Analysis of Various Games

• 1980s (Analysis of Games)
• 1990s (Analysis of Games)
• 2000s (Analysis of Games)
• 2010s (Analysis of Games)

Quote:

Sources and influences[edit]
Main article: Sources and influences on the development of Dungeons & Dragons
An immediate predecessor of Dungeons & Dragons was a set of medieval miniature rules written by Jeff Perren. These were expanded by Gary Gygax, whose additions included a fantasy supplement, before the game was published as Chainmail. When Dave Wesely entered the Army in 1970, his friend and fellow Napoleonics wargamer Dave Arneson began a medieval variation of Wesely's Braunstein games, where players control individuals instead of armies.[67] Arneson used Chainmail to resolve combats.[3] As play progressed, Arneson added such innovations as character classes, experience points, level advancement, armor class, and others.[67] Having partnered previously with Gygax on Don't Give Up the Ship!, Arneson introduced Gygax to his Blackmoor game and the two then collaborated on developing "The Fantasy Game", the role-playing game (RPG) that became Dungeons & Dragons, with the final writing and preparation of the text being done by Gygax.[2][68][69]
Many Dungeons & Dragons elements appear in hobbies of the mid-to-late 20th century. For example, character-based role playing can be seen in improvisational theatre.[70] Game-world simulations were well developed in wargaming. Fantasy milieus specifically designed for gaming could be seen in Glorantha's board games among others.[71] Ultimately, however, Dungeons & Dragons represents a unique blending of these elements.
The world of D&D was influenced by world mythology, history, pulp fiction, and contemporary fantasy novels. The importance of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit as an influence on D&D is controversial. The presence in the game of halflings, elves, half-elves, dwarves, orcs, rangers, and the like, draw comparisons to these works. The resemblance was even closer before the threat of copyright action from Tolkien Enterprises prompted the name changes of hobbit to 'halfling', ent to 'treant', and balrog to 'Type VI demon [balor]'. Gygax played down the influence of Tolkien on his development of the game.[72][73][74]
The D&D magic system, in which wizards memorize spells that are used up once cast and must be re-memorized the next day, was heavily influenced by the Dying Earth stories and novels of Jack Vance.[75] The original alignment system (which grouped all characters and creatures into 'Law', 'Neutrality' and 'Chaos') was derived from the novel Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson.[76] A troll described in this work also influenced the D&D definition of that monster.[73]
Other influences include the works of Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Moorcock.[77] Monsters, spells, and magic items used in the game have been inspired by hundreds of individual works such as A. E. van Vogt's "Black Destroyer", Coeurl (the Displacer Beast), Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky" (vorpal sword) and the Book of Genesis (the clerical spell 'Blade Barrier' was inspired by the "flaming sword which turned every way" at the gates of Eden).[76]

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

• Why's it good?
  • The levels are a great length, which seems to be very heavily influenced by the level length in Doom. It's easy to just pick up the game for one level and then call it a day. Considering this, it's an interesting change to not allow players to save during a mission. I wonder if that was because of technical limitations or something else.

Similarities between GoldenEye and Doom

• General game design
  • The game is broken into a series of levels.
    • This was pretty common back then. Mario did this, etc.
• Level design
  • There is a clear focus on variety of appearance.
    • The diversity of appearance in the levels for GoldenEye really is stunning, even today.
  • There is also a clear focus on creating a particular atmosphere.
  • The length of the levels.
    • Speedrunners have gotten the GoldenEye world records to around a minute or less for most of the levels, with the longest level (Control) taking around four minutes. But for new players, those same levels would probably taken between ten minutes and an hour, depending on how cautious the player is being.
  • There are a lot of sliding metal doors (a lot of them open horizontally in GoldenEye as opposed to Doom's vertically-opening doors, but if you look at the Control level you'll see vertically-opening metal doors: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WzuQTSFIWk
  • There are a lot of keycards used to get access to certain doors.
  • The idea of having par times for each level.
• Movement
  • You move quickly, at a running pace.
    • This leads to a lot of action, because you can run past enemies and accumulate a big crowd of them following you, or you can run away from some enemies and inadvertently run into another group of enemies.
  • Side-strafing makes you move faster. This effect is actually way more pronounced in Doom than it is in GoldenEye.
• Combat
  • It is possible to "dodge" enemy attacks.
    • In Doom, many enemies fire projectiles that move in a straight line to the position you were occupying when the shot was fire. These projectiles take enough time to arrive at their destinations that you can avoid being hit by them by moving out of the way (like in Galaga). The enemies also take enough time to shoot at you that, if you're quick, you can shoot them first.
      • This is unlike, say, OFP, where the AI are faster at identifying targets as friend or foe, are quicker on the draw, and are more accurate than human players.
    • In GoldenEye, the projectiles arrive at their destination immediately, but the guards always play some kind of animation before they fire (like kneeling down), and so you if you spot them, you have time to move behind cover or to shoot them first (which, if it doesn't kill them, stuns them, preventing them from firing for a period of time).
• Weapons
  • There are limited ammo types. The pistol uses the same ammo as one or more of the automatic weapons.
    • This makes for less time thinking about ammunition (as opposed to, say, OFP), less frustration when switching between weapons (as a weapon is more likely to have ammo), and probably helps a lot to speed up the game.
    • In GoldenEye they actually pretty-much follow the real world, where pistols and SMGs are both 9mm, and the AK and M16 both use an 'assault rifle' round.
  • Ammo is automatically switched between weapons that use the same ammo type.

Things GoldenEye did that went beyond Doom

• General game design
  • GoldenEye tracked whether or not you had beaten each level on each difficulty level.
    • This made the game much more open, because if you got stuck on a particular level on a particular difficulty, you could still "progress" by beating another level on a difficulty which you hadn't yet beat it on.
• Weapons
  • In Doom, you never reload your weapon. In GoldenEye, you do.
    • I think GoldenEye's reloading adds a nice layer of tactics to the game.

GoldenEye Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016460/Cl ... -GoldenEye

• he confirms that they were playing a lot of Doom while they worked on GoldenEye
• he stresses that the game came out so well because he had a fantastic team
• basically everyone on the team was a big James Bond fan, so that probably motivated them to work harder
• he stresses the importance of using humor to reduce tension.
• he mentions that even after developing the game for 3 years he still enjoyed playing it because of its sandbox potential. for example, he would go to the bunker level, put on invincibility, let the infinite guards come after him, and he'd shoot off their hats so that he had a bunch of hats on the ground. then he'd shoot the hats up into the air and try to juggle them by shooting them. (I had this exact same kind of experience with its sandbox potential.)
• he says that halfway through development he was not happy at all with the progress they had made. He says they spent a full year going over levels again and again and again to add little details that would make the world seem more alive.

1997 - Ultima Online
Ultima Online Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016629/Cl ... tem-Ultima



1997 - Fallout
Fallout Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1015843/Cl ... Postmortem
1:00 - It was an unusual game for Interplay at the time b/c it 1) didn't use one of the fancy licenses available to them (eg Star-Trek), 2) they didn't use one of the many engines available to them, 3) there was no budget, 4) there was no staff (at the beginning). He would buy pizza to entice people to come by after their normal work to talk about the game.
3:45 - The #1 takeaway he wants you to know is that he had an "AMAZING TEAM".
5:00 - Computer game influences:
- X-COM - for the turn-based combat
- Crusader - for the crisp 640x480 graphics
- Wasteland - Everyone on the team had played this game.
- Ultima - It guided how the guy thought about how an RPG should be made.
7:00 - Paper and pencil game influences
- GURPS - Classless, skill-based games
- WizWar - The board is shuffled, so every time you play it it feels like a totally different game.
- Gamma world - The idea of mutations, a wide variety of things that you can run intpo
8:20 - Book influences:
- A Canticle for Leibowitz - For the idea of people cherishing technology after a war.
- I Am Legend (and the movie Omega Man) - For how an individual would handle thinking he's the last surviving person on Earth. They wanted people to feel isolated when they were chosen to leave the Vault, and to feel like the only "normal" person in the world, so they'd feel special.
- On the Beach - For how a community would survive past a nuclear war, and what happens when they're approached by strangers.
9:30 - Movie influences:
- Road Warrior - This one's obvious. The jacket, gun, and dog are all in the game.
- A Boy and His Dog - This one had the Vault, and the idea that not all the mutations would be obvious.
- The Day After - For the idea of how rapidly civilization would deteriorate after a war.
- Forbidden Planet - That the robots and tech would be based on what the '50s projected the future would be like.
- City of Lost Children - The art people fell in love with this movie: steam-powered tech, large knobs and dials.
- La Jetee - How civilization would try to recover from a horrible disaster. The art director loved the look of the tech in this movie.
11:45 - Challenges came in four flavors: Team, Design, Technical, Legal
12:37 - Team challenges: At first there were no resources. The first six months were just him. After 6 months he got 1 scripter and 1 artist. Many of the people who helped during year 1 joined officially in year 2, when they had 15 people. In year 3 they had 30 people.
15:00 - He shows a video of the first prototype, which he created by combining assets from other games that Interplay was working on. He says the prototype can be found on the Fallout disk in an extras folder. The final team challenge was long hours: for the last six months of the game they were all working 12-14 hours a day, every day. He says he doesn't know if any of them could do it now when they're older (they were in their 20s at the time).
18:20 - Design challenges - 
24:00 - If there's one thing he could remove from the game, it would be the timed quests.
25:00 - The team wanted to put in a lot of cultural references, but he was worried about the game becoming dated, so he made a rule: if a player doesn't get a joke / reference, they shouldn't even realize that a joke / reference is being made. He gives an example of the "Slayer" attribute being named like that b/c one of the members was a huge "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" fan and wanted a perk with the word "slayer" in it.
26:30 - The original name for the game was "Vault 13", and the team liked it, but marketing didn't like it b/c it didn't give a sense of what the game was about. Marketing suggested names like "Aftermath", "Survivor", "Postnuclear Adventure". Then the president of Interplay took the game home over a weekend and played it, and suggested the name "Fallout", which Jim immediately liked.
41:45 - He talks about the legacy of Fallout: things he sees in other games now that weren't prevalent before Fallout.
- An open world: 1) It's a "sandbox" game before that term existed, 2) no areas were restricted, 3) the only limits are creature difficulty
- A nonlinear story: 1) the player was free to go wherever, 2) the story unfolded naturally over time, 3) there were multiple ways to solve quests. They had a rule that for any quest, there should be a way to 1) fight your way through it, 2) talk your way through it, and 3) sneak your way through it.
43:40 - He was heavily influenced by one of the first quests in Wasteland, where a boy is looking for his dog and you find it in a cave, but the dog is rabid, so you have to kill it, and the boy ends up hating you, and so you have to ask yourself whether you did a good thing or a bad thing.
44:30 - Perks were really easy to implement, and were put in after the head of Interplay said that skill points weren't enough.
45:20 - Called shots let them add variety to combat (reminds me a LOT of GoldenEye's variety in death animations), and allowed them to add to their dark humor motif (letting you shoot a cow in the udder).
46:40 - He thinks the vision statement was really important for getting their new employees in the right mindset about what the game was going for.
- He also stresses the usefulness of reusable software (OS abstraction, movie player, script engine)
47:25 - They stressed the game as an EXPERIENCE from the very beginning: the box, the manual, the Interplay logo, the interface itself, the splash screens, the web page
48:30 - He stresses again how amazing the team was. He lists the following qualities:
- Talented
- Hard-working
- Ego-less
- Focused on the same goals


1997 - Final Fantasy VII

Why's it Good?
- attractive girls
- really, really easy gameplay.
- lots of variety; there are lots of small puzzles (ex: the motorcycle chase)
- I'm noticing the kind of gameplay that people see a LOT of nowadays in console games: it's basically an interactive movie/comic, where there's no real challenge. You just kind of hit the "x" button every so often.
- the story seems heavily influenced by the movie/manga Akira

What Could Be Better?

1998 - Metal Gear Solid

This speedrun actually seems to do a great job of highlighting the essential gameplay. Since it makes the entire game viewable within a single sitting you get a really good bird's-eye perspective of the game.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUQY6RHrtbs
Things I noticed:
- Awesome music.
- Awesome textures / graphics.
- Awesome sounds.
- Awesome variety of gameplay.
- You get to imagine yourself as a badass.
- There's a love story.
- There's a lot of science fiction (this reminds me of Will Smith's observation that scifi movies were the most successful).
- A lot of variation in the voices of the characters: black accent (DARPA chief), rich white accent (the pres of ArmsTech), English accent (Liquid Snake), nerdy accent (Otacon), russian accent (Sniper Wolf), cowboy accent (Revolver Ocelot), whatever Psycho Mantis' accent is, Vulcan Raven's accent. And all of the voice actors give dramatic readings of their lines: it doesn't sound like real-life.
- Getting the three keycards to activate Metal Gear seems really drawn out. IDK if they did that to make the game longer or to build anticipation for the activation of Metal Gear, but it's noticeable that the first disk of the game is action-packed (it's just one thing happening after another) and the second disk of the game feels less action-packed.
- I've noticed that they use cinematic transitions before some of the boss fights. For example, before the 2nd vulcan raven fight you have the crows circling you in the elevator; before you fight psycho mantis the music gets cut out in the lobby; before you fight grey fox you see the soldiers cut up in the hallway.
- There are some very cinematic camera angles (that seems to have been inherited from RPGs).

1998 - Starcraft


1998 - Rainbow Six

Why's it Good?
- the atmosphere is phenomenal.
- the game's concept was very novel when it came out; I'm not aware of any attempts at making a realistic 3D shooter.

What Could Be Better?

• while replaying it, right after playing a little Doom, I was struck by how much time I spent fighting the clunky controls. Even with Doom I struggle a bit to do the things I want to do, but Rainbow Six is a lot worse: important buttons are spread all over the keyboard, so common tasks like flashbanging a room and then switching to your primary weapon require you to move your hand across the entire keyboard.
  
  • Later: You can remap the controls, so this doesn't seem like a fair criticism.
• I also noticed that the game gets into "uncanny valley" territory, where the focus on the realism of the setting of the game makes the unrealistic portions stand out a lot more. For example, having enemies that just stand there while you shoot them (even Doom isn't that unrealistic), or friendlies who don't look in the direction of the most likely enemy contact, or being unable to tell your squadmates to watch a door or throw a flashbang.
  
• It takes too long to try again after a failure. Doom and Hotline Miami are great because they load games lightning-fast, which keeps you from getting too frustrated when you hit a really hard portion of the game: you can just keep trying over and over again. It's a lot more frustrating when you have to wait 10-20 seconds every time something goes wrong (which happens frequently when you're learning the ropes).

1999 - Counter-Strike

Why's it Good?
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/s ... ?t=2859978
http://www.neoseeker.com/forums/1185/t1 ... -so-great/
http://www.ign.com/articles/2009/09/28/ ... nterstrike
http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/tactical-intervention
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/1 ... php?page=2

An excellent collection of articles on level design by Counter-Strike's most successful level creator, David Johnston:
http://www.johnsto.co.uk/design/
- one thing that I took away from his postmortems was that he really benefited from being there at the beginning: his levels had nothing inherently wrong with them, and so they just built up a following that was hard to supplant with new maps. For example, he created maps later that no one ever played, even though they were probably just as good as de_dust.
- Another thing I took away from this is that he didn't need to spend an obscene amount of time creating a level that ended up getting an absolutely humongous following. In other words, there's no direct relationship between the amount of time you spend creating the level and how successful it will be. A lot of factors that determine whether the level goes viral are outside of the level-creation process.

Why cs_office is an awesome map
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srkFwR11T68

cs is about iteration
adapting what you do about over a series of rounds
the time when you're dead gives you time to think about what to do next round
- the race for positioning makes a big difference
- one side can gain an advantage by using 1 tactic, but the other side can respond with a counter-tactic
- what you do 5 seconds into the round makes a big difference
- there are only three areas where the teams interact
- there's a rush like the tip-off in basketball
- he likes how the map offers a change in the engagement ranges as you move through the map
- it's one of the few places in games that's in a "normal" environment
- lots of breakable stuff in the environment. If you find a hallway with everything torn apart you can get an idea of what's happened



1999 - Driver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_(video_game)
Creative Director: Martin Edmondson

My thoughts on the game:
- Great '70s-style music
- Great sound effects (the sound of the engine / accelerator is very satisfying)
- Great details (boxes / papers in the alleys, hubcaps flying off)
- Great physics (it feels real but also fun)
- The game runs very smoothly [the lack of this characteristic ended up being a huge problem with Driver 2 IIRC]
- You can skip all of the story stuff and just enjoy the gameplay (the Gunpoint creator stressed that this is extremely important)
- Just like with GoldenEye, IMO a lot of the enjoyment comes from imagining yourself to be a cool character who you have seen a lot in movies. So the game itself doesn't need to spend a lot of time telling a story, because the people playing the game will come to the game already supplying the fantasy from all of the movies they (the players) have watched.
- I liked the immersion of taking your missions from your answering machine

A retrospective on the game:
http://gamerlimit.com/2010/08/retrospec ... -wheelman/
- It payed homage to '70s car chases that a lot of people had fond memories of (reminds me of GoldenEye)
- It was the first game to let people drive around a city in 3D. GTA had a top-down view at that point.
- It was also in real cities (unlike GTA)
- The graphics were great for the time
- He praises the physics / details (boxes, hubcaps)
- He notes that the company had previously created the Destruction Derby series, and so they were presumably building on past experience. That seems to be a common theme in success stories.
- He praises the film director feature
- He praises the ability to choose between missions and still get to the end of the game.

Creative Director Martin Edmondson on his first favorite game: Defender
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIVaUUqyWhE
- He emphasizes the how satisfying the particle and sound effects were when you knocked out an opponent


1999 - Super Smash Brothers

2000s - Avernum

Why's it Good?
- exotic names help w/ escapism
- exotic ways of talking help w/ escapism
- exotic scenery & topics help w/ escapism
- audio effects help w/ escapism (the dripping of the cave)
- You get into a kind of trance, where you just totally forget about the real world and instead get hypnotized into only perceiving the fake world.
- it's easy at first
- you get a fun sense of exploration

What Could Be Better?


2000 - Baldur's Gate II
Baldur's Gate Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1013661/Baldur-s-Gate-A-10


2001 - Grand Theft Auto III



2001 - Halo: Combat Evolved

2014.09.05 - Kotaku - The Unusual Excellence Of Halo's Best Level
http://kotaku.com/the-unusual-excellenc ... 1631041139
- gives really good analysis of what makes the game good



2005 - Guitar Hero

2012.12.30 - Fantastic interview via StartupGrind
http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/30/how-th ... -business/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=td7eIm7za2Q
- This is an amazing talk. It's packed with useful information.
- They started out renting videogames over the web in '99, during the dot-com boom. They raised $1 million with a powerpoint pitch. Their company started 6 months after Netflix. After the bust they realized they couldn't raise money to do a B2C company and so they decided they would need to do something else.
- They ended up selling gamepads for DDR before it got mainstream in the US, and the gamepads kept breaking, so they realized they could make them themselves (they had experience working with manufacturers in China/Taiwan when they were working for their father's company, which was an auto parts import/export business).
- They had a real appreciation for how huge DDR was in Asia, and had been thinking for years about how to make it accessible to westerners. Part of the problem was that DDR was heavy on J-Pop; there wasn't a lot of music that was recognizable to westerners.
- They knew a westernized version should have music that the players would recognize.
- He thinks a big part of its success is that it makes people feel like they're a rock star. One critic who had refused to play the game for years said he changed his mind the first time he put the strap over his head to have the guitar hang from his shoulders; the psychological effect was immediate.
39:00 - Big videogame companies use sales data to decide what to do in the future. The problem is that that data is backwards looking, which means that people tend to make whatever has already existed. That's a big reason for the lack of innovation in videogames. [I need to get the exact quote; this was eye-opening to me]
45:00 - He thinks not having VC money gave them more flexibility to pivot; sounds exactly like the story of how Twitter got started (a huge pivot)
48:50 - He gets asked about his new company
49:50 - He says they've been interested for a long time in the idea of using videogames for exercise.
50:00 - 53:00 - He gives the example of how tag is physiologically the same as doing sprints, but the experience is a lot more fun for people.
55:50 - He says he's seen a problem with a lot of companies where they'll get to 12-15 people and then hire 2-3 people, but also lose 2-3, and it's hard for them to grow past that level.
56-57 - He says their team is only 8 people; he sounds a LOT like where the Blogger guy was before he started Twitter: he's had one hit, and made millions on it, but now he's trying to do something even bigger.
57:30 - He switches to Q&A
Someone asks about what it was like dealing with the music industry. He says that for the original game they couldn't get access to the original songs, they could only get permission to do re-records. So they had someone help them to do that.

2007 - Portal
Portal Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014822/Ou ... cular-Drop



2008 - Braid
Braid Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014831/In ... Innovative



2009 - FarmVille
FarmVille Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1016592/Th ... arned-from



2009 - Minecraft

Why's it Good?

- accessible / simple
- easy to learn, hard to master(?)
- allows for people creating new games within the game (like GoldenEye's multiplayer)
- multiplayer is what really hooks people and made it viral (same as CS, GoldenEye, etc.)

Misc Links

2010.03.01 - Official Minecraft Site - About
http://web.archive.org/web/201003011038 ... /about.jsp

Quote:

Origins

I started Minecraft after playing some Infiniminer with a couple of people from TigSource.
I realized that a game that simple yet that dynamic had a lot of potential to turn into a really great game, and kept coming up with things I wanted to change and stuff I wanted to add.
I had recently quit my job as a game developer to be able to focus more on indie game dev during my free time, and I was looking for a new game to develop. I had a few ideas floating around, but most required really long development times.

These two factors led to Minecraft.

Development and philosophy

I've got a few plans and visions, but my only true design decision is to keep it fun and accessible. There's no design doc, but there are two lists; one for bugs, and one for features I want to add but think I might forget. I make sure to play the game a lot [Nathan: This was also true of the GoldenEye team], and I've built my share of towers, and flooded my share of caves. If something ever doesn't feel fun, I'll remove it. I believe that I can combine enough fun, accessibility and building blocks for this game to be a huge melting pot of emergent gameplay.

I strongly believe that all good stories have a conflict, and that all good games tell a good story regardless of if it's pre-written or emergent. Free building mode is fine and dandy, but for many people it will ultimately become boring once you've got it figured out. It's like playing a first person shooter in god mode, or giving yourself infinite funds in a strategy game.. a lack of challenge kills the fun.
For survival mode, I'd rather make the game too difficult than too easy. That also means I'm going to have to include some way of winning the game (or some other climax) to prevent it becoming too exhausting.

But if it's no fun, I'll redesign.

2014.09.15 - Notch - I'm Leaving Mojang
http://notch.net/2014/09/im-leaving-mojang/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8318702

Quote:

Not everyone can be an entrepreneur and I feel that in this case (on a different scale of course), we basically watched a plausible version of how Apple could have gotten started if there was only a Wozniak but no Jobs. [Nathan - very interesting point!]

2013.11.05 - Wired - The Amazingly Unlikely Story of How Minecraft Was Born
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/11/minecraft-book/

Quote:

Anyone looking for more refined business logic behind what would become the most profitable gaming phenomenon of the last decade is on a fool’s errand. Markus is notoriously disinterested in business and economics. When someone asks him to reveal the secret behind Minecraft‘s unbelievable financial success, he just smiles and shrugs his shoulders. He just followed his gut, he says, did what felt right and what worked for him. To the question of what was the most important thing he learned from Minecraft‘s early sales, Markus answers:

“I understood that an orange splash where it says ‘half price’ works really well. That’s what I had on the site during the alpha phase.”

Lesson: The game's virality might be attributable in part to the fact that people can very easily share their accomplishments with other people who haven't played the game, and nonplayers will immediately appreciate the accomplishment. It's not like other areas where there's a big gap between how impressive a feat is to the people who play the game and how impressive it is to people who've never played it before and have no idea what they're looking at. A good example is Dwarf Fortress: people can't just snap a screenshot of Dwarf Fortress and impress non-players; non-players will have no idea what they're looking at. The best closest DF can come is in the stories that people have written up about their adventures in the game.


What Could Be Better?






2011 - Super Morse Code RPG
http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/567733

Why's it Good?
- good music
- quick intro (I wish you could skip it though...)
- simple controls (just one button!), and he did a really good job of making it reset after a second of no input.
- sound effects for all the different actions
- the game makes you feel like you're doing something educational
- the game is pretty easy
- good music

What Could Be Better?
- There are a lot of arbitrary factors in the game that determine your success, and each time you reach a dead end you have to start from the beginning of the game. It's like being in a maze where every time you hit a dead end you need to start over again from the beginning. It gets kind of old after a while.
- it gets boring. there isn't much replay value. I think this is probably because the game is very linear; there isn't any variation in your interactions with the enemies, or the way you can go about doing things. You can't have fun by trying to do things in a weird way (unlike Doom or GoldenEye, where you can set up challenges for yourself, like finishing the level in a certain amount of time)



2012 - Journey
Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017700/Designing


2013 - Game Dev Tycoon

Why's it Good?
- You learn a lot of real-world lessons from playing the game. One example: making multiple games in a single genre is a very smart idea because with each iteration you learn valuable information about what works and what doesn't work. After seeing this in the game I immediately saw a parallel in R/L when watching 1) John Romero giving a postmortem of Doom and 2) a postmortem of Myst. In both cases the game developers had created ~5 previous games in their respective genres before their huge success.

What Could Be Better?
- I am personally more interested in the early stages of becoming a game developer because that's where I am right now, but the game pretty quickly gets you to the point where you're managing other people. I wish the game gave more attention to the early battles that game developers will face, like staying motivated when you've got other responsibilities competing for your attention.



2010 - Amnesia: The Dark Descent
Thoughts while playing the demo:
- While playing it I was reminded of my experience exploring the old TCNJ library at night junior year. I started thinking about the differences between the game and my r/l experience: 1) in the game you have audioclips that play of people talking, eg if you find a letter you hear someone read it out. This contrasts with my r/l experience, where there was absolute dead silence the entire time.
- The atmospheric audio may be a bit overdone IMO. My guess is that you want enough audio to overcome any ambient noise that the player may have going on in r/l (like traffic outside), but in my r/l experience I found the silence pretty scary. And you could maybe record "room tone".
- Again, compared with my r/l experience, there was WAY more light in Amnesia. This may be just another limitation of the technology. In r/l it was really pretty spooky to just have the dim glow from my cell phone lighting up a small area in front of me.
- Another problem is the gamer's ability to stop the game and then pick up where he left off. If you're really exploring an abandoned building you don't have that option, and it adds to the tension. I'm not sure there's any way around that, though. Maybe if you made players play while having their hands restricted so they couldn't remove the goggles? That would be an interesting experiment...


2010 - Starcraft 2

An interesting fan-opinion on why he disliked SC2's multiplayer:
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/04 ... he-void/2/

Quote:

I played StarCraft II for a while, a bit before HotS was released, and I found the single-player campaign to be a lot of fun but the multi-player was far more trouble than it was worth. With a huge amount of effort, playing every day, I made it into the “gold” league but I really resented the amount of time I had to spend studying units and maps and learning every possible “cheese” on every map, how to spot it, when and where to scout for it and how to counter it. “Cheese doesn’t work,” the saying went, and that was true if you diligently kept up your vigilance. Quite simply, though, scouting for cheese was not my idea of fun and, even though I would win more than I lost if the game actually became a real game, this happened so infrequently that I stopped bothering.

I should add that I was not playing to win. I was playing to have a real game, not a cheesy coin flip. Also, I really resented being told “oh, you see, you obviously lost because that pylon was half a second too late and one grid-square to the left – DUH!”

2012 - Hotline Miami

Complex - The Hotline Miami Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilKzuY9tjyg
- some good info about how they made the game

- One reason I liked GTA3 (in Liberty City) was that the protagonist didn't talk, so it was easier to project yourself into the game (if that makes any sense). Jonatan Soderstrom said the same thing in one interview (it may be the Complex interview above). Hotline Miami 1 sort of does that with the main character; I don't think even see his face much. But what's even more interesting is that it also seems to do the same thing with the story: it holds back enough about the story that you can project your own reasons why you are doing what you're doing. I only realized that when I read a critical fan review of the second game, in which the person didn't like having everything explained. So when making a new game it may be worth considering holding back a full explanation for why you're doing what you're doing.



2013 - Forza Motorsport 5

- I love being able to rewind. It reminds me of Braid and Gunpoint.
- I wish I could control how far back it would rewind. 
- I love that you spend most of the time winning; it's relatively easy to get gold medals in the races
- I love having the game tell me "Good Turn" / "Perfect Turn" etc for drafting. It reminds me of DDR / Guitar Hero
- I wish the game gave you more ability to come up with interesting scenarios. IMO that was one of the things that made GoldenEye amazing: the combination of the weapon-choices, level-choices, and win-condition choices made it easy to create scenarios that felt totally new (eg proximity mines in Archives is unlike anything in the rest of the game)



2013 - Gunpoint

Why's it Good?
- humor
- good art
- good music
- you're able to retry quickly (just like hotline miami and doom)

2013 - How Reviewing Games for Nine Years Helped in Designing Gunpoint
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1019349/Ho ... s-for-Nine
- Lesson #1: Spending time thinking about why you like the games you like will help you make better games.
- He gives Deus Ex as an example:
1) He liked the fact that you have a lot of options, but then noticed that Morrowind also had lots of options but that he still liked Deus Ex more, so he asked himself, "What are those moments in the game that make me go, 'This game is awesome'?"
2) He then recounted an experience in which he was faced with such a difficult obstacle that his options were severely cut off, and he had to use his imagination to determine what options, if any, were still open to him. He ended up realizing that he did still have an option open to him, and felt a great feeling of success at having discovered this counter-intuitive solution to the situation. He says he applied this to Gunpoint by making the guards extremely tough; this severely limits the player's option-space, which forces the player to use his brain to figure out which of his many initial options are the right ones him to get through a tough situation.
- Lesson #2: If you understand something, you don't need to copy it. Specifically, he says exactlywhat I've noticed about art: if you really understand why you like something, you'll also understand the underlying reasons that you like it, and so you'll be able to create something else which is superficially different but provides the same underlying satisfaction. That way you avoid having your artistic work seem stale.
- Lesson #3: Question conventions before you copy them. He'd been annoyed for years with games that didn't have a good autosave system, and so rather than just following the behavior of other games he decided to break from the mold and have the game autosave every 5 seconds, and allow the player to go back to any of the previous saves. He ended up getting a lot of positive feedback because of it. This reminds me of John Romero's postmortem of Doom: he said it is very important to be able to save anywhere and have games load instantly.
- Lesson #4: Never assume the player is engaged. Make the story skippable. This is something I noticed about Halo: I was able to play through the entire game without the slightest idea of the plot.
- Lesson #5: Play the games people are excited about, even if they're not your thing. He started his career at PC Gamer writing the 60-word summaries of all the games on their demo disk, and he says this was a brilliant education for a game maker because it forced him to play all the genres, even ones that he might have otherwise avoided. He gives Rise of Nations as an example of a game he would not have otherwise played, but ended up falling in love with. He says that the key thing that the game did well to win him over was to have a great tutorial: it would tell you to do something, but wouldn't lock off your other options, and so if you clicked on some other unit, it would tell you about it. It felt more collaborative than most demos.
- He gives a second example of Spelunky: He put off playing it for a long time, but then fell in love with it. He said the key to the game was the random levels, which prevents the game from feeling frustrating. It fixes the problem that he had with no autosave: the repetitiveness involved in learning how to get good at the game.
- He heard that Spelunky was made with GameMaker, tinkered with GameMaker every weekend for 3 years, eventually hired artists and musicians, and published the game on Steam.

2013.06 - The Making of Gunpoint
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7mHbTvDtBA
- He had ~9 testers via his blog almost from the beginning of his development.
9:30 - He added a slight delay to how quickly the guards would shoot you after getting feedback from his testers.
12:20 - He got the idea for the Crosslink from his experience creating levels for Doom / Quake2 / etc. When making those levels you create the door, then create the switch, and then have to tell the game that those two objects should talk to each other. He found that he liked having switches interact with the doors in more interesting ways, like having a single switch activate two doors, or activate a door that was further away from it.
15:30 - He gives another source of inspiration for Crosslink: the 130-in-1 electronics kits that they make for kids, that let you hook up different things to each other.
17:30 - The first time he thought he might be on to something was when he sent the first version with Crosslink to his testers and he started hearing back about all the crazy things they were doing with it. At that point he had 94 testers.
22:30 - He explains that at one point he had guards leave floors that were dark if the lights weren't working, but he decided not to keep it b/c it made it too easy to sneak around b/c you could just turn off all the lights.
22:50 - He notes that an intermediate version of the game had acceleration on the walking, which was very annoying. He says the final game has little, if any.
25:00 - He gives an anecdote of how it took him 4 days to get the elevators working the way they do. He only later realized that there would be a much simpler way to code it. He recommends that if a feature is taking more than half a day to code, you should ask yourself, "Do I really need this?".
27-30min - He discusses how he got his artists. He recorded an 8 minute video of him playing the game and asked (on his blog?) if any artists would be interested in helping out. At that point he was planning for the game to be free, and he recommends that you start out that way, because then the people you get will be interested in the project for its own sake (this reminds me of the GoldenEye and Fallout postmortems; in both teams the majority of the people loved the game for its own sake and were not as motivated by money). He mentions that everyone who worked on the game is set up to get a certain fair percentage.
30:50 - After going back and forth with the artist about the scale of the objects in the game, he ended up having to remake all of the levels so that the artist could make things a proper size.
~36min - A lot of people were telling him to charge for it, but he had already said it would be free, so he put up a blog post asking people what they thought, and he got a 99-1 split in favor of charging for it.
41 - He turned down any offers from publishers that required exclusivity.


2013 - The Unfinished Swan
Postmortem
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018037/Th ... om-Student
3-4min - The way his game got picked up is: 1) he was a grad student at USC and got weekly assignments from one of the profs there, and one of them was the idea for this game, 2) he entered the game into festivals, 3) A video of his game got uploaded to YouTube, 4) some people at Sony saw the video and contacted him about turning into a full-fledged game


2014 - Flappy Bird
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/a ... rd/283526/
http://www.unwinnable.com/2014/02/11/fl ... wDWQ_ldVHu
- easy to learn
- tests reaction-time rather than testing a person's ability to think something out. I think humans aren't really designed to think really hard, and so they tend to prefer games that don't require hard thinking.
- trial-and-error gameplay with fast loading of new games (similar to Doom, Hotline Miami, Angry Birds(?), Canabalt)
- one of the article points out that the game doesn't gradually build up the difficulty, but instead starts it out hard. I should think about how a person should make that decision one way or the other. In Hotline Miami the game starts out easier. Same in Doom. On the other hand, in those games you can save once you pass the easier sections, so that if you fail at a harder section you don't need to repeat the easier sections. Flappy Bird doesn't do this. I wonder if this was an oversight on their part?

http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/new ... -201403114




2015 - Westerado: Double-Barreled
- Great art
- Great music, reminded me of Ocarina of Time. The music you get when you enter a shop especially reminded me of Ocarina of Time.
- Loved the way animals scatter from in front of you (rabbits, chickens, buffalo, etc)
- Easy combat (also like Ocarina) is pleasant
- Final boss battle was a bit frustrating because you get started so much further back than the actual boss, so you need to repeatedly go over the same enemies, which takes a minute or two
- I LOVED the in-game 5-card draw, I'd never played that poker variant before, so it felt really cool to learn it and also really helped with the immersion. It reminded me a lot of how I got sucked into FF8 by the card game.
- The way the different areas connect to each other reminded me of Pokemon, although I suppose early Zelda games worked the same way (?)
- The layout of the towns reminded me a lot of Fallout, maybe just b/c of the graphics style (ie it wasn't square-sized people like in Pokemon).