Ok. So, in what ways could this game deliever fun. based on the set of dynamic sentencing, and random quests? This is probably more of a philosophy question as the game will mimick the ways of our life.

Edit. You enter a town. You ask someone to let you borrow 1 gold piece. And they (depending on their personality and their knowlede of you) ask you when you will return it. Then they agree and give it to you. You buy the new sword thats just came out on the market. You use the sword to chop meat, and sell food to other npcs. Then you pay back the one who lended you the gold peice.

After that you buy a building from someone and give living space for lots of npcs. Then you become the lead npc. then you do other favors around the city as long as your conscious will let you.

You can invent objects and teach npcs.

Ignoring any of the technical aspects:

The most fun from a game like this would be gotten from watching the world react to what you do. You'd have to make your somewhat small actions have medium-sized reactions, and large actions have game-changing reactions.

" If you decide to do so, Wanda takes it and begins to flirt with you. You can respond by having sex, or just leave. "

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LMFAO, if only it were that simple.

Endless gameplay isn't fun. I once heard a phrase "player must be able to win the game", but i don't remember who said that. Anyway, if there is no win state in the game, then it's boring.
On the other hand, i never liked Sims. Maybe Sims fans would like the game. I don't know.

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Original post by Paulius Maruska Endless gameplay isn't fun. I once heard a phrase "player must be able to win the game", but i don't remember who said that. Anyway, if there is no win state in the game, then it's boring. On the other hand, i never liked Sims. Maybe Sims fans would like the game. I don't know.

It's not that there has to be a win condition, as much as there has to be goals. The player can set these goals themselves (Sim City, get a 1,000,000 population) or can be given these goals by the designer (Save the princess). As soon as you give the player a goal, you have taken the first step to limiting their verb set.

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Original post by JBourrie Quote: Original post by Paulius Maruska Endless gameplay isn't fun. I once heard a phrase "player must be able to win the game", but i don't remember who said that. Anyway, if there is no win state in the game, then it's boring. On the other hand, i never liked Sims. Maybe Sims fans would like the game. I don't know. It's not that there has to be a win condition, as much as there has to be goals. The player can set these goals themselves (Sim City, get a 1,000,000 population) or can be given these goals by the designer (Save the princess). As soon as you give the player a goal, you have taken the first step to limiting their verb set.

"player must be able to win the game" is a rather misleading line.

Take poker for example. it isn't a matter that you 'win' it is more a matter that you 'don't lose'.

Pinball. How do you win a game of pinball? get to 100 pts? oh, look at that, you can go to 200,... 20,000,000? You can't really 'win' the game, you just try to not lose for as long as possible, but you aren't truely 'winning' in the end, at the end you've lost because you failed to keep the ball in play, you just hopefully lost after a longer time than other people.

It is kind of like life, in the end, we all lose :P it is what you do while you are losing that matters.

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It is kind of like life, in the end, we all lose :P it is what you do while you are losing that matters.

You almost made me shed a tear.


Edit: This was not meant to be an insult. I purposely took it out of context. Please put down the pitchforks :)

[Edited by - JBourrie on June 22, 2006 12:54:31 PM]

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Original post by Talroth Pinball. How do you win a game of pinball? get to 100 pts? oh, look at that, you can go to 200,... 20,000,000? You can't really 'win' the game, you just try to not lose for as long as possible, but you aren't truely 'winning' in the end, at the end you've lost because you failed to keep the ball in play, you just hopefully lost after a longer time than other people.

Hmm. But after you win for so long, it gets pretty boring. Then you just walk away. Not really lose, just quit.

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It is kind of like life, in the end, we all lose :P it is what you do while you are losing that matters.

Again, some people just get bored and quit. Or just don't try to play at all, and just wing it. I think they call that "hitting bottom". The high-point of existence. Once you hit bottom, you can only win.

Well, you would be a fool to think you can make a game that everyone would enjoy playing the rest of their lives. That is why we make NEW games after all.

Oh and JBourrie, that was rather uncalled for, I don't see any connection to 'emo' which as far as I've seen is mostly regarded as a group of whining teens wanting attention, not striving to do great things in your life.

I've seen a few game ideas like this one from time to time. In fact, my own "dream game" that I'd like to make one day fits into the random quest model and sounds a bit like your idea.

However, you seem to be falling into the trap of expecting the player to be able to do absolutely anything in the game. Don't do this! You can't expect to encode, test and balance a game where the player can do absolutely anything.

What JBourrie wrote is absolutely key:

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Original post by JBourrie Interactivity is all about what verbs the player wants, and you have to make sure you give him all of the verbs to interact with your world. The trick isn't to let the player do anything they want to, the trick is to make them not ever want to do anything that they can't do. This is done by not only limiting the rule set, but designing the world so that the player never says "gee, I wish I could go through that door" or "why can't I jump on top of that tiny crate?"

You need to figure out what aspects of interactivity you wish to include in your game (for example: romance), then figure out the actions to make this as interactive as possible while still remaining implementable. Adding things one step at a time, like Kest suggested, is a good idea. You will also need to abstract away elements like conversation somehow.

It's an extremely hard task to make a character sim that will provide what you want to achieve, so I'd limit your scope on the interactivity considerably before trying to start a project of this magnitude, otherwise you'll be stuck in the theoretical stage of "wouldn't it be cool if we could do this" forever. Trust me on that one [grin].