4 cool game development stuff

Hello! This is not a full-fledged post, we just made four translations of Tynan Sylvester's blog posts, a peasant who created the Rimworld toy in one mess. He gives out good thoughts about the development of games, for some of which in a decent company he would have been beaten. Below is a short squeeze of each and a link to the translation.

The Dream Simulator describes the good old history of the world from the Westworld series - when players are offered a complex world with internal conflicts, it’s a true masterpiece of art. And they immediately kill and rape everyone. Not necessarily in that order.
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After the release of Ultima Online, Richard Garriott said: “We thought it would be something fantastic. We spent a huge amount of time and effort on it. But it happened that the players simply walked and killed everyone so quickly that the game did not even switch to a new round, and the life simulator did not even begin. And this part, on which we spent so much time, even no one has ever noticed, not once! And in the end, we just removed it from the game. ”

And then a completely crazy concept of plot density estimation is introduced - a model in the player's head. This has turned a lot for me.

The point is: you need to look, not what is really happening in the model, but how the player perceives it emotionally.

“Consider every interaction in the game - every harvest, every path traveled, every word uttered by the hero. Of all the interactions of the game, what percentage of them is part of an emotionally significant plot? Such a percentage is high in a successful game. ”

So, where did his AI storytellers in Rimworld come from, which slip unexpected or desired events! And that is why there is such a complex society - because the matmodel of relationships in the player’s head becomes the life of a colony. Not “they broke the bond of reproduction”, but “my characters stopped meeting, because the major had his nose shot off while he was defending the base from the orbital landing” - and now a completely different attitude to history. And the answer to the question of why we love to build houses in games so much - we are not building characters for ourselves, but in our heads. In general, it is necessary to read, there are analyzes with specific examples.

The material is here , the original is here .

Development speed

Then we have “From e-mails: reducing improvements and non-linear results” - a big angry letter, where Tynan fiercely defends one very cool idea. The main thing in development is speed. The game is not an application software, there is no clear TZ and a plan, it’s all about the samples of hundreds of options. The more I tried, the better the final result. It is amazing fighting with the business - instead of 80% of the time to finish 20% of the work, it is better to plant someone to finish this section, and to do the next one yourself, where you can do something serious.

“Most of the things we do are not really very important,” I really think that the final impression is created with just a few key insights. In the BioShock project, these were the Little Sisters and the Big Daddies, both turned out to be a couple of bright ideas chosen from a giant pile of simple ideas. But these particular ideas became the basis of the franchise! When 1% of your labor generates more money than the remaining 99% combined, you get a completely non-linear relationship between time spent and income received. ”

The material is here , the original is here .

And, of course, in order to move quickly, you need to set priorities correctly. About how and where to look, he writes in the Development Landscape.

“The first strategy is to move slowly and constantly check the altimeter readings. This is a testing process when a developer enters only small changes at a time and confirms their effectiveness with frequent testing. The advantage of this approach to climbing is that it guarantees finding the nearest peak. The downside is that the nearest peak may not be very high. As a result, we will stand on the top of a small hill, although Everest may wait for us in the fog very close, not opened by us only because of indecision, such is the specificity of the step-by-step method. You can climb the mountain faster. You can push forward on all the possible options, only testing them slightly, even without really understanding them. This will give us faster progress with less testing. Many developers first begin to move quickly, jumping over mountain ranges, then slow down at the end of development in search of the highest mountain peak in a given area. This slowdown process continues even after the game is released - the release of many updates after the release of the popular game is akin to how the developer moves the boulders on the top of the mountain, which he climbed during development to select the largest boulder and climb on it. Sometimes we make giant blind jumps, weakly imagining where we are going. MineCraft Notcha received inspiration from Dwarf Fortress ... No developer moves across the landscape alone. Imagine a landscape that is boiling with activity. Popular areas are literally teeming with developers who map territories more and more accurately, sometimes stumbling over each other in the process. ”

Strange as it may seem for an indie developer, in the material Tynan tells how to learn from someone else’s experience, and how important it is.

The material is here , the original is here .

Replayability

And finally, a short "Limit of skill." The point is very simple: there are two types of games. The first rest against the hardware capabilities of the human body, the second - the possibility of the mind. For example, shooting faster than others in shooters is a complication due to the fact that you cannot outrun biology. And it is better to play chess - at the expense of deepening the strategy.

“Imagine playing tic-tac-toe, but with the condition that you only have a third of a second per move. As a mental exercise, you can remove the element of speed from any game, slowing it down. Imagine a multiplayer Modern Warfare 2, "Starcraft", which is played at a speed of 10% of the original. The second method is the Go method. He has nothing to do with the ability to jerk sharply, but he has many points of contact with the management of complex strategies and tactical information. The fact is that there are so many options and variable parameters in the game that it’s easy to imagine where everything is going, no one can even if you stare at the game for an arbitrarily long time. It’s much more difficult to create such a level of multi-component content than just making high-speed input. ”

The material is here , the original is here .

For now. Just Tynan is cool.