Work more, think, work more, not, think, think, think think, work.

A game developer’s goal is to design a satisfying game experience, and even assuming the most basic mechanics possible, the execution of this design can be derailed at many points in the development cycle. The design must translate his idea through the minds of everyone else who has touched the project, and who will have many different ideas regarding what’s feasible within the given scope of the project. A design document does not hold a candle to the months and years of hard work required to complete a game, no matter how intricately designed the document.

drawn to obscure title like moths to a bug light

ZZZAP

falls in lake and gets eaten by a small fish

Very unusual for BPR to be posting an article on your game idea being worthless, especially when he has one of those ‘brilliant game ideas’ being worked on himself.

Maybe he doesn’t want Wrectified to have any competition then? :stuck_out_tongue:

Actually, everything in wrectified almost has already been done,

I had to restart my project at one point because I had ideas in front of implementation,
now I have restarted and went for viability and efficiency rather then just possible.

Side note ace,
have you seen the current videos of Wrectified?

I dont have a single bug or glitch or problem now,
everything is almost coded,
as lazily as possible.

Everything is modular so I can reuse it later.

If the games forum is anything like the animation forum, it’s probably out of frustration with noobs who want help but won’t tell you anything for fear of you stealing their million dollar idea. As if.

I don’t see any contradiction between proclaiming that the idea by itself is worthless, and needing an idea in the first place to do the work.

I’m sure the mechanics are better than they used to be, but it’s hard to know which videos I should watch if you’re posting videos of every little change you do during the entirety of development (almost like video spam).

Make an alpha trailer that contains all of your major game mechanics so people can at least know what video to watch if they want to see a good overview of the game.

this is tonight’s work

(one of the final pieces of the pie)

I make a little progress here and there, but what you don’t see is
30 lines of code that make each little improvement possible,

My microvideos are for people who check in every night, and want to see where
the game is going :smiley:

This is a very good idea actually.

And the article sounds harsh but it’s true, what’s a good idea without the execution skill?

then again, sometimes what makes a good execution is the motivation, so an idea is as important than just good technical/calculation skill. Good art motivates the soul.

Cheers to those designers who began without any good idea or references.

Ha! An interesting article.

I’m from the UK but I live in Korea and a few years ago I had a Korean friend who was an Art Professor in a university.
He was really worried because one of his ex students had started making art work (sculptures of tea pots using slip mold casting) which he felt was too similar to his own. He asked me what he should do, whether he should take legal action to get her to stop.

I said that art isn’t just about having an idea, you have to showcase the idea at the right time. No matter how good your concept is, you have to get it out in front of people otherwise it doesn’t exist. Once you have done that, it’s time to move on. Start with the next idea, you can’t be like Jackson Pollock making the exact same paintings your entire life. At first Pollock’s drip paintings were revolutionary, but then they weren’t, and then he carried on making them for ever.

Of course a good idea is important, but you have to do the work to make it real. And then you have to have another good idea, and another…

*The student in question was ridiculed when she presented her work in an exhibition, everyone who saw it knew about the professor’s work and felt she was just ripping off his ideas and techniques.

The ability to execute doesn’t mean much if your idea is substandard, and a good idea doesn’t mean much without the ability to execute. You need to have both to make something worthwhile.

For people stuck on execution: You probably just need to lower your scope until it’s something that you can basically do within some reasonable time period (like a month or so).

Even SolarLune had to do that:

I also think it would be helpful to actually create the entire game-play experience first, with minimal artistic assets - It should be fun before it’s pretty, and you should basically be able to play the whole thing, from beginning to end, using nothing more than simple geometric primitives.

After the game is essentially complete, you can go on to make the art, and generally polish things.

Build the game in layers (skeleton -> flesh -> skin), not in pieces (head -> torso -> arms -> … ).

Yep. And get people to playtest it during development.

However, most people here are beginners, interested in learning and developing their skills. Thats why so few games get finished. I don’t think that’s 100% a bad thing… but it is nice to see all the finished games that get done each time the BGMC rolls around. It’s amazing how a deadline can help you focus. ^^

But don’t you need at least a little eye-candy to get people to do the playtesting? I can’t imagine too many people willing to spend hours playing with simple geometric primitives.

People are willing to play games like tetris for hours, and that’s essentially a game composed of just basic primitives - If you have something that’s really fun to play, you don’t need anything more than simple primitives, with maybe a few static textures.

Gameplay over graphics can only be stretched so far though, Tetris at least had presentable 2D graphics that looked like blocks.

If the initial idea of BDX for instance was stretching this to the point where 3D games look like it could’ve been done in the early 90’s, then no one is going to use it for 3D games. People at least want to have decent graphics nowadays because it’s an important part of immersing people in the gameplay (not really of UE4 quality, but at least N64/PS1 or better).

@BPR - I think it’s safe to say the BGE community at-large agrees with this statement.
Everyone I’ve worked with tells me the same thing when the topic comes up.

More points:
People new to the project are completely lost and don’t have time to dig through thousands of posts.
The videos have no meaning out of context. And it is kinda spam-like.

The thread is more like a blog than a discussion, constantly breaking forum etiquette with countless bumps and n-posts.
This sort of behavior drowns out the other law-abiding threads.

</rant>

It’s fine, and that is good advice,

I tend to be a creature of habit, and I work, get something working, record it, and upload while trying something else, or before going to bed, Its a open project but perhaps I should focus on quality of updates rather then constant micro-updates.

I actually need to redo all the documentation now that it’s done, it all works,
and I played around for quite a long time without any errors thrown, and 1 small glitch,
(ray casts don’t always line up with aiming laser)

Yes, work on posting larger updates rather than the result of that one or two lines of code you just changed.

It is also to be noted that you single-handedly made Wrectified the most advertised game project in the history of the Blender forum (even more than Yo Frankie! and projects made during the NaN days), I even recall you got banned once for advertising the latest updates a bit too much. Please start focusing on larger update period between posts and give breathing room for actual discussion of the game.

@Ace - Two lines of code is an clear misunderstanding, as I progressed, I rewrote everything when
I learned a better way, or when I noticed something would not work correctly with the goals of the game.

I rewrote assembly 4 times… (it used to be over 400 lines of code) now it’s a small script.

Well, now that for the most part it is coded,

and I hope to make the engine look good :smiley:

I was trying really hard to get help to make the game, (I was stuck a few times) and I
did not want to give up.

In the end I got all the skills I needed, and also some help came
in the form of bug fixes, so I could forgo work arounds.

now with the PBR stuff on it’s way, I can only wonder at what will happen with the project
now that it all works :smiley:

If the mechanics are truly innovative, it doesn’t have to be “stretched”, because it basically covers the fundamental core of the overall experience (especially for early playtesting sessions).

Not to say that pretty graphics can’t contribute, but if your game can’t stand without them, it’s probably not very interesting to begin with, and there’s no amount of “shiny lights” that can change that.

Good gameplay is at the core of every good game. Graphics are important, but only on top of that.

This implies that you would play a game with absolutely ugly looking graphics (that looked like it went through a blender) just because the gameplay mechanics seem to work. If you played a game that was supposed to be full of people and the ‘people’ were just solid rectangles, I could see that as really stretching the methodology.

That said, since you’re an engine developer, you will be expected to provide modern graphical capabilities to people who don’t want to be forced to make retro-style games in the name of ‘graphics over gameplay’. An engine that expects people to make the games the way the developer would make his instead of the user doing it his way would guarantee the project’s eventual death.