On 27/06/2017 at 4:34 AM, Wavinator said:

Games that have attempted this, like Spore (or the little known Gordon Alliance decades before it), often run afoul of the problem of sacrificing depth for breadth or suffering from mechanics that just don't cohere well together.

Evoland and Evoland 2 did this on a deeper level, I think. The base game is a top-down action/adventure (something like Zelda: Link To The Past), but there are many parts of different styles, mostly as little minigames in certain parts of the game. This was the core idea of the game, so at least they tried to make it work. Overall, it's a game I liked.

That said, they suffer exactly from de depth problem: almost no minigame has the depth of the depicted style (the turn based strategy and turn based RPG are examples of that). Another problem is the quality of these minigames: many suffer from poor execution (2D platforming is subpar, in my opinion), others have bad mechanics or control, like the fighting part (2 or 3 fights in a row, can't remember now), which is terrible. Others are good, despite little depth (like the shoot'em up).

As others mentioned, it is less common for good reason.  It is jarring.

I recently played a small game where you played one puzzle after another, defeating level after level and getting points based on how quickly you resolved the puzzle.  Then on every 10th level after beating the puzzle, a memory game popped up. (Flip a tile, flip another tile, both vanish if they match.) It was incredibly jarring, and was the only thing I hated about the game.  I played it for the fun puzzle levels, not the randomly included thing.

I recall many games in the '80s and early '90s that jumped from play style to play style.  Battletoads was one of the more annoying ones among the games I enjoyed. Side scroller fighter, rappelling, swimming, speed bikes, surfing, jet planes, unicycles, and more.  Every level was different, and each required different skills. As a result, it is often called one of the hardest video games ever.

Side-games can be fun, especially if they are entirely optional. Final Fantasy 8 introduced a side-game called "Triple Triad" that they reused in a few other games in the series. it is a totally optional side-quest that has nothing to do with the main story, but was fun enough as a side element.

Final Fantasy X had Blitzball, which was mostly optional but sadly required in a few levels for story progression. I recall people who struggled and even hated the game because of the mandatory Blitzball tournament. 

2 hours ago, frob said:

As others mentioned, it is less common for good reason.  It is jarring.

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

7 minutes ago, Archduke said:

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

 

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

Hardly anything is always true. But what if in soccer you had to stop and win a chess match before you could play the next soccer match.

30 minutes ago, Tom Sloper said:

Hardly anything is always true. But what if in soccer you had to stop and win a chess match before you could play the next soccer match.

Didn't mean to sound confrontational, if I did. Just exploring the topic, maybe something actionable falls out of it.

That would be pretty jarring, and would be a totally different skill. Seems like that may be the answer, then. Adding games that practice unrelated skills is jarring, but adding games that use subsets of the broader game's practiced skills is less jarring. I wonder how different you can make the games before they start to feel disconnected.

There is a game call chessboxing, where two boxers alternate rounds of chess and boxing.  Not super popular, as you can imagine.  

Jade Empire had a weird side scrolling shooter portion in it's RPG, Mass Effect had it's vehicle portions.  Space Rangers is all over the place with different mechanics.  X-COM has base building and tactics portions -- it's arguably the most successful blend of genres.

But mostly it's better to spend as much time as possible honing your core game mechanic instead of throwing a bunch of things on the wall and seeing what sticks.

I think it's mostly jarring when it requires a completely different set of skills, and more so if it comes out of left field without warning.  Games have been successfully blending macro and micro level strategy, real-time and turn based for a while now.  Like Total War.  Same with vehicular and non-vehicular sections, like GTA.  Some games successfully mix stealth and action, or first and third person.

1 hour ago, Archduke said:

I don't think that's always true. In Soccer for example, penalty kicks are a different game included within the broader game, but I would expect most players don't find them very jarring. A handful of pinball games also have upper playfields with different rules.

Are they only jarring if the added game requires different skills?

Penalty kicks are not a different game, they are only a specialized form in which the ball is kicked into the goal unusually fast and intercepted by the goalkeeper with unusual difficulty: not only the same skills, but the same rules as normal play.

The same applies to second-playfield pinball games, where the player uses button-controlled flippers and plungers to avoid losing balls in both: what you call "different rules" in the two playfields are simply two branches of a single system of ways to score and places to hit with the ball. Even in extreme cases like the physically separate mini-pinball in Shrek multiple playfields are only a mild novelty, less jarring than gimmicks in which the regular ball does something strange.

A videogame example: Micro Machines offers multiple vehicle types with different handling, control systems and special features, but you use them all for full-contact racing, often on the same tracks; general skills (e.g. looking at, and memorizing, the tracks; bumping opponents; not crashing) and universal rules are much more important and "larger" than specialized ones (e.g. shooting with tanks) so the game as a whole feels varied but coherent.

14 minutes ago, LorenzoGatti said:

The same applies to second-playfield pinball games, where the player uses button-controlled flippers and plungers to avoid losing balls in both: what you call "different rules" in the two playfields are simply two branches of a single system of ways to score and places to hit with the ball.

You're arguing two things here: that having the same core mechanism (in the Burgunian sense) means having the same game, and that having the same systems means having the same game.

To the first, chess and checkers are both "physically moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own", but they're different games.

To the second, we would be missing information if we distinguished games only by the systems that facilitate them. Speedruns take place within the same systems as standard play, but the rules and win condition are changed, making them different games.

There could be a chance that switching genres could add freshness to a game, and could perhaps rekindle the childlike wonder of not knowing what comes next.  However,when switching genres in a video game may have the potential to lose it's identity.  In my opinion, the best games are the ones that start with a simple core gameplay loop, and gradually build to a complex yet fun challenge.  Constantly changing the genre would damage this flow, and instead of gradually building up your skills over time, it feels more like your turning off the game you're currently playing and starting a new one.  It leaves less room for complexity, and in terms of marketing, instead of finding people that like the genre for your game, you would have to market to people who conveniently enjoy all the styles of game play that your title has, making it incredibly niche.

This is my stance on your proposal, but don't let it stop you from attempting to make a title such as the one you described.  

10 hours ago, Archduke said:

You're arguing two things here: that having the same core mechanism (in the Burgunian sense) means having the same game, and that having the same systems means having the same game.

To the first, chess and checkers are both "physically moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own", but they're different games.

To the second, we would be missing information if we distinguished games only by the systems that facilitate them. Speedruns take place within the same systems as standard play, but the rules and win condition are changed, making them different games.

No, I'm arguing about specific examples. You are arguing about different examples of different situations.

In the case of chess and checkers, you neglect that the "same core mechanism" is the same only if its important aspects are the same, not if two games fit in the same branch of an arbitrary classification. In pinball, there is only a game mechanic that matters, using flippers to keep the ball in play and hit stuff, and any rules layered on top of that merely provide superficial differences in how to score. Consider that if a pinball machine is damaged (e.g. a bumper becomes inert) the player can adjust to the new rules during the same game, whereas if a piece is moved arbitrarily in chess or checkers the game in progress loses all meaning.

Is every sport in which a ball is used to score points and the team without the ball defends against the scoring attempts of the team with the ball the same? No, they need at least the same ball, the same team size and a very similar playfield to have a chance of being compatible and comparable. Did anyone successfully combine chess and checkers in nontrivial ways? No, because games about "moving tokens to capture enemy tokens and avoid losing your own" are so strongly dependent on piece movement and placement rules that any change disrupts their "chore mechanism" producing an essentially different game, with different strategies and techniques, and chess and checkers are particularly different instances of the genre. There are cases in which less different games share some skills, for example familiarity with traditional Shogi pieces that are featured in many variants and in similar starting configuration, or similar positions in different sizes of checkers, but it is an exception to the general need to reason about each game position piece by piece and move by move.

In the case of speedruns (I'll limit the discussion to glitch exploitation and skillful play, excluding tool-assisted speedruns), you forget that the discussion in this thread is about the game designer, not about formally different or formally similar games.

The possibility of players attempting a speedrun is only relevant as a group among many of requirements involved in evaluating the opportunity to write a more or less composite game. For example:

• Are speedrun-rewarding and speedrun-enabling features (e.g. bosses with hard to hit weak spots) a good idea for all players? In all parts of the game?
• Are there parts that do not allow speedrunning (e.g. strategic orders between action battles)? Would they be harmless, or even a welcome lull, or disruptive and annoying for the speedrunning player?
• Do the different parts of the game share similar control schemes and general glitch types? Unlike a typical player with plenty of time to adjust, a speedrunner might find the game too diverse.