's all show and no substance. It looks spectacular on video, but it doesn't feel spectacular when you play it, since it's non-interactive script driven gameplay, barely more interactive than a cutscene. A bit of juice is fine and necessary, but the moment your juice starts to look like interactive gameplay, but isn't, it went way to far and just becomes noise…
But games come out that break the mold of AAA style over substance, and sometimes they are great. Games like Stardew Valley or Valheim or Factorio had very small teams, and rudimentary graphics, and yet offered up countless hours of addictive gameplay.
What are some other examples of breakout hits?
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Hence mentioning a PID controller that has autotuning. Drop it in a new environment and it'll adjust. Drop it in another and it'll reconfigure itself.
That is not getting better at learning. That’s repeatedly re-learning in the same way.
I do like that meta observation though that not only do people get better at prediction through learning they can also get better at the rate at which they improve their predictions.
This reads like the handbook for people making grind-based games. Sure enough, the author exclusively works in the mmorpg space. If you are a game designer, please take this with a grain of salt. Fun does not equal repeated challenges. And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun.
> And let me also reject the implicit notion that stories are entertainment but not, academically speaking, fun. Stories are obviously fun, otherwise no-one would read books, but a story that you interact with meaningfully, that you can change significantly, really hard to do well. Like every game where you can do good thing or bad thing, and the game punishes you for doing bad thing. It's really hard to write a comp…