Tools don’t stifle art!

 Posted by (Visited 15211 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Aug 132013
 

Luke McMillan has a nice article on Gamasutra entitled “An Intro to RLD,” which is about using math to assess the difficulty of jumping puzzles (and by extension, other parts of the content ramp in your game design).

I’m not here to talk about the article. It’s a nice article. I’m here to talk about one of the reactions to it.

The article is a nice, straightforward illustration of how quantitative methods can bring greater clarity to something that designers do every day, usually by “feel.” And of course, the challenge with “feel” is that it only arises from experience. As I have termed it before, the “apprenticeship model” of learning game design: you do it until you develop the feel, and have internalized heuristics of your own for things like difficulty ramps. Then you struggle to communicate those heuristics to others, and they learn it the hard way themselves.

Michael Joseph, in the comments, states the following:

  • that the article shows “a desire to depersonalize game design”
  • that no one has “proved that ‘zen’ style of game design is a significant problem”
  • that these methods are “design encroachment tool by the business side so that any hairless monkey can churn out a game”
  • and that the method “reminds me of the Auto-Tune used by some singers with questionable talent.”

McMillan responded very politely to this comment. I on the other hand… this stuff makes me mad enough to be sarcastic and blunt. I apologize in advance to Joseph, since I know his track record in the industry, and it doesn’t seem reflective of the comments he’s making.

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Ways To Be Right

 Posted by (Visited 11614 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Aug 062013
 

In response to http://ellaguro.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-talk-of-magicians.html:

You can choose an art style that is broadly accessible, or not.
You can have training in your new mechanics, or not.
You can expect to make money at your art, or not.
You can see your art as a business, or not.
You can regard player needs as paramount, or not.
You can require absolute adherence to your own artistic vision, or not.
You can embrace the sordid need for marketing, or not.
You can select a populist price point, or not.
You can wish for many to embrace your work, or not.

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Dishonest opponents

 Posted by (Visited 13009 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
Jul 082013
 

Another question from Quora. At issue was whether a game can be successful if it relies on players being honest about what they think. The example given was “what number am I thinking of?” If the player with the secret number lies, then the game can be unwinnable. So the poster wondered if there were any examples of successful games that rely on blind trust.

Original question is here. The poster has since updated it to ask “opponents” rather than “players.” Before the edit, I posted that I was unsure if I understood the question, because of course there are so many examples of games that rely in blind trust in other players:

  • A player in a team sport relies on his teammates’ cognition all the time. As just one example, passes are executed with the faith that the receiver will be where he is supposed to be, as previously practiced.
  • Team sports rely especially on the coach’s cognition, and there’s a good case to be made that many team games are actually coach vs coach, using the players as poorly controlled tokens. The players often cannot perceive the overall strategic situation very well
  • Bridge and many other cooperative games are about building up trust in partner’s capabilities even though they do not share equal access to information.
  • The classic Prisoner’s Dilemma is a game theory example of blind trust.

I could go on. Which led me to conclude that what was being asked was really about whether the opponent is trusted, and specifically as regards the feedback they give to an action in the game. In a game like this, the player makes a move (uses a verb), it feeds into the black box of rules, and the opponent is supposed to be honest about the way in which the game state is updated, and feed back to the player the results of the action.

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Programming languages for aspiring designers

 Posted by (Visited 18598 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
Jul 012013
 

I answered a whole lot of questions on Quora in the last few days, and thought I would share some of them here on the blog over the next little while, since I have been pretty quiet.

The question on this occasion was, what programming languages should an aspiring game designer learn? And the answers tended to be around things like “C++.” But I suggest a different approach to the problem.

Learning new things is hard. Programming calls for a new mindset, if you have never done it before.

Therefore, you should learn whichever one you will stick with. And that means, the one that is easiest for you to learn first. The one that will give you positive feedback quickly.

Don’t jump to C++ because you are “supposed to,” even if you are aiming at working in AAA console. Don’t jump to C# because it’s the current hotness or what Unity uses. Pick the one that you feel like you personally can make progress in.

Any good programmer will learn many languages over the course of their career. Heck, I am not a good programmer, and I have worked with BASIC, C, C++, Python, Lua, modern BASICs like Blitz (three members of that family so far), three homegrown scripting lnaguages, JavaScript, PHP, and Java.

Pick one that is easy and cheap to get started in. It doesn’t need to be powerful, because you don’t know how to use that power yet. Instead, what you want is something that will let you get a picture on screen very quickly. When you are starting out, positive feedback is the hardest thing to come by, because you suck. So you want a language that will make iteration fast and your failures obvious, and your success gratifying to you.

Don’t worry, you may graduate to a language with greater complexity and power. (You may not… designers don’t need to be great programmers. They need to be able to try ideas out).

So high level languages will work best for a beginner. I would try out things like

  • Gamemaker
  • Flash
  • One of the versions of Lua with a simple graphics library. I used to use one for PSP homebrew development that had a simple API like “screen:draw(“picture,jpg”). That is the level of complexity you want.
  • Same goes for one of the versions of python with a graphics libray.
  • One of the many BASIC variants aimed at indie game developers: BlitzMax, DarkBasic, whatever. I am currently using Monkey, a cross-platform language by the maker of Blitz.
  • If you have an iPad, a neat Lua variant is Codea — you can code right on the iPad! I’ve used it for a couple of prototypes. There are similar apps for Python, and other languages.

Remember, your first game is going to be on the order of Hangman, Pong, guess the number, not Uncharted. You want a “toy” language, as the pros will derisively call these., because you want to play around.

A lot of your game development heroes started out with MS BASIC.

On personal games

 Posted by (Visited 16615 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 092013
 

I don’t have any tales of games saving me from depression.

I mean, I did go through a period where I was depressed. I dropped out of high school while living overseas and basically just didn’t go anywhere. I slept for 23 hours straight. I woke up to eat something and read. It was listlessness, pointlessness, it was like a blank. I didn’t feel sad. I felt… absent. Eventually I was dragged to a doctor who basically prescribed sunshine and a lot of vitamins, and a swift kick in the ass.

The terror of reintegrating into life was enormous. I was shaking and trembling as I caught the bus to downtown. Walking onto the campus had me breathless. And the perfunctory disbelief as I tried to explain to the school administrators what had happened was shocking: idle curiosity married to not caring. Their response to my terror was to say “well, just go back. It’ll be hard.” It was. And it comes back, every once in a while, though never as bad.

But games didn’t save me from that.

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