Game research

[SymbolicFrank]

I meet young people that want to make video games for a living quite often. And I offer to coach them about half the time.

The first thing I urge them to do, is research (play) the highlights of the old classics. So they can see how games evolved, and what works.

They never do.

They want to create the perfect game they have in their head. Which is perfect! It is the best game ever! And the one they want to play.

But, when I keep asking questions, they don't really know how it should look or work, just that it should be like in their dreams.

Better than all others they know!


And when I give them a bunch of old classics, for research material, they never play them. Those are all boring and look bad. It's, like actual work! They don't need to play them to know that their perfect games beat them in all aspects! They don't have to play old, boring and ugly games to find that out! It's obvious!


Then again, they don't have a clue how you go about building a game, either.


Is it me, or is it them?

 

[Excidium II]

That's how all those survival games on early access come to be.

 

[IncendiaryDevice]

 

[Azarkon]

It's similar to how, the problem with the video game industry is that the best designers spend all their time on the Codex while the worst ones are making all the games.

 

[Mustawd]

I meet young people that want to make video games for a living quite often. And I offer to coach them about half the time.

The first thing I urge them to do, is research (play) the highlights of the old classics. So they can see how games evolved, and what works.

They never do.

They want to create the perfect game they have in their head. Which is perfect! It is the best game ever! And the one they want to play.

But, when I keep asking questions, they don't really know how it should look or work, just that it should be like in their dreams.

Better than all others they know!


And when I give them a bunch of old classics, for research material, they never play them. Those are all boring and look bad. It's, like actual work! They don't need to play them to know that their perfect games beat them in all aspects! They don't have to play old, boring and ugly games to find that out! It's obvious!


Then again, they don't have a clue how you go about building a game, either.


Is it me, or is it them?

It's not just you.

Most people I hear who want to start a game always inevitably fall into the trap of going from 0 to 100. They don't understand the benefit of starting with something small. I always think starting with something easy like RPGMaker would help them in terms of designing areas, characters, dialogue, combat, etc.

But people just tend to grab free Unity/Unreal, or whatever and start to create without zero thought behind it.

Part of it is the time we live in now, with answers at our fingertips or youtube videos that make things seem easy. The other part is just young people being dumb and impulsive.

 

[Space Insect]

I'd have to say that from my own experience and what I've heard, it's the same idea for writers. One of the best ways to improve your writing is by reading. And not just read just books that you like or well written books. It is important to read poorly written books as well to get an idea of what is good and bad.

 

[Wayward Son]

Most people I hear who want to start a game always inevitably fall into the trap of going from 0 to 100. They don't understand the benefit of starting with something small. I always think starting with something easy like RPGMaker would help them in terms of designing areas, characters, dialogue, combat, etc.

I'm 100% guilty of this. I tried and even got a decent way into an RPGMaker design and decided that I should restart from scratch so that I could do certain other things that it stopped me from doing. I've recently tried actually taking it step by step, but am not actually making much progress.

So to the OP:
It's not you.

EDIT:
Given, I am actually playing a lot of older (read:1981-2002) games that I missed by being a millennial raised on consoles. I am trying to emulate these to some extent.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

I find it very telling that in many modern RPG developer interviews, when asked what games they are currently playing, it is almost entirely games that just recently came out and/or are generally popular with current gamers.

I pledge that if I ever develop an RPG, I will be playing classic RPGs at the time of making it. Hell, I already play 90% classic RPGs that I missed when I was growing up as a console gamer, so I consider all of this back study and research for the future.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Playing video games is the best way to gain the knowledge and perspective to design good video games yourself. Most people of course will have played the latest (otherwise they wouldn't want to make video games), but there is a ton of older games that most likely would not even be on their radar, that often happen to contain absolutely brilliant stuff. Playing other people's games is essentially watching them make the same kind of mistakes you would make if you had tried something similar or in other cases, watching them make some brilliant design decision that actually works, which you might or might not have made yourself. So by seeing what they do, you can take a shortcut and start where they left off, saving yourself a ton of time and wasted effort, and allowing you to incorporate the intelligence and creative genius of tens or even hundreds of people into your game instead of just one. It's simple arithmetic.

But the world being the way it is, it is not just you, most people who end up making games today have probably not even played anything earlier than the mid-late 2000s era hits, and after trying to appeal to lowest common denominator to make more money, this might just be the second biggest reason most games suck. So many times, after playing some great RPG from the past, I ask myself, why don't these idiots just use this particular system from this game? It's amazing! But nobody does...

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Playing video games is the best way to gain the knowledge and perspective to design good video games yourself. Most people of course will have played the latest (otherwise they wouldn't want to make video games), but there is a ton of older games that most likely would not even be on their radar, that often happen to contain absolutely brilliant stuff. Playing other people's games is essentially watching them make the same kind of mistakes you would make if you had tried something similar or in other cases, watching them make some brilliant design decision that actually works, which you might or might not have made yourself. So by seeing what they do, you can take a shortcut and start where they left off, saving yourself a ton of time and wasted effort, and allowing you to incorporate the intelligence and creative genius of tens or even hundreds of people into your game instead of just one. It's simple arithmetic.

But the world being the way it is, it is not just you, most people who end up making games today have probably not even played anything earlier than the mid-late 2000s era hits, and after trying to appeal to lowest common denominator to make more money, this might just be the second biggest reason most games suck. So many times, after playing some great RPG from the past, I ask myself, why don't these idiots just use this particular system from this game? It's amazing! But nobody does...

There's a lot of truth in this post.

There are so many classic RPGs that have been forgotten by modern developers over the years that contain brilliant ideas.

I mean, why is Piranha Bytes basically the only company that designs open-world like the Gothic 1 & 2 games? Why don't you see their style of static, hand-placed, hand-crafted worlds in modern RPGs?

I could go on and on, but I definitely see an attempt to homogenize RPGs into all having similar systems with modern, big budget titles.

RPG developers need to dig back into the classics and try to use some of the brilliant ideas of RPGs-past. Put a new modern twist on them. But don't call them "archaic" and trash them like they are worthless. That is a very short-sighted and narrow-minded approach, in my opinion.

 

[Severian Silk]

I mean, why is Piranha Bytes basically the only company that designs open-world like the Gothic 1 & 2 games? Why don't you see their style of static, hand-placed, hand-crafted worlds in modern RPGs?

Dude, Piranha Bytes hasn't developed a Gothic game in over a decade.

 

[Deleted Member 16721]

Dude, Piranha Bytes hasn't developed a Gothic game in over a decade.

True, although their recent games feature some bits of ideas from the originals.

My point is, why don't other companies take some of the brilliant, creative ideas from Gothic 1 & 2, for example, and build new games based on those ideas?

Many people have forgotten the games and ideas of the past, unfortunately.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

The only good idea the Gothic games bring to the table is the open world with (almost) unrestricted access. They opted to forgo the invisible walls and funneling gateways and instead use clever monster placement to impede and direct the player. At the same time the Gothic games bring ideas and mechanics to the table that make the overall game...kinda bizarre. Like a portable pocket dimension serving as the inventory. You can pick up EVERYTHING in Gothic and carry it around without trouble.

Or how you're only able to talk to one character at a time, and how conversations taking place in small bubbles that no one else around can hear...which makes for highly comical instances where there are 3-4 guys within earshot and you're talking about secrets and stuff, and they don't even interrupt or suddenly run off.

And not to mention the strange controls.

Now, keep in mind that I'm mostly talking about the first Gothic game here, but since then Gothic has had 2 sequels (Gothic 4? Never heard of it.) and then a spinoff series inspired by Gothic that itself has had 2 sequels...and which one of these bizarre game mechanics have been improved or updated over the years? Just the controls. They've been tinkered with, but the other strange mechanics were left untouched for over a decade. The graphics have been revamped, of course, but here is where it all ties into the thread topic: Piranha Bytes found a "formula" for a game that works, and chose to milk it dry instead of trying to improve it. At least you could see developers that hit upon a good formula for a game constantly tinker with it before the turn of the century, and then later entire gaming genres had to quickly adapt to changing market forces. Piranha Bytes didn't care, they just cobbled together a game and then ran with it until its inevitable death. No research involved, no innovation beyond the creation of the original.

This raises a question: Are modern-day game developers looking to make a good game, or just a money-making franchise? Take a look at the AAA industry and the answer is obvious. Take a look at the Indie scene and the answer is not so clear. The AAA titles are playing the tune: You don't have to make a groundbreaking game...just a decent one that appeals to the player. How many (would-be) developerrs are dancing to that tune?

There's a developer that recently released a game that Did the Research, he studied the games that inspired him to make his game - he took his time to play them, disassemble them and learn all he could about them. Then he made his own game - Undertale. Many of you scoff at the mere mention of that name, but one undeniable fact about the game is that it was made by someone who knew what he was doing...even though he all he did was play around with RPG Maker. Imagine if more people followed his example: Pick a game genre, study the games that came before, learn from them and then slowly but surely build a good game that draws upon the best of the genre.

But don't the AAA studios do that already with extensive market research and focus test groups? Yes, and look where that got them. They can make a loud and pervasive marketing campaign for a game that feels like lukewarm leftovers from last week. Meanwhile every marketing guru knows that the best marketing out there is word-of-mouth...which is something good games generate on their own. Gothic did just that 15 years ago - it grew on word-of-mouth marketing. Sadly the developers chose to rest on their laurels and keep the money rolling in instead of daring to take the series anywhere.

tl;dr - Researching games to make good games takes money and :effort: which immediately puts off most people from doing it.

 

[DramaticPopcorn]

Most people don't know what they want, news at 11.

 

[Karellen]

I agree about the problem, but I'm not so sure about the solution. It's true that most "game ideas" that people generally have are these high-level concepts that become interesting (or uninteresting) at a scale of tens of hours of play, when in fact the most difficult thing about designing games, in my (admittedly narrow) experience, is figuring out, in exhaustive detail, what exactly goes into a typical ten minutes of gameplay. There is a huge amount of superficially trivial and banal things to resolve within those ten minutes that nonetheless ultimately determine what the overall experience of playing the game is like - in an RPG, it would start from things like how movement works, how exploration or a combat encounter or a NPC conversation or whatever is actually visualised in the game, how exactly the game is actually controlled, how much information is presented to the player in different situations and in what manner, how long various encounters take to resolve. And that's without even getting to the nitty-gritty of the actual game mechanics.

A lot of the time, people who have a "game idea" actually have no idea what those ten minutes are actually like, which is another way of saying that they don't really have a "game idea" at all. That said, I don't know what exactly would help - the reality is that most people come up with these high-level concepts while playing games - through the process of playing a game, seeing something about it that they think is bad or not done enough or whatever, and then thinking, "man, this game would be much cooler if it was like that instead." The legion of little things that, to a large extent, actually make or break a game aren't something that people readily perceive while playing the game, so if you make people play a bunch of old games, classic or not, they'll just end up with a score of new pie-in-the-sky high-level ideas instead, just based on these classics instead. Honestly, they'd be better off throwing their ideas into RPGMaker or something; the main strength of tools like that, in my opinion, is precisely how restrictive they are. A game made in RPGMaker will always look, feel and play esesentially like an RPGMaker game, which might be suboptimal, but it also means that the person making the game can concentrate on whatever it is that he actually likes, be it writing or coming up with puzzles or whatever.

I guess I think that if playing a lot of games was all it took to become an adequate game designer, there wouldn't be so many bad games in the world. Looking for ideas in old games does help, of course - but for the most part, only once you've actually confronted the devil that lies in the details of the game you're trying to make. In this regard, I think old games generally do make for better research material, since there are less bells and whistles and the underlying design is more evident, and certainly many of them were more innovative and tried unusual things (many of which did not work, of course). Hell, when it comes to RPGs, I think playing a bunch of board games would be just as good, if not better. But ultimately, to get to that point, I think the fastest way might be to try and make your dream game and fail gloriously. No amount of sage advice about "starting small" or "understanding the essence of classic games" or whatever is ever going to help, partly because I think that this kind of wisdom cannot be taught, only learned through pain, humiliation and suffering, but mostly because making games is a lot of really hard work. No one is going to waste that much time and effort into something that isn't even their dream project, and wasting ridiculous amounts of time is probably the only way anyone will ever end up making a good game.

 

[Arrowgrab]

Quick explanation to OP:

Young people are retards.

Most people are retards.

People are retards.

 

[Mustawd]

I'd have to say that from my own experience and what I've heard, it's the same idea for writers. One of the best ways to improve your writing is by reading. And not just read just books that you like or well written books. It is important to read poorly written books as well to get an idea of what is good and bad.

Saw a documentary on Hunter S Thompson that mentioned he would actually type out work from his favorite authors to get the rythm down. So not just reading, but mimicking is also a great way to learn. Isn't that similar to what Lovecraft did?

 

[Lurker King]

And when I give them a bunch of old classics, for research material, they never play them. Those are all boring and look bad. It's, like actual work! They don't need to play them to know that their perfect games beat them in all aspects! They don't have to play old, boring and ugly games to find that out! It's obvious!

Then again, they don't have a clue how you go about building a game, either.

Is it me, or is it them?

In the olden days, developers were MIT types with a PhD in computer science who created studios for fun. Nowadays they are illiterate causals that grow up playing Triple-A bullshit and pay a fortune to have a diploma on game design and end up being another cog in some big studio.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

I meet young people that want to make video games for a living quite often. And I offer to coach them about half the time.

Who the fuck are you?

Potential RPG developer.

uhhhh...

Is it me, or is it them?