Love these kinds of videos; especially with Casey as the interviewer. Thanks for uploading it!

@liquidvapour

3 жыл бұрын

I agree, just needs more adverts, especially near the begining. I find it hard to focus if every sentence is not interrupted by an advert or two. 😇

That's a nice lamp.

04:09 Fiction analogy. Isolated puzzles. 20:11 Gameplay plan must adjust in a meaningful, interesting, playful way. 23:24 Being simple yet not easy, explaining just enough. 28:00 Music analogy (motifs). The symphony of PUBG. 39:15 Starting with simple dev-player communication. 42:50 Jon's hovertank view distance story. Enabling constraints. 48:09 Implemented mechanics should matter in the game. 52:48 Games that try too hard to appeal to player. 56:20 Engine programming and limits. 58:20 Rant Jonathan talks about is here: www.youtube com/watch?v=6JzNt1bSk_U 1:03:35 QUESTIONS PART START: How to connect symphonic mechanics to story aspect of the game. 1:06:48 Infantilization of stories. 1:08:20 Is demonstrating emergent behavior the true purpose of games? 1:14:46 If anything can happen, there is no reason for the story. 1:18:00 Jon's horoscope MMO idea. 1:21:53 Examples of games with good stories. 1:24:59 Opinion on "if novels move readers through pages, games move players through space, time and transaction" generalization. 1:27:37 On mastering dynamic systems. 1:34:26 Everything works in concert. Universal rule of art. 1:39:52 Jon's game design space/style.

@Juhziz

2 жыл бұрын

1:44:30 Kung-fu movies they speak about: Master of The Flying Guillotine, Raid 2, Black Dynamite, Iron Monkey.

@chralexNET

Жыл бұрын

1:47:15 Awkward cutoff at the end. BYE MAN TAKE IT EASY, (squelched).

Thanks for uploading this after the stream. It's the kind of thing I want to keep in my back pocket when I hit a roadblock and need a reminder. It's the kind of thing where I can just play it while I'm doing chores and spark a ton of ideas again.

Thanks for the inspiration! This really chimes with inspirations I take for my independent music, it’s so nice to see this kind of work out there.

I enjoyed this discussion a lot, would love to see some more game design discussion!

Amazing discussion, I could listen to Jonathan talking about game design all day and learn so much

The musical construction Jon was referring to at ~29:30 is called a Motif for anyone wondering - it's a musical idea or phrase that serves as the thematic reference for a composition which evolves over the duration of a song. This could be something as simple as the classic "dot dot dot dash" motif from Beethoven's 5th symphony, or more stylistic / abstract motifs of symmetry and counterpoint present in some of Bach's music. It's a really interesting corollary! Thanks Jon and Casey

@GodOfMacro

3 жыл бұрын

motifs means pattern in french

@benhbr

3 жыл бұрын

Also called leitmotif/leitmotiv

@GodOfMacro

3 жыл бұрын

@@benhbr but that's from motivation

I'd be interested to hear these guys' commentary on a game like Caves of Qud or Dwarf Fortress in reference to emergent gameplay. You get enough interacting simulation elements and new stories emerge on their own without the developer even intending the specifics.

@Jaximous

11 ай бұрын

I was thinking the same thing, especially since both games seem to fall victim to the "Immersive Fallacy".

Great points on random generation and roguelikes. It's always tempting to try and avoid the tedium that designing levels can be, but the difference is always stark. I made a dungeon slasher game, grid based, and designed 100 levels for it, lots of doors and rooms and mazes. But what I found is that I can randomise several components with that - mirroring the level on X and Y, changing enemies, changing objectives, changing level theme... so I ended up with designed levels but they are always different. Personally I don't think developers go to the lengths necessary to really make good use of random generation. There has to be an architect, but a good architect gets a lot done without all the heavy work.

This is just enjoyable listening! Very refreshing and nonmechanical way of thinking about games and design

that winnie the pooh mug is cracking me up for some reason. fantastic discussion! Ive come back to this video many times.

@jonathan About fixing volume differences, there's an audio filtering technique called "leveling" which can help automate that. It can be applied over everything, including just a single voice, to keep volume consistent throughout. There are typically plug-ins for it to most recording software and DAWs.

@MarcusOttosson

3 жыл бұрын

@@simonfarre4907 Good question! Normalising uniformly adjusts the volume across a whole track, whereas levelling non-uniformly normalises it. For example, if you accidentally touch the microphone somewhere during a recording, normalising would adjust the volume to fit that large spike. Levelling on the other hand would increase the volume of the parts surrounding that spike, and possibly lower the spike too.

Great conversation. Like this sort of upload

12:14 Casey was the voice of Gordon Freeman in Half Life 2?? PogChamp

@howdoiexitvim-sg2xl

Күн бұрын

he didn't speak because there's no almond milk in the game

Good talk guys thanks for sharing... Great insight

Just crossed about to cross day 20 of handmade hero. This has been an interesting journey!

I've actually been thinking about this problem a lot. As time goes on and I find that more and more genres get close to being "solved" (in the sense that there's been good design schemes that maximize the experience within that genre's constraints), I feel like RPGs are one of those ones that's furthest from being solved, and that I'm not really sure what the path forward is. So far, from the games I've played, the one I think got closest to enlightenment was Trails in the Sky (the 1st game), and it's largely on the back of the constantly changing party. It's a game that's otherwise fairly traditional, but that every few plot beats usually something will happen that will mean a new character will join your party, or sometimes a character will leave your party, and sometimes your party will be 2 characters, and other times it could be 3 or 4. And as this happens, due to the different toolsets of the characters and how they interact, you're forced to change your strategies often. That thing of settling on a strategy at the start of the game and repeating it throughout the whole game just does not happen here. And that felt incredibly enjoyable to me. It immediately trumped every other RPG experience I'd had before. The game has other design problems, but I found this so refreshing and (perhaps unintentionally) visionary. (This also has the awesome benefit of making it so characters don't have plot armor. It makes things much more unpredictable and exciting.) Another game that I think has some good ideas is the Disgaea series. Disgaea does sort of a brunt complexity approach. You have *so* many interlocking systems, and with so much depth, that you can dig into them for the entirety of the campaign and feel like you were always unlocking cool new ways to battle. But I feel like once you've unlocked all the things, or get past a certain power level, then strategy goes out the window and it's all about how strong you are. It's like it became a game about progression on a meta level, and not necessarily having engaging combat. Which is not to say that that is not enjoyable - further from it, I think Disgaea games are by far the most enjoyable progression games out there - but it becomes sort of a different kind of game from an RPG. I think one of the big problems that needs to be solved in the genre as a whole is a better alternative to elemental systems. The standard pokemon/persona formula of trying every spell until you find the enemy's weakness and then just spamming it the whole match is so rote. It's not interesting and does not scale well with difficulty tuning (harder battles usually just mean the boss has more HP and it takes longer to beat). I imagine there's gotta be a better system that's still relatively clean, but I haven't figured out what that is.

@KuroOnehalf

3 жыл бұрын

@@bellebellus4383 See, but that's the thing, by itself it's not varied or nuanced enough, yet it's often the most effective fighting strategy, so it turns combat into a mechanical repetitive process super quick. I figure there has to be a solution that's equally intuitive but offers more base depth / doesn't override all other strategies, like for example having momentum in platformers.

For an interesting modern story ish game, I'd recommend Subsurface Circular. Very short experience, but some interesting ideas specifically with how dialogue works

Casey got Dogme 95 wrong. Its was not about scripted vs improv but about story and acting vs gci and effects. Very nice conversation anyway, thx a lot for uploading.

I think Tension The Void handles the "story game" in an interesting way. There are characters in a world that exist there dynamically, and you can interact with them and those interactions can spawn events. On top of this, there is an external force that forces some story beats at certain times that are always the same, but can have different effects depending on what game state the player created (the bad guys will not react to some world event if you have killed them all, for example). It is a blend of a linear crafted story and a dynamic simulation, it is very limited but the idea is there and I think it's cool.

@mark.slater

3 жыл бұрын

Thank you so much for the suggestion. After reading your comment and checking out a couple of videos, I've just bought it and can't wait for a chance to play it this weekend.

emergence means quite literally "bigger than the sum of its parts", that is, the game has properties and behaviours that its parts do not have on their own

dude, those endless questions ... I permanently would asked what was the question again? :)

Cinco paus is a game that does an excellent job at confronting the player with new and interesting situations that give the player’s choices significance. It’s one of the most well designed games I ever played but as I see it, few people heard of it. So there is an underlying issue of how to make good game design financially feasible in order to enable game designers to make interesting games to begin with. As it is now, there are a lot of technologically impressive games, but they are mostly as profound as Marvel movies.

@poppag8281

Жыл бұрын

I think there are a few that slip through the cracks here and there

Interesting conversation

Identifying HOW to make a game fun may be as simple as thinking about the most fun that you've had playing various games over the last 25 years and then attempting to identify what aspects of that game (or games) made you experience the fun. Identifying what those aspects are could be very difficult and they could also be super simple things that you would have never realized were big fun factors until you did a deep dive analysis on it.

a little example of changing world variables: in gta online there's global weather cycle and rain affects road conditions which change which cars are better in races.

1:18:00 there is an oldschool mmorpg called "Eternal Lands" which has random AND planned special day events (there are special items that turn a regular day into special day but since the mmorpg has such a small community you want to plan when to use that item for maximized profit for your guild or whatever), some examples would be "Acid rain day" where if you are outside during rain on that day there is a chance your armor will break, other events provide double xp for a specific skill that day or increase chances that you will find rare gems while mining or make a rare weapon from crafting, one day makes all monsters stronger, one will make that you will not drop your items when you die, one day is called peace day where you can't fight anything etc etc. This element alone was very interesting and successful in making the game really addicting. It's probably not as deep as Jon's example but the game also had its own calendar/year system like the month of rain or the month of harvesting but i don't think it had an influence on what type of special days would occur during that month.

That was quiet an amazing talk! I'm only 1/4 through and will keep the rest for later. I really want to take the time to sit down and fully absorb the information!

Tabletop RPG design talks a lot about the issues of emergence and storytelling, and I think it has some more subtle things to say about the supposed dichotomy, and the role that rules play (that applies equally well to the programmed rules of a video game). I think anyone interested in story in games really ought to look there first - the conversations about this are more mature there than they are in the video game design community. One of the questions, for instance, is whether the game's rules (or the GM's pre-written prep, which functions similarly to rules) generate a story, or whether they enable the player to generate a story. Most games that attempt to improvise a story are pretty dissatisfying: either there are only a few choices that matter, the story is mostly linear, etc., or the story is too random to have satisfying pacing and coherence. On the other hand, there are some fantastic games that offer players the ability to occupy this simultaneous writer/director/actor role wherein the player is creating a story as they experience it, where you're leveraging the ability of the human to make a coherent, satisfying story, while leveraging the rules of the system to make it a story of a particular form, to redirect the player around certain writing pitfalls, to inject certain themes or moods or ideas (often in "emergent" ways that the player doesn't see coming, despite being the "author" of the story beats in a sense). Crucially, this isn't the same thing as just designing a writing exercise - you're still playing it, and your play matters to the story too. I think video games are only touching the very edges of this latter kind of experience, whereas tabletop RPGs have been experimenting with this and speaking pretty explicitly about it for decades now. Obviously it is, in some ways, easier to do in tabletop since you don't need to provide enough "assets" for the player to create their story like you do in a video game (although that freedom also presents its own problems when designing the rules that are intended to produce the narrative structures that you want), but I think this is where story-focused video games should be looking: not at how to present a story to the player (books and films will always win there), not at how to make a better choose-your-own-adventure book (there are interesting things to explore there, but it's a limited medium), and not at procedural generation (it will never be as good as something created intentionally, and even if it were, it'd be better to just procedurally generate a film or novel instead of a game), but at how it is possible to structure a game where the player is both the author of and the player in the story. And it has to be satisfying from both ends: it has to be creatively satisfying in terms of authorship, but also satisfying as a player, which means you're not just going through the motions of a story you yourself just wrote - you have to create a story that has unforeseen consequences that emerge from your creative decisions, which is where the rules come in. The rules function on the narrative much like they do on the gameplay as described in the video: they produce a combination of foreseeable consequences (you want the sense that, if you author something interesting, it will come to pass - the things you author matter), and consequences that perhaps designer foresaw, but you didn't (you want the sense that there is a reason to play the game instead of just sitting down and writing a short story). In their best moments, tabletop RPGs achieve this. Video games sometimes achieve it on the smallest scale, with "emergent narratives" of the sort Casey mentions like "how did the Thief get into the building", but they abandon it for any larger structures. In games, the player, through play, sometimes authors a lot of the moment-to-moment story (although plenty of games don't offer that either beyond success/failure), but anything beyond that is always pre-written (perhaps with a couple of binary choices) or random chaos that might as well be noise (and throwing noise at the player hoping for some narrative apophenia is not what I'm talking about). And there's a tiny bit of experimentation from the other end, creating "games" that are really just simplified game-making software, but these feel nothing like playing a game, and you're certainly not experiencing the story as a player as you help construct it - you're an author, and then, after you're done, you can go be a player. You're never both at once like you are in some tabletop RPGs. The best game recently I can think of in this vein is Paradise Killer, which has it at exactly one moment, albeit a crucial one. It's a murder mystery and it asks you to construct the ending. If you accuse someone with evidence, then they're guilty. If you decide not to, they're not. And the story is structured such that different people might come into the ending with different ideas about what happened, and the game is set up such that you are given no indication about whether an answer was "right" or "wrong" - the answer is whatever you think it is. It's limited, and there are scripted sequences during the trial, and and there is still, in a sense, a "right answer" if you know everything, but it's the closest exploration I can think of recently. An interesting corollary is that this does perhaps require more "simulation-y" games, where, yeah, maybe you can grab the fork off the table and go stab someone with it. But the thing that makes that ability boring isn't that it's realistic, but that it has no purpose. It's not hard to imagine a very moving story that involves someone using a fork as a weapon. The problem isn't the availability of that action, it's the fact that there's been no thought put towards constructing a world and rules that offer both the ability to pick up the fork and use it as a weapon along with the capability to explore any of the things that could make that an interesting thing to do and not just a novelty. Multiplayer games, especially MMOs are probably best-positioned to do this, since players are good at providing the impetus and structure for one another's stories (controlling for griefing). In smaller settings, they already do! You can see this very thing happening in some MUDs still today! You can see this melding of systems and rules and player freedom and creativity that allows the players to create narratives themselves, but narratives that are supported, prompted, and elaborated by the game engine (it's not just freeform group writing). But practically no one outside of these very niche games is exploring this. The most we get is sandboxes with new fork-weapon features. There is also a very interesting strand of discussion about the use of rules to define a negative space for storytelling to take place within, although, while it's a fascinating conversation, I think it's probably harder to apply to video games.

@quantumpotato

3 жыл бұрын

oh that's intriguing about Paradise Killer

Spelunky 2 is an interesting case study for some of the ideas presented in this discussion, especially in regards to randomness.

Would Dark Souls be an example of a game with intentional map connectivity design? Good verticality, ledges & ladders matter for combat, and opening shortcuts is really satisfying

"Oh it's almost like I can use that strategy, but I can't." Literally chess.

If games could be more like Invisible Cities, very few people today would be able to anticipate it. But if more design was in the spirit of that, people would catch on to the spirit of that kind of author/audience conversation and that would be incredibly interesting.

big reason that books and music can convey emotion and story better than games is because they are a single medium, where a game is trying to combine several. if anything is off (or missing entirely) then it takes away from the total experience. it could be a sound effect, an animation, a line of dialog, the method of solving a quest.. in a book that space is filled by the readers imagination. ( it can still be done wrong, its just less likely that a story will have a massive plot error or a forgotten story arc etc) in music often the expectation of how the song develops throughout is either IN or OUT of tune with the listener, and that can be good or bad, depending on what they expected/desired. with a game, its all of these things being combined into one, so the chances of someone getting what they expect out of the story, sound, mechanics and graphics etc is a lot lower. i could describe a castle, but if i were to then show a picture of what i described, it might not match at all what you imagined. a game is in a way, an expression of a story, using graphics and sound, but if they dont match the experience properly then the whole thing suffers. and everyone has their own opinion on weather it matches or not

The first person asked a rare good question

Hey Jonathan, your talks are always very insightful. I appreciated your comparisons to the patterns found in music as an ideal for beautiful game design, and I absolutely agree with this idea at an aesthetic level. I did have one disagreement with what you said. Around 28:00, you first mention the idea of musical arguments, specifically saying that this idea is present in "actual music." I want to challenge this in two ways. Firstly, modern and popular musicians do this all the time. Constantly. In every single song. It's not always as intricate as Bach, but Katy Perry still does it. Some more interesting examples, in my opinion, would be Ben Folds (see the brass duet in "Army") or Tycho, who writes very complex electronic music. The idea of motivic argument in music happens absolutely everywhere today - it's just not on "classical instruments." I realize that you weren't very thorough in defining what you meant by "actual music," so this point may or may not have actually challenged what you intended. But this is an idea that many people have, that popular music is always worse than classical music based on this false delineation. Secondly, and much more importantly, the idea space of what music can be is actually far, far larger than motivic argument. To make an analogy back to games, saying good music involves musical argument is like saying good video games are ones where the player controls a character that moves around in some space; such an idea has a great deal of potential, but doing it doesn't make the game good, and not doing it doesn't make the game bad. The idea space of what a game can be is so much larger than that. Similarly, music can be larger, but modern music theory often attempts to restrict us. We have largely thrown away whole cultures and rich musical traditions because they don't fit with the contemporary idea of motivic music. All of this doesn't even consider musical temperament. Modern music theory is taught exclusively in 12-TET, which wasn't even invented until 1584. Anything before that, or from non-European countries, is being discarded. Anyway, I apologize for such a longwinded challenge to your small comment - music theory is one of my passions, and there's a great deal of misunderstanding about it in popular culture. I could go off for a while on the bullshit that is Schenkerian Analysis. Thanks again for all your thoughts.

it's all puzzles all the way down

Just a tip to deal with these audio volume difference issues automatically. Use a dynamic range compressor, usually just called "compressor" . Your video editor must have one :)

Peripeteia and anagnorisis. The moment when knowledge “snaps” into place and becomes a heuristic framework in the brain. It’s a core foundation of puzzle games. These happen in rpgs mechanically - let’s go to dark souls or street fighter where a core foundation like blocking properly snaps into place. You collect these heuristics. Same with story, the moment of betrayal or drama that reframes the story - think for a moment when the boy realizes Bruce Willis is a ghost in the sixth sense or you realize cloud’s origin in ff7. It “snaps” knowledge into place and reframes your historic perspective. It’s like “Godel Esher and Bach”, it’s that moment of realization paired with a loop.

@EditorOrion

3 жыл бұрын

Not to get too abstract, or sound too crazy, but what you’re seeing in puzzles is the core of human experience. We travel and see the world to reframe our perspective on the world, to return to the mundane after transformation (yes, learning loops back to “the hero’s journey”, surprise everything is connected). We obsess over our hobbies to reframe our worldview - a statistician learns about baysian stats and comes back to his world enlightened. We learn basic processor language as data scientists to come back to our higher order languages enlightened. It’s the core drive of gambling, the fantasy or reframing our world (by reimagining it as being rich). It’s the cycle buddhists general consider the root of suffering. To an extreme it’s the root of irony and humor. Congrats, you’re on a path to wisdom.

@sollybrown8217

11 ай бұрын

Shut up

Just here from the future to point out that Ashes of Creation is implementing that exact horoscope model down to the theming with constellations.

What does he think of the new peasant boxes?

I feel like Hades would be a great case study for Casey to learn from on how to communicate to the player through the gameplay.

@ChaosPootato

3 жыл бұрын

@@keaganroos2288 I feel like Hades fits more the example Jon gives after that, where you get to choose between random stuff and you have to deal with what was given to you. It affects the way you'll handle a similar room and keeps gameplay a bit more fresh.

@Homan93

3 жыл бұрын

@@keaganroos2288 Sure if we're talking about "deep" ideas/concepts I agree. Although the cross interaction of all of the different boons/weapons and other systems in the game could be considered "deep" to a certain degree. I wasn't under the impression that Casey was only specifically looking for how to communicate deep ideas & concept. I just felt like I very easily and quickly understood all of the systems in the game without much effort. And enemy behavior is also communicated very nicely through the various animations and polished design. I haven't thought too deeply on this to understand why, it's just clear to me that it is a well designed game from my interactions with it and worth taking a look at it. But ultimately it depends on what kind of game Casey is working on.

New HD camera?

if anyone doesn't understand what jon means in the music part - try undertale

What was Mr. Muratori referring to about the narrator of Into The Spiderverse? (I think it was the best Spiderman movie and possibly even the best comic book movie as of writing. Doesn't mean its perfect, of course. 😄)

@scottadamgordon1625

3 жыл бұрын

I came to the comments looking for this. I wonder if it was Morales calling himself "the one and only spiderman" even though there are many versions. It could be that, though that line felt like an intentional joke to me (could the writers really have forgotten there were other "spidermen" in the film?) . It could also be the "anyone can wear the mask" line..... But again that felt to me pretty consistent like hey you can be a pig or a Manga character or a private eye . Idk, just throwing it out there :/

@KaushalDamania

6 күн бұрын

Yeah I came to the comments for this too i re-watched the movie and still couldn''t relate to what he meant. Can anyone help me?

Are these lessions that Blow are talking about (speaking about the game design of PUBG etc) available online? I have seen all his old talks (prior to 2019 or )

@raphaeld9270

4 ай бұрын

Maybe kzread.info/dash/bejne/o4t6tcWmpMypZJc.html ? Though I can't guarantee it, I still need to finish both these videos properly 😅

I would love to know what your advice might be to someone that Over designs things. I have found myself stuck in a rut a bit because I try to think of far to many possibilities for my code and while it produces decent enough code I get relatively little done compared to when I wrote shittier code but accomplished a lot. Even worse the constant over thinking on larger projects causes this slow morphing of the project from the desired target to the point that when it gets sufficiently large it starts to look like incoherent blob. I try simply, Not over thinking it but that is easier said than done. Any tips on how one might be able to set a target and stick with it even if feature creep and better ideas pop into ones mind through the coding process itself?

@saniel2748

3 жыл бұрын

Did you find an answer?

@embersworkshop

2 жыл бұрын

This might be 8 months too late, but my advice: Shoot really low. Practice saying no to yourself. Stick to a document you make in pre-planning. Focus on coding as a means to publish rather than as a means for quality, because then you get well-rounded experience which will inately improve your quality. I think scope creep and a balance we all face because sometimes it's fun and rewarding to add bonus features, but it can't come at the cost of virtually undoing all the hard work you did because the scope/breadth went exponential.

@embersworkshop

2 жыл бұрын

Forgot to add, my favourite exercise of late has been to make elementary games (checkers, memory, tic tac toe) and see just what my inclination to complexify is. That's helped me adjust the way I do things a ton, realizing that I will find a way to make a boring idea fun, or a simple idea complex.

I started writing my own engine because I hate myself and I am in this EXACT spot lol, loved the music analogy, that was soooooo helpful!

@peripheralarbor

3 жыл бұрын

I've really enjoyed the way kzread.info visualizes musical themes. It's deepened my already significant appreciation of classical music.

Crossover between Jonathan Blow and Orchestration Online.

So the conclusion of the entire discussion is "get disciples for your kung-fu style before you get ran over by a bus", right ?

hmm secret fidel dungeon rescue 2 announcement 😤🤔

47:43 More like the idea of interesting in games is the ability to things that you legally or socially cannot do in real world. Games are sunset of real world activities. There is nothing different that one can put in games. Ability to steal a car, shoot police up and get away by hiding is interesting because you get to do it in games without consequences. Better design is to find such thing and put it in game. May be find something that people never realised doing in real life but as they find in-game they get this awe feeling.

most games give the player a toolcase and lets them experiment, no one solution. Games like Deus Ex back in the day would advertise the possibility of finding many ways, even talking your way into or out of situations. Thats what players enjoy, freedom to be creative and solve problems.

It's hilarious how earnest Casey is about games. If I were supreme dictator I'd open up an academic department at the spongebob university of goof-offs for his geekery to flourish.

41:00 The idea of using limited elements as part of multiple compositions is much easier to see in 90s era games. The constriction created by the limitations was far more real, as a result many games exhausted large swathes of the possibility space for the limited elements they could employ. For an example to study, a classic that comes to mind is Link to the Past.

@littlebigcommentary

3 жыл бұрын

Do you mean like the dark world in the link to the past and how it's just a palette swap to save space and stuff?

@yunggolem4687

3 жыл бұрын

@@littlebigcommentary Not really. I mean there's a lot of rooms that use the same enemies but play with placement and environment to create unique quasi-puzzles.

In the context of mmo's, I agree there needs to be a way to keep more experienced/knowledgeable/talented players from walking all over the less experienced/knowledgeable/talented players, but I strongly disagree with directly using time constraints as a way to do it. It creates unnecessary conflict between the person playing the game because they feel like playing right then, or someone playing a game because its the once a week chance they get to be strongest with whatever stats they have specced into or to do whatever activity they want the reward from. I think a better way to handle it is having combat counters and also having these counters change depending on terrain or the number of entities involved in the combat.

Here's a good list of music details that can be used in an analogous way with game design: kzread.info/dash/bejne/epyGzNCYmtO3qM4.html "Decoding the Music of The Matrix" by Sideways Undertale is an example of a game that was designed music-first, with leitmotif heavy music, and as a result has leitmotifs built into the story and design.

What game did Casey voice act in?

@jack_crawford

3 жыл бұрын

I assume it’s Jonathan’s secret-ish “Game 3”.

@HoshoLegacy

3 жыл бұрын

An as-of-yet-unannounced project. We, the public, know nothing yet.

@nosferadu

3 жыл бұрын

Ah, the Sokoban game.

@jonny__b

3 жыл бұрын

@@nosferadu No not the Sokoban game, it's an unannounced project.

@nosferadu

3 жыл бұрын

@@jonny__b Oh wow, there's another one? So he's currently working on two games AND the programming language? That is nuts! I love it. Just hope he manages.

I'm puzzled

I am convinced jb has one of the greatest minds I’ve ever found. Some of the things he says are so insightful and abstract and complex. It’s so rare to find someone who thinks in numbers and logic and puzzles who is just as competent in the realm of the abstract or artistic.

So basically inception.

👍

I think Casey doesn't really understand the difference between emergent gameplay and emergent *storytelling*.

50:00 Game 3 will have random map generation & Casey voice? Hmm

@jonny__b

3 жыл бұрын

And monster fighting by the sounds of it :O

I have a different answer to the initial question. I define a 'story' as a narrative wherein a question is both asked and answered by the narrative itself. So a narrative of "I went to the store, got some milk and eggs, and came home" is not a story because there's no question asked and answered. Answers can be derived: you now have milk and eggs. Questions can be asked: why did you get milk and eggs? But not both. On the other hand, a narrative of "I was driving home from work, and ran into a traffic jam on the freeway. Fortunately, I was able to get off the freeway and take a detour on Home St, so it wasn't that big of a deal. It seemed like a car accident of some sort." This has both questions and answers to those questions. How did you get past the jam? Took a detour. What caused the jam? Some sort of accident. Now the reality behind this is that questions and answers are both _interpretive._ The first narrative _does_ have a question and answer, it's: why did you go to the store? To get milk and eggs. However, most people who listen to the narrative will truncate it into "I got milk and eggs", because the question is too obvious and too common in our lives. So I think games are like that. RPGs are a game of "find the question", and the answer will be revealed through simple time and effort; while puzzle games are more of a game of "find the answer", because the question is known from the very beginning. To make a story/game good, it must have potential for finding questions, finding answers, and degrees of challenge in both. A good example of a challenging question in an RPG is a background plot about a background character. This would be when there's just a character at the town you visit often, whereupon everytime you go through more of the main story, that character's dialogue changes to reveal more of some story involving that character; such as a romance plot, or a mystery plot. This answer is extremely easy to find, just come back to the character to talk again throughout the game. The question, however, is hard to find, because it requires 1: talking to the background character in the first place, and 2: paying attention enough to realize that there's a background plot going on with this character. This also boils down to the essence of art. Art is not objective. Art is also not subjective. Art is very specifically the interplay between objective and subjective. Don't focus on only one. Don't even focus on both. Focus on the interplay between the two. And design for the possibility of questions and answers. Hence why emergent gameplay is the holy grail.

Need George Hotz.

43ish I agree with that. Baldur's gate is an incredible game but at the end of the day is not all that much fun because the idea is cool but not all that fun

an ad every 2 minutes? Come on!

@SiisKolkytEuroo

3 жыл бұрын

Get adblock for your browser on desktop, get youtube vanced app for android

"Continuous puzzle game" The Witness would be that, yes?

@quantumpotato

3 жыл бұрын

if you're talking about ________ then yeah. The main puzzle mechanic is discrete.

It almost feels like rpg is more of an aesthetic than a type of game. Like why is Final fantasy an rpg but not legend of Zelda? I don't think you can justify saying it's cause you have levels. Many fps games have levels, don't make them rpgs... Think you can learn by memorization, understanding or by perfecting a method. I think games tap into our monkey brains and let us act on our instincts and ancient reward systems. Like playing minecraft involves exploring nature, finding natural resources, building bases, securing food. All deeply rooted behaviors, and feel immensely satisfying.

I have exams next week and a comp. eng. test in 4 hours idk why i'm watching this. whatever.

@typicallucas

3 жыл бұрын

maybe you are have an unsatisfied need to hear smart people talk ;)

"right?" "yes" "right?" "uh huh" "right?" "yup" "right?" "yeah"

3 obvious examples of "a recent game that tells its story in a good way" (1:21:55 or so) Hotline Miami Axiom Verge Hollow Knight

Programming should be teach more like martial arts.

@alexnoman1498

3 жыл бұрын

Yes. We need 50 different schools of programming, tought to impressionable youngster with rigorous training. Then, after a couple years, we need a UFC for programming to figure out which one is best. It is the only way.

I don't think the general public watches movies for the story.

What makes a good RPG? ARPG or traditional RPG? ARPG: **Itemization** RPG: **Story** _All_ ARPGs boil down to: 1. Genocide 2. Get Phat Loot 3. Rinse and Repeat Take ARPGs like _Diablo 3, Grim Dawn or Path of Exile_ -- they indirectly teach the player about builts. Max resists, invest in life, damage, etc.

@zhulikkulik

Жыл бұрын

It's funny that I never see “RPG element” as RPG. For me something like Reigns or Life is Strange is more RPG than fallout for example. For me it's all about choosing and playing a role in a story rather than choosing and playing a role as a support/tank/dd/etc.

Интересненько

Do game programmers generally lose hair?

@alexnoman1498

3 жыл бұрын

He joked before about pulling it all out over C++

Braid 2?

@SimGunther

3 жыл бұрын

The Braided Witness: free with your download of Jai :P

First , hi jonathon , i like braid a lot

4 minute question

Geeze, that must be the longest question I've ever heard asked, starts at 0:15 ends at 3:53. A 3 minute 38 second question is not a question, it's a speech

@TheSandvichTrials

3 жыл бұрын

See it as setting up the conversation space more than a question that needs to be able to receive a direct 1:1 answer!

@peripheralarbor

3 жыл бұрын

It's okay in a conversation. Good thing conventions are a thing of the past though, so panel hosts will never need to suffer through "questions" like this ever again.

@LagMasterSam

3 жыл бұрын

Perhaps the fact that he can explore the context of a question for so long is why he's smarter and more knowledgeable than you'll ever be.

@n8style

3 жыл бұрын

@@LagMasterSam lol

I acutlly like alot of rpg's lol I wonder why he thinks alot of them are bad?

@microdavid7098

Жыл бұрын

rpgs the way they are have random encounters and usually don't have ideas that coalesce together. Not all of them but a lot of them. Say you're walking around when suddenly you hit an invisible barrier that triggers an enemy. It's interesting the first time around but when you fight and defeat the enemy up the xp and hit the same enemy again out of randomness, that's where the agitation walks in. A lot of rpgs just copy and paste this formula without thinking about why people would hate this and why people would love it. This is basically what design is all about. Using known things, understanding strengths and weaknesses and using what in what situation and not because others have done it before and you're just copying them without realizing their failures and strengths

a guy with a slightly longer club, in the corner, generally doesnt work. unless its dark souls. p.s. if anyone thinks avengers is gud storytelling i dunno how they found you or how they stuck around

I think Reggie's "If the game's not fun, why bother" is a decent mindset to have. Game's don't have to be fun to be good, but games are a medium mostly about mechanics, and basically all good games have some level of enjoyable mechanics (i.e. fun)

money cant be the driver of solutions, you get p(x|money) not p(x), solution to the wrong problem, money is a transformation that does not make any sense

@Jkauppa

2 жыл бұрын

ie, "in the condition of money, we do x", not "we do x", so you are focused into the condition, not the thing you should be doing, thats the puzzle solution, simplified

@Jkauppa

2 жыл бұрын

ie, if you dont get money, you dont do x, even if the goal is to do x

@Jkauppa

2 жыл бұрын

team goals, generalized goals, goals, just goals, not any constraining guidances

@Jkauppa

2 жыл бұрын

culture is a constraint, not the actual focus

@Jkauppa

2 жыл бұрын

in the condition of knowledge, you dont do that thing either, you concentrate on the knowledge, not doing anything when you are consumed by the knowledge

_The Witness_ isn't art.