No way JR, that's encouraged.

I love the look of it, you pulled it off quite well. But please don't make it Just Another Pretty Indie Platformer™, maybe some deep sword combat and Greek rituals. It's a beautiful mythology with so much to work with beyond jumping on things. Look into the stories of the heroes, Perseus, Heracles, Achilles, Jason, Theseus... they were all clever over strong and swift. Could make for some really cool gameplay and maybe something actually epic.

High hopes! 

Nope, and they don't have a free pass either. Deciding what one's passion is in life is a process that's hard for me to explain, so I'll just say because of our empathy, living so selfishly as to spend all of your time in a room shooting things for points (or anything where the main goal is personal happiness) is often not considered the height of human potential. Though people often disagree with me on that. It's a moral foundation issue, which of course gets complicated quickly.

All I'm saying is many of you were quick to judge, and that distraction can be a serious problem if left unchecked.

There's something to that Christian video. Maybe because I disagree with the "time you enjoyed wasting is not wasted", or because I'm watching all of Breaking Bad, but there are things that you're not proud of that use your time, your energy, and your money. Games that are time killers, mid level competitions, escapist, or made solely for fun easily distract from the things you truly want to do, and can slowly replace your ambition. For Christians, focusing on Christ is the greatest thing humans can do, and games (entertainment of any sort) is a severe distraction and even replacement. I don't like anyone's words being mocked if they have truth in them.

The problem of "addictive" things is not just the physical consequences, but the power to stop you from doing what is most important in life.

Holy 

I hope the sword goes flying!

It's a giant flying whale, but instead of a carpet hat it is more like a remora suction cup:

A remora is to a shark as a whale is to a...?

Very cool, good to see some assets for this.

You can see the time that went into it, so best of luck to twooby as this ambitious thing goes on. Be careful with color though, the greens flatten things out a little.

Yup, skill and knowledge are being shown quite well. This sketch is a great example of how important the next step of drawing is, value being used to describe form and texture and never for outline. It's impossible to tell there's a mask because everything is flat and white and smooth, which are the usually properties of a mask--not a face. If you start to shade, and its fun trust me, the clothing can have cloth texture and depth and skin and ivory mask will appear very, very different.

Looks very ambitious. The rendered scenes look great but be careful with the faces, the uncanny valley runs deep. Hope to see some gameplay soon!

Look at me! I'm Derek Yu!

Probably best to keep them in the Competitions forum, with a [FF] tag. Maybe it could get its own subthing and frontpaged, but its my fault for suggesting it on such absurdly short notice.

I think the folklore part is so unexplored that it needs to happen, not even necessarily combining the intensely cliché Tim Burtony Halloween stuff. I'd say an Autumn Legends compo, and I like the timeframe. I'll talk to mods and hopefully we can try to get it set up.

For references to what I'm talking about, I mean stuff like this: http://americanfolklore.net/folklore/urban-legends/ with elements of the really strange and dark http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_Fairy_Tales, the obscure ones though, the world doesn't need another American McGee.

Triplane Turmoil and Jump N  Bump. Good times.

Satire is taking a serious tone to a questionable topic, taking its key tennants to their despicable ends, see: A Modest Proposal.

Satire, sarcasm, trolling have lost any actual meaning with anyone on the internet, because no one pays attention to context. Nowadays I just look and see if they being constructive or just trying to attract attention to themselves and make people angry? As it stands, there are very few people in the game industry worth listening to, and surprisingly its usually the people people say are "trolls" who are trying to see quality new ideas.

Edit: Some people got really upset that the post is compared to A Modest Proposal. I've read it, multiple times, but I hadn't actually read the post. Satire is what is is, and this post is satire but poorly done, unlike A Modest Proposal which of course is a masterpiece. Because of the lack of tact and intention, it was difficult to separate the author's expected reaction from the audience and his own feelings on the issue. Just trying to defend the lovely art of satire.

I'd love to, but I wouldn't see the point. Designers are so human they can't design around it. Usually what happens is the character model is slightly more green than it should be so some characters don't like me. It's a straight up no if the other races are elf, orc, dwarf, fat guy, skinny guy, dragon head guy.

Somehow they need to wrap me up in the culture so it feels like my character has a bond to my race and a shared heritage. Unique ability that humans, even superhuman don't have, with different strengths and weaknesses to worry about. Also the story changes drastically as not all animals are in the same quest for glory and power as we are, usually its about spawning infinitely.

Wow! A lot of awesome mockups in this thread.

Here's my mockup for a WIP breakout game:

Pixeltao's amazing mockup from page 20 of this thread is now a real game! 
http://pixeltao.ca/2011/09/28/wizorb-available-now/
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=21940.msg621588#msg621588

Well right, emergence just states that complexity it just a simple concept repeated on itself like a the appearance of a snowflake or a coastline. The complexity of say a city is still the interaction of smaller bits following an exact pattern, and it appears very complex but can be repeated through simple rules. I'm a poor teacher, but there's Wikipedia, Radio Lab, or Wolfram himself to explain the marvelous concept.

And yeah it's part being honest with the player what he can or cannot do. If you give someone a gun and say certain things can't be shot, that's awful and yet that happens all the time because the objects in the game are defined as immortal walls rather than the brick they appear to be. If you want them to be barriers make them out of something that can't be blown up, don't lie about it.

Emergent design is making objects with properties rather than using smoke and mirrors and giving the player rubber props.

Luckily I wrote a little bit on what I mean. Emergence as a theory for design rather than a bullet point for an FPS. It's something that should be thought of in the beginning. In sum, if you have a series of objects define them by their simple attributes, a let the simple rule, usually physics, constantly apply to all of them, letting them all interact unexpectedly.

The really dangerous part they just sit there agreeing with each other. Though if someone got angry and went off on them, they'd just ignore it, but that's how people react to anger.

Thank you for the responses guys, this is probably one of the most interesting topics in game design for me, and I really would like to hear more opinions coming from different disciplines. Emergence is indeed a topic that comes up again and again when looking at the world, so it can look very technical. I tried to put it simply so we could discuss it, but I ended getting very philosophical very fast. If there's anything you want clarified let me know because I really want to talk about this. Tell your friends!

What I think is "bad form" is to ignore the really hard problems with current game design of replayability, cost of visual/musical assets, and designer vs. player freedom, which if I may be so bold emergenct game design seems to solve.

I had forgotten to mention Inside a Star Filled Sky and I feel bad about that. He nailed it with that game by using almost entirely emergent procedures to make a shmup way more interesting. The downside with that is that it become entirely abstract, which is where design comes back in as eclectocrat said. Making a new system actually look like something take a lot of direction. Also, I'd much rather time be spent on faster calculations than faster rending if fractal patterns could look as amazing as they do, designed in seconds rather than weeks.

The reason why I really want to talk to all of you about this is the oddity of why emergence is only being noticed recently. Wolfram said (I had watched a few of his talks, but haven't read his books) people didn't think about letting simple systems repeat because they felt they knew what the outcomes would be. This change in attitude is a step in bettering the communication between designer and audience (that all art struggles with) where making information more free to interact, and giving the player more freedom seems to produce better, or at least more complex responses than what designer intended. This change hasn't quite happened in game design to the degree that is should. Platonically defined objects by their intended function is way less interesting that the system of Aristotle where objects are defined by their natures.

Put shortly, I hate it when Macs don't let me change a setting or let me do something I know it can run. The same thing happens in games all the time where the action is already existent in the game (adventure games had plenty of action options defined Falmil) but the option is not there because there is no animation or game state for the result.

Apologies for the wordiness. Please, all thoughts are welcome.

These titles are getting more pretentious as I go on, sorry! This is not a thesis, just a point for discussion with you guys.

My personal definition of emergence is starting a world with a few simple objects repeated infinitly by means of simple rules allowing the objects to continually interact. It seems to be the fundamental principle of, er, the universe. It's a very anti-platonic style of thought. Plato said that everything that exists is defined by it's specific form in intellectual hyperspace. I use the word define very exactly here.

For example, if Socrates would ask "What is a chair?" he would respond that it is a thing that chairs, or exhibits the strengths of immortal chairhood.

When actually a chair is a concept that emerged from a cleverly balanced pile of wood, often used as for sitting on, for a step, or for burning.



So game design to me seems to start with genre, eg. I want to make a puzzle game or I want to make an MMO or platform shooter. What is a platform shooter? What would Socrates say it is? Defining is setting some ideal form and it ends up with a list of required macguffins that have to be expertly taped together, bosses, chests, doubled jump etc. This is more or less how most people design games.

There are quite a few examples of emergent design, such as Grand Theft Auto, Dwarf Fortress, Sleep is Death, Space Chem, Saint's Row and Knytt (sort of) but I can't hide my unabashed joy with the design process of Minecraft. I could honestly write a paper on the things the game does well, I'm going to focus on the crafting mechanic, item use, and world generation.

Being able to craft items means inventing your own tech tree, and is a basic human response that games tend to ignore. Being able to use any item to mine and attack and being able to carry (almost) every item is an example of simple rules applying to everything. Referring to the suicide of the old school adventure game, at a certain point the player's solution is not applicable because the designer's puzzle choice is somehow better. I want to combine the lipstick and the chicken: nope, well why not?



If you allow this creativity, the game begins to design itself and emerge as something truly new. This is actually pretty obvious considering how DnD works. It's a way for the players to take back the narrative, and designer narrative falls into lore and physics.

Thinking about emergence in a world seems to dramatically change the way graphics could be done, music could be done, but especially how writing could be done. Some of the best stories come from characters acting emergently. Authors often speak of the story writing itself by having characters (objects) being well defined (by simple rules) fully able to interact with each other. Because that's exactly what happens, humans are storytelling machines who put the phenomenon of the real or virtual world in a narrative context, even of their “own” actions creating a story of ones self.

So what are the limitations of emergent design? I don't know nearly enough about programming to say except that computer logic and language are key and emergence is philosophically opposed to the strict rigidity of those systems. An iron rod found in a musical instrument would be taken from the class “string” and instead defined by the simple (empirical) rules as “hard, sharp, flexible, etc.” Meaning any object “soft,  smooth, full of blood (blood defined as liquid, red and warm)” is a clever and gruesome way of killing someone with piano wire found in an actual piano, or maybe using it as a key to a locked door. It sounds like an infinite amount of objects need to be made, but the solution could be a procedural combination of traits that defines the appearance and use of objects. Don't limit the story by telling they player they can't do something, allow them to do it and show how negative or worthless it is. Failure is important because failure is how people learn.



Should the systems be as complex as Dwarf Fortress? Theoretically we all understand how awesome that would be, and the absurd amount of content in Minecraft modding suggests it, but no. Keeping situations closed with a fairly limited number of objects could still improve how games are played. In fact, the less realistic rules and objects the more interesting games could be as far as new worlds go. Think about it for a second, small changes in physics have very large scale effects. Or biology, consider trilateral symmetry rather than bilateral, different gravitational effects, different light patterns, etc. Allowing for new organism evolution from incredibly simple systems (shades of Incredipede) allows you to think about how life works, but also would mean aliens would finally be alien (adapted to their specific environment) instead of goshdarn blue people.

So what do you think? What happens when you let the world create itself and emergent from simple rules, and what happens when you allow the player to act within the rules? Being god, or a game designer is not about forcing your will on the people, but creating a system where their narrative affects them in the way you want it to. This can be done by changing how characters act with them, or how time and space work. Remember though, you can chop down a tree with a herring, and it might not be a good idea and have serious consequences, but allowing those objects to interact and the player to make that choice makes a totally unique, personal and memorable experience.