Games Are Math: 10 Core Mechanics That Drive Compelling Gameplay

 

Audio

A recording of this presentation is available on the GDCVault, behind a paywall.

 

  One Response to “Games Are Math: 10 Core Mechanics That Drive Compelling Gameplay”

  1. Playing with Space – CritPoints says:
    March 12, 2017 at 6:57 am

    […] A lot of good positional gameplay can also be related back to mathematics. There’s a lot of common difficult mathematics problems, like traveling salesman, maximum cut, knapsack problem, etc, that fall in the complexity class NP-Hard or above. In Nier and Nier Automata, you have attacks like dark lance and the laser or hammer pod program that can hit through enemies or hit a certain area of enemies. So in combat it can be efficient to group enemies together rather than fighting them, and it pays to recognize when enemies are grouped such that an area hitting attack would work. Raph Koster gave a talk on how a lot of these mathematics type problems overlap with games, and many of them are oriented around space. https://www.raphkoster.com/games/presentations/games-are-math-10-core-mechanics-that-drive-compelling… […]