Gigi has completed his overview.

Context.



I am going to try and decode this dry erase tablet of accumulated wisdom, if everything here can be used to turn a noob into a pro then I think it's a better investment of time than arguing yet again about what does/doesn't belong on this forum.

I started going through one by one, and I'm stuck at number 2. What is A,t pipeline... art pipeline? I'm on my PC now and this image is really a lot higher rez than I thought.

Now, can anyone tell me what Convexity means in relation to game design/development? All I can find is a bunch of articles about Cooporative play and Coalition Play, but not anything deeper.

 

I got to the Ziegarnik effect, and that blew my mind because that's pretty much what happens to me in every game. Unfinished business forces me to revisit the same challenges until I win. It gives me ideas about introducing monsters that players can't defeat or stopping them in the middle of quests to begin side quests, in a never ending cycle of redirection and diversion. That really sounds a lot like a real time strategy game, come to think of it...

 

My favorite is "reading".

 

Can someone link me a video tutorial on "reading"?

 

I like juice too, my preference goes to apple one

This list is full of concepts, but I assume that it makes much more sense for the people involved than for the rest of us, because it's just something put together as keywords while being part of an ongoing discussion.

 

I seriously considered drawing pictures on my whiteboard of apples, platforms, diagrams showing the relationship between collecting apples and the health bar, a smiley face would appear next to the apples, a sketch of some spikes would have a sad face next to it... then posting it with "here is another you can study".

In both cases my takeaway is "you should be working on your game". Which is what I am looking forward to doing 2 hours from now when I take vacation from work for the rest of today.

 

Yeah, that's a good one. I'm not sure that increasing the frustration of your players is a winning strategy, though. I know we need to keep them coming back for more, but at the same time, we don't want them to get so annoyed they stop playing.

I know when I was playing Oblivion — a heavily quest-based game — I got mighty annoyed when I had one quest already in progress, and somebody would hand me another quest. Of course that's (apparently) unavoidable, but the more quests I had incomplete at once, the less I liked it... and I would get to the point of actively avoiding talking to NPCs (or refusing to accept quests) once my to-do list got too long.

I wonder if some sort of director could use this to make a more enjoyable game experience — perhaps something as simple as, if the player's already got several quests open, don't offer more unless they seem to be really asking for it?

 

Haha... I don't know for sure. I think you have to test it out.

 

That is an interesting topic actually.
Perhaps a better question is to ask why you didn't want more than one quest active at once?
I would assume that it's not just because you are obsessive or controlling, and instead perhaps it could be because having more than one quest is cluttered in terms of UI, or makes it hard to identify some sort of direction (in the objective sense, rather than navigational), perhaps it's down to it turning into a less intuitive experience, or harder to keep tabs on current direct objectives(if there are any, even).

Solving the cause of that anxiety (for want of a better word), could prove for a much more involved experience that then isn't limited by removing the ability to take on more quests, or talk to NPCs!

MMOs do a fairly good job of tracking and indicating multiple quests, but it can sometimes feel overwhelming if there are a lot, a more dynamic system that perhaps only shows data relevant to closer objectives, might help.
Maybe even attempting to track what the player wants to do, based on trends or other data, might be an even more ambitious idea.

I think there's a lot of untapped potential in quest based gameplay still, it's not an easy problem to solve though.

 

I don't think it's a problem with UI. I think it really is the Ziegarnik effect, where unfinished business causes dissonance (i.e. mental stress).

It's also that I was only playing for about an hour a day, and not every day at that, so if I had too many items on my to-do list, then I would lose track of what I was supposed to be doing. Purple flower — am I still collecting those? Lemme open my quest log and see... scroll... scroll... no, I don't see that here, but I'm sure I was collecting those, where is it? Switch tabs (completed quests), scroll scroll scroll... oh there it is, I finished that one last week. Nope, purple flowers no longer needed. Move on.

Basically quests turn a game into a job, which is fine if it's a fun job, but when the NPCs start piling on the errands so fast that you feel you can't keep up with them, or keep track of them without frequent reference to your issue tracker (erm, I mean quest log), then it's no longer fun. Or that's how I feel, at least.

 

Some good points there, I'd love to try and spit-ball some ideas but the fire alarm in our office has been going off intermittently for the past 20 minutes and I now have a splitting headache >.>

 

A better title might be 'Gigi can't draw!'

Zeigarnik insists we remember incomplete tasks more than complete ones. Good and bad and very relevant.

Convexity argues that a series of branches are best when they periodically collapse. This was Noah Falstein's term for what Jesse Schell calls, Rivers and Pearls. It works well with the Interest Curve.



Interest Curve encourages an initial spike, followed by a series of increasing spikes, with a large peak just before a rapid finish.



Choice, simplicity, and a few other staples are introduced here. And a detailed discussion of flow, motivation, and fun can be found here.

Gigi

 

Thank you, kind sir.