Rules of the Game: Five Techniques from Quite Inventive Designers

this talk is literally "A man can get lost in the sauce, but the same man. can be lost without the sauce." -Gucci Mane

Great talk overall. I watched all of them except the last one, though. For some reason it felt like a presentation that just talked about "What makes this game cool" instead of giving defined, actionable guidance like all the talks before it.

"Our player has a brain." Questionable. In fact, I would argue the average player doesn't, and that that fact explains the success of modern AAA titles. Also remember: no matter how robust you make your system, the universe will always create a bigger idiot who is smart enough to defeat it and dumb enough to try.

"Where do your ideas come from?"
Through a melding of eldritch arts and perverted dark science I have managed to imprison a muse within a contraption that allows me to syphon inspiration from her like a hellish ichor. It's the easiest way.

this is the complete opposite of what i heard i should do. i heard i should wait to put in these really fun special effects and work with programmer art for as long as i can and make the game fun before adding these things, that way the game is even more fun in the end.
however what no one told me is that this makes developing the game a lot less fun for you, the dev and less fun slows down development.
i might try giving my games a bit of polish early on, maybe this way i wont get depressed and give up halfway through.

Quite liked the Lee Perry talk, currently watching the Emily Short one and I'm liking it even more. This is a lot of fun to watch, and very interesting/informative.

at first i was like "what a weird concept", so glad i didnt click away. binging these hard. 10minutes really cooks out an interesting essential message on which one can build.

That talk on the nemesis system took me back to being a kid watching the race to break the home run record. It all seems like pro wrestling to me now though.

Wait, you guys use code to pallet swap?

What is the best software to make flow charts ? And they should be easy to modify too. Any suggestions would greatly help.

I came up with a cool one myself that I haven't seen anywhere else... You can use dynamic movable lights on actors to "light up" when they get hit... Looks really sweet... Its not performance heavy either... I'm on a five year old rig... Over 30fps...

George Fan was great. The others were too.

I really liked the documentation talk!

The documentation talk was great!

the talk on documentation was surprisingly informative

novel ideas and fun are the essence of good games. if you just make something that works, it is just a brainless soulless factory made clone... and i dont care much about those, or more precisely, i actively hate them.

I enjoy this talk but that opener still grates on me and the MC is very much impeding the speakers with his rushing on of speakers and negative weighted commentary between speakers.

Even just in his first talking points you see him pushing pretty to bitter attitudes. If good ideas are so prolific then how come bad ideas continue to reach publication. How come the same ideas are being rehashed to the point of stagnation. The reality is that there is often dismissive attitudes toward people who have particularly ambitious or risky ideas. That's fair enough if someone is looking for a budget but at some point we need people to take those risks. The fact that indie devs continue to be the pioneers in creating new genres and new styles of play shows to me that this "ideas are easy" attitude is just industry talk to undermine creatives.

Yes implementation is the hardest part but that is such a general term that covers 90% of the process of development. Implementation includes designing, coding, debugging, play testing, animating etc. If you divide development into catagories of conception Vs implementation then no wonder you will see that one is a larger project.

So yeah I don't know if the MC is a nice person so I'm not judging him as a person but I hope he has improved his MC skills because I shouldn't be here thinking about that when so many of the speakers had such thoughtful opinions they were expressing.

I dunno, fun is a pretty specific descriptor word. Maybe that's why a lot of games suck, devs don't like the word fun.

WTF? "Feedback is Pizzazz?" Feedback is FEEDBACK. You don't need to make up another term to describe its importance. Have you ever played a game where there's NO feedback when you take damage? Feedback is how your player knows that a thing happened. It's not polish, and it's not "pizzazz." Pizzazz is an extra layer of art direction over the top of feedback. Feedback tells you what happened, EXACTLY when it happened, ideally a little bit about WHY it happened, and its scale should reflect its importance. Don't just throw a bunch of unnecessary particle effects on the screen for the hell of it.When the thing that matters happens, make it LOOK like it happened and like it mattered! That's literally what feedback is. Without feedback, the player doesn't even push buttons because the first time they pushed them, nothing happened!

Seems flawed since the concept is based around a limited time to develop not "make the funnest game you can". This is why there are few good games that last these days.

The talk about enemy variety covers some of the most important ways of looking at enemies, he even went over interesting prioritization that REALLY helps to make a single enemy translate interestingly to various contexts, stopping you from falling in patterns of seeing enemy x and doing y.
I hope people hear this one, this is the thing I spend by far the most of my time on, the enemies, their traits, their ai, the way multiple enemies combine, all in a space that itself has meaning through your and the enemies' mechanics.

I highly recommend just throwing together random levels and discovering how much more there is to your selection of enemies etc. than you though. The level will probably suck, but you end up seeing partial solutions to unbeatable encounters, and a little bit of fun that just needs some conflict in the trivial ones etc. etc.
Basically, do what Jonathan Blow does, poke at your system and be perceptive of what happens and how you can harness that.

Emerlald: it's alwys one step ath a i tim that allo thiws kinf comple viow o game development

Lee Perry's talk was really illuminating!

The game that really hit me hard with a cnosequence of my actions was "dishonored". Due to some choices a certain character dies. I go to the place where he/she dies and crouch on the corpse and press interact (which is used to examine) and the prompt just said "you discovered nothing". Don't know why but it hit me hard.

This is awesome

Lol, the humour is great.

Lol, the humour is great.

I loved Lee Perry's work on the Jamaican port of the E.T. game

Kudos on not showing gay sports

Emily dipped out with the quickness.

This is a really fantastic talk overall

The Pizzazz talk was really interesting and helpful

They don't like to talk about fun - it's no wonder they don't make anything substantial.
Fun isn't abstract concept, and it's objective. But I understand why they would think this way. It's just sad that this kind of knowledge is widespread in the game development industry.

Lee Perry's little segment was just great.

The Witcher 3 used the visualization of their database to fix bugs and glitches. Yes, it could have been worse.

Why do we care about people xD

Plant and fireball differ too because plant has linear movement and fireball has non-linear movement.

george's talk was simple, comprehensive and very informative. loved it!

"We don't like the word fun very much" - probably why so many games suck these days.

Well that confirmed I'm too susceptible to motion sickness to ever play VR games.

I never believed the Nemesis system would make me feel taunted and played through the game and barely died ever.
Then I farmed some Runes and suddenly met a captain with ridiculous immunities, he easily killed me and I went back to avenge my death and I died again and he got became Warlord soon after!
I was REALLY scared of this guy and used every trick in the game to trap, face and defeat him and his army in a 50min faceoff at the fortress with cliffs always going back and forth!

Never would've thought this game could trigger this feeling in me and other than the story ending it's a masterpiece in most ways!
Now even more disappointing and downright aggravating that the successor is turning out to be a shitshow we have to boycott

还不错~希望出更多。