How to make a good game?

Circles are finnicky to aim around, and are too strong for snipers to hide behind.

You're playing against an AI, AI in single player games doesn't give out nearly the same amount of quick movements as a player would, in nearly all cases.

Yeah, as I said, they feel lame and weak.

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Can't agree with you on that one, some of the best effects on weapons are seeing little details like a glowing heated barrel after firing multiple rounds.

Wish more games did that.

heated barrels are exceptions to the rule. They're not scifi shit plasma garbage

both are shit.
Way to prove the other guy right

Glowy, flashy weapon betray extreeme energy ineficciency. Just like armor with tons of glowy bits - meant to look "cool" despite it being functionally retarded.

The problem with energy weapons is that light has abysmal kinetic energy. It's fucking boring and weak no matter how you design a light-based weapon.

Are we just giving out random tidbits of info?
Color is a really important aspect of a game that you can use to manipulate your player without them noticing. You don't want too many colors when you're making a level - just pick 2 or 3 big ones that achieve the purpose you want and use shades of those colors as you move forward.

For example, let's say I wanted the player to go through a nasty, grimy swamp full of enemies that wear you down through poison and attrition.
What do I want the player to feel during this? I want them to feel sluggish, overwhelmed, and claustrophobic. This means that I'm going to want to use "cooler" colors to make the player feel subdued, but I want them to be dark to reinforce my goals. Obviously, I'm going to want the idea of disease and corruption to hang over the player, so some gross shade of green/yellow would compliment the blues well.
At this point, I need a final color that can stand out and really highlight what I want without seeming too out of place from the other 2 colors. So I check out the color wheel and noticed that Chartreuse was opposite from the center of green and blue, and as you can see, it pops against the other colors without feeling overly visual.

Of course, I don't really make video games, so take this with a grain of salt. I'm just going off of various artfaggot knowledge.

That's pretty much the idea, yeah. Sharing little bits of info is the best thing we can do to people that develop vidya as a hobby

i guess people like sucking each other off on topic of Tumblr Dogs rather than talk about videogames

This.
Something I've begun to notice is that most games are being made exactly like books and movies. I'm not even talking about The Last of Us/MGS style "cinematic experience," even good games are structured as having a linear pace with a set beginning and end. It feels like the player is an actor in a play, rather than someone in a game. Pic related are the only games off the top of my head that feel like they actually are more about being "toylike" rather than traditionally structured.

That's because if an AI moves like a player, the player hates it. AIs can and do have a much, much faster reaction speed then a player ever will if they're allowed to play no holds barred. On top of that AIs can put in whatever input sequence they want instantaneously too.

wut

program in delays to simulate the input

"energy" weapons like samus' power beam behave more like kinetic weapons with glowing projectile

well my personal approach basically boils down to "JUST DO IT" and also thinking about what i would have done differently about game mechanics of games i played.

Check IDs

Make some cancerous infographics just like the rest while you're at it, so that no dev is ever allowed to make a design decision on his own again.

angels > demons

3 and 2 are common sense, though.

angels are cool, too.

God damn it OP

Nobody said they were rules, you can go shit up your own thread now.

You making a game OP?

please dont sexualice demons and angels

I've got one for you: stop
What is and isn't appropriate detail will quickly become apparent WHEN YOU MAKE THE FUCKING GAME. Assuming you have some level of self-assessment. Or, alternatively, you could go full autist and write a design doc describing every element of every mechanic and the theory of such in excruciating detail and then you'll know exactly what you're doing. Either's fine. What isn't fine is shit like in the OP, because it's busywork that makes you think you're doing something useful when 99% of it will end up being utterly irrelevant or of no consequence. So either work on something practical, or on the SPECIFICS of what you're trying to do.

We passed the point where that was possible a long time ago.

With characters, you need to have a diverse set of females. You want enough combinations of different body types, hair styles/lengths/colors, voices, and personalities to make everyone happy. For example, if you only have titty monsters the dfc people won't see a reason to play. If you have a character creator then make sure there are a ton of options, like what Phantasy Star Online 2 provides but even better.

This only applies to Japanese style games. If you are making a western style game then shit will be ugly no matter what you do so there is no need to bother.

okay :^)

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moar

get to the point and dump your hottest ecchi pics, I kinda wanna fap right now

Yeah. It's gonna be fun.

It's a shooter.

It's not gonna be anything if you don't stop making these shit threads

If you have character customization, don't stifle it with overstylization. If you have an idea of what the player character is gonna look like, just design fucking characters.

You can have a narrative and still have meaningful story altering choices. It's okay to have an ending in mind, but let the player influence parts of the story that lead into that. This is how you make a GAME plot, as opposed to a plot on top of a game. Look at Chrono Cross for a good model of this. Then look at Spyro for less story but a more flexible progression model.

Weapon variety should be about variety, not scale. You shouldn't abandon your sword because the one you found is better, you should abandon it because the one you found is better FOR YOU. This is something that tends to irk me about RPGs. Shooters tend to be better about it.

On that note, class-locks are retarded. If you have classes make it so that they can excel with some gear without being excluded from other gear (some exceptions make sense, such as magic or gizmos). It makes sense for characters to use a less-proficient setup if circumstance calls for it. More sense than them going from mighty warrior to suddenly 100% useless, at least. For a shooter, apply this logic to needing another sniper when all you have is a trenchgunner. It's better to have them pick up a rifle and fire with mediocre proficiency than to just sit there waiting to get shot.

But really, advice builds best on a foundation. The more we know about your gaym, the better we can tailor our suggestions.

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Just because I'm making a thread on here every once in a while, less than once a week by the way, doesn't mean I'm not working on my project.

I have even more reason to post it now - the components for my new build aren't gonna be delivered until the next weekend.

Then post about specifics, assuming you have some. The difference between ideaguy garbage and design talk is that the design talk has a context and the ideaguy garbage is just generic blabber about anything. Right now, this thread has no context whatsoever. No, genre isn't enough, high concept is barely enough. Specifics.
If you don't know the specifics, you haven't decided or you just have no planning whatsoever, fix that now while you have time.

The reason why I'm not saying specifics is because this thread is not about my game - its about game design tips in general.

I have a very cohesive design direction and most of the game outlined down to weapon design. The reason I'm not posting it is because it'll derail the thread.

Nah m8. I wanted to post the plasma cutter but it's already on

Share some more tips with us, then. I'd be happy to read them.

What about them feels powerful? All I see are oversized flashlights.

A lot of these notes are specific to my game in particular. Some of them are ideas, not "rules".

Fuck yourself, You aren't a gamer, you don't belong here.

You shouldn't fuck guns, user.

That's not a rule you made back there, it's an opinion. A shitty one.

For the second time in this thread, nobody has said those are rules. Please read posts harder in the future.

I spend the better part of my day tryharding videogames and learning what makes them fun to me.

I don't even know why you'd want to call yourself a gamer. It has this overall casual feeling to it like "you play games". There's no commitment.

I love videogames, user. I don't need a label to define what archetype to identify with.

As another user said, these are my personal notes to fit my personal views and observations of videogames.

user but imagine sexy female hands loading a fantastical revolver, round by round, where every single one of them gently "pops" into place. Imagine her right hand coming through to hold the cylinder, and slowly rotating it as she fills the revolver up.

Everything what is wrong with games in 2016.
Telling the player what he is going to feel.
DOOM was further with immersion in 1993 already.

are you serious

physical sensation, not his emotions. You're already telling him what he sees and hears, what's the issue with telling him the tactile and atmospheric sensations?

Energy guns would feel weak and awful if you make them weak and awful.
Everything, well, depends on the feedback the gun has. You need to combine gun's outfit, sound, effects it has on player's side, like sparkles\flashes\recoil gun does while firing or idling and how it effects everything else.
Like, let's say, BFG9000. It's BIG, it's flashy, it has silly "fzshshsht" wind up sound but look how it annihilates enemies.
If you want a gun to feel more powerful, add more recoil to animation, shake camera harder and slap a firing sound with more boom to it.
Also feeling of being watched can be better made up with ambient sounds and music rather than just a message.

This. Telling the player a sensation isn't immersive. You have to use visual and auditory cues to SIMULATE or IMPLY other senses. Like the screen flashing red for an instant when you take a hit. Like the wheezing that persists after getting up from a punch to the gut. Like the green distortion above the putrid waste.

Because saying your shoulders feel tired falls flat in the second person. No, my shoulders are fine, thank you.

So much so that gfed troopers have what are effectively smg versions of them.
also

Pretty sure you just don't like energy weapons OP.

IMHO a good in-between if they really want something like this is to have a main character who narrates their thoughts in past-tense. As though recounting the events as the player plays them.

Pic related.

Reading always was better at conveying atmospheric feelings than music and graphics.

You have to make shit cartoony and overbearing to "convey" ideas like that. Outright telling people what your ingame character feels allows you to relate to him and imagine what it's like.

Simplicity is key. Instead of thinking a million ways in which you can convey a feeling or an atmosphere using a convoluted mess of things that everyone feels differently, just outright state that this is what your character is feeling right now.

You'll relate to it all the same or better. Old school RPG's did it and it worked very, very well. More than whatever modern games are trying to accomplish.

a character narrating his feelings removes the player-character "sync".

There are multiple interviews as to why Freeman doesn't talk in Half-Life, for example.

Have you tried books? You'll shit your pants I promise.

You can to a certain extent, though the voice actor has to be not-shit, but even then, if it doesn't touch the gameplay it's still useless.

If the game is trying to express how exhausted some character is, but they're still prancing around and tumbling/jumping to move like they have been for the last few hours straight, then you're not really getting the message across.

Of course I have. That's why I like reading in games. It's great.

Making it obligatory never works, but you should be able to when you want to, which is where the "you feel xyz" idea came from. It's just extra context that you can learn if you want to.

bull

Reading in games is great, and works terrifically in RPGS because they allow you the freedom to go in depth like that and characterisation is usually very important.
Just because something works in one genre doesn't mean you can rip it out, put the identical mechanic in another genre and everything is great. It's why "fps with rpg mechanics and customization" has become so fucking stale.

In a first person shooter, unless there is clear characterisation of the wanker you're playing as, the emotions felt are mostly the emotions of the player as they move through environment. It sounds like you're trying to dictate the emotions of the player rather than letting them play how they see fit.

I disagree that you have to make shit cartoony and overbearing for it to work.

As you said, "simplicity is key". Subtlety can still go a long way.

I just think presentation on the medium's own terms is better than something as remote as text for most genres.

If you're talking about something like Rogue, Zork, or Ultima, then sure it can work. If you're talking about a shooter or action game, or anything cinematic including many RPGs, I'm sure it would just feel remote.

jesus christ can you get any more low effort than that?

to answer that - yeah, they did. I don't understand how this is even a question

Which is why I stated specifically that this part of the UI should be very small and lowkey. The idea here is to allow a person to walk around the map, and have this box change, therefore giving some subtle text description of what that particular part of he map feels like to the character.

Nobody is trying to dictate your emotions, chill the fuck out.

but cinematic games are shit, user. UI is supposed to work as a vehicle to help the player be aware of whats going on around them - text is only going to play into that further.

The problem is, that contemporary gamedev fuckers don't have any clue about immersive game design. Most of them don't know how first-person games work:
In a FP game the player characters sits in the front of the computer and views the world through the screen. That's the whole point of FP.

The sad reality is, that the 1980s/1990s were the golden age for videogames just how the 18th and 19th century was for music.

Show me something good that just tells you how your character feels

While I agree that "cinematic" is ruining games, I still think it was worth lumping in as an example. The point being that action games and shooters are supposed to bring in an element of being-in-the-action that has more in common with the "cinematic" experience than the "reading" experience.

It calls for something else to keep a consistent feel of immersion. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a UI, just that the UI should be tailored to how the game itself is presented. And I think, for a lot of games, text will just contrast as opposed to playing well into it.

Ever played E.Y.E?

"My legs are broken" - sure, it was a status message but it did make me go "oh that probably fucking hurts" and gave me a slight phantom tingle in my ankle.

all further opinions discarded. There's no singular golden age for anything. There are peaks and lows of particular time periods and trends, but there's no "golden ages". That's an approach of a closeminded elitist fuck.

reading is something that an educated man does effortlessly. It's also one of the best ways of conveying ideas.

Language can be beautiful. There's no need to give that up for the sake of your game feeling "dynamic" or "cinematic". A player should be able to stop, think, perceive, take information in, before moving on and blowing someone's brains out.

You expect me to believe this happened every time your legs weren't OK?
You expect me to believe this happened ever?

I'm going to bet that you continued to run around on your broken leg for a bit before patching up your crippling injury and going on your merry way because it was not a good aspect of the game from an immersion/scene setting standpoint.

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Yeah. You'd be surprised, but text doesn't feel intrusive because you need to READ IT to take in information and you can choose NOT TO read it if you already read it.

user at this point I'm starting to feel as though you have attention span of a small child. Text is amazing. Morrowind was great because it had a shit ton of text that you could choose to read, or not to read.

It was great. It was like you were swimming in the ocean of lore, free to bask in it whenever you wanted.

Theres no harm in taking a little scoop of that and putting it onto a quicker paced game.

It's not about what people can do effortlessly. It's about what fits the vibe of the game. And for many games, throwing text in like that just wouldn't feel consistent.

This isn't a sign of low education or a lack of literacy. It's a matter of aesthetic and immersion. Just as talk-bubbles would look good on a 70's political cartoon, but not a Victorian painting.

Does the lack of text mean the painting conveys less feeling and sensation? If you ask me, no, it simply means it must go about conveying it differently.

Games where text doesn't feel consistent are usually not deep enough to be consistent with anything other than rudimentary, surface-level gameplay.

The issue with a painting is that it's expressive art. It's not something that conveys a hard-set meaning - it is what you perceive it as.

I was going to say something along these lines, that a good game is where the developers think of everything for the most part. A flimsy wooden door should be able to be set on fire (and consequentially, the entire fucking building should go up in flames if you don't put it out). A metal footlocker should be able to be tossed about and kicked until it's too dented to stay locked… or maybe it's so dented that now it won't unlock at all even if you have a key.

Things should be taken into consideration for multiple play styles and actions and their consequences or victories should also be taken into consideration.

Unfortunately, most developers don't take the time to bother even though many of the bigger things, like wooden doors, are seen over and over so they really should be scripted to have multiple ways of entry.

There again most developers won't even take into consideration that weapons lose their sharpness and fall apart over time, so maybe I'm expecting too damn much.

Theres a picture that used to go around of a door in fallout 3 that looked rotted and the top half of the door was completely destroyed, It had a very hard lock on it and you couldnt jump through it or get past it.

Lore/world building text and dialogue have nothing to do with what we're talking about. And the initial objection was to old school RPGs using it as their primary means of conveying character state, which is wrong, and not quicker paced games, which do it ineffectively when done like your example where the player character can't be assed to perform some acting to go along with the broken leg and the problem is trivial anyway. If you want to stay in that genre, contrast EYE's trivial leg breaking text to eg. Metro's breathing in the overworld and you can see just how shallow and ineffective EYE is at conveying what's going on with your character.

As far as my experience with text though, I played and coded on muds for over a decade. One of the cardinal rules wizards had to abide by was always "Don't fucking tell the person what their character is feeling".

user if you're subtly trolling then you're doing a good job because my blood is starting to boil.

feeling EMOTIONS =/= FEELING TACTILE INPUT

The ability to kill anyone for any reason at any time as long as you have the skill or your player has the skill is a very overlooked feature in games. I quite enjoy playing Mount and Blade mods that allow me to execute captured lords and soldiers. It's really nice watching entire factions die out because I keep executing their vassals, watching them squirm around in their shackles as the blade severs their neck from their head. 'Tis the price of treason.

Lucky thing I didn't say anything about emotions then, huh?

There's also a difference between descriptive text conveying things that the game may not literally visually show:

And trying to force a roleplay characterization onto you:

I don't mean any offense, but seems to me like you have a rather shallow concept of depth. Like a game, being the lesser medium, must shadow the finer art of literature in order to have depth. The thing is, there isn't just a one-and-only depth.

In art (and I will go as far as calling any entertainment medium an artform) synergy is key. Contrast that doesn't compliment merely displaces. And trying to incorporate a form of depth that doesn't match can actually lead to a more shallow result.

Just as a special effect in film can be made less convincing simply by being in-your-face, a sensation in a game can be made less immersive by being too literal. And unless you're overly poetic, text is likely to be way too literal. And if you are overly poetic, it will likely just take players out of what's happening.

anything can work if you implement it properly. There's a reason why EYE is a pretty good game despite being a bastard child of Morrowind and Half-Life 2.

Considering that usually early first person shooters were made with idea that it's (You) are the demons dude\gal who shoots enemies or dies, such text definitely breaks this effect.

Also this idea is going to blow in your face on the immersion side if text that you'll put in that box won't fit happening on the screen at all. It may absolutely miss the playstyle or character's status. Don't forget that there're countless players with countless playstyles and skills levels, don't expect them all play the game the way you planned them to play. You'd either spent too much time trying to cover all possible holes or watch idea blow in your face.

While I agree that anything can work if implemented properly, that doesn't mean everything should be stated to. I don't think we should say something adds deeper feeling unconditionally, or even generally, just because there are some talented examples that pulled it off well.

I'd still say that speaking generally, this is better left to subtle visual and auditory cues. Things that play off of inference and the power of association.

If a designer has the creative vision and the talent to back it up, of course there will be functional exceptions. And those with confidence and experience should go for it. This applies to any medium, really. We just shouldn't treat high-bar examples like an objective truth of design.

It's not what's put into theory, it's what put into practice that makes it difficult. Anyone can make a perfect game, but you're mainly bottlenecked by the lack of resources and tight deadlines.

If you're aiming for an emotional experience, music plays a huge role.

Music can make a sad scene depressing, a happy scene ecstatic, or just create a sense of nostalgia or familiarity in the player if you play a theme they've heard before in a new and alien environment to give it an immediate and meaningful presence.

There's nothing more exciting than when everything goes to shit and even the music makes sure to let you know that you are FUCKED.

This one is pretty high up on my list as far as music setting the mood goes.

Fuck off, Obsidian. Pillars of Equality was the strongest soporific I've ever had in my life.

What a spicy post

Stop talking to me, weeaboo faggot.

Even if I was a weaboo, I'd pick it over being an illiterate nigger any day.

So fucking good, I'm a huge sucker for dynamic music like in Banjo Kazooie.

im going to make a game where you start off with 2d sprites and end up with huge 3d models that fuck shit you up

How can someone get so upset over where their cartoons come from?

hello?

kike

It is the same cut as the SJWs that complain about cultural appropriation.

You should pick images that are more relevant to your post. This kind of thing is my shit, but I saw a wall of succubus booty and assumed that it was just a porn thread, so I kept scrolling, unawares. Maybe I'm the fag for not always reading the text body at first, though.

It's a known spammer. Posts that in random threads. Unknown if it's some kind of bot.

Sage for no direct contribution.

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When designing an arcade action experience it is always important to give the player some moment to take a brief break. The best way to do this is with an end-of-stage performance summary.

>it's still not finished and I have yet to publish it

Post a chapter each week you don't finish it. Start with one today.
I'm running low on reading material.

Fuck off and don't ever come back. The point of discourse on shit like this is to find what "works", not "what might appeal to some people maybe but it's okay if it doesn't because we all need our safe space."

Lrn2human

Make a clear flow for it, so you have a set of objectives, and work on them. Otherwise, you will never finish it.

t. Someone who has written around 50 essays on game design in the last three years that have gone unpublished, because they weren't "finished," which is code for "perfect."

I've considered that (either by posting here, or, god forbid, setting up a blog), but some of the chapters are pretty fucking big still. They encompass some of the more broad concepts presented in MMO's (that they almost always fall flat on, because the genre is a pile of dogshit).

I might write some more in it again, though, given that devs STILL can't fucking get them right- even in an era where WoW is divebombing while on fire.

I made it in like 2012 and haven't touched it since 2015
Every single point is still relevant even today

bump

Do not decide on a genre. Just design the game. Let others classify your game.

This is pretty important, too. Genres give you too much of a feeling of what you "need" to do.