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[Graham.]

Yes. . Achieving flow is easier said than done.


The point of a slug isn't to classify a game, or a movie. It is there as a handle, like a title. You could title a work something with 34 words, and it would be much more accurate, but less wieldy. The point of a title is to act as a reference point. A slug has a similar function.

Agents and producers and artists use slugs to catch the listener in a conversation. A slug is the ice-breaker into a discussion about a project. If you have only a single sentence to hook your listener, you better perfect it. You can hit them with something more substantial after you've got them.

If the slug describes your entire game, yes that is bad. However, if you can't slug a game it means you can't identify its most important trait, and that means you'll likely mismanage the design by occassionaly not focusing where you should. "Poor focus" plagues every sub-par game there ever was. A "slug" is an exercise to see if you know your own priorities. It is not a design bible. That would be insane.

(slugs always over-simplify)

[Udderdude]

Yes, I can summarize my games in one sentence, but that sentence does not involve "It's like this meets that".

People who are so easily convinced by slugs are probably not the kind I'm interested in dealing with anyway.

[Graham.]

I didn't mean you couldn't do it. I believed you could. I meant "other people"... whoever they are.

Slugs don't have to follow a structure, I don't believe. They are just 1 sentence descriptors. I suppose in the movies they do a this-and-this-meet-that sort of thing. That slug is one type. It's useful in production, I imagine. Only shallow producers are 'convinced' by slugs. I don't know if anyone like that actually exists.

Indies are rarely interested in dealing with money-men, but they do it anyway. 'Generalizations' are just a by-product of focusing a project towards a market. They aren't inherent to the process.

My slugs are rarely of that form either.

[1982]

It is about you. You could say that the defining feature of a game is "you" (and other other players) and your input. This game is just about your input. There is a state of Zen that occurs when you express yourself, say in a conversation with a good friend or family member, playing an instrument, or camping. Each activity finds you in a place of total self-awareness and control, where you get to be yourself without having to consciously manage it. The feeling is magical. In eastern spiritualism this state of mind is called "absorption." In western psychology, sports, and video games it is called "flow." Finding one's "flow" in an arbitrary task is no easy thing. So the game will do everything it can to teach you how. It will wrap you in whatever insight I've gleamed from the world, then slowly release you into the wild where you can produce on your own. You will be the writer without writer's block... or the video game player without the mental blocks that normally prevent you from becoming absorbed in an experience. Maybe the game is about teaching you how to meditate. That wouldn't be an awful description.

Well heh, you basically described any really good game. But what is the game really about? I don't care about hearing slug, you can give as long explanation as you wish. But hopefully something more concrete as basically just saying "it is inside genre of good games".

I am truly interested, and I hope we don't end with 10 miles long and over the top design documents while the end result is tic tac toe.

[Graham.]

for your tea break...

Hahahah.

Well, the pattern emerges. I pontificate and people bring me back down
to earth.

There are three truths to me:
  1. I theorize.
  2. It matters.
  3. Sometimes it creates problems.

That's what I was afraid of, that I would describe any good
game. In some ways my game is a lesson on what every other game does
wrong, in the general case. At least that might shed some light on
why I am always so abstract, or vice-versa.

Most games aren't really about the player. "Games" are about the
player, but a particular game is not. Take some arbitrary example,
like Arkham City. In that one you can make choices (as the
player). You can fly around the city, fight goons, progress the plot,
do side-quests, solve "riddles" and so on. But the game is also about
being Batman. You can't fight any way you want. You have to follow the
structure of the game. There's kind of this slo-mo kind of thing when
you fight, and there's chaining. A lot of the combat is about
crowd-control, positioning, and predicting where the next attack will
come from. That design is pretty specific. You get control within that
realm, but you are still forced to live within it.

My game is about you getting actual control. There are limitations
certainly. I have my pages of characters and combat system aesthetics
and what-have-you, all the "gamey" stuff that's personal to me. I like
Final Fantasy, and Star Trek, and anime, and shooters, and Prince of
Persia. So there will be influences from those things in the game. I
think of the first third of the game - abstractly - as being the "play
within my perfect game game." In it the player plays what is
effectively what I consider to be the perfect game for me. It is my
dream game, the perfect mashup of my life experiences, favourite
movies, books, and tv (and games). But those are just the training
wheels for the real experience, which is self-defined.

All the while, from the first button press, the system learns. It
learns about you, the person at the controls, and immediately starts
tailoring the experience to drive you to a point where the game
becomes a meditative center: you enter it and hit the zone as fast as
possible. There is a place where we are at our most creative, most
capable. The game will take you there. It will work constantly to find
that place, and reconstruct itself so that you can find it too, so
that you can get there, and stay there, and do whatever it takes to
never leave. The game exists as a toolbox for you to re-arrange it as
you see fit to create the experience that you want, that you don't
know that you want, because you haven't figured it out yet. That's why
you need the game.

Ok. So here is a simple example. Shooters are complicated. They are
very, very complicated. Let's say I took Modern Warfare and rebuilt it
to make it more accessible, without losing depth, so that any player,
just by putting time into the experience, could progress steadily
towards being an expert, engaging at a level comparable to a pro. You
could do this just by re-arranging levels and enemies dynamically to
slowly build the player's skills.

Skip the bits where I actually do this. You have to do some serious
level slicing... the whole game needs to be reconstructable in a
procedural way... and that's actually super complicated. Assume I
don't change the story, or "feeling". All I want to do is ensure that
a player is given challenges in such a way so that he can get a
balanced experience and always, in an obvious way, improve. The game
identifies skills that the player is lacking, then re-enforces them,
without ruining the experience.

"Flow" in a game is largely about balancing difficulty. To produce it
you have to deconstruct all the things a player "has to think about"
to be successful, then arrange challenges in such a way so that each
skill is honed, but the experience of play isn't disturbed.

Let's assume we did the same thing for turn-based combat, fighting,
exploration, platforming, environmental puzzle solving, whatever. Then
we mixed it all together. Then we explained to the system, "please
teach the player how to be good in all of these things, but in such a
way so that he is always steadily growing to understand the game more
deeply, so that his engagement is growing in the long-term." Then we
throw in dynamic story lines, and the ability for the player to affect
the world, and you would have my game.

The game in a way is literally about, "getting good at games," without
ever saying so. Realizing such is true is something that might happen
eventually to the player, but probably not for a while. Savvy players
might get it earlier. It will not be obvious, at all.

Maybe a good analogy is this. Minecraft is about building stuff, and
mining stuff. Focus on the building. In the game you explore what is
reasonably possible using gravity, a single laborer, twisted rules of
construction, an array of blocks, a couple of tools and other objects,
and lava/water. There are monsters too.

Minecraft is like this exploration of what can built using
blocks. That's what it is. The mining and stuff just helps drive that
experience: it is the "seeing construction from a new angle, the
'world's angle.'" My game is like the Minecraft for interaction
primitives. I want the player to be able to explore as much as he can
in a world defined from movement, camera work, building, geometric
puzzling etc. The beginning of the game trains him - more formally
than Minecraft did - in the ways of the world. Then the game slowly
transfers him into the "open-ended" area where he sets his own
goals, but instead of being creative and building, he is doing
anything "game-like."

If you break-down a Modern Warfare level into its functional
components you get simple stuff. There are walls, they have
heights. There are stairs and ladders and doors. All of these things
are positioned relatively to one another to define a set of
sight-lines and auditory "spaces" for every possible position a player
could be standing in. The enemies wander around in this area. The
player is pushed through it one general direction. There are some
scripted events. There are guns and tanks and ammo and so on.

You could manipulate these primitives to create the MW experience
without losing anything, and make it effectively endless, and tuned to
what the player needs, by listening to his needs. The idea runs
parallel to the generated worlds of Minecraft, except that Minecraft
worlds don't change themselves dynamically. Minecraft has general seed
values that act as "DNA" for worlds, that have been tuned to create a
good experience for the player, in the general case, but these seeds
are static (semi-random), and the world doesn't change. Also I don't
like the story-less free-roam aspect of Minecraft (for my
game). Pretend there is a more guided structure.

Imagine two states: that represent, say, the first 2 thirds of my
game. At the beginning of the first state (the beginning of the game),
the player is in a narrow corridor of play. There is very little
control for him, like in how MW actually is. Then imagine that over
time this control grows. The player develops his skills, because the
world adjusts to develop them - without breaking narrative continuity
- and gains more say in how things develop.

For example, every shooter player "finds his voice" the more he
plays. Every writer writes differently; every shooter player plays
differently. Only amateur players play the same, and even then they're
pretty diverse. The more experience you get shooting the more personal
your play becomes. The game - my game - adjusts to embrace this
diversity. Players are given increasing freedom so that they can grow
in the way that best suits them.

Think about choosing a development path in Skyrim for your character,
or your talent tree in Diablo II. In both cases you are leveling in the
direction that satisfies you. I am proposing something very similar,
but more granular, and directly integrated into the world. The player
grows in the way that he chooses.

There is this awesome implied system in Minecraft that allows you to
set your own goals. The game silently forces you to cycle between goal
setting and construction by limiting resources, forcing
encounters with enemies, and having a day/night cycle. But it
is a game about setting your own goals and reaching them. It is
very similar in this way to Skyrim, except in it your goals are
declared implicitly. You have to set them, you just don't have to say
them.

My game will be something in-between. The player will earn increasing
rights to set his own goals. The game will guide him so that he
doesn't set poor ones. If he sets good goals that engage him then the
system loosens and gives him more freedom. It will do this largely
through implicit means. That part is a little harder to explain.

The second state of the game is the player having complete
freedom. (Remember the first state is the player gaining skills). The
player can enter into a shooter level that suits his desires. He can
control its construction down to whatever detail he likes. He can even
influence it in broad strokes, like, "more hectic, with shorter burst
of high-intensity, long stretches of dawdling, less team reliance,
longer ranges, more aggressive enemies." But the interface for
specifying these things will be in-game and natural, the way the
Minecraft world is the interface for "choosing what your house
looks like." You don't get a menu like you do in Farmville or The
Sims, you just get the game.

The first part of the game is one long training session in how to
handle oneself accordingly in the second part, in which you can
control what your experience is in extreme detail. In it you can sit
there and compose music if you want, or master arbitrary platforming
skills, or improve at number-crunching battle prep for turn-based
mayhem. Whatever.

The player transfers slowly, gradually, from the first "state" (part)
of the game to the second, from a place of no freedom to complete. The
third part of the game involves other players, and I'll talk about
that some other time.

So imagine playing MW but slowly gaining control over the kinds of
levels you are playing. In fact, much of the control is expressed
fluidly by moving down a path that gives you the kind of experience
that you want. In RPGs I can "control the story output" by choosing
who to talk to. Such an interface is a very simple one for defining my
experience. In my game I can control any aspect by doing things just
as naturally, and having the world re-arrange itself around me to suit
my desires.

Ok, now imagine combining all my favourite games into one game and
doing the same thing I did with MW. The world stays continuous - it
holds together - and the player, slowly, gains influence over it, so
that it becomes like a home. A home is a place where your most
developed relationships are, and all the things that reflect who you
are.

That might be a little long... hey! ... that's me. I don't think I
explained it very well either. There are all these pieces floating in
my head, and at any given moment I can only capture one angle of the
whole thing.

[nikki]

I'll end with an analogy...we'd be building planes and rocket craft with trial and error. The danger would be immense ... what's happening there.

yeah sure, the scientific approach is very valueable, but I believe the original (indie ) inventors of the early flying machines where very much of a hands-on mentality (you know shed, plywood, sewing machine) and much less of calculating resistance factors at differnt mach speeds, a lot of them fell hard and often, but they got it working/(or died trying).

what you are doing looks more (to me, no offence) like theorizing about experimental gameplay without actually experimenting.. to keep it in the analogy : You look like your calculating how to save fuel on trans-atlantic flights by inventing better aerodynamics, more powerfull fuel and lighter composite metals, without actually being able to get off the ground in the first place. I'm just saying

[Graham.]

Yeah, I know, and I respect that. But I've crashed enough shit to know what that feels like. I've crashed so much that I have an intuitive sense for what works and what doesn't. I don't know most things, definitely, but I know enough to feel confident theorizing like this.

A lot of people have a difficult time translating theory to reality. That's a skill like any other. It just takes practice. I have a lot of that. I'm a theory kind of guy. It allows me to do things I would not otherwise be able to do. Game's, I believe, currently lack a lot of formal theory. So I have to invent some to make the game that I want to make. It makes me unusual, definitely, but it suits my strengths. Solving problems in my head has always been one of my most identifying trait in a group. So I'm doing here, with games, what I've always done.

I have a very particular idea in my head of what I want for my game. I know I need theory to deliver it. So I go where the conclusions tell me to. Needless to say, the game in my head isn't like any other that is out there. So the normal, "this plus this plus that," description doesn't work. If I just started building I'd end up with something useless, or that doesn't support what I want to deliver.

Right now a lot of game concepts don't even get off the ground, so they just aren't even attempted. That's why the triple-A industry for example is so elastic in on itself. All of their games are similar to one another. They avoid concepts they can't deliver, and that is most concepts, so their range of expression grows slowly. We can build certain kinds of planes, and they will fly, but in the realm of all planes what we currently have the experience to build is very limited. My dream plane isn't on that list, so I have to figure out some principles that haven't been figured out yet. The first flyable planes were built by creators armed with an understanding of flight that hadn't been seriously considered before because it didn't seem valuable. They were not built by a bunch of guys with materials, tools, and a passion. Those guys all died... or something else not-so-great happened to them.

I respect both approaches to game-building: theorizing and experimenting. We have enough experience for both to be good options. I like experimentation too. I kind of miss it, and will welcome its return when it comes later on in my cycle. I just prefer theory this time around.

It's all about what kind of plane you want to build.

[1982]

Most games aren't really about the player. "Games" are about the
player, but a particular game is not. Take some arbitrary example,
like Arkham City. In that one you can make choices (as the
player). You can fly around the city, fight goons, progress the plot,
do side-quests, solve "riddles" and so on. But the game is also about
being Batman. You can't fight any way you want. You have to follow the
structure of the game. There's kind of this slo-mo kind of thing when
you fight, and there's chaining. A lot of the combat is about
crowd-control, positioning, and predicting where the next attack will
come from. That design is pretty specific. You get control within that
realm, but you are still forced to live within it.

You actually sold this to me at the first paragraph. I have similar approach on design, but you have different technical/mechanical starting point. As I am not coder I can't develop so sophisticated systems I really would like, but I still try to follow my philosophy of player playing as himself, not as a character. In a extent, I try to remove the whole concept of character. Sure we still have traits like appearance (not a problem in first person view game), NPC discussions, and other, sometimes illogical, limitations of the game reality. But a lot can be done by just removing the character from the game world. In my current project I have succeeded with this pretty well, I try to give meaningful decisions for the player as himself, not as the "character" he controls on the screen. The game is more like interactive book, where reader controls how the world in the book evolves through what he wants to see/experience.

I personally also try to avoid playing games that are heavily character driven, as I like to be me in the game world, not any of the foolish character game designer wants me to be.

Yes, you have nice starting point. But I am still waiting for the rest of it, like theme, setting and visuals :D Okay well they do not matter at beginning state, but they usually make me either interested or uninterested.

[Graham.]

I have a lot of "theme" ideas, and visuals and so on. I've got a lot of that stuff, but summarzing is a task for later after I've been able to make more decisions in that area.

I know there is a strong presence of animals and eco-systems (in my game). There is a theme of how we are controlled by our perceptions. There is outer-space, war, conflict, systemic issues in society. The idea of how events and decisions ripple through-out a society is explored. The idea that a person is a construct of their experiences is explored. Players learn what it means to struggle, and how to survive when they are pushed to their limits. Players learn where their limits are and how their comfort zone controls their development.

I've always like the idea of Pokemon but more grand like Monster Hunter, but in which the monsters are more personally relatable, almost like a person would be, but simpler. I love shooting things. I like the "brothers in battle" theme that gets attempted every so often in games but usually doesn't go too far. I feel like I have something to contribute there. I love Miyazaki films and ninjas and kung fu.

There's a lot of stuff like that, personal things. I actually like playing character-driven games. I love JRPGs. I miss the good ones. I know I want a story-line that switches perspectives naturally. I like how in FF8 the characters fall asleep and witness events from the past every so often. FF has a lot of that, bouncing between the perspectives of various characters. I like the idea of playing yourself in the game but being able to hop around to other characters and see what they are doing, maybe influencing things in subtle ways.

I think the beginning of my game will feel character-driven, then it will become about you. Then it will become about other people.

At some point I'll put up a devlog when I have things to show, but I'm a long way from that.

[Graham.]

@1982

I checked out your devlog. Your game is very cool. I want to play it.

It feels like Space Quest but grown-up. There's a series of books I'm getting into called "Red/Blue/Green Mars," in which the characters try to colonize mars. They do so in a way that is very close to reality. The books are a drama inside an exploration of what would actually be required to colonize space. There's no ship battles or unreal technology. It is straight-up nearly modern-day stuff, but on Mars. Your game kind-of reminds me of that.

The cool concept is that there are all these "modern" scientists and people trying to create a wholly new society from scratch, literally, including a functioning atmosphere and ecosystem. So decisions have these huge implications. I like the role of religion in your game.

Even when I plan out well-defined characters for the player to influence, or scripted story-sequences, I'm always trying to make it as dynamic as possible. I'll watch an episode of Star Trek and think, "how could a player play through this but make his own decisions, so he'd feel like one of these characters, and not just a spectator or shadow?"

I am at the opposite end than you. My skills are straight-up technical. I'm always looking for ways to stretch my art assets in clever ways, like how Minecraft does. Procedurally creating environments is straight up my alley. I can craft a compelling story, and I'm getting a feel for sound and music, but art work will be a strange new place to me. I can critic a design, an aesthetic, probably pick excellent camera angles and lighting setups and interior designs, but drawing is my weakest link. Your game reminds me of how far a little art can go. Love the temple room, with the hand reaching out and the stair-case carved into it.

[Gimym TILBERT]

@toast
Basically you want a binary DM, a game that parse gameplay action and reverse parse a situation to answer it, that look at who the player is and adapt his setting (like dda without difficulty adjustement ). Well a game that converse with the player, a the sims with more narrative and personality thrown into it.

It looks like we might have the same goal, except you want it for  a particular setting in mind, while I try to crack in a generic way (for all setting).

[Graham.]

Well it's just like DDA. The experience mutates to drive the player towards the ideal experience. The player is only given choice at the rate that he can handle it.

Think of it this way. I have a child, let's say. I tell him what to do, all the time. He does what I say, and grows. So then I say, "ok, Child, now you can choose one thing to do on your own." Then he does. Since he has personal freedom he'll be able to make a choice that I won't be able to predict. If he grows as a result of making that choice, then I give him another. I scale up his freedom at the same rate that he is able to convert it to a productive life, scaling it back down, and around, dynamically to suit his unique growth.

This is what I'm doing with the game. The ideal scenario is that the player drives his own experience and the "system" just watches to ensure he is having a good time. But to begin with the system controls everything, to guide the player. There's full DDA, everything. I don't think the player will ever get to a point where he will have "full" control, because I won't be able to train him that well, so DDA and the like will always be there at least a little.

Yes, I think we have the same goal, but different approaches. I want the general case as well. I'm just handling the one I relate to the most as well, as a starting point. The player needs to start in some world. If that world is built out of things that I care about then it will be more compelling. Over the course of play I will transfer him to the general case, or at least my closest approximation of it.

I think of it this way. The player starts off in what is "my world," the place where I can have my ideal experience. Then over the course of the game's linear narrative equivalent, that world transforms to become his own, so that it reflects his needs as much as it originally reflected mine. Then he starts doing something similar with other players, entering into shared spaces, or sharing pieces of his own, then collectively converting those to become theirs.

It's a normal game that turns into The Sims, except that that Sims also plays like a normal game. There will be a lot of action and hard-thinking and exploration and mastery. It's The Sims gone hardcore. ... Though players will probably see it just as "hardcore" with the freedom of The Sims.