Wind waker is everything water world should have been and more?

HEY LISTEN!

BEAT UP KEVIN COSTNER!

 

Not to hate but this sounds like the Adjustment Bureau movie coming out soon. Except from the point of view of John Slattery.

Huh? Wikipedia says that's based off of a Philip K Dick novel though, so I don't feel surprised. Philip K has thought of everything already.

I know, right? Hollywood has a mild obsession with his work.

Howdy all.

I write and design games. I used to do some programming, 3D modeling, animation, and 2D art. I got rusty though. I was always better at the big picture anyway. That, and Maya is expensive.

I presently live in Virginia, US, with my wife and pet rabbit. I play a bit of everything. I prefer to design strategy, sims, and RPGs. I do enjoy writing for FPSs.


Also, I need a new job. Haha.

I'd like to get settled into a new place in the near future with a job that pays the bills. Once I get that squared away I want to put together a team of people and work on some ideas. I have a couple ideas for something that can be put on Steam and then there is the holy grail idea I have that I haven't worked the kinks out of yet that I want to do down the road.

No one tool will solve all problems.

Obviously loose paper of any type is necessary to draw out impromptu designs. There is no substitute.

I prefer Open Office. I use documents to do detail work. Spreadsheets are better to keep and organize lists. You can switch over to other formats if you like but those two plus paper works for me.

I do also like to keep highlighters and big lined notecards on hand too. Just in case. I would also like to buy a big white board but something tells me to wait until I move next before I do that.

You are a disgraced engineer who works in the bowels of a city monitoring it's sewage and treatment facilities. While attempting to repair and unclog pipes due to all the crap people flush and throw into storm drains, you notice a dead body in a pipe. Now you have to search the pipes for other clues to figure out who was murdered by whom and why.

All while avoiding crocodiles.

The universe is ruled by the Hierarchy of the Cosmics. It's a vast, faceless bureaucracy of forces and formless entities bound together by the desire to codify and enforce the laws of Physics.

A human man has lost his wife, and now intends to bring her back to life. If he defies the finality of Death, he may damage the linearity of Time itself.

You are the one charged to stop him. What motivates you to kill a dream?

Not to hate but this sounds like the Adjustment Bureau movie coming out soon. Except from the point of view of John Slattery.

You can always go the bold route and try to make a better version of a bad idea.

In this case, use the Waterworld scenario wherein the world is covered with water rather than land. Small floating cities and ships are what is left of civilization. So your map is not always accurate because everyone is moving around. You have to recruit people for your crew and upgrade your boat with stuff you find, buy, or steal.


And then you beat up Kevin Costner, or whatever.

I think this subject is difficult to tack down to one thing or another.

All the people moving about in the GTA series did not necessarily make it more alive. NPCs and sounds and triggers are all handy but they have be used in concert to make a believable background.

Portal was a game with an incredibly immersive world and it lacked NPCs and open areas completely. The soundscape was limited to something sort of industrial and the only triggered sequences were a part of the gameplay. We all love it though because the backdrop matches the story being told. The writing on the wall, the cracks in the paint, and the holes in the story being told to you by GLADoS all serve to paint a picture of what is going on that every player can believe.

The Mass Effect series is believable not because of all the embellishments themselves (and there were a lot of them) but how they all work in unison to convey a world in which you are participating.

Iconic characters are truly never made. No one will ever know their creation will become iconic when it is made. To me, what makes a character in any media iconic tends to be a mixture of popularity after creation, the appropriate suspension of disbelief, and easy readability.

I think most people like characters that are easily recognizable in a lineup of characters. They look for characters with whom they identify. Sometimes, the character is someone with whom they absolutely cannot identify (which is in itself identifying with the character, go figure). While most fictional characters are recognized as being fictitious, the characters we love the most are beyond belief but not quite beyond our believing in them.

Mario has a simple color palette and an outfit that is simple and conveys what he is. His form tells you his background. He travels through pipes and fights monster with nothing but extreme jumping powers that defy his girth, but somehow these facts are not completely unrealistic to us.

Solid Snake has a simple form and outfit with the exception of his bandanna (his easily recognizable trait). He is apparently the world's best sneak, sniper, fighter, soldier, etc. He can kill hundreds of super soldiers or just walk through their lines into an extremely heavily guarded facility and blow it all to hell and still escape.

Characters like these are iconic because they make sense in the environment in which they exist. Through playing them in their game we believe in them. The situation in which they are presented may be just as ridiculous but we believe in that too. And so, in playing them and enjoying the game in which they exist, we spread our enjoyment of them. They become popular and then they become iconic.

It's not just the character. It's everything else too.

Untrue. There's always a need for that. Unfortunately, TIGS is pretty overabundant with talent in every regard, which I think tends to give a lot of us that perception.

Well, I think my frustration comes from a place of having to compete with a large group of people for the opportunity to write for a game. Writers are always needed, certainly. However, many games, especially indie games due to the limited size of the project, do not lend themselves to needing anything more than cursory writing.

I prefer working on the big picture and so I do not take the time to learn more advanced coding techniques or new languages. It's my crutch.

I write everything out as I become satisfied with the idea. Things I am not sure about I prefer to let stew in my head. If I don't have time to stew on it, I'll list the options I have come up with thus far.

Regardless, I tend to write game bibles because I am already used to writing production bibles for everything else. I start with a general premise and usually a list of similar games for reference. As the document expands, I edit it to split it into appropriate sections such as setting, a list of characters, player abilities, enemy types, etc.

None of this should be a surprise however because I am a writer.

One thought I have for other people: I tend to keep a folder of game design documents but with that folder I also keep an idea dump file. It is literally a single document that has a list of scenarios or character ideas or whatever that sound interesting. That way no idea is lost because there is not enough other information accompanying it. For example, one thing on my list is "haunted monastery." Whenever I get around to it or come up with something brilliant to go along with it, I move that off the list and that idea gets its own design document.

I have no doubt that many achievements are designed out of laziness (ie. Congrats! You beat the game! Have 25g.). Even if it were not mandated that some of a game's achievement allotment are to be used on the mundane, I have no doubt that many games would not actually stray from that path.

Why?

Because it is hard to come up with achievements. Achievements work best when they challenge the player to try a strategy that is not in their skill set or take a path with more risk than reward. Achievements are an added incentive to play crazier than your more methodical play style.

Team Fortress 2 is the perfect example of how achievements can be used effectively. The achievements available for each character and specific weapon loadouts encourage players to play in ways they normally would not play. For example, I am a great support player. I play Spy, Medic, Scout, and Engineer extremely well. I had no desire to ever play Grenadier until Grenadier got its achievement set.

Now, the downside to achievements in Team Fortress 2 is that many achievements are not strategically viable. Why would you want to try to hit someone at maximum distance with the Scout's baseball in a real game? Add to this the fact that weapon upgrades were tied to the number of achievements gained and those weapon upgrades were very valuable in regular games. Thus, mapmakers ended up making maps specifically for the completion of all achievements for a specific character type. People harvested achievements in order to reap the rewards so they could continue being competitive in regular game play.

A good achievement is one that promotes play that would not normally be strategically recommended. The reward is the satisfaction of pulling it off and getting the title and no more. In the Xbox Live version of Ticket to Ride (the railroad building game), an achievement exists that encourages a player to play all of their trains in one long path rather than connecting railroads wherever cheapest or most easily attained. This will also gain the player a bonus to their score if their path is the longest but it is also is harder to accomplish. The achievement adds weight to trying out a strategy that is not immediately more valuable.

Right now I am designing a cooperative civilization game. The goal is to thrust a number of players into a village environment where they need to cooperate to advance their society and avoid conflict with other cities. It's sort of a test to see if players will work in concert to provide the maximum benefit to all rather than competing and risking everything for a slight advantage over others.

Coding. Long gone are the days when I could code something halfway decent. Everyone else has far surpassed my ability in that.

Of course then my next weakness is that what I am good at is the writing and design aspect because there is never a need for people who can do that.

I don't use it but it's still funny: "One thing led to another..."

I think this is pretty self-explanatory on the surface. As aforementioned, many video game companies do not hire actual writers to do the work. The design aspect of a game, which includes writing, is often held as the job to which everyone aspires and is thus to which they are promoted. However, while everyone can write for games and even come up with concepts, not every can do either or both well.

Having a good writer for a game does not guarantee good writing in the game. Different game genres require different types of writing. Not all writers are adept at all genre styles. Games like Fallout 3 require a considerable amount of dialogue and item description writing but not necessarily scenario writing. The Halo series has limited divergent dialogue strings but there is a significant amount of detailed scenario writing. The Metroid Prime trilogy has little dialogue but significant amounts of item description. This would be tedious if it weren't for the fact that initial scans have limited description and the option to read more in the log.

Most writing types can be tedious if abundant and not also complemented by other types. Each game genre does best with different degrees of each writing type. One must also factor in the preferences of the assumed audience.