To all you modders out there!

[rtjhbfvsrry]

As for both Dear Esther and Heavy Rain, I can promise you guys that when the ideas for these games was though of someone showed up and said ''Let's make a game like this'' they did not however show up with a 400 page book and told people to make a game out of it.

See where I'm coming from?

Also just as Hirnwirbel stated before, this stuff really applies to students, as someone whom is currently going through a school just like this I can tell you that pretty much every single word she writes in here is true.

Dear Esther was an experiment in gameplay, yet they didn't start to build the core experience without a story which is what the guide says, though they would have started designing and refining the core gameplay of the mod long before they started work, but the gameplay is not the game, the gameplay could be an idea, there is a lot of theory behind it. They would show up with the core design of the game, the setting plan and the narrative. Narrative is designed and created alongside the design of the game, it is not shoved in after the core features of the game, as she implies, at least not for a well crafted story in a game.

Before you start to work on the assets and programming of a game there will be months, or possibly even years of design and planning, as well as a narrative being crafted in amongst these times. Call of Duty has a terrible story, though it's design is nearly eight years old now, and they do not have that long period of planning and design as other games do.

I don't know if you're joking with that last bit.

Deadlines in game design are generally so tight that sometimes you have to bang out your basic design ideas and start prototyping your tech in less than a week. Call of Duty in fact tends to have longer for design because most of the time the tech is already in place. Do you think the game mechanics are stupid? Because I guarantee the mechanics in those games are extremely well thought out from the stupid overpowered noob weapons to the crappy set piece explosions that you have no control over. They don't appeal to you because you are not their audience, but every single detail in those games has been combed over to infinity - it's just that the target audience is twelve year old morons.

That to say that non-story driven games are not immediately worse than story driven games. Everything by Quantic Dream comes to mind, which are movies with bits of unrelated gameplay without meaningful choices taped on with duct tape. It could not be more obvious that they have no idea how to make a game and are really just angry that their scripts are too shitty to be picked up in Hollywood. This is what happens when your game starts with the story.

As for Dear Esther, they would have had to figure out what the player does and how the narrative is relayed to the player before they would have created the story, hence the gameplay would have come first (Remember, gameplay =/= game mechanics). Gameplay literally has to come first because a narrative in a game is part of the gameplay, and it is quite idiotic to come up with the story first because your gameplay might have to change it. I can have the best plot ever, but if there's no interesting way for the player to experience it my game is going to be shit. Books are pure story, but there is not a single book that would work if ported page for page as a game. You would have to change literally everything to to fit gameplay.