I noticed that most games do the "run-action-run-action-puzzle" method. For example, sonic you run awhile, stomping on small enemeies, and before you begin to get bored with it, you're given action--you have to defeat the harder enemies, taking time to think about how to defeat them. THen, before you get bored with that, you're off running again. You run run run, colleting more coins, power-ups and what have you, and before you get bored with that, you're back to challenging harder enemies. Thinking on how to defeat the enemeies. After defeating them, you run a little while more, then before you get bored with the whole "run-action-run-action" system, you're thrown a puzzle. A spatial puzzle or a riddle of sorts. After that, you probably run into action. Then you run again. My idea is to make a game that randomly spawns running areas w small enemies, and then randomly spawn a harder enemy challenge, then cycle that, and then randomly spawn a spatial puzzle. then repeat the whole system. That would make for a never ending-but fun game. After all, it what all games do, but this system would make it contiguous and never ending.

There's something to be said about the closure that a good game ending offers.

I don't know about the rest, but personally I find that closure of the game's story at the end of a game is very important to me. It happens to be a powerful motivator to keep going sometimes when I feel bored of a certain part of the game, so I'm not sure how a game that purposely has no ending would be played. It would be all up to the gameplay to keep me going, I guess, and I doubt I'd play it much further past the point where I get bored with the gameplay.

Something to think about.

Yes, but as the game goes on, it gives more hints that you are reaching the closure of the game, although you never reach it. I like to think of it as life, we all assume that there is closure but we haven't reached it. Do we really know if there is an end to life? After all, we haven't reached it yet :).

Thanks.

Morris0:

Your method really isn't designing, then, it's just taking bits and throwning them at random. When game designing, you are looking at the whole picture, which is why most games follow that pattern, because they want the player to do certain things, but not get bored doing them, so they try tacking on different obstacles-- that's the puzzles you're talking about. The harder enemies are to make it a little more difficult to move forward, or to increase the player's skill.

Patterns are a good thing, Morris0-- random isn't so great. It's like going out without a plan.

And not giving any closure and randomness is harkening back to the days of Atari. No real reward ever playing those games.


shurcool:

I totally agree with you. The story is part of the big picture that Morris0 seems to be against. If it's random, what kind of story are you going to get? Not a very important one, if it's random.

[Edited by - deathtojohnny on April 30, 2008 2:34:30 PM]

I think everything depends on your intended audience and the type of game. Sure, those looking for meaning and story aren't going to be happy, but they're only a fraction of the game playing audience. The argument for closure is powerful, but probably means little to players of games like Tetris or the legions of flash games out there that are meant to be casual and fun games.

It sounds like you know what you want your basic gameplay loop to be, now the next step if you haven't already done it is to define the specifics. How are the levels going to get harder, and what kind of logic will you use to generate puzzles so that the player doesn't get bored?

I think content is your big problem: Diversity of enemies, number of attacks, types of defenses and movement strategies. You can scale up something like number of toughness, for instance, for quite awhile, but there will be a point where it all becomes ridiculous unless your clever about keeping the ratios between attack and defense somehow balanced. Speed would be another scalable attribute, in which case players eventually meet a limit where the AI is just better because its faster.

Thanks for your responses. The story method could also be 'random' in that the story is build on the level's puzzle, action, and adventure sequences. A similar random logic would be applied to a 'story generator' and it would match the gameplay.

I feel I could get an important story out of a random story generator. I feel that all important stories have similar elements (suspense, suprise, humor) that can be effectively generated.

It'll take a lot of planning to make a random story generator have any sense of theme to it.

Theme is very important to a story-- what point are you trying to get across to the audience with a random story?

I knew this guy who SWORE to the world that he could make movies. He believed that people who wrote scripts are stupid, because scripts should just happen-- and movies just happen...

No, situations happen that can inspire parts to a story, but that's it.

Well, turns out that his movie is a total load of horse manure, and we constantly bring it up and play it at parties and get drunk and watch it. It's not good at all. It's become a joke to everyone.

Even worse, was a book he wrote based on his life. Where it was random thoughts and events that made no sense together-- absolutely no theme.

Why am I being so tough on you for not including a theme to your story when most video game stories are really bad?

Well, because you are mentioning the story as though it really matters. If the story really doesn't matter, than go ahead and make a random game. If it does matter, reconsider that idea.

Good luck either way.

Thanks for your reply. I'm thinking we could preset a "theme" of the story. And have the story generator generate dialog and narrative based from that theme.

Quote:

Original post by Morris0 Thanks for your reply. I'm thinking we could preset a "theme" of the story. And have the story generator generate dialog and narrative based from that theme.

No problem, man, thanks for taking what I said without getting upset.

That idea you have right there is perfect. It'll keep your story on track!

Thanks, however I think I've found a flaw in this idea. What interests people is HUMAN EMPATHY. We like the customer service, we like when a driver lets us in traffic, we like knowing that someone made a cool song or game for us to listen to or play. Any diffenciency we detect in human empathy we consider the subject to be inferior, thus disregarding it and making it unworthy of our returned empathy.

However, if the game was pitch with the idea that it was created for the entertainment of the user, that levels were created at random, perhaps the user could indeed have empathy for it. I think empathy is the understand of what something truly is, and empathy is the thing we all strive to have and use. Empathy is what fuels us.