I'd suggest anyone interested in the topic check out Engineering Emergence. It's thick, but a great starting point to serious game design. And I like that in academic papers, everything is really well-defined: no three page arguments on people who just have different understanding of the same terms.

It's not always something you can just "add" to a game. It can be a slider between emergence and progression:


I'll copy-paste this definition of "progression":

Progression in games refers to the structures in games where a designer
outlined the possible game states beforehand, usually through level design
or through some form of game scripting. Progression offers much control
of the play experience but has the disadvantage that it generates relatively
low replay value

You pick which elements matter more to your game and choose how much you want to rely on emergence or progression. Some elements don't need to be emergent at all - nobody plays procedurally generated maps, items, and character skills in DOTA, because there's plenty of emergence with the existing maps, items, and skills.

Something like chess is a highly emergent game and above the difficulty level of most people.

There was this table in a book:


I think it defines a RPG pretty well (like Mr Sinner says, a RPG, not actual role-playing). Social interaction is on the 'medium' scale for these games, maybe even lower. RPGs aren't about roleplaying anymore.

But a very large portion of what defines a "RPG" is economy. This may not necessarily take the place of stat-juggling and battle, but too many components of economy involve battles. Combat involves attrition of HP and MP (attrition being defined as something where both sides pay a cost to make the other lose a higher cost). The option of combat allows people to decide whether progression (a quest/goal) is worth losing HP for.

You can probably make a full RPG by substituting something like hostile finances (ala Catan). Just take a strategy game, remove some tactical elements and add in more progression and you have yourself a RPG. It's not an easy task, though.

(footnote: I was going to call Monopoly a hostile economics game then realized that despite it being economically themed, it has little to do with handling economics. It's better classed as an adventure game where progression depends on negotiation skill)

Sounds like something's missing. I think Desktop Dungeons did a good job about stripping dungeon crawling to their basics. There are still more elements of choice than fight/flee/spells. ADOM and Crawl did a good job of defining elements in a roguelike.

Artifact guardians: An exceptionally difficult enemy that also comes with an exceptional prize, based on how tough they are.

Altars: Kill or sacrifice for long term piety points.

Vaults: Plenty of monsters. Sometimes tough monsters. But plenty of loot too.

Tension rooms: You're hinted that one of the rooms might be more dangerous than usual. Your choice whether you're at the HP or power level to handle it or just skim the level.


I think a lot of roguelikes aren't about exploration. They're puzzles, about choosing what your next move is based on the cards you're dealt. 3 choices seems a bit too shallow.

A huge part of something like ADOM is deciding the order of dungeons to go into and whether to stay in a dungeon to grind (and risk corruption) or go on.

HB says excess money goes into cancer charities. Since brandonnn hit his target, all of it goes to cancer charities?

Juice = fine, unnecessary cosmetic feedback
Physics = vectors and acceleration
Friction = negative feedback
Gamefeel = responsiveness and reaction to controls. Juice is only a subset of gamefeel.

People use so many words to describe all this.

Lets get semantic, all games are Role-Playing-Games. Glad we cleared that up.

But the question is, can you sell those games as RPG? Sure you play a role in something like Civilization, but if someone buys it, thinking that it's a "RPG", they'd flip shit and demand their money back.

RPG, as a genre, is about stat juggling. It's evolved from actual tabletop role playing to taking out the stat juggling complex formulas and manipulating rules in a way that only computers can handle. Half of playing a RPG is in character creation and character builds.

That's why The Sims doesn't count as a "RPG" - not enough of it is in character builds. You have the leveling up and stuff but your choices in character design and path doesn't make enough difference. And you can't mix together those characters into a "party" to win.

I'd put MOBAs into the RPG category, because they refined character and party builds into gameplay, while skipping most of the grind.

lol, I've been looking for this. Figures that the people making these apps would hang out at TIGS. Most of them aren't great though.

I'm looking for something minimalistic. I'd want something where I can pinch zoom and maybe pan around with two finger swipes. And the palette has to be really easy to set up and access. For a lot of these, the palettes are too numerous to click.

Look at pretty much any mmorpgs that have open pvp with actual risk and reward and you'll find plenty of politics. Ultima Online was a classic (can't say anything about official servers now a days), Shadowbane when it was alive was tons of politics, Dark Fall has ton of politics, and I'm not quite sure after that at the moment.

These types of games alas are pretty rare.

It has to give players a degree of freedom too. Games like Armageddon MUD have potential for politics, but it's ruined by the world being too tightly staff controlled.

Ok, got bored of it already. No depth to it. No missions, nothing to look forward to. At least in Dwarf Fortress you get sieges and megastructures. The mid-late game stage of Banished is just clearing woods and making more houses and stuff. The difficulty level goes down and it loses its appeal.

5/10, would not recommend. Just grab Tropico instead.

(including coding)

Player Type: Multiclass rogue. Maybe a bard or similar jack of all trades class.
Personality Type: Hyperactive who blames a favorite god for things that go wrong or right.
Job Type: Mercenary

Reason #1 why you should never artificially inflate your estimates:
People (likely people you care about) will get fired.

The reasoning is this. If people upstairs really want project A and remotely want project B, and they have the exact budget they need to do both, but you tell them project A will cost more, they might need to cancel project B and fire that staff.
It's that simple.
And it hurts.

Lol, there's some serious project management issues going on there if that happens.

For one thing, good software developers are pretty damn rare and rarely get fired if they can get hired in the first place. Even if they do get fired, it's probably not too hard to find another job that pays as well, and severance pay makes for a nice bonus.

Chances are that the people on project B will get reassigned to project A. If you gave a target that you couldn't do, then neither project gets completed properly, and everyone loses.

If anything, they're more likely to be hiring for project B and asked for project A estimates just so they could decide whether or not to hire.

Life experience tells me that there are a few people out there who are perfectly fine with doing something illegal, because they're in denial that bad things will happen to them.

This is 3D Realms after all, the company that's most well known for failing to complete a contract. Nobody should take that long to complete a game when they have the resources to do so.

They sued Gearbox earlier and dropped it. I'd bet that they realized that they had no grounds on that lawsuit against Gearbox, but begged for money anyway because they expected to get lucky.

They've been given a C&D by Gearbox. They signed a breach notice agreeing not to do Duke Nukem stuff. They'd be fucking stupid to do it anyway, but they kept promoting it.

Gearbox has full right to sue their asses off and nearly 100% chance of winning because of that breach notice.

Games are often in first or second person. They're rarely ever third person even if the camera angle is that way, except in something like Bastion. I'd define something like Fallout as first person storytelling, because you choose your character's actions and someone else doesn't say what they're doing. In Bastion, someone else narrates what you are doing or have done, so the storytelling is close to third person.

It's hard to inject a personality into something that the player controls fully. Let's say I have a hotheaded protagonist who gets into trouble because of his emotions. If given a choice, the player probably won't do it at all. If not given a choice, forcing the story from a character flaw is kinda lame - it goes against the classic D&D style RPGs where the DM can't decide the player's actions.

Anyone know any good examples of this kind of writing? So far I think Betrayal at Krondor does well in this regard, because you still get the first person narration, but it's based on response to what you do, without feeling like you're forced to do something. The storytelling characters also encourage you to do one thing or another based on their thoughts but the game responses if you do otherwise.

Check out some of Rovio's phone games. Mobile games are good at getting things across without dialogue, because of the limited space. Or rather, they should be good if they're well designed. Angry Birds does story without dialogue. Tiny Thief gives complex levels without saying anything, except for a single icon bubble when people are talking.

Angry Birds style: different ratings based on how well you do at the level. Option to redo levels you had poor ratings on.

I'm not a fan of collectibles, high score, or challenge levels. Angry Birds style is great because it limits the score to only one level - it means that if I do bad in a level I hate it doesn't affect my overall score, but I can also retry individual levels if I want to do better or show off.

You can still use score as an unlockable if you want with that system.

It's a poor metric. Too many games have too much filler. I feel Bethesda is guilty of this.

Some games, especially the social types, have a poor $/hour ratio, but can entertain you for very long periods of time and be more fun than single player games. Some of those games are even playable at work - I've seen plenty of people idle in a game-based chatroom from work.

It's different for different people too. I've seen plenty of reviews of short games - some praise that the games are short, whereas others blast them for it. The people who become game reviewers very often want longer games, so a short concise game will get you a lot of bad reviews even though it's popular with the 'casual' crowd. That's also why Bethesda games get overrated.

A lot of games are incredibly repetitive - Total War, strategy games, city builders, every RPG with combat. Sometimes the repetition is fun; people don't get bored of repetition with MOBAs and FPSes because they're still challenged. Repetition in single player DOTA and multiplayer DOTA are worth very differently even for the same number of hours. And how do you rate training hours?

I'm happy to fork over quite a lot of money to watch a movie - it hits all my senses and gets right to the point. Games so far have been very poor at getting as concise as movies. Why are 3 hour movies too long and 3 hour games too short?

(answer: because games are expected to be emergent)

I don't really have this problem. Perhaps it's a sign that the story isn't too good. What makes the story special?

Writing is an iterative process. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. Too often it goes too slow because people think that once they get to the last chapter it's over.

Here's what I do:
I grab a story I like for inspiration. Bring along a notepad. Your goal is not to copy it, but to find out which part of the story resonates with yours. This can be a book, a movie, but books are fastest to skim through. Lyrics are good too.

As you read/listen to it, write down what you like most about it. Why do you like the character? Do you like the theme? The plot and its twists? The narration? Narration and plot are very different things.

Try to replicate that into a story, and write it as fast as possible. I set my limit to 1 hour. You'll get a really crappy story. That's fine. What's important is that you'll find what you love about it. Take a break, grab your theme from this synopsis. You'll probably get a character or two you like.

Rewrite. Keep rewriting. Your goal is to rewrite and iterate enough to get:
 - An ending
 - A starting point
 - At least 3 story arcs - inciting incident, twist, low point
 - A bunch of characters who all have their own personality. Especially the main ones - protagonist, deutragonist, antagonist, supporting characters.

This is the skeleton of the story. Once you have all this, then you bulk and detail it up.

If your theme and characters are compelling enough, you should have little issue creating a world that they can run in. If they're not good enough, you'll procrastinate. But don't give up, trying to get to that point is hard work.

Someone (another Pixarian) wrote this in response to these rules:
http://static.squarespace.com/static/52675998e4b07faca3f636a5/t/527f0a75e4b012bf9e7361c5/1384057461885/Pixar22RulesAnalyzed_Bugaj.pdf

It was written in 2013, so well worth a necro. It actually breaks down and analyzes everything pretty damn well. The original 'pixar rules' weren't very well explained, especially as they were all written in Twitter. Just about every criticism of those rules have been acknowledged by Bugaj in the PDF.

Some other nice tips I got from that:
 - Begin with the end in mind.
 - Rule 4, as a template, has a lot of flaws, but is a good exercise. It can be too story oriented, whereas you often want to focus on characters.
 - Rule 2 (Keep in mind what’s interesting to you as an audience, not what’s fun to do as a writer. They can be very different) is poorly communicated. It means that what's fun to write doesn't really apply to all mediums. If your audience are game players, your audience finds the gameplay interesting. JRPGs and Visual Novels are an example of what happens when good writing doesn't translate into good gameplay.
 - Rewriting is essential to a good story, especially as the setting is more unique. It's similar to prototyping - the more unique your gameplay, the more prototypes you need. Story writing is similarly iterative.
 - The stakes are very important in making a character people would root for. People won't root for a character who wins easily, they root for a character who struggles and doesn't seem like they can survive. This is probably harder to portray in games because people don't want to lose often either.

My favorite part:

A good pitch strips-away the inessential details, no matter how great those details may be, and refines the entire story down to its compelling essentials:
 
• Title and genre
• Who the story is about (the protagonist)
• Where and when the story takes place (the setting)
• Her want and how it isn't met (the core conflict)
• The plot outcome if the protagonist fails (the external stakes)
• Her need and what will happen if it isn't realized (the internal stakes)
• What about her character and philosophy is being tested (the thematic question or philosophical stakes)
• The most crucial turning points in the story (the inciting incident, the midpoint twist/kicker, and the low point)
• The final resolution (of the plot, character arc, and thematic question)
 
And it does this in about three sentences.

The trailer rule: Any game trailer where the gameplay is less than 50% of the trailer is probably being deceptive. Be very wary of the features it tries to sell. Especially if the trailer is loaded with captions and concept art.