Wife-Aggro

I took a bit of a break from my normal Unity routine this week and started up the 3rd person controller video tutorial series over at 3d Buzz. It’s free, which is always good, but it does serve as a good sample of the paid content that they have at that site. I’m now about 90% positive that I’ll end up a subscriber over there.

It’s deep on theory and very interesting in how essentially the same thing is done different between two programming tutorials. It’s entirely possible that what I learned from Bergzerg is making keeping up with the 3D buzz instructors (there are two at a time on that series), better. I’m not going to lie, when Eulers comes up in instructional conversation, I still have to pause the video and find a referance for what the heck it is. But the theory is starting to sink in. I think.

My book that I ordered from Amazon came in. I got a pretty big kick out of how it starts. I’ll paraphrase

See this game, go ahead and download it from this site and try it out. See the cool things that they did here.

You’re not likely to make this game. It took a team of 80 people to make this game.

Now try this game. You can download it her. See how it’s fun, but not quite as polished as the last game.

You’re not likely to create this game either. It took a team of 12 to do this.

Now check out the games on this site. They’re not close to polished, but they’re fun.

You might, if you’re lucky pull this off.

Then it goes on to talk about building from small pieces and how to start small and build up.

Cracked me up.

-dr

I think too many games try to be everything to everyone. They lose themselves to the scope of what they want to be and end up diluting what could have been their strengths.

I think it’s important to decide early what you want the core focus of the game to be, and work towards that first. Then, if there’s time maybe you can add in something additional.

There’s a saying that paraphrased comes off as, “shoot for the moon because even if you fall short, you’ll achieve something great.” I don’t believe that’s true in video games. Too many games have over promised and under delivered when they’ve tried to do too much, told everyone what they were going to do, and then came up short. Few things in life are as brutal as a disappointed potential fan base. Except, maybe, an existing fan base that you disappoint.

Maybe the lesson there is to watch what you promise, but I can empathize with those developers who have made this mistake because we live in a buzz driven culture. If a game isn’t generating a certain level of buzz (depending on its platform) early on, it’s not likely to do well.

So, I think the second word in my theme is Scope. Scope your project with achievable goals early and stick to those goals. Avoid feature creep. Avoid over promising what you can deliver. And, if possible, sneak in a surprise or two at the end.

-dr

I’ve been thinking a lot about what makes me want to keep playing a game. The idea being that maybe I could come up with some sort of cool acronym to design for when working through this project.

I’m not sure what it’ll spell, but maybe I’ll switch it around a lot at the end and end up with something awesome. P.H.A.R.T, perhaps.

I’m already pretty sure that it’s not going to be that, though, because the first thing I think appeals to me in a game is when I can change the world that I’m playing in.

Sometimes it’s a change that really obvious and the act of changing is a large part of the game. Sim City, for example. That game is nothing BUT starting with a blank slate and building something from it. Minecraft has that appeal as well. It’s not a blank slate that you start with, but you do build your own world out of those millions of blocks.

Other times, though, it’s something that’s not so obvious that I’m doing to the world around me that gives me that sense that I’ve made something. I actually think that I enjoyed GTA: San Andreas more than GTA IV due in part that I could take over the various parts (hoods) of that game world. That was one of the better parts of that game for me and it was obviously missing in IV. That’s probably why I enjoyed Saint’s Row: the third even though the game was kind of corny. I did get to take over that down.

For the most part the game genre that seems to get this, or use to, is Real Time Strategy games. Warcraft, Total Annihilation, Cossacks! and others of that ilk really got was it was like to build something from nothing and defend it. They didn’t always. The Total War series, while some of the more fun combat games really cut back on the feeling of building up the towns. And I think that I grow tired of those games quicker because of it.

I think the one genre that really misses this is the MMO. Real MMOs. Not the many lobby based battleground type games passing themselves off as an MMO, but the real ones. Dark Age of Camelot let you build a house that others could see. And I know that there have been other pieces like this as well. Conan would let your clan build a town. But I honestly didn’t play that game long enough to see if they ever got the aggressive NPCs to do anything to them. Lots of promises, Conan….

Anyhow, I think the first part of my theme is Change the World. So that’s either a C or a W for the acronym depending on how much I feel like cheating.

-dr