Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Game design is simple

raphkoster.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 186 posts

Re: Game design is simple

#51

Post by CompoundEyes »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #44
CompoundEyes wrote: post #40

> 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/

"juice" (in terms of game making) will always remind me of this amazing, classic talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Fantastic watch thanks for sharing. I realize now how a favorite game of mine, Wario’s Woods on SNES, juices up a twist on match 3 puzzle and how dry early versions of Tetris were (succeeding despite that).

Re: Game design is simple

#52

Post by gryn »

ninkendo wrote: post #20

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid ? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene,…

my theory is a there are two camps of "games" (really more of a spectrum from the projection of 2 axes "play" and "art"):

- proper games ("play"): if you remove all the lore, cinematics, dialogs, etc the gameplay can stand on its own and the user find it fun. (ex: Elden ring, Pokemon. you can play a cut-scenes ripped version in a language you don't understand and still enjoy both, chess and other abstract games are the extreme end of this category)

- interactive DVD menus ("media arts"): it's a movie but sometimes you get to interact with it. in this category you have also have visual novels with branching trees/DAGs. they are more than a movie but still ultimately the most important test: they can't stand alone without the story/lore.

I enjoy both, but I wish games and steam pages were more front and center about which camp they are in the beginning before I even buy them.

my ultimate sin is games that think they are in category 1 who give you unskippable cut scenes.

Re: Game design is simple

#53

Post by godelski »

philipov wrote: post #13
godelski wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that sense most things are simple. Though it's also simple to over simplify. Since often simplicity arises out of the accumulation of expert analysis rather than being obvious from the get go. Which I think is just as important as what you say: Simple != easy Simple != obvious Simple != intuitive Simple != easy to understand I think if people remembered these things then things would be more simple. I'll add one m…

Simple means not complex, means not composed of even simpler parts. A twelve step plan is literally a list of simpler parts, making it not simple. Most things are complex, since there are so many ways to combine simples. It is an ironic title.

  > Simple means not complex
I disagree. Most things are complex, yet most things are also simple.

Don't forget that words are overloaded so they only mean things in context. Words are both simple and complex because of this.

As an example: the rules to the game of life are simple. The outcomes are complex. The rules cannot even be decomposed further, making them first principles of that universe.

  >  means not composed of even simpler parts
These would really be "first principles". Which is a form of simplicity. Being the simplest something can be, yet that sentence itself conveys that "simple" relies on context and in a continuum.

This relationship of "simple yet complex" is quite common. We could say the same thing about chaotic functions like the double pendulum. It is both simple and complex.

Re: Game design is simple

#54

Post by bigstrat2003 »

jayd16 wrote: post #35
ninkendo wrote: post #20

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid ? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene,…

Bad take IMO. Cutscenes are fine. Many are beloved, even. Taking agency away from the player is usually a bad thing, so its not something you want to do when the player has other goals to work on. They are a fine tool to break up the action and games are also about the story and world building so expositional sections are a natural thing. Its important to not mess with the game pacing, though. After a heavy boss figh…

Agreed. Cutscenes are perfectly fine things to have in a game. Ninkendo is writing like a personal preference (not liking cutscenes) is a universal law of game design, but that is not at all the case.

Re: Game design is simple

#55

Post by AdieuToLogic »

ninkendo wrote: post #20

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid ? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene,…

> My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

Two things to consider regarding cut scenes. First, sometimes they are mandated by the game story writers and backed up by artists wanting to show off. Second, and more importantly from a game developer's perspective, they are a useful tool for hiding scene loading I/O such that the customer experience does not notice a nontrivial delay.

Re: Game design is simple

#57

Post by netcoyote »

ninkendo wrote: post #20

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid ? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene,…

> is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid?

Yes. In general it's because they're made by a different team, with different incentives, working to a different schedule.

They're often made using an earlier version of the game lore and story. Due to the massive effort required to make changes and render frames, they often don't match up with late-breaking changes made by the game team.

But sometimes you get lucky and the cinematics team excels. I worked with Blizzard's cinematics team in the '90s, and those spectacular folks produced an amazing body of work.

Re: Game design is simple

#58

Post by PhearTheCeal »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #44
CompoundEyes wrote: post #40

> 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/

"juice" (in terms of game making) will always remind me of this amazing, classic talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg

Reminds me of this interactive demo (created by the lead of Dead Cells) where you can adjust the juice amount in the menu: https://deepnight.net/games/game-feel/

Re: Game design is simple

#59

Post by stevenwoo »

ninkendo wrote: post #20

My question: is there a concise theory of game design that properly explains why cutscenes are fucking stupid ? There are a lot of AAA games out there that very clearly seem like the developers wish they were directing a movie instead. Sure, there’s loads of cutscenes to show off some cool visuals. But then they seem to think “ok well we need to actually let the player play now”, but it’s still basically a cutscene,…

I worked on an AAA game and the cinematic group had a team that worked in a different location from the main development team, we met a few times very early during preproduction, cue about three years of work, we got the completed videos pretty deep into development (nothing major was going to change in either the cinematics or the gameplay) and after viewing them were wondering what the cinematics had to do with the game with we made, to be fair the cinematics looked very good for the time, but I just plugged them into the game's framework to play at the appropriate point as one of my milestones, but all these videos were skippable after one viewing and I only viewed them completely just to QA the rest of the game when I was ahead of schedule.

I don't think it's a modern thing, I tried playing the original Kingdom Hearts on my PS/2 but gave up because there are so many mandatory videos that are unskippable during combat. Not going back as far, Bayonetta series has a ton of quicktime sequences, that I hate, have to beat an enemy, die to due slow reflexes and unexpected quicktime event, repeat and hopefully get the timing right on button press which is sharp contrast to the otherwise fluid combat in Bayonetta.

There was also at one point in ancient history a very big deal to have cinematics integrate seamlessly into gameplay, using the same engine for both, instead of prerecorded video sequences. So then games did that just as a point of pride, and having the cinematics in game engine it possible for non specialists to add (or storyboard and leaving final result to specialists) cinematics into a game's flow.

Re: Game design is simple

#60

Post by tekbruh9000 »

codebje wrote: post #50
ehnto wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The skill tree system was so nice compared to the rigid class systems of other MMORPGs, too. The fact that player towns just emerged was really cool. It was such a shame the space expansion was so ... flat. Neither space nor ground had a storyline to follow, but space wasn't an open world, and had no real element of choice in skill paths.

PVE was indeed awful. Especially given the back drop; it should have been full of adventure across the galaxy, established characters messing with players, but was merely "run here and kill 6 kobolds". NPC AI sucked.

Would love to strip from my private server, NPC generation as-is as implementation is static and does not allow dynamic responses. Replace it with modern agents to connect like players and train them to build out the world like players can.

Also started a project to make a new client using video and segmentation, gen AI to recreate initial game engine entities as Godot scenes to have full control.

Too little time for either, initial code has sat untouched for years.

Post reply on HN