Extra Punctuation: Not All Sequels Suck

[BreakfastMan]

I actually think that is a bad thing. Let us look at books for example. Would it have really been good if writing books was so complicate that only a select few with years of training could write them?

Well, actually, it already is. Writing takes both talent and experience, and is much more involved than "have a good idea and then write 400 pages of your characters diong things". Very few people actually write on a level that is publishable. See: Fanfiction.

The point is that those people can actually create a story (or at least something that vaguely resembles one in many cases) with a relatively small amount of effort. No, they will probable not be published, but they can at least make something without years of technical know-how. Video games don't even have that.

 

[BreakfastMan]

But what if mainstream gaming took the Inform 7 approach? Create a deep, intuitive toolset designed for non-programmers that can let you create models, textures and game mechanics with dropdowns and a visual mouse-driven interface to as complex a level as the user desires, so that any lone developer, like ones who specialize more in aesthetics or story writing, can create a game that could then be sold in mainstream circles or over Steam to anyone who wants to look for it?

I actually think this is your strongest point in that entire article. I had been thinking about the same thing myself recently. All other forms of story-telling (books, movies, music) are all very easy to create. All you have to do is just pick up a pen and some paper/video camera/instrument and go at it. Video games are not at the point were they can do that (the closest thing is Game Maker, and even that needs a decent amount of technical expertise), and I think that is really hampering the medium. You hear that developers? Make a freeware program that makes creating games so stupidly simple my grandmother could do it! Get on it!

I think the problem with this is that the more you simplify the language the less control you have over what you can create with it. Making a text adventure game is one thing, but when you start talking about more complicated games its a different story. While toolsets and specialized scripting languages can help remove complexity from programming and such, they tend to be rather focused in what you can do with them. So no matter how powerful your toolset you're always going to be limited by what its capable of, and generally speaking the simpler the toolset the less powerful it is.

So sure coming up with a simple intuitive language for creating text based games is one thing, but more complex games will always require more complex tools, and more complex tools will always require more technical knowledge.

Really I think the best route is to the kind of scenario being talked about here is through modding toolsets. You can take out a lot of the complexity due to the fact that most of the guts of the game are already put together.

I do agree, that is a problem. That is probably the only reason something like that does not exist at this point. But I can dream, can't I?

 

[OmniscientOstrich]

'Speaking as a novelist, writing a novel is easy. Well, actually it's probably a lot harder than most people realize, but it's a lot easier technically speaking than making a game. But what if mainstream gaming took the Inform 7 approach? Create a deep, intuitive toolset designed for non-programmers that can let you create models, textures and game mechanics with dropdowns and a visual mouse-driven interface to as complex a level as the user desires, so that any lone developer, like ones who specialize more in aesthetics or story writing, can create a game that could then be sold in mainstream circles or over Steam to anyone who wants to look for it? Would that not spark the same creative renaissance in gaming that inexpensive digital cameras created in the film industry?'

Oh, so now he's all behind the idea of creating a development toolset system that easliy enables those with little game design experience to craft their ideas. So much for only wanting games by 'professional game designers' (see LBP review) eh Yahtzee, you quixotic, hypocritical shit.

 

[rickynumber24]

I really wish more of those early 3d-era games had taken the "leper king" approach.
The awful low-polygon count blobs that made up so many games then are a complete turnoff for me, both at the time they came out, but more especially now when I want to go back and experience some of the ones I never played.
I know people love the shit out of FF7, but for me the hopping marshmallows that were the characters on environment maps that were super detailed made the game feel absurd. I always imagine how cool it would have been if they had stuck with 2D sprites for just one more iteration, and just made them super-detailed.

Yeah, it's fun to play the "guess the pre-rendered background part" game.
(... where by "fun", I mean "an interesting distraction"...)

My personal pet peeve is actually the control scheme: It's really, really hard to tell, sometimes, where you can get to from where, and they really like making you go directions that don't correspond to the cardinal directions on the gamepad.

 

[OtherSideofSky]

Well, I guess it's time to look up Inform 7 and experiment with some text adventures. I've written a short one before in Jython, but the complexity that even that required made me despair of ever being able to have the time for something more complicated.

 

[The Cake Is Annoying]

Thanks muchly for the Inform 7 recommendation. I've been banging my head off a brick wall trying to learn programming for too long and doing a full time course isn't an option. This could be what I'm looking for : )

 

[So_So_Man]

what about half-life 2?

 

[SuperShadowAce]

I play Mario games for the story, well the RPG's anyway.

 

[RIOgreatescapist]

"Another one was Resident Evil 4, the head-and-shoulders standout best of an otherwise TERRIBLY OVERRATED SERIES, and which featured the same protagonist as Resident Evil 2."

What a shame, yahtzee has indeed jumped the shark.

 

[rankfx]

I keep telling myself that as game development becomes more complicated and involved, the tools will have to get easier to use and it's only a matter of time before people with little knowledge of programming or rigging a skeleton can make a game. I think everyone (well at least most people on the escapist) would have had at least one idea for a game- it'd be cool if it were easier to make them without learning all the details of programming.

I think books are a good example- anyone could write a book if they applied themselves, so it's not really about who can afford to go and get the best education and then spend years working their way up the industry, it's about who has a good idea and has an understanding of the medium deep enough to make something worth reading.

 

[rayen020]

i don't know that this should be titled not all sequels suck. it's more like "this is stuff i would have said during absense of punctuation but didn't have time".

still good aritcle and an interesting read. I so want a holodeck.

 

[DanDeFool]

Just the other day, I was dreaming of a game dev tool exactly like the one Yahtzee suggests. Even GameMaker is too programming-intensive for most people.

Would be nice if we had something like LabVIEW for game programming. Anyone who's worked in science or engineering has probably used it at some point; it's a graphical programming language for data acquisition and signal processing applications, mostly. You can write programs by moving function blocks around and wiring terminals together, and it assembles and compiles your result into C code.

I remember an ancient game-maker program called Klik n' Play, which was developed by Maxis. It had kind of the same premise, graphical programming interface and all, but wasn't nearly powerful enough to be a viable for present-day developers. It was pretty much just a game-making sandbox strictly for dicking-around purposes as opposed to serious game development.

 

[Souplex]

You're overlooking other very tangible benefits to sequels:
1: Developers learn from developing, and can release a game, then release a sequel that improves on that game using what they learned from making the first one, and any other games along the way.

2: Developers can space out a game they couldn't afford to make otherwise so that they can use the first game to get financial backing to finish their stories.

3: If game A is good, and a sequel to game A (Let's call it game AA) is more of game A, then game AA is more good stuff.

 

[pretzil]

Abe's Oddysee and Exodus were both 2D titles which mastered 2D graphics on the PS1 instead of jumping into ugly 3D, and I think Exodus may have been better than Oddysee.

 

[Idocreating]

Not sure how they compare to SotN, but the three DS Castlevania games all seem to get a lot better in terms of how combat is done and sub-weapons upgraded.

Dawn of Sorrow: Sub Weapons are Souls. One is casted like a spell/ranged attack, another is an effect that is triggered and must be held and will continuously drain mana for an effect and the last is a passive benefit.

Souls are aquired from killing a creature. Sometimes it's soul will fly about the room and your character absorbs it. Now do that, for the most part, 8 more times to get the maximum power of that soul, whatever it's effect is. Combined with the fact that some souls are RIDICULOUSLY low drop chances, combined with mana being slow to regenerate, the game lacks a decent kind of flow for it's sub-weapon system.

Portrait of Ruin: System is tweaked, you control two characters. One being a Jonathan with various additional weapons or attacks as his sub-weapon, the other being Charlotte whose sub-weapons are her spells. These are aquired in more varied ways than the previous game, you can find certain ones in levels, buy certain ones in shops, as reward for quests.

Charlotte's spells are static and only scale in damage with your stats, but Jonathan's weapons must be mastered. Hitting an enemy with a sub-weapon and killing it will improve the mastery by 1. As you raise the mastery, the weapon does more damage and will grow in size and effect. It's a far better system than the chaotic randomness of Dawn of Sorrow, and certain sub-weapons for Jonathan are low on the mana side, which helps as mana is still an arse mechanic in the game as it still regenerates too slow.

Order of Ecclesia: Previous system of main attack and sub-weapons that use mana combined. The game now has two attack buttons and whatever abilty you've aquired can be mapped to it. Duel-wielding swords? Go for it. Sword and a Fireball? Sure! As long as you have the mana, you can attack away. Mana also restores itself incredibly quickly when you've not attacked for a second or two, allowing for strategic use of dodging and attacking.

The game calls it's system "Glyphs", glyphs are found in a similar way to the previous games, dropped from monsters at a rare rate, aquired from quests or progressing to story, just around in the world (Sometimes the glyph is making a hazard in a room that you must navigate to find the glyph and absorb it). Mastery is back, but is not limited to each glyph, but instead the element or effect the glyph has, be that Fire or Blunt (For hammers). This can lead to you developing one or two types of attack far above the others and having trouble when said attacks do next to no damage to a particular foe (Such as Holy damage to an Angel).

Overall, the combat system over these three games just evolves in a really great way, each time the developers think about ways to tweak and improve the way the player fights. With the slightly confusing dual-character gameplay of Portrait of Ruin (Having that second character out was more of a hiderance than help), they succeed in this aspect. And considering Order of Ecclesia could be hard as hell, it needed to improve the system too.

 

[aegix drakan_v1legacy]

But what if mainstream gaming took the Inform 7 approach? Create a deep, intuitive toolset designed for non-programmers that can let you create models, textures and game mechanics with dropdowns and a visual mouse-driven interface to as complex a level as the user desires, so that any lone developer, like ones who specialize more in aesthetics or story writing, can create a game that could then be sold in mainstream circles or over Steam to anyone who wants to look for it? Would that not spark the same creative renaissance in gaming that inexpensive digital cameras created in the film industry?

Although I am a programmer and enjoy coding, I would kill (something non-human) for this.

I used RPGMaker XP for a good while and although it's not THAT intuitive, it's not too complex, and once you understand how all the tools work, you can make some REALLY awesome stuff with just the pre-installed tools.

If I could have that, but for 3D graphics, and multiple styles of games...*drools* Yeah, that would kick serious ass.

 

[ScottMcTony]

But what if mainstream gaming took the Inform 7 approach? Create a deep, intuitive toolset designed for non-programmers that can let you create models, textures and game mechanics with dropdowns and a visual mouse-driven interface to as complex a level as the user desires, so that any lone developer, like ones who specialize more in aesthetics or story writing, can create a game that could then be sold in mainstream circles or over Steam to anyone who wants to look for it?

Sorry but reading this to me felt like reading a plea for a pen that would allow someone to draw a beautifully illustrated comic without knowing how to draw. That goes triply for BreakfastMan up there. Have you ever tried to make music? I don't mean a roughly recorded jam, I mean a properly mixed song. Have you ever tried to make a movie, even a short film? Mind, again, I don't mean an extremely amateur youtube video.

 

[sievr]

And just to annoy Yahtzee, Buffy (TV Series) beats Buffy (Movie).

The Buffy scenario isn't really a sequel. It's a reboot, which I think is more in line with what Yahtzee is saying is a better idea.

 

[vxicepickxv]

I keep telling myself that as game development becomes more complicated and involved, the tools will have to get easier to use and it's only a matter of time before people with little knowledge of programming or rigging a skeleton can make a game. I think everyone (well at least most people on the escapist) would have had at least one idea for a game- it'd be cool if it were easier to make them without learning all the details of programming.

I think books are a good example- anyone could write a book if they applied themselves, so it's not really about who can afford to go and get the best education and then spend years working their way up the industry, it's about who has a good idea and has an understanding of the medium deep enough to make something worth reading.

I think you're almost there with the idea, but it takes more than just an idea and an understanding. I think it also takes ability and drive.

You have to have the ability to take your idea and understanding and be able to apply it as needed, as well as the drive to do it.

I have an idea that I think would be great, and I have an understanding of how the idea would work, but I have neither the ability to code it, nor the drive to really learn how. At this point, it's almost easier to hire people to do it for me.(It's not a book, so don't worry about that)


Someone mentioned Neverwinter Nights, and I'd like to mention that I've seen people code things that were considered beyond the scope of the game engine into the game, without using any .hak packs. That's what made it so interesting, is that it seems with the right knowledge and skills, you can go beyond preset limits.

 

[smudgey]

I'd pay good money for a program that let me make games without the technical knowledge currently required. I've got a bunch of ideas i'd love to bring to life.