To all you modders out there!

[plutomaniac]

I'm gonna be honest, I can't stand it when people use replay value and gameplay time as a means of judging a game. It's not about how long a game is, it's about what it does with the time it uses. If a game only needs two hours to tell its story and give you the intended experience, then adding on extra time just so it has a lengthy play time would only detract from the experience and act as filler. I'd rather have an incredibly mind blowing hour long game than a good game that lasts 20. Same goes for replay value, I'd rather play an incredibly well done game once and have an amazing experience than play a good game 5 times because it has replay value.

If you really need any proof of this, go play Journey, and then get back to me on how longer play time and replay value make a game better.

An excellent example of what I think you are saying is a small game called Thirty Flights of Loving. It also includes the previous game this developer made which was even smaller and free (Gravity Bone). TFOL tells you a good story in less than 13 minutes, it's really something unique.

[Kreekakon]

Haha, well, honestly, for anyone not making arcade games his advice of "forgetting about fun in video games" is pretty solid, though for the wrong reasons. I've always thought the developer goal of "how do I make this game fun?" should be replaced with "how do I make this game engaging?".

Frictional seems to understand this more than any other company. When in the proper mindset, Amnesia is terrifying. If I'm terrified, I'm extremely engaged, but I'd hesitate to call the experience "fun".

I agree very much with this statement, although I personally prefer to use the word "entertaining" instead of "engaging" in my version of the theory.

[Statyk]

we need googolplex here, he could enlighten us about this whole story vs gameplay thing

yup

Get out.

[Bridge]

we need googolplex here, he could enlighten us about this whole story vs gameplay thing

yup

Get out.

I humbly and most insincerely endorse this comment on the grounds that this user is of a higher stature than I am.

[Wooderson]

Oh god what have I started!?

I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere before.

[Traggey]

All really obvious stuff, I never took it whilst reading this as if she claimed story is secondary in big-time productions, this is targeted towards students, trust me mate, school development is very different as our goal is to simply make a working game.

[Adrianis]

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.

Agreed with most of it, but not that sentence. For all the planning you do, if you end up not being able to execute on it properly then it doesn't matter - spending months or years designing around a core principle that ends up not working means an awful lot of lost time. You should be able to have a decent prototype of ideas in a shortish space of time - programming gameplay features in an existing engine doesn't take long, neither does modelling very basic assets. You're designs get improved once you actually get a feel for the system as it would be in game, and that gives you a basis to iterate from.

[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.

[Traggey]

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.

Agreed with most of it, but not that sentence. For all the planning you do, if you end up not being able to execute on it properly then it doesn't matter - spending months or years designing around a core principle that ends up not working means an awful lot of lost time. You should be able to have a decent prototype of ideas in a shortish space of time - programming gameplay features in an existing engine doesn't take long, neither does modelling very basic assets. You're designs get improved once you actually get a feel for the system as it would be in game, and that gives you a basis to iterate from.

This depends, if you're an indie developer you're pretty much free to do whatever the balls you feel like, if you're however aiming to develop for a publisher you're going to need to pitch your game ideas to the publisher before getting to work on the game, the pre-production stages of a game can indeed take many many months to go through and it is here that you actually make sure that your ideas won't suck, that is why it takes so long.

[rtjhbfvsrry]

As an indie developer you most certainly are not free to do whatever the balls you feel like. You are only free to do whatever brings food on your employees' table and keeps you in business. Most indie developers aren't as lucky as Frictional Games and judging by the hard road it was to get Amnesia made it took a LOT of luck for that happen. You hear a lot of success stories but the reality is that most indie developers are stuck making shitty licensed games on impossible deadlines just to keep running.