What do you think about the last Jim Sterling video?

Thats a implementation detail. I'm talking about the broader picture. Like how did you abstract that pathfinder so that you can replace it with any other path finder without changing any core domain logic. Real world example. We released to Early access with a borked network SDK. It took us roughly one man month to completly rewrite that SDK with our own. Only changed very little of the core logic because we had abstracted the network SDK. (And the changes was maintly improvements because of the now better network SDK)

 

Nice game bud!
Your missing my point entirely, abstraction and maintainability when it comes to SDKs, I had other points earlier but I have forgotten them, something about developers and game design

 

I guess my point is simple: there are many different kinds of games, and many different kinds of programmers. It is unfair to many to lump things together too much.

Wasn't this about asset flips or logos or something?

 

Yes 100% correct if you want to make soulless titles that will be hopefully, quickly forgotten that will get the largest amount of refunds.

Building systems that users "want" to interact with is something you can do on paper. Knowing how to craft behaviour that feels fantastic goes far beyond that. You need a really talented, creative programmer who knows the secrets to playability, and trust me - these are secrets, and nobody shares them on GDC.

It's the difference between an indie title that looks great but plays like a potato compared with an average looking 10 year old AAA title that still plays way, way better.

 

I agree that video game design skills are what really makes games enjoyable for the players. But programming skills are critical for implementing those video game designs. Without solid programming skills on the team, even the best video game designs will not get implemented. All of the games you listed had skill programmers implementing the games.

 

If I was a guru level programmer instead of a clueless noob I could get what I want done alot ALOT faster. It seems at least mild programming skills are needed and an advanced level would allow for faster cleaner development and more feature creep/better thought out features in a timeframe that still works. Again comblete noob perspective here.

 

Nah, you just procrastinate about bigger projects instead..

 

Do you know me? It's almost like youve been watching my habits. I may be a unity noob but i am definitely a PROcrastinator.

 

Nope, it just seems to be a trend / safe bet ..

 

Once you gain the experience & skill you then realize the full scope of work so find yourself breaking it all down and thinking man I could do this... oh yeah and I could make a little system to do that.... oh and build another piece to handle this... wow it is all coming together technically. Then you take a drink of your beer and think or I could just relax and play some games or maybe get outside for a walk.

 

Beer is not my preferred relaxant however that does hit home pretty squarely. After 10 hours on the farm at my actual job I am lucky to get anything accomplished when I make it home.

 

How in the world does "designing systems users want to interact with" mean soulless titles? I have no idea what you're even saying, it's not related in any way at all. Please define the logic behind "designing a compelling system = soulless."

And "looks great," no one said anything about a game looking nice. This isn't about art, though art is nice. It's about design. This is about a game that plays "great" because the design is compelling, though the backend, aka the programming no one playing the game cares about, is not top-tier stuff.

You're proving my point: this has nothing to do with knowing how to program, and everything to do with design.

It's possible that when you and others say "programmer," you're not talking about someone writing code. Because you're not describing someone who writes code (with statements like playability and "plays great."). You're describing...a designer.

 

With great designs comes great responsibility, to implement said design...

 

You need to make a quote of the day desk calendar with that phrase on a monday.

 

I'm sorry, but it is you that fails to understand that you just can't translate some things from design. I already told you that you can design all you like. You can do it on paper, you can design every single aspect, but not many programmers can deliver. This isn't an area of "it works or it doesn't", it's an area where you need to do a ton of research that isn't on google, and isn't about design at all but implementing that design.

Seriously, a vast of bulk of programmers settle for the best they can get away with. You can actually fail to reach behaviours you design for, while other programmers can reach that.

Do you understand?

In easier terms: can you program a path tracer on GPU? no? Thought not. It's the same for gameplay. Most people can't do things at a sufficiently high quality in code.

The reason that bad game you're playing, plays like S***, is because the developer is bad. He or she doesn't have the ability or the decades of experience to pull it off. Even if it's just inertia on a car. OK you'll tear apart marco monster. You'll look at various assets. You'll scour google from top to bottom.

And fail to replicate the exact feel of mariokart 8.

I find utterly astonishing I have to explain it.

 

In VR the design on paper is easy "Laser sight should work like real life laser sight", next couple of weeks spent at fiddling with colliders, Z index, plane angels etc, etc to get a perfect laser dot, that actually works and not halting the render thread to a complete halt with more than one laser sight in the scene

 

First off, all programmers settle for the best they can get away with. There have been bugs in massively used API that have gone unnoticed for decades.

Almost every aspect of game programming is some degree of hack. Starting with the fact that you're trying to fake 3d representation on a 2d plane (screen) using 2d geometry (geometry with no actual volume) mapped to 3 dimensions. Every aspect of game programming is settling for what you can get away with.

If you're talking about stuff like "the character feels unresponsive after I attack" then often yes, that's programming. When the game plays like S*** because the difficulty curve has too many spikes that is not a programming problem.

When the game's UI is too confusing and has too many buttons, labels, and knobs and numbers... is that a programming problem?

Maybe you are hyper focused on the problem set where design and code have the most overlap, but that does not mean that all good coders must also be good designers or vice versa. It also doesn't mean that all design problems are code problems.

This discussion has gone to some weird ass places.

 

Sounds more like an idea. Design would imply you mapped out how things work in your environment and put thought toward the process involved. Like a real life one is descriptive but you dont start designing it untill you start talking about how it actually works. Example, "I will have to cast a ray from here to there and draw a sprite if........." Then you get to implementation or using a programming environment to write the code that does what you just designed. Thats my take on it anyway but whats in a name the act is the same.

 

Just curious - how would you do this properly? The solution can't be simple because a collider you'd use on animated character can't have enough detail - you need to do this by using camera depth buffer, by analyzing the mesh itself or through use of a specialized shader that interpolates the contact point to add a decal.

How'd you end up doing it?

 

Laser sight should work like real life laser sight is a gameplay oriented design goal.

That's technical design. The design done before (and quite often during) implementation.

There used to be many discussions here regarding how ideas were worthless on their own. People were so wrapped up in the implementation aspect they saw it very simply as ideas are worthless. Of course, they meant without implementation but that doesn't make the ideas worthless.

The ideas are the design. Implementation cannot happen without it. And implementing a bad design (bad ideas) flawlessly is no better and sometimes not even as good as implementing a great design (great ideas) poorly.

But overall I definitely agree with @hippocoder. When you play a game you can feel the programming in it or at least the programming skill that was brought to the project. You feel it in the responsiveness of the controls, the general feeling of fun from simply moving around and so forth. And you can also feel very poor programming.

 

Fair point about "implementing design." That definitely requires "translational" skill. But I would still argue that what makes a game unique and actually worth playing is the design which the programmer then has to implement, not the fact that a programmer is good at implementing design.

You can deliberately design things that are straightforward to program, and yet are very compelling experiences. But even if you're great at implementing complex design in code, that doesn't mean you actually have good design to implement. It all is predicated upon the design - programming comes after. That was my main point.

 

I w

Than you just go copy it! we first tried with query the actual mesh to be rendered, it worked on our target platform which is PC but with a way to high impact to use practical. So we instead use standard raycasts then, check the camera plane to get an optimal plane angel for the dot. Lastly a shader with some Z buffer hacks to ensure it renders the dot even when the skinned mesh is inside the crude primitive collider setup (basicly a bunch of capsule colliders on the bones).

 

You have a screenshot of the effect? Can you see the beam as well or only the dot?

 

To see the beam that would require smoke, but we will add that later so that when you throw a smoke grenade or even environmental smoke will make the beam visible. I dont have a recent clip of the dot effect on skinned mesh, I know my brother did some changes after this clip was made (he is the shader guru of us two) but its just a little better on skinned meshes since that vid was taken

You can watch from this timecode, pretty cool when my brother adds the attachments and its netwrorked to my machine, watch my laser sight on him later in the clip

sorry for the OT
The laser is offcourse not that advanced, it was just a pretty lame example on a few lines of design requirement taking days or weeks to implement.

 

Maybe I don't play enough action games.

Most recent programming problems I've noticed were in XCOM 2's MVC implementation mostly when firing off special effects and animations. The fact is that the game as a whole is so slick in terms of design, that the straight up bugs, glitches and other problems are fairly minor annoyances that you roll through as you play.

I can't imagine anyone calling XCOM 2 a triumph of good code (it's still immensely buggy) but god damn is it a good game, and it feels amazing to play.

This may simply be a difference in genre, since TB games don't have the same feedback response levels as action games.

This is how to know when someone is really doing work. These kinds of little details that turn into major pain in the butt are totally real.

As a side note - to use hippo's example - perhaps other developers could find a solution faster or know of solutions that would work immediately. That does not make them a better developer - it makes them more of an expert on domain.

I think many programmers underestimate how much domain expertise matters, and instead roll it into a "good programmer" umbrella.

We all get better at what we do with practice, study and experience. We all have strengths and weaknesses, and those strengths and weaknesses can change over time. This is just life and reality.

 

Well ok, I like the name but the act was the same. We seem to completely agree although I think we have different perspectives. I am not a game designer, dev, implementor, or anything more than learning as I go yet. I dont have the experience and perspective of someone who has actually worked doing this. I made a few lame games in the early 90s using first basic then turbo pascal but it was all school projects. I never went anywhere with it. At 16 my life was not at a point I could. I had quit school and was working full time to buy groceries, living on my own. Long story. Even with just that most basic level of programming knowledge I can tell when a game was programmed well. When I first started at this venture a few months ago I told myself that the controls physics motion and feel of moving the player was first and foremost. I am not great with blender so I know I will be using dreaded art assets from the asset store and thats ok. I think I can make a game with minimal art thats still alot of fun to play. Currently I have a flat plane with a few basic models of ramps and cube walls to stack around and I've been at it for several months. I have been studying c# nonstop and focusing on the parts that get my game moving like I want. I have been working with the baked lighting, mixed lighting, global illumination getting things running smooth with a great deal more geometry on screen than I will end up with but I am only doing that so I can keep framerate up not because I'm looking for stellar graphics. I have abandoned the standard assets scripting in favor of my own brand of player movement. I have always felt that physics and controls were on top of the list for good game. Not necessarily realistic physics but responsive not glitchy and fun. From a players perspective sloppy programming means laggy controls or twitchy inconsistent behaviors. As far as I'm concerned any of that is unacceptable.

 

I don't know that things would be any different elsewhere. I'm a complete novice at coding, so maybe that's why I haven't noticed anything, but I've played things DMC4 and Metal Gear Rising, action games heralded as the pinnacle (inb4 DMC3 & Bayonetta fans) of their genre, and there's nothing about their gameplay that strikes me as a result of "good" or "bad" coding. Animation cancelling and stringing together combos aren't the product of a mean for loop, they're the product of a guy who said, "what this gameplay needs is enemy attacks with tells and a parry system."

 

It's not a genre thing I don't think. I think this is just you gave an example of the other side of the coin. A game where the ideas (design) were so good that it turned out great even with poor programming.

You know what I mean I am sure. There are many different aspects to a game. Any of them can be a strength or a weakness. A lot of focus on these forums has typically been on the visuals for example. Because they are the first thing seen and because some people would play horribly designed & horribly programmed games if they had awesome graphics.

For others it is a game's music. They will return to certain games just for the music and find themselves humming it when they aren't playing. It is this kind of thing. I believe you don't need to excel on every aspect but if you excel on one of them you have a much better chance of making a game that stands out (in a good way). Excel on 2 and you're doing really good... possibly as good as the top Indies. Excel on 3 or more and you are narrowing the gap toward AAA.

From what you describe your XCOM 2 has a great design and probably has solid audio and visuals and that overcomes the poor programming.

 

I have seen games that understood responsive controls though. Maybe I will show my age here but:

Street Fighter vs Mortal Combat

No contest: the controls in SF were Nintendo quality, Mortal Combat felt cludgy and unresponsive.

When I play Gears of War, sliding into cover felt amazing. No other cover based shooter felt anywhere near as good for years and years.

Was that programming or design? I honestly donno how those responsibilities break down in AAA studios, but I remember hearing that Gears had like 14 layers of particle effects that went into the cover slide.

 

tell me about it, and we are way too much focused on the details. Like we have a complete IK setup for the trigger finger coming in the next update The other VR games dont even animate trigger most often..

 

Writing those particle effects was no doubt solid work...but that wouldn't have mattered if a guy hadn't looked at it and said "you know, this cover slide doesn't feel visceral [sorry] enough...it needs some effects to really hammer home the impact." In other words, design.

 

I think this is what makes your game cool though. It's important for your design to get those details 100% right.

Kind of like the xcom example, if you get those details solid enough - then many players will overlook other things that aren't perfect.

I think this is also an important part. Most especially for small project teams.

You cannot do everything 100%. You must make sacrifices to some things, and knowing where to focus your time and add more polish is probably the single most important thing to being successful.

Or at least this is my excuse for not successfully releasing yet - because I suck at this

 

... and then implementation apparently in an equally thorough way.

Design is super important. No doubt about that. But the programming is too. See the thing is any programmer (at least that I know) when translating design into technical design and ultimately code put their spin on it. They will tweak and adjust as well. An iterative process until it feels good. Or at least that is what a great programmer does. So yes we could say well this is also just design. Because it is the programmer implementing tweaks based on their ideas.

But I think to keep things sane it is best to divide it up by the disciplines... designer comes up with something and passes it over to programmer. Programmer implements it. Hmm... this is pretty good but it doesn't quite feel right yet. A few iterations later... it feels different (hopefully better).

Again I am not saying programmers are the most important or anything like that. I am saying that they can make something better or worse just like the designers can.

 

@frosted So very true. You just have to divide and conquer and start with the things that you think will bring most value to the players. We have 3 maps for now, that will probably not change for a while for example. Better to focus on existing features and polish those. Add some new weapon types, perfect the net code, etc

 

@GarBenjamin Good points, a dev that blindly implements a requirement without coming with own ideas are not a good dev in my opinion.

I actually have noticed this is also a problem with freelancing artists (or artists in general offcourse, not just freelancing ones), I had a really great guy that really understood requirements and he came with his own input on my requirements. Which is great, I'm a developer/gamedesigner not 3d artist why would I know everything th. Sadly he got a full time job (Most great artists do eventually). So I got a new guy, still very talented, but he does not come with his own input and ideas. I'm sure his technical skills are the same, but to me he is on a complete different scale from the first guy..

With those wise words I will call it the day, its soon half past 2 in the morning here in Sweden

 

I don't know if I'm good enough to pull off a lot of games. I do know that I'm not good enough by my standards, if that's any consolation

 

The irony there being some of the most famous / successful games have some of the clunkyest controls / systems out of both Indie and AAA.. Like I love W3 and Skryim, but let's face it I spent half my time blowing out candles and facing the wrong direction.. Skyrim was press back and spam until you won with it's rather clunky third person animations / controls and everyone levels with you system..

Again amazing games for sure but they must of missed that unshared secrect not revealed in GDC.. I'm not saying this to be a bitter old cod, one of the issues with Indie's is we tend to look too deep because we're obsessive / cyclic perfectionists and even when you look at the best of the best they are flawed gems..

One of the reasons AAA is successful is they can holistically put a game together well and choose their battles, or at the very least they spend millions in prototypes to sort it out.. The most memorable games show they are masters of crafting an experience and from what you hear about "waste" are not worried to cut the fat to make the experience the best it can be as a whole.

Sure they are also known for pushing hardware boundaries but as you said 10 years on and some of these games still play better than most of the games in the market.. I had a chat with an experienced sound engineer who said something that always stuck with me, if you solo a track like a guitar you can mix it to roar like thunder; stick it back in the mix and the rest will meow like a kitten.. Just like most things in life, it's about balance..

TLDR;

We need to cut ourselves some slack sometimes...

 

Please do name the indie games that somehow beat them for gameplay though? Thing is maybe these games do practise content over playability, they're hardly driving/action after all. Shame, because they could be.

 

Skyrim definitely carried the day despite some flaws. Skyrim included a horrible opening sequence with nearly no player agency for a very long time, before finally giving the player some control. Even then the controls were somewhat clunky. But Skyrim absolutely shined with vast content and polish. In terms of strictly gameplay, a lot of indie games beat Skyrim. In terms of the entire gaming experience, Skyrim beats all indie games.

 

You also need coders who can design and write flexible, maintainable software. (That doesn't mean that it's pretty code or that it's textbook code, though I will say that good textbooks suggest the things they suggest for good reasons, so they're often solid ideals to aim for!)

Shortcuts might help you meet a milestone and they're great in game jams, but cutting a corner could cost you much more time in the future than it saves now, and often it'll do it by stealth. If you're making a product for commercial release then chances are that you're pouring money into your dev team to get it done. Poor code means reduced productivity, and that costs you money and makes "finished" harder to reach. Your source is an asset that should be cared for and maintained as if your business depends on it. Because it does.

 

The Forest, Ziggurat to name a few (there were a bunch of them posted on that AAA thread and some were indies).. Don't get me wrong, when we start comparing to Batman / Shadow of Mordor, Nier Automata then AAA straight up wins.. Some of the best combat systems out there..

They probably could but it just proves said game doesn't have to be the best of the absolute best in every area to compete.. Some of the systems in Skyrim were mediocre and it didn't stop anyone (including myself) thoroughly enjoying the game.

Actually my favourite game of all time is Dragon Age Origins and that certainly does not have a fluent / uber responsive / impressive combat system.. Ironic, DA2 had a very fluent control / combat / arcade style system and not many seemed to care for it..

 

I agree with @EternalAmbiguity and @frosted about UI being primarily a design problem. Code-wise, I've never encountered anything terribly sophisticated in and of itself, it all comes down to clear organisation and management of hierarchies of states, and managing dependent variables as a single entity as much as possible. So it can become quite tedious but mainly because of the interdependency of many relatively simple states, so,like with any state machine, organisation is absolutely the most important thing.

But design wise, it's not so clear. For example, I'm working on a radar targeting system where you can lock multiple missiles onto the same target, as well as showing 'lead target' pips for multiple weapons with different projectile velocities. Sure, all I have to do is pass multiple instances of the targeting data to the HUD, so the code is somewhat straightforward ... but how do I display it in the HUD in a way that doesn't get too busy or confuse the player?

• Should I allow multiple locking animations on the target box widget?

• How does the player know how many weapons are locked?

• How does the player know which weapon locked onto the target? It's not an option to load tons of text information on a widget flying around the screen. Is it even necessary for them to know?

• What about the 'lead target' pips? Does the player need to know which pip corresponds to which weapon? Can/should I fade out the pips furthest from the players current aiming point, to make the whole thing a bit cleaner?

• Can I display part or all of this information in a static sidebar UI? What difficulties are there spreading out the information between the target box widget and a sidebar? Does it destroy the fluidity and coherence of the information?

• What about sounds? Can I add sounds to amplify information that I cannot display in an ideal way?

That's not to mention other UI design issues such as power management, weapon groups management, and a host of other things that have to occur in a limited screen space, possibly interacted with only with joystick controls, and still somehow be quite easy for a player to intuitively pick up.

Some games (I would argue especially space combat games) are essentially UI-based games. These games live and die on how well the UI is constructed. I think it's quite easy to underestimate the difficulty of making something that just feels like an extension of your senses, and not like some kind of whiteboard that nobody has bothered to clean off.

 

No, you don't need to go viral/fluke/full add campign to make reasonable income from your game. You can build expectation, potential customers and community around your game simply by regualrly interacting with people, showing them works in progress, keeping them posted on release dates, having a piece dedicated forum/blog, giving out preview keys, getting in contact with youtubers that might like your game, gaming press etc.
There are tons of guides on marketing with no budget/very limited budget. Rules don't change; if you don't have the money, put in the time.


If after all that you still can't sell your game, well, make something that someone other than you would like to play. The opposite (making a game that nobody, other than you, would play), I would argue, is harder.
I haven't seen a game that nobody would play. Jim's "problem" with unity image really hammers this point. Those games got on steam becasue they had an audience.

You know you can preview most books these days, right?
There are library sites made for just that purpose. Even amazon lets you do that. Same with games. You can look at reviews and gamplay videos and make an informed decision on whether to buy it.

 

Programmer tend to inflate their influence, but a lot of very advance stuff only happen because artist faked the impossible and producer keep everyone on tracks. I mean who have seen unchartred 4? The game have advanced hair physics that react to water and even chest hair in animated, the grass sway realistically and bend when the player is close, the game features massive soft physics deformation on car ... all driven by the exact same system the artist pulled off after programmer told them that wasn't possible. By the way they also have skin that bend on contact realitically ... using a curve that deform stuff.

 

I'd definitely say that DA: O had a fantastic combat system. One of the best I've played in a game period. Probably helped by my use of a mod that allowed me to automate the player character and watch combat play out, based on my tactics set up beforehand. Incredibly enjoyable.

DA ][ had essentially the same system as DA: O. You had some minor differences like things like spell combinations or weapon switching and the admittedly large difference of allowing a character to use whatever weapons they wished (though, I strongly doubt any significant portion of the playerbase used these). But in both you pointed and clicked to auto-attack, and had a list of skills you could use.

I'll point out that I played DA ][ a year or so after release, so I wasn't around for its first few months. But when I played it was all but identical to DA:O.

The main difference between the two was the feel and pace of the combat - the design, you might say The (dual-wield) Warden took 1 or 1.5 seconds between attacks, while with DA ][ it was like 0.5 seconds (and the animations were far more exaggerated).

 

Hyper Light Drifter and Furi both come to mind as indie games that dramatically outclass at least Skyrim in the gameplay department, though I can't speak for the Witcher games as they're still in my backlog, mostly because of the huge swaths of indie games I have to play still.

Edit: I wrote those two entries, but here's a few more games I think have a better core combat loop than skyrim in the combat department. I'll leave out games with better dialogue options as we'd be here all month if I did, since Skyrim was a huge step back compared to even Oblivion, a game I despise.

• Hyper Light Drifter
• Furi
• Volgarr the Viking
• Bleed 2
• The Joylancer: Legendary Motor Knight
• Noitu Love 2: Devolution
• Risk of Rain
• Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight

And probably countless others I'm missing, since I mostly just went down my Steam games list and slid my mental filter to primarily focus on indie games. Really, Skyrim (again, haven't played more than five minutes of the Witcher 2 and 3) leans super heavily on the scope of its world rather than how you really interact with it. It gives you a breadth of choices to be sure, but each choice you make quickly devolves into a very same-y encounter strategy, which I feel goes against the few attempts at emergent gameplay that Bethesda was going for.

I firmly disagree with this, as some of the best combat I've encountered outside of games made my Platinum Games has been coming from indie games, even extending past the ones I listed up there. The best indie games can have core gameplay loops that dramatically exceed most AAA games because indies actually have less time to dedicate than the massive manhours a AAA studio can put forth.

When you're an indie, it's best not to try and make an entire game that's super polished if you want to stand out. Instead, it's best to find what the most important thing to your game and really polish it to a shine. Take Flinthook, a game which I forgot to mention earlier. Movement is a big deal in Flinthook and the movement in that game is absolutely miles ahead of the movement in most AAA games I've played outside of... maybe Titanfall 2? I'll come back to Titanfall 2 later, along with Platinum games. Back on topic though, Flinthook is absolutely polished to a mirror shine in its movement system, which plays into its combat, but the rest of the game is kinda lacking. The thing is though? It dramatically outclasses a lot of AAA games just because of how well the movement and combat end up working.

So now we come back to Platinum Games and also Titanfall 2. I'm not saying Titanfall 1 was somehow bad or anything, mind, just that I never played it because I'm first and foremost a single-player gamer. Now, Platinum Games, I feel, really embodies the spirit of polishing your best feature until it's at a mirror shine, like I recommend indies should. In METAL GEAR RISING: REVENGEANCE, this manifests in the combat loop. Everything outside of the combat? Completely forgettable, honestly. But the combat itself, especially the boss fights? That's where the game goes from being a rather generic character action game to one that absolutely blows me away. This applies when you're playing on hard or higher mind, as the lower settings are kinda ehn. It's this level of polish in just the right places that make that game one of my favourite games of all time.

Titanfall 2 is another example, but in this case, it's because of the movement and how you interact with the environment. COD tried to do similar, but never really polished the movement systems to a shine quite like Titanfall did. Titanfall's exceptionally polish when it comes to features like wall-running and sliding made the game feel like an absolute joy to play, far more than many other AAA games, as movement is one of the things you kinda exclusively do in shooters other than shooting. Now, while Titanfall 2's shooting is okay I consider it kinda serviceable rather than excellent. However, that never really gets in the way, since the action of sliding under a wall, jumping off a wall behind it, on to the roof of a building and then shooting somebody in the back 100 times more than makes up for some honestly kinda weedly feeling guns.

This all is why whenever I talk to indie devs working on something asking how to balance the design of their game I recommend they put their best foot forward and polish the hell out of the big feature of their game and putting a focus on that, rather than trying to polish everything equally. I think Platinum Games and Respawn entertainment both get this.

Wow, these edits turned into a massive wall of text.

 

Sorry if I misunderstood but none of these games have the same gameplay as Skyrim or Witcher. That is, 3rd person, open world, exploring, trading, aiming with bows, weapons, 3D 3rd person jumping, movement, arrow to the knee and so on. I don't even like Skyrim or Witcher. They don't particularly play well. But we can't compare those except against each other, probably throwing in another RPG for good measure that's also 3D.

Hyper Light Drifter plays way better than Skyrim or Witcher does, but it plays top down and the gameplay in it won't function in those games so we would need to take HLD and a very similar game to HLD and compare those to see. The best way I guess would be to examine clones of games and why they fall short.

The argument I'm making isn't that "wow this totally different game is more fun to play" just that "wow this game doesn't measure up in playability, feel, etc to similar games."

For example, does it feel fun racing on a horse? if so why? Does it feel fun running along in 3D? how about dodging and melee? why is it fun in game A but not in super similar game B.

I'm sure some do. An example would have been Dark Souls vs Necropolis. Necropolis gives it a good shot but falls short. But it doesn't fall short much at all. Whoever made it knew what made DS tick went another direction.

My arguments were more about how nintendo can make something feel brilliant and even if it looked simple, it wasn't simple to get right (Mariokart). If you look at other kart racers, well let's just say they're basically not that good, and I'm not talking about the graphics, audio or anything other than how good it feels to play.

Another would be overwatch vs just about everything ever. Why can't an indie make overwatch with cubes, and make the gameplay just as good? What is missing? Evidently, a lot. A lot of AAA titles do not measure up to it.

You can design something on paper but 2 different developers will give you 2 different results even with the same project manager standing behind them.

Also it somehow got dragged into Indie vs AAA. That's not my intent. My intent was that bad devs make bad games. By that I only meant the playability, it's an old term we used from 8 bit until today, but I don't see people saying it much any more. AAA obviously is a little better at doing this because there's some Darwinism going on: bad devs tend to be out of business, so they can make a good (but not exclusive) testbed.

Welcome to my world

 

Nah, it was not good.

DA:Origins had that problem where an outcome of an attack was determined at a beginning of an animation.
I remember fighting the first revenant, and trying to run away from its melee attacks. It didn't work. Basically, the dude starts a melee swing, you start running away, you're 20 meters away from him, and you will be STILL hit by the attack, even though you're outside of his reach.

Older "Golden AGE Rpgs" and Infinity engine games often had better combat system. DA:O was modeled after those, it was a solid effort, but it didn't quite get to the same level.

DA:2 had the system dumbed down and moved towards flashy combat animations. In DA:O there were more tactics involved, for example, cone spells were narrow and could be targeted between party members. In Drago nAge 2, cone spells suddenly had 130 degree arcs, and by default friendly fire was off. Lack of friendly fire simplified combat animation, and wide spell arcs made your life much more difficult if you'd try to enable friendly fire back. DA:2 also had poor battle design - where in dragon age origins enemies were present on the maps, in DA:2 we had waves of them spawn and jump down from the roofs for no reason whatsoever. Meaning tactic component got thrown away and focus moved towards arcade-like nonsense.

 

Yeah, but I find that when we start comparing games of that scope to indie games, it's best to compare the quality of the execution of the core gameplay loop rather than the games themselves, as the scope factor ends up casting a LOT of indies to the side since it's just plain near impossible to compete. Even open world indie games fail to come close because a lot of them are relying really heavily on procgen which is super difficult to get the same quality out of as a handcrafted world, or even a world made in World Machine. Heck, even 3D is a pretty big barrier to entry, though not one near as difficult to surmount as open-world.

I'm afraid you've lost me on this one.

I'll also defer to your knowledge on this one as I've only logged a whopping 51 minutes in the first Dark Souls and haven't played any of the games that share its design inspiration. I'm still waiting on a new Armored Core from FromSoftware instead.

I feel this is kiiiinda covered by the part of my reply addressed to ShadowK, where I mention how it's generally a good idea to put the bulk of the polish up front for indies. I know I have a semi-functional prototype for a game that I think I could polish up and have a contender for a really good multiplayer shooter, but I know it's only really working because I spent so much time polishing the movement and the core concept. Sadly, I'm ass-terrible at netcode, so it'll probably never see the light of day.

And... there's a thing about the cube argument that always gets me. Cubes still need to look readable and nice. It's absolutely possible to make primitives look decent (Thomas Was Alone springs to mind) but to do so still requires a bit of an artist's touch. In 3D, at least, you need to be able to determine depth at a glance, and walls of untextured cubes can very quickly become difficult to read. There are ways around this, of course. I tend to use a shader that slightly darkens things the more the normal becomes parallel to the view angle for this very purpose.

Absolutely, which is what makes things interesting :v

 

I edited my post so that you would have to roll your eyes and edit yours. Walls aren't built overnight you know!