T w e n t y S i d e d

I cited some of my influences way back at the start of this series. I left one out. One other thing that’s really shaping my vision for this gameplay is this:

Mass Effect 2 (and to be fair, a LOT of other games) are an influence on how I want leveling to work. But not in an imitative sort of way. Like, I play those games and my goal is to do the exact opposite of everything they did. What do you call that? A negative influence? But that makes it sound like I’m just imitating the bad parts of the game. An inverse influence? Anti-influence?

I don’t know. Whatever. My pitch for the leveling in this game is to show you that screenshot above with the subtitle of, “NOT THIS.”

Here’s what I find unsatisfying about it:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 16: Level Up”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

At the beginning of a project there’s always a big burst of progress. Every ten minutes you’ve got another feature or another improvement, and it’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you’re John Carmack. But then you enter the middle phase of the project and suddenly it’s time to tidy things up, get your interfaces in order, and work on some of the boring, non-sexy stuff.

So that’s where I am right now. Sooner or later I need to do the Great Big Post About Gameplay Mechanics, but I keep putting that one off. Up until now this game has been all things to all people. Everyone can look at these screenshots and fantasize about all the ways it could be exactly what they wish. Everyone can look at it an scream, “Shut up and take my money!” because so far they haven’t seen anything that indicates it’s not something they would like. When I finally get around to nailing things down I’ll end up breaking some hearts, and I’m not quite ready for that trial yet.

So let’s dig through funny screenshots.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 14: Outtakes”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve been reading back over this series, and I have to say I’m pretty happy at how far we’ve come in such a short time. But I have to admit the one thing we need more of in this write-up is crappy MS-Paint level illustrations. So let’s fix that.

We start with our flying robot:

Pfft. I have no idea why people waste money on artists making concept sketches. I think this looks awesome already! In fact, we could throw a little lens flare on that thing and we’d be ready to start taking pre-orders.

As cool as this is, I think it would look even more amazing with a leg. Maybe even more than one leg. But we’ll start with one. The first step is to pick a horizontal offset from the body. Let’s say we draw a line that extends one unit to the left of the body. This creates a point which we will call the knee. The knee can move up and down, but it always has to stay the same distance from the body horizontally. (Yes, I could have the knee pivot instead of moving up and down, which would be more “correct”. But I’m going for an effect here.)

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 13: How Do We Leg?”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Games are a young medium, and we’re still inventing (or appropriating) nomenclature for it. Ludonarrative Dissonance, Kinesthetics, skinner box, gamification, consolification, boss fight, quicktime event, RPG, difficulty curve, level scaling, HOTs and DOTs, raid, crowd control, pay-to-win, force feedback. Twenty years ago these terms either didn’t exist, or they meant something else to the average person. Some of these terms came from the audience, and some of them came from game designers, but they all arose out of a need to talk about a thing that didn’t have a name yet.

One concept I’ve needed a word for is the way games use multiple audio / visual cues to let you know that a thing happened. The term I’ve settled into was “feedback channels”. But lots of people have run into this concept long before I showed up, and they already had their own terms. These two guys call it “juice” or making a game “juicy”:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 12: Feedback Channels”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.