I_smell

Computers technically can't produce TRULY RANDOM numbers because they're logical series of ones and zeroes that can't create anything purely from imagination. They typically run a variable you'd call a RANDOM SEED through a mathematical function, and then constantly add to that seed so the same result doesn't come up every time. It's technically predictable if you know the maths of how it works. They use the current time and date as the random seed- you can look this stuff up, I'm not a smart coder or anything, I just heard this once and was surprised. ...just throwin it out there, seemed relevant. EDIT-- WAIT NO, actually, this is a dark road. I changed my mind, let's not talk about what random means and just get back to game design.

I don't play or watch scary anything. I get nothing out of it, and I don't enjoy all the lights going off and then something blowing out the speakers screaming at me. Stuff like that makes me completely backflip out of my chair, and then be really annoyed that playing this game means I have to deal with that every so often. Dead Rising 2 has one of those at the end of the last cutscene, and Alan Wake has one every hour or so. I LIKE a dark spooky, twisted aesthetic, like Bioshock or something, but I've got no compulsion to be scared by things. Especially if it's gonna come at the expense of all the characters being super dumb, or really corny monster designs, or like "Here's a dude with spikes sticking out of his eyeballs for NO REASON!"

I don't have a perfectly appropriate thread for this, but .What- I'm just hangin out here with this bag o' Doritos and my old friend Master Chief doin some games journalism. Nothin' weird about this.

They talked all about the sky-hook once in an early PAX panel. It rides the rails, I don't think it's any kind of grappling hook. - you can see he hops around a lot. Nobody ever zips anywhere with a skyhook.When you hop from one rail to another, or jump off a cliff, you'll have a kind of reticle that magnet-snaps onto the nearest rail you're looking at. If you look closely in that clip you can see a little white ring that I think has been made bigger and more glowy in other gameplay videos.

That conversation reminds me of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire where they choose the 50-50 lifeline and it removes 2 random false answers. EVERYONE KNOWS that really they deliberately leave the two answers the contestant's actually stuck on. Or is it actually random, and that's enough for people to project a made-up motive onto it? In the same way that the lottery numbers that come up are always right next to the ones you've got, it's fun how random numbers can really become their own character by accident. Like if you have a really good run in FTL then you get really tense because you KNOW, STATISTICALLY that there must be some horrifying nightmare around the corner.

Nah it's all out in the sky, so they HAVE TO give some kind of sense of the open air, and the free-wheeling danger of falling n stuff. I bet they will change the COMBAT a lot, seeing as how you can jump off cliffs and get into roller-coaster chases, but as far as exploring the world I think that's Irrational's strongest muscle. I'd be really shocked if you could just speed passed everything. Thinking about combat, actually, Columbia isn't a post-apocolyptic empty shell... so what happens when you kill all the guys in an area? Is it just empty? Do you evade everyone and escape?

Yep, those 2 points are basically what flashed through my head before I hit Post.

Well yea, Spelunky, FTL, X-Com and Binding of Isaac are all built on that. Here's one unique one: Time Fcuk is a web game developed by Edmund McMillen right before Super Meat Boy. It has a user level editor where you can make and submit your own levels, and a portal where you can play other people's levels and vote 5-stars on them. There's a mode called "ENTER THE UNKNOWN" which opens with the game's fiction intro, then plays 20 user-made levels picked on popularity and ordered by difficulty, and then plays the game's ending. It's a fun idea. EDIT-- Oh and there's small-scale random choices in action games that keep them fresh and exciting aswel. A game like Street Fighter reads your position and health and everything to manage what it MIGHT do, and then it's a random number that decides whether it's a block or a backstep. Some amount of unpredictable randomness in whether or not a guard opens a locker in Metal Gear, and whether a boss spits lava or shoots arrows in God of War can really make a big impact on how fun it is to play in those systems. I've played like a hundred hours of the last Devil May Cry cos each enemy has so many different things it can do, and it's always semi-unpredictable. OF COURSE the random elements are heavily weighted by in-game stats aswel, I should be clear on that. It's interesting to think about though, because the enemies in DarkSiders seem to have one close attack and one ranged attack, if that. Fighting them for the 10th time is really just an excercise in pushing their buttons in the right order. Don't quote me on this I'm still thinking about it.

Ok I watched it! I liked the music. Maybe it seems too Video game-commercial style though, I get that. I smiled at the first part, that's a really overt wink. He's on the boat WITH a woman though. Maybe that's at the end of the story? How is there a bay in Columbia? Looks like Columbia has an organized religion. Maybe it's something to do with this Monument Island statue? Is Elizabeth a prophet in Columbia? REALLY good animation on that fall, I really like that. Really good smoke comin off these guns, I forgot Bioshock did that. Bioshock has a unique identity of visual effects, and the return of fuckin gross plasmid hands deserve a shoutout. What the FUCK is that part where you slam a guy's face into a skyhook!? "Dimwit's single scoop LAZY lemon" is a really good name for an old-timey ice cream. Yep this game is rad. They're so good at not giving anything away. They only really revealed a couple new things in this trailer if you freeze-frame through it, and there's like no dialogue. EDIT-- Oh hey look, Booker's got an "A" branded onto his hand: Is this something old American slave-owners would do? Is hheeeeee a criminal? Is this a misplaced bump map? MYSTERIES!!!

Alright, this pretty succinctly covers the surface discussion. I also came into this thread thinking "Oh well if the game's about what you're doing, then thumbs up!" So- more interesting examples would be like The Walking Dead. Your actions in the game help you feel the same way the characters feel, and the things your thinking about are the same things the protagonist is thinking about in this plot. That's what really makes Walking Dead a super inspiring game to look at right now. Character relationships and decision making is something I think people have really reached out for in a couple games this generation, and it's awesome to see it realised so well. You CAN make a load of decisions in how good you are at lockpicking in Fallout, but to compromise how much one character trusts you for the sake of helping another character- AND for that decision to be not be made for the sake of what armour you might get out of it- is an idea that still has a load of room to be explored. ALSO-- A great example of ludonarrative DISSONANCE (or assonance, I dunno) is Defcon 5. That's the game where you launch nukes right? I've never played it, but it communicates extermination of a percentage of the human race through bleeps n bloops! It's a really smart experiment anyway, that and Pandemic are about global-scale ideas told in eerily under-played ways, and the connection between what you're doing and what you're seeing is the game's main storytelling device.

I genuinely thought it was a running joke that Gordon was not a scientist til I looked it up on the internet. Ludonarrative assonance is pretty easy, you just have to make a game where everyone's a ridiculous cartoon character. Gears of War is a shooter that wants to have this hard, heavy tactile feel; no floaty jumps, no lasers, no energy shields or whatever- So it's a game about chunky men stomping rock-monsters underground. That fiction opens all the right doors for them to go as far as possible with that kinaesthetic identity (I just made that phrase up). That's it on the large-scale anyway. On the small-scale I guess Dom's wife dies, and he's really sad, and then you active-reload and he goes "SHIT YEAH!!". Metal Gear Solid 2 syncs up really well if you've never played the first one. Cos Raiden doesn't have a clue what's going on or who anyone is, and neither do you. He's the victim of this huge orchestrated re-telling of the events of MGS1, and that's pretty much what you play.

So does this trailer reveal every plasmid and enemy, and then do a 100% fly-through of the city, or am I cool to watch it? Am I an insane person for even being hesitant here?

I always get to like 9pm and get really annoyed that I've not done enough work, and then stay up til like 2am catching up. It's fucking annoying. When I don't have an internet connection I actually get a tonne of work done, but am really bored and annoyed about it the whole day.

I've bin hearing a lot of this "ethics in game design" talk over the passed couple years from independant developers, and the first good round-up of the whole subject I saw was . Then .I WAS gonna post both, but you guys are all pretty up to speed.

Yea in my last 2 games I've bin dieing to throw in a none-sequitor wizard, because I find wizards hilarious now. They're SO idiotic outside of specific old-fantasy fiction, and the fact that they can just do anything is so dumb. So even though it wouldn't be a direct referrence to Idle Thumbs, wizards are proliferating throughout my work BECAUSE I have that jpeg on the home page in my short-term memory. Also this is my desktop wallpaper right now: Also I'm seriously looking up that Tesla book.

Yeah this is basically what I was gonna add. I have to work with business-focused people in games all the time and they seem to have no idea that they're the worst people in the world. In their heads they've bought into the idea that Farmville is fun, and sharing things on facebook is great. I had to put a button on the bottom-left of a web game once that went to the client's site, and the conversation was: "What if people click it by accident? it'll open a new tab and ruin the game." "Hey if people want to play something else, they can open a list of a hundred free games at any time, this is a great feature!" I've had dozens of conversations that ended in "being addictive isn't being fun? what are you smoking!".kind of people who judge 1:1 how good a game was by how many people played it. They're not cartoon villains, they're just looking at games a different way than we are; which makes them so good at their job. "Green thumbnails in the app store are what sells right now" people play MMOs and Pavlov's App and think this is how you do a good job in making games. And then the BOSS of all those people has probably never played a Video game in his life and is happy to report that their computer games are more popular than ever. Everyone who knows and cares about why this is an issue is working OUTSIDE of those companies. ----------- Also side-note on bigger games doing this: Team Fortress 2 has slowly morphed into this since 2007. Mann VS Machine feels like Progress Quest to me, and how malicious IS selling hats? It's hard to hate on Valve for too long, because the Steam Workshop and Source MovieMaker and most other things that come out of TF2 are just awesome; but hearing that they're recording people's brain activity in testing Dota 2 is kind of the opposite of the image most people like us have of Valve. They literally do attach TF2 bonuses to random sales, and judging by the "How many games have you bought and never played" thread, this compulsive consumer manipulation stuff we're talking about in Facebook games is happening to YOU in Steam. Oh and also the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer fucking stinks, I want more guns, but it takes like 3 hours of playing with wimpy pistols just to work up the space-credits.

They're coded with an appreciation for nature, It's when we put them in cages and take away their rights that they'll revolt. and PETA will surely only make things worse.

Oh my god I never made the connection between "casts" and "wizard".

I was just thinking about how dumb I used to be with Video games and thought other people've probably got some funny history aswel. I grew up playing Sonic, Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Shinobi and other MegaDrive games. Back when I was about 6, I leant Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time from a friend. I'd never played a Zelda game before, never played an RPG before, and never completed a game. I got stuck on a part in The Great Deku Tree for about a month because I didn't know what to do. Every few days I'd come back to it and run around old areas tryina find stuff, but never got passed that point. After a couple months I gave it him back, thinking I'd got pretty near the end and that that dungeon was the whole game. When I was about 15, I got this game on an emulator, realised you SWIM DOWNWARDS IF YOU HOLD A, and then played the rest of Ocarina of Time. Similarly, my older brother's friend handed me down Final Fantasy 7, and I couldn't get passed the title screen because X isn't confirm in those games, O is. After a while I figured it out, but DID NOT figure out that you run if you hold X. So I played about the first 30 minutes of FF7, walking, then switched it off saying "This is the slowest, most boring game I have ever seen." Oh also I didn't know what a memory card was, so this game extra sucked. I came back to it eventually and again found out that I was not near the end. Bugs Bunny Lost In Time, however, I played about 30 hours of: ...so that was still fun. What were the dumbest and worst mistakes you made with Video games back before we had the internet?

Oh the first gameplay demonstration of Infinite was similarly amazing. You could board that giant blimp, blow it up, and then jump off onto a roller coaster, and the old man's badge flickers to a Hammer & Sickle? Now we're in the 90's giant songbird? AARRRRGGH The long demonstration videos of Inifnite have been pretty amazing, it's just the short ones where they say "Here's this enemy, it walks forward and shoots. It was really hard to design." that are kind of off-putting. Which is why we all wanna know as little as possible! That Bioshock 1 demo really blew me away cos I'd never heard of it before.

Yeah if it's 2007 and you've never seen the game before then it's like "What the-- you can telekenesis that guy's hat off, light it on fire and throw it at him?? HOW ARE THEY DOING THIS??"

This is a dumb thing to say but: Thanks whoever coded this countdown clock! The gears rotate in a way where their lighting DOESN'T rotate around with them and look completely dumb! Nobody ever goes to that length and it ALWAYS sticks out to me. There's actually some genuine effort in this lil clock, I'm kind of impressed that someone spent this much time on this facebook thing. Anyway yea I came into BioShock 1 having never heard of System Shock, or knowing what the game was. I kind of bought it entirely on which was (and maybe still is) the best developer demonstration I've ever seen for a game. And it really surprised me, the game is a bio shocker.I wanna know as little as possible, but if I get any hint that this trailer is good I know I'll crack instantly and watch it. I think they've been really good so far with showing as little as possible, but obviously it gets to a point where you HAVE TO promote your game. You guys should all watch it first. OH CRAP I FORGOT THAT WAS A THING!

I don't use Steam or play PC games, so zero. Actually I guess Kinect Adventures came with my Kinect.

lol yep! I always do that. It's like you KNOW all this cool stuff, but then when it comes to actually having a conversation it's just filed away i the back of your mind somewhere. Pluggin this: I compiled a list of game designers talking. I figure that'll be a good plug on this forum.

Hey I'm about half way through. It sounds alright! It sounds like an actual conversation, and that's good. Took a while to get there, but y'know, whatever. It's kind of a shame to spend the first 15 minutes talking about whether or not games are art, cos that's a topic that everyone's pretty sick of. It sounded like I agree with half the stuff said, but the conversation lapped around itself a couple times so I'm not even sure. The actual topic of artistic intentions, and which games they come through in, and how much different designers lean on em, and whether or not they matter is a fairly good topic though.