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[Suminsky]

weren't Tomb Raider acrobatic moves cool?

What do you think about pure aesthetic (and frigging cool) useless stuff?

Considering theyr pure aesthetic that is.. I think theres some purpose on tomb raider moves, a pretty neat one.

Think with me.. Games that require exploration, unless youre using a walktrough (faaaaaag), will always make the player go back and forth, like when you dont know exactly were to go or are trying to find secret stuff.. After long hours playing, that shit tires the player out, walking around after the 'level' (or whatever) are mostly done/cleaned is really boring. So how frigging cool is to go jumping around doing nice moves purely for fun? Its like a mini game, a mini game about pressing buttons on timed sequences (or something alike).. Quite neat.. I feel stuff like that is frowned upon by designers (I can imagine a counter arg saying "if a level is boring, fix the level", but I think its too idealistic), but I like this kind of tutti frutti..

Another utility is playing like a boss.. For impressing ppl, instead of just killing enemies, killing with style, with requires extra skill, is also cool.

It  doesnt break gameplay, if you dont like dont do it, so its an extra..

What do you think?

[JWK5]

You have to bake the cake first before you put on the frosting.

[DavidCaruso]

Stuff that's "purely aesthetic" adds to how a game plays because aesthetics are a huge part of how a game plays. "Pure gameplay" is just a bunch of wireframe cubes shooting cubes at other wireframe cubes, while everything jumps around unshaded flat polygon platforms (and maybe every few minutes you stop to watch a cutscene of a cube humming binaural tones at another cube). Mechanics and aesthetics complement and enhance one another. Some people call this "gamefeel", but I think that's maybe the ugliest word that's ever been invented so I don't really like it.

The cake-frosting analogy seems spurious because a cake can taste good by itself, and so can frosting (in limited amounts). But without aesthetics you have... like, nothing (either a bunch of cubes or just a straight up black screen). Without mechanics at least you can still have a cool movie or painting or album. Personally, in contrast to what a lot of people advise, I'm a fan of adding at least some graphical and aural polish as soon as you can (i.e. as soon as your engine is extensible enough and you aren't just hard coding everything or making it a pain in the ass to change/extend later on).

Like a lot of other people I've known, I used to think that a game could be fun even if it just looked like a bunch of rectangles jumping around soundlessly, as long as the mechanics were solid enough. But then I tried playing games that were prototyped this way (or with bad "programmer art"), and trying to prototype my own stuff that way, and it just isn't good, so now I try get placeholders from real games as soon as I can (my current game basically started out looking like a fangame before getting reskinned into proper original art).

[JWK5]

The cake-frosting analogy seems spurious because a cake can taste good by itself, and so can frosting (in limited amounts). But without aesthetics you have... like, nothing (either a bunch of cubes or just a straight up black screen). Without mechanics at least you can still have a cool movie or painting or album.

Not to be contrary for the sake of it, but you can also have fun mechanics without the polish. I wouldn't call checkers, chess, etc. very aesthetically polished (unless you buy a decorative set) but their gameplay mechanics hold up nicely all on their own. Similarly, you could strip most RTS games of their graphical polish and make each unit generic shapes (with differences) and the gameplay itself would like hold up and remain fun. It really depends on the type of game, some games benefit from aesthetics far more than others. In general, though, all games benefit from good aesthetics.

Personally, in contrast to what a lot of people advise, I'm a fan of adding at least some graphical and aural polish as soon as you can (i.e. as soon as your engine is extensible enough and you aren't just hard coding everything or making it a pain in the ass to change/extend later on).

I would have to agree, I think people really underestimate the power of growing the game aesthetics with the gameplay rather than aside from the gameplay or after the gameplay. The more everything comes together in harmony the more impact the experience is going to have overall, I think.

[bdsowers]

Part of the enjoyment from a game is experiencing the game's universe, and that is visual & aural. Some games manage to exist largely on that experience (Journey). I used to make little meta-games with Mario 64 jumping around like a madman. Some games get away without visual enjoyment, and some subsist purely on it, and both of those types of games are Just Fine.

Some games try & combine aesthetics & gameplay. Devil May Cry would rank the stylishness of your combat, which was often a function of how varied it was.

[oahda]

faaaaaag

who uses that as insult in 2015
are you twelve years old