dennis.videogameworkshop.com
I make educational games! Currently making cool stuff at Twin Cities PBS
I like to talk about game dev, design, programming, board games, pokemon and Magic the Gathering. (PhD, invited speaker Tedx GDC Lego)
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I agree and will admit my bias is that the mechanics affect the feel/vibe of the game more than the aesthetics... but there are certainly feelings to the contrary out there!
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I still talk to every NPC in a Zelda game when I find a new area!
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For sure. Highly dependent on the person playing it. I've seen people play "Papers Please" to relax and others stress themselves out over the fact that their farm isn't optimal. Quite a spectrum.
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Resisting the urge to suggest reading the MDA paper, but if you all are interested here it is: users.cs.northwestern.edu/~hunicke/MDA...
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If you're curious about id and the making of doom/quake I highly recommend reading Romero's autobiography (linked above). It's crazy how much game dev has evolved over the past ~30 years!
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To be clear, I love this game. This was my second fps after quake.
But to have this project be ok'd in the shape it came out... is crazy. That's like if someone the dark souls engine to make a Capitan crunch game.
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A link to the study if you'd like to find out more: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
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"Per my last email" energy
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You gotta remember, this is after the time where Miyamoto famously took about a year of preproduction just working on how Mario moved. After all that prep and design having your kid fail to leave the starting area would be soul crushing.
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I'd appreciate the add!
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Interestingly, there seems to be some universal cultural significance humans have with the numbers 1-3 and 6/7 (trinities, lucky 7 etc). The way we process numbers visually might be the reason.
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In fact it takes about double the amount of things for us to visually distinguish groups once we get above the number 4.
We can't *quickly* determine if a group of 5 is bigger than a group of 4 but we can compare a group of 4 and 7.
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So, one theory about why this is, is because our brains actually count in a logarithmic way. In short it means that we can visually compare small amounts of things (1-4) because the differences between 1 and 2 is comparatively/visually bigger than comparing 5 and 6.
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Follow me if you like talking about game design game development and programming. I need more people to geek out on this stuff with me!
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So yeah, the "dragon age veilguard would have done better as a live service game" totally tracks.
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Two: it rubbed me the wrong way how much credit they were trying to get for inquisition's departure from the DA2 streamlined approach. "I allowed" "I took a risk" "I'm proud of the final product"
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A few things about that interaction have stuck with me. One being: yeah good you get it now but also it's sad you have such a high position influencing so many games and it's obvious you haven't played anything other than FIFA, you basically said as much.
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Apparently the example that finally won them over was a scenario pitch where two warring factions were separated by a river. The DA:I team told the executive about how players would have a chance to align with either faction or build a bridge which would result in the tribes uniting. IGetItNow.jpg
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To their credit, the executive was transparent about their biases and how they didn't understand "those types of games." He sat down with the team, heard their pitch, and "allowed" them to make a more complicated game. He also started to understand why they could just make a new DA game every year.
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So apparently around this time the inquisition team reached out to him to try to get EA to back off from reduced complexity and embrace player agency and branching narratives. This was a response to DA2 which also seems to have been influenced by this "streamlining" mandate.
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I'm about to get to part 2!
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It was ambiguous what other mandates they requested but they emphasize simplicity and reducing complexity like branching narratives.
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They started by saying how prior to their current position they had only worked on FIFA and didn't understand other types of games. Meanwhile, they were giving suggestions to the ME3 team about how to make their endgame metrics more visible to players like in sports sims. War assets anyone?
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After ME 3 was released and right before Inquisition, I got the opportunity to hear a talk from a high ranking EA executive about their work. The talk was about what EA considers their market rivals and lessons learned from changes they requested from the bioware team during development.
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