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Child pages (Children Display)


BC Millions of Years - Play Fighting





AD 600 - Chess





1829 - Poker





1886 - Bridge





1935 - Monopoly





1957 - Risk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_game




1959 - Diplomacy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_game




1974 - Dungeons & Dragons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

...


Early D&D Was Rubbish
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdo5ErnXH3E
- This is a great video
- He goes through all the broken mechanics
- it's a 3-part series that also looks at "middle"-D&D and "modern"-D&D
- The manual says "describe the scenery, if any". It says knights "always say thou, instead of you"
- The heroes were incredibly weak compared to the monsters: a whole party of heroes would never get past the first level of monsters. The heroes have 1-4 hit points.
- The heroes don't have a lot of options; a mage would have 1 spell, which was equivalent to an arrow.
- You'd have to roll the dice to see if you could bash open a door (idk, I can see that slowing down the gameplay in an effective way)
- The gameplay was repetitive: you just went from room to room fighting monsters, collecting copper pieces (sounds just like Diablo)
- There was no explanation of who built the labyrinth and why
- The dungeons were too artificial: you'd have two big rooms that were connected by a hallway that wasn't straight: it would go up, then turn 90 degrees and go to the next room. It was so that everything could fit on the grid.
- There was no incentive to use any weapons other than a dagger and a bow. All weapons do 1D6 damage (meaning you roll a single six-sided die). A dagger could attack twice per round and did the same amount of damage as a broadsword, which could only attack every other round. The ranged weapons were similarly broken.

Part 2: Mid-period D&D
- The rulebook got a lot thicker and the print got a lot smaller. [This is the same problem with Axis and Allies IMO]
- He bought Runequest and it was totally intuitive.
- The language of the manual in Runequest was very unpretentious; easy to read
- Classes in D&D are too limiting. A thief can't pick up a sword, for example, because it's not considered part of his class. This is not the case in Runequest: there are no classes.
- The armor class in D&D is totally counterintuitive. More armor makes you harder to hit, but once you get hit, it does the same amount of damage. In Runequest you roll to see if you've hit someone and then they roll to see if they've parried / dodged. And if you hit him (in RQ) you just subtract from your normal damage the amount of armor he's wearing.

Part 3: Fourth Edition D&D is Terrible
- The 3.5 edition of D&D had an even thicker manual than the previous one.
- Then they ditched that for the 4th edition, which is even more expensive.
- He says the game is totally different now; he's heard it described as World of Warcraft on a tabletop, and he thinks that's a pretty good description. "It's a weird, miniature skirmish game. An incredibly slow one." In a recent game, in 4 hours they had a fight with 5 kobolds (weak monsters).
- The new system pretty much demands miniatures.
- It just generally takes away from the fun of describing what you're doing.
- When he played it, no one said anything in character. It was treated as a skirmish game.
- The rules aren't flexible enough to allow for improvisation: he wanted to be a thief disguised as a wizard, but at the very start of the game he was asked by the DM which of his abilities he wanted to use, and he had to pick one, and he only had thief abilities, so everyone immediately knew he was a thief.
- In another situation he spent his turn running around the back of a big monster so that he could improvise and jump on the monster's back, but the DM said "No, you have to use one of your abilities".
- He thinks the concept of "leveling" is dumb
- He thinks the concept of "hitpoints" is dumb
- He thinks it's dumb / unrealistic to portray the heroes as very attractive, (esp. very attractive females)
- He thinks it's dumb that no reason is given for the heroes' going into the dungeons
- He doesn't like it that you're either trained in a skill or not
- He briefly mentions "saving rolls" as being like tossing a coin
- New feature: He thinks healing surges are dumb; you just wait a bit and you're as good as new. It takes away from the experience. It's like being Wylie E. Coyote. In all the pics of the heroes, their clothing is in perfect condition; no scratches or frayed ends.
- Mages are just artillery: all of the spells are variations on "I zap you"
- The final comment is about how there are never any bathrooms in the dungeons.


1980 - Pac-Man
Pac-Man Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014631/Cl ... mortem-PAC




1980 - Rogue
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)

Gaming History - Rogue (THE roguelike precursor)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AZPc6Hz1nk
- at a certain point he talks about how the game limits how much you can carry. This is something that Diablo continued.
- 24:00 - He points out that you can use items without knowing what their effects will be (eg putting on a ring without knowing what it will do). And he stresses that items are very hit-or-miss: a lot of them do harm. This is very unlike Diablo, where you need to use a scroll of identify before you can benefit from the item's magical effects, and no items actively harm you.
- He also points out that because scrolls of identify are so rare, at a certain point you start using unidentified items out of desperation (eg if you're in a really bad situation and you'd be likely to die anyway). When I heard that I thought that was a really interesting mechanic to have in a game.
- 24:00 - He also points out that as you go further down the levels get darker and darker. This is also unlike Diablo, where (AFAIK) you generally have the same view distance regardless of how far into the game you go.
- you heal a lot faster in Rogue than in Diablo, so that you can run away from a monster and automatically heal while you're running away.



1985 - Super Mario Brothers




1987 - NetHack
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetHack






1989 - Populous
Populous Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Cl ... Postmortem
- Peter Molyneux is really funny
- he tells of how lucky he was to get into the games industry: he had a company exporting baked beans to the Middle East, and Commodore accidentally thought his company was another one (his was Taurus, they mixed him up with another company named Torus).
- he stresses how organically the game came together; the different mechanics came in one at a time in response to their playtesting
- he says taking 2 to 3 days to fix a problem was a big deal
- he starts up Visual Studio to show people his 200-person version of Populous
- at the end he says that he now tries to know EXACTLY what the gameplay will be before they start writing any code. Reminds me of the importance of having a good script before shooting a film.
- he says that he really likes worlds that seem to live on their own. and he likes it when a player can do things that he never could have predicted.
- he says Farmville is a brilliant piece of design
- he points out that the industry does play "follow the leader" a lot


1989 - Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014634/Cl ... -PRINCE-OF



1991 - Hellcats over the Pacific





1993 - Doom

Why's it Good?
- You can dodge all enemy attacks. For example, all ranged enemies have projectiles that take time to get to you. This is also a feature in Goldeneye: if you time things correctly, you can avoid getting shot by a guard. And this is also a feature in Super Smash Brothers.
- You can reload saved games very fast, so you can try something over and over again very quickly.This is exactly how Hotline Miami works, and I think it's a big part of why Hotline Miami is so addictive. Contrast this with Rainbow Six, where you have a good 10-20 seconds or so before you can try again, and you can't save in the middle of a mission: you have to start from the beginning.
- The levels are a great length. It's easy to just pick up the game for one level and then call it a day. If you're good you can finish them in a minute or two, and if you're playing for the first time they can take 10-20 minutes.

Misc
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014627/Cl ... Postmortem
-

  • Doom was

...

  • their 5th FPS.

...

  • They were looking first-and-foremost at the technological advances that had been made when they were considering what they were going to do in their new game.
  • 12:31 - Everything they make goes in the game; they don't have any pre-production. They were also very confident that this game was going to be awesome.
  • 14:00 - They created their creatures this way: they had an artist who would draw pictures of them, and then the artist made clay models of the monsters, and then they used their NEXT computer's camera to take pictures of the clay model as they rotated it on a lazy-susan. But then they stopped doing it because animating the clay models was a pain in the ass; the clay would melt as it was under the lights.
  • 15:43 - John Romero was very concerned about too many polys on screen because he wanted the game to be "fast-fast-fast, a blazing fast game". This reminds me a lot of how Super Smash Brothers, Super Mario, Twisted Metal, Goldeneye, and other games I like can be blazing fast.
  • 16:50 - They made the weapons by buying toys at a toy store, taking pictures of them, and using the NEXT computer's photo software to make them usable in the game.
  • 18:00 - They started making levels that looked like real military bases (square, bland) but then discovered that "flow-wise" it wasn't very fun.
  • 19:30 - They had a UI that was taking up a lot of the screen w/ info (eg a minimap), but they decided it wasn't working well, so they took it out.
  • 19:50 - They also had items at first, which made sense w/ their original idea to have one large world.
  • 20:50 - They had H. R. Giger books / art all over the place as a source of inspiration. They were offered the license to Aliens but turned it down because they didn't want to give up creative control.
  • 21:30 - They also thought it would be more original / unexpected to have players encountering Hell demons in space instead of aliens.

      ...

        • This makes for a rough challenge for sequels to Doom: How do you capture that sense of originality / surprise / the unexpected if people have gotten used to the idea of fighting demons on Mars?
      • 22:10 - John Romero said "forget the boring architecture of real military bases"; he wanted shapes that were more interesting. He wanted places that didn't feel realistic but that seemed plausible as something that might be a military base. He wanted it to be interesting to explore. He focused

      ...

      • on contrast in room heights and contrast in lighting.
      • 23:30 - Romero talks about how the Doom engine introduced an innovation that made it a lot easier to make scary environments: the engine automatically diminished light as it went further from the light source. Then they talk about the first room they created with high ceilings and computer banks above the level of the player; they talk about how most games focused on being functional, but Doom changed things by focusing on the ambiance.
      • 24:30 - They had a crisis in the middle of development because the guy who was porting Wolfenstein 3D to the SNES didn't finish it, and so the whole team had to port it from scratch and got it done in 3 weeks.
      • 26:30 - They ran into a problem where a certain architectural feature in a level was causing the engine to slow down, but John Romero chose to tell the engine developer to fix the engine instead of telling the artist to leave out the interesting architecture. The developer did some research and found a white paper on a particular algorithm that he thought might fix the problem, and it ended up giving birth to a new technique that really sped up the engine and allowed the game to do more interesting things.
      • 37:30 - The artist had to fight with the programmers to get flying monsters in the game, but they felt it was very important (I'm guessing to separate the game from its predecessors and competitors).
      • 38:50 - Tom's vision was getting boiled down in the programmers' attempt to get the game running as fast as possible.
      • 45:10 - They didn't have enough money to do their own sound drivers so they bought some that were being licensed by another guy.
      • 45:50 - John Romero: It takes a lot of time to just go over and over the same area in a game to refine it. Making a great level requires a ton of iteration and a ton of play; you need to play your own level.
      • 46:30 - Their original sky was black, which they thought was realistic, but they realized that it didn't look / feel good, so they switched it. They had tried putting stars but it would look buggy.
      • 47:20 - Even near the end of the development they were tracking the number of lives that a player had, which was a prevalent idea in games at the time b/c of the tradition of arcade games. Romero decided that it wasn't worth frustrating a player who was having a hard time with a level to tell the player that they would need to start the game from the beginning, so he took it out. He also added a save/load feature that would let you save at any point in a level and reload it instantly, as much as you wanted. "So there's a high probability that players will be able to finish the game and get through it"
        • Lesson: Don't mindlessly follow whatever practices the rest of the industry is using. Think about whether that practice is appropriate for your game.
      • 50:10 - They had a 30-hour stretch at the very end with no sleep, where they were running the game on every machine.
      • 53:30 - Romero: Everything was heavily iterated on. We locked the FPS at 35 to make it more stable on slower machines, and we locked the AI at 10 FPS because we didn't want the AI coming at the player too quickly. They started with certain general ideas: if something is far away we don't want the player using the shotgun, we want them using the pistol or the chaingun; if something is big we want the player using the rocket launcher. "We got really lucky balancing all the damage."
      • 57:20 - Romero says that modern deathmatch games have players moving slower through the world, and he really likes the Doom/Quake speeds for player-run.






      1993 - Magic: The Gathering
      - I haven't played this game myself but I have friends who have.

      Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering - Ten Things Every Game Needs
      http://www.wizards.com/magic/magazine/a ... ily/mm/174

      Mark Rosewater, head designer of Magic: The Gathering - Bursting with Flavor: Why Magic is still so delicious
      http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/A ... daily/mr60





      1993 - Myst
      Why's it Good?
      - It's immersive.
      Myst Postmortem
      http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018048/Cl ... Postmortem
      - Just as with the Doom team and successful music bands, their huge hit came after they had already made several previous similar titles:
      1988 - The Manhole
      1989 - The Manhole CD-ROM
      1989 - Cosmic Osmo (floppy disk)
      1990 - Cosmic Osmo and the World Beyond the Mackeral (CD-ROM)
      1991 - Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo
      - They noticed while watching people play that people didn't want boundaries: if they saw a door or forest, they wanted to be able to interact with it. So they tried to make that happen more and more as they created their new games.
      - 7:30 - They didn't know the specifics of what they wanted to do (with the game that became Myst) but they knew some of the things they wanted to do with the game: 1) nonlinear story, 2) believable characters, 3) more advanced graphics, 4) non-arbitrary puzzles, 5) ethical choice, 6) mystery.
      - 8:50 - D&D was an inspiration: they would observe when there's a really good dungeon master, what is it that makes it cool? Rand made a D&D dungeon that didn't have people rolling for their attributes, he would just tell the players what they saw.
      - 10:50 - Zork was another inspiration b/c of its nonlinear story. Star Wars was an inspiration for the world and myth it created. CS Lewis's books were an inspiration for the idea of a portal to another world. Jules Verne was an inspiration for the idea of old books and mysterious islands. They got the idea of two brothers as the main characters from the fact that they (the makers of the game) were two brothers.
      - 13:30 - They were forced by hardware limitations to compartmentalize the game, and they found that it worked really well to have a central place in the game from which other areas branched off. He said they found it very useful, and if you look at DisneyWorld for example they have the same kind of thing going on there (with their different areas branching off from the main area). It makes it easy to avoid getting lost.
      14:30 - They started the game knowing that most people don't like puzzles, and so they focused on a few things to make the game more accessible: make the puzzles 1) familiar, 2) non-arbitrary, and 3) solvable through observation and common sense. "A good puzzle doesn't feel like a puzzle."
      17:30 - He thinks one of the reasons Myst did well is that they made the game for themselves.
      He shows a lot of drawings from their proposal. So it may be a smart idea to sketch out the idea for your game on paper before you start coding.
      $265k was the budget for the game. They came up with the amount they actually thought it would cost, then doubled that and added a bunch more. [in the Q&A he says it actually cost more than that to make the game, but he doesn't remember exactly how much]
      18:45 - They playtested the game in a D&D fashion using the people they had hired, and they found a bunch of issues that they were able to fix before they even started the game.
      24:30 - They wanted to make the world as believable as possible; it's not very believable when someone is talking to you and you can't respond to them, so they had the communication one way through books.
      25:00 - They had a very simple flowchart that described the plot, which made them very happy. He then contrasts that with the flowcharts for Riven's plot, which were so complex that they could never keep things straight in their minds.
      27:50 - He admits that they failed to achieve their goal to emotionally provoke the player.
      30:00 - He says that they chose not to have a soundtrack b/c they thought it would ruin the immersiveness. But they tried it and decided it really added to the game. So they were willing to listen and try new things.
      31:40 - They did "pretty extensive" game testing. They would always put two people at the same time so they could hear them talking to each other. He said this was vitally, vitally important. "We spent a lot of time doing this kind of testing."
      42:50 - He thinks the only game he had ever played previous to Myst was Zork 2.
      49:00 - A questioner says she finished the game in 5 days, and she has friends who finished it in one setting. She asked how they planned out the hours of gameplay. He responds by saying that at that time they didn't really have a precedent for the idea of a game being a certain number of hours, it was more about creating an interesting world.

      1994 - X-COM: Enemy Unknown
      X-COM Postmortem
      http://gdcvault.com/play/1017808/Classi ... rtem-X-COM



      1995 - The Settlers of Catan
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Settlers_of_catan

      - I never really fell in love with this game, and I think it's because it doesn't seem to do as good a job of allowing me to imagine myself as being some powerful person. Monopoly and Risk both let you imagine yourself as the kind of powerful figure you see people talking about all the time (presidents, CEOs, etc). I think those games probably tap into the life experiences of their players: if the player has spent a lot of time listening to people talk about powerful men, then the games that let you pretend to be those powerful men will probably have more of a psychological draw.




      1995 - Warcraft 2





      1996 - Duke Nukem 3D
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duke_Nukem_3D

      Learn to Let Go: How Success Killed Duke Nukem
      http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/fail_duke_nukem/


      1997 - Goldeneye