in which kevin waxes zarathustran

[erf_]

In the month following the end of my last contract I've done a lot of recentering. Specifically, I've been trying to rediscover what it is I love about video games so much that I'll gladly work an engineer's hours in an artist's living conditions just for another shot at doing it for a living

Comments

[retch]

Actually the random maps in Diablo are intentional and in Dave Brevik's mind incredibly important. He feels very heavily that the randomness is critical to creating that true sense of exploration. The world IS what you go and discover, not something that you can look up a map of online. That wasn't a minor part of his design, it was a crucial element. :)

Complexity is indeed a reaction to people having mastered simpler ones. Genres tend to grow in complexity over time as once you've established the language of a particular game type you can express more complex ideas within that genre and the players demand increased complexity to keep purchasing it. This can ultimately lead to the demise of a genre as complexity spirals upwards, driving off new players while retaining an ever shrinking set of genre devotees (because you always have lossage over time).

This is part of where the platform reset of Casual Games and then Social Games was useful, it allowed lower complexity games to gain a foothold amongst new cohorts of players. It is part of why games can acquire new players down at the very young end of the market too.

Good luck with your goal! It is certainly a challenging direction to try and go. Experimenting and trying to find gameplay is hard and expensive. We came up with Iron Construct that way, and there were some interesting experiments along the way. It would have been neat to see how the game could have been if we'd been able to get funding and build the whole thing out. :)

For me, I'll have fun making games I love that are elegant and fun to play, that's what I look for in my personal projects. :)

[erf_]

Elegant and fun to play is what I'm shooting for too. :] And I am frequently impressed by how even games with well understood mechanics can deliver surprises. (Orbital Defense Platforms + Heavy Carriers = mobile blockade! :D )

I understand what Dave Brevik intended to do with the random maps in Diablo, I just don't think it worked out as well as he wanted. Instead of creating a wholly new world each game, with surprises around every corner, Diablo generated a uniform soup of the same experience done eight or nine different ways. This was true of early builds of Angband, too, which Brevik names as the inspiration for Diablo.

Personally, I'm not convinced that interesting world generation--rather than just noise--is a problem that has been completely solved. The best solution I've seen is in Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, and that involves adding non-random, carefully designed "vaults" (sub-dungeons) to the pool of dungeon features that can be randomly generated. Which is great, as it's fantastic to unexpectedly discover a gnoll fortress or underground lake as you turn a corner in your random-noise roguelike cavern, but it sort of defeats the point of random map generation in the first place, since you can look up maps of the vaults on wikis and whatnot.

I'm looking at the casual games boom as an opportunity, myself. Ever since I was a little kid all the games I've come up with have been built around complexity. Having the chance to come up with something simple enough to sell for a dollar in the App Store, under the constraints of zero development costs, a very short timeframe, and a single-developer team, forces me to get away from that. And if I pull it off, maybe I can even recoup some of my costs.

I've been hard at work implementing some of my new ideas. It's anyone's guess how the final product will be received. And that excites me.

[retch]

Yup, the App Store was another reset, though we can see the years of burgeoning complexity there too now.

Good luck, looking forward to getting to play what you've built! :)