Prototyping 50 Games in One Semester 72
StarEmperor writes "Gamasutra has a good feature about four grad students who created 50 games in one semester. The article presents their insights about game design, evaluating gameplay, and generally what makes for a fun game."
Re:nice try buddy (Score:5, Insightful)
I've played the Tower of Goo game. It's really a fun "casual game" sort of game, and honestly, they came up with an idea that was fairly different from much of anything else out there, which isn't easy to do. They didn't just make yet another Tetris clone, or a Bejeweled clone, or some other puzzle game that's been done a million times, they seem to have tried to come up with really innovative game ideas.
The Experimental Gameplay Project [experimentalgameplay.com] has a lot of really unique game concepts like this.
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You do get a lot of simple or basic functionality tests, but some do have a nice polished feel.
Crayon Physics and Tower of Goo stand out the most. Every few months I download all the new games and just kill time seeing what they can do.
SLASHDOTTED (Score:1)
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I've got a fever & the only prescription is mo (Score:5, Insightful)
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Most Final Fantasy titles have mediocre stories with little or no meaningful interaction, somewhat nice gameplay and plenty of slashfic featurng the lead characters.
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So FFVIII was almost a movie in the amount of cutscenes, but I liked it that way. And compared to other games (maybe not the RPG genre) it had a lot of storyline.
The gameplay actually seemed a bit repetitive at times (especially summoning)
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back to topic:
I'd like to see these programmers rewrite those 50 games using an Atari console with only 128 bytes of RAM. Now *that* would impress me. It's still amazing what was accomplished by Atari and Activision programmers 30 years ago.
Do It Again (Score:5, Insightful)
-No, your games aren't going to be in WorstBuy anytime soon.
-No, your games aren't going to get any attention whatsoever from the media.
-No, you won't be able to afford porting them to the console du-jour.
-No, you won't attract VC to grow your business.
-Yes, you will have some loyal consumers. Make your games multilingual (i18?) and you'll have many.
-Yes, you can build a very successful enterprise.
In all cases that's the way doing something original works. I wish more young Americans had this kind of attitude and perserverance.
I just hope they are smart enough to keep going on their own instead of using it as a resume builder.
Re:Cheap game space (Score:5, Interesting)
Desktop Tower Defense is pretty addictive (for a while anyway):
http://www.kongregate.com/games/preecep/desktop-tower-defense [kongregate.com]
Also liked this one:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/AlejandroG/spin-the-black-circle [kongregate.com]
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It's doubtfully enough to make a living off of, but it's enough to pay for the coffee / Mountain Dew and cheesies of a hobby-level programmer.
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But yeah, Kongregate is an example of people getting paid for games that can be put together in a couple of weeks or months.
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If you like turn based strategy games, this little chess-inspired motherfucker will absorb your time like nothing else.
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http://experimentalgameplay.com/
also, Kyle Gabler has expanded on the tower of goo idea and built it into a product: http://2dboy.com/games.php
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Most modern games:
Graphics
Storyline
Gameplay
It's rather disappointing, as a lot of modern games are interactive movies rather than games.
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So in other words... (Score:1)
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These days it's unacceptable to require the player to find secrets with no hint towards them or have huge mazes without any map function.
Really? I've found it to be more or at least as prevalent in games these days to hide secrets which are completely unsolvable without a guide. I think the developers are just assuming that kids will disseminate the information on GameFAQs or other websites. It's really a shame too, as I like to solve things myself. You can probably beat the game without any of that game guide bullshit, but you won't "100%" it.
Oh, and as far as the built in map functions these days, I liked mapmaking on graph paper, but I c
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Ironically Tower of Goo is getting ported to the Wii.
This is a feature from October 26, 2005 (Score:5, Informative)
*sigh*
Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is a feature from October 26, 2005 (Score:4, Insightful)
On a site that's "news for nerds," events that were made public 2 years ago would hardly be called news. That, and this might just be a dupe that was spaced so far apart nobody can remember the original (worse than the dupe on SHA1 being cracked).
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Not to mention that what is old hat to you could be news to someone else. Or would you argue that because someone wrote about everyday physics once, no one else needs to
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productivity vs. burnout (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it would be a nice follow up to do an extended study of this kind of development cycle in a corporate environment and examine the turnover rate for developers. Will they be intrigued by working on something new every week, or will they get tired of the quick turnaround and quit?
Re:productivity vs. burnout (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I wouldn't think of this as any developer's full-time job. Rather, they are describing a strategy for coming up with novel game mechanics, game genres, game elements, etc. Maybe in-between big projects, you give your designers/developers a few weeks of this kind of structured rapid prototyping. At the end, you decide which ideas are not worth pursuing, which ideas could be polished into small games (for release as flash games, as mini-games inside full games, etc.), and which ideas could be expanded upon to create a full, novel game. (E.g. the next "Portal" in terms of novel game-play.)
You're probably right that any developer would burn-out if they tried to churn out a new, novel game every week (they might also eventually become frustrated by never being able to "finish" any project). But as a way to sometimes come up with actually creative game ideas... it definitely has merit.
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That's exactly what kills the creativity: trying to systematize creating, trying to find a perfect 'way' that will always work and ensure originality. No, it can't work and it never will as long people have deadlines or a
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The prototyping method from the article has been around for a while at CMU, since about 1998 in a class called "Building Virtual Worlds". The whole theory is to get people to think creatively by giving them a central idea, a bunch of constraints, and an even bigger set of tools to play with.
The process is actually intended to NOT be perfect. The idea is for people to quickly design an idea, then sketch out the idea in code using prototype tools, then test it out in front of an audience, all in a week.
meh (Score:1, Funny)
Not exactly a dupe (Score:4, Insightful)
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=173642&cid=14446612 [slashdot.org]
"Nobody cares about your engineering..." (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, the kind of mechanic they were talking about really doesn't seem like it'd make something polished. If you already have a solid prototype, take some time to go back and do it right.
Bit old - but still important... (Score:2, Insightful)
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There is a bi-annual 48 hour solo game development competition called Ludum Dare 48h [imitationpickles.org] that has just finished its 11th incarnation. All the entries have to supply source so it might be interesting for you to have a look though these. This time there were over 70 final entries but you do have to realise that there is a wide range of polish and completeness.
The competition itself is actually quite fun and provides a good forum for playing at game development as at doesn't take up much time and the end results
Just from the summary... (Score:2)
Fun in games (Score:2)
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TF2: Team Fortress 2 -nt- (Score:1)
Welcome to October 2005 (Score:3, Informative)
Did they cheat and (Score:1)
I kid. But gojo is hella fun. The main programmer is working on porting it to the wii and has support for the wiiboard written (doubt that's in the main trunk though).
ok, how about the technology? (Score:2)
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glorious trainwrecks! (Score:2)
People who dig this stuff are welcome to join the 'wreckers!
The old 80/20 rule (Score:2)
This reminds me of the 80/20 rule that generally still applies to graphic design, web design, game design... most creative pursuits, actually. In short: The first 20% of the effort creates the first 80% of the result, and the last 80% of the effort goes into the remaining 20% of the result.
In other words, the core ideas come quick, and all the fine details take much longer.
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In other words, the core ideas come quick, and all the fine details take much longer.
I totally agree. Back in the day, I remember Randy Pausch (who started the whole "game" prototyping process mentioned in the article) lecturing at a few of us coders for spending too much time making code re-usable. He said that code-reuse is good and all, but not in the context of prototyping and testing out ideas.
I remember shocked whispers throughout the lab: "did he just tell us to write ugly code???".
PS3 Uses innovative control schemes (Score:1)