And that also means, that non-professional people's highlevel ideas could be valid, if they are good enough. Which they often are not, but sometimes they are IMO.
Speaking only from watching the closing of forum "suggestion" box topics--99% of player ideas are crap.
It offends players to hear this (unsurpisingly). But suggestion box topics aren't commented upon (often) by devs, for a reason. Nothing is quite so angry as a back-seat developer who's been told why his pet idea won't really fly.Ticked off idea man sets out on a witch hunt, rally the troops, burn this forum to the ground...better off just leaving him be.
Actually, experts being proven wrong are the most angry. They'll go to much greater lengths rather than admitting they dont have any more clue than the next guy. Of coarse you seem to be focusing on ideas that change existing games rather than ideas for brand new ones.
99% of all ideas are crap. Even yours.
Er...Yes?
(brand new forum alt, just for me? Yay!)
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Right, make a lot of money how? That's a better question.
When the schooling for game design costs roughly $110,000 dollars to attend it's fairly hard to come up with that money. So it's easier said than done. If you're going to say that I should just take out a student loan then there's another issue. Due to the fact that I'm under a certain age in my state and my parents are making XX income I cannot obtain federal student aide.
...snip
They speak truth. Ran into the same problem myself and couldn't attend college until after 25 because they kept holding what a parent made against me (around 75k). I didn't live with them and I had 2 full-time jobs, it didn't matter. My parents stated early on that they would not fund college for us or cosign. The one of my parents that went had to go on scholarships and their own so they thought it taught you better to pay for it yourself. You can't force them to spend their money on you but the government will still expect them to do it.
Torik, you could probably make some decent cash selling sarcasm meters here.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Features and ideas brought up on gaming forums are just idle chat. It's meant to start conversation, I suspect most people take it with a grain of salt.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. -- Herman Melville
Features and ideas brought up on gaming forums are just idle chat. It's meant to start conversation, I suspect most people take it with a grain of salt.
I'm hoping some of these passionate gamers start prototyping their ideas. There are plenty of tools out there to do it. There was one guy several years ago that did that with his crafting idea and it turned out to be a fun little minigame on its own. I've been searching the web to try to find it but have been coming up empty.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by FromHell Ideas are worthless, only execution counts
This is the dumbest phrase I've ever heard. You're basing all of mans creations off of impulse then. Sorry buddy but the biggest inventions and innovations start with a single idea.
And they only became the biggest inventions and innovations because the person was able to execute them.
I am still waiting on your example of ideas shouted by the community that isn't possible with current tech.. I ask you a few pages ago Lokto...just refreshing your memory.
I'm not the one that said anything was impossible with current tech, so you can "refresh my memory" all you want and it won't really help you get your answer.
Than what the hell you quoted me for originally? #confused
Originally posted by FromHell Ideas are worthless, only execution counts
This is the dumbest phrase I've ever heard. You're basing all of mans creations off of impulse then. Sorry buddy but the biggest inventions and innovations start with a single idea.
And they only became the biggest inventions and innovations because the person was able to execute them.
I am still waiting on your example of ideas shouted by the community that isn't possible with current tech.. I ask you a few pages ago Lokto...just refreshing your memory.
I'm not the one that said anything was impossible with current tech, so you can "refresh my memory" all you want and it won't really help you get your answer.
Than what the hell you quoted me for originally? #confused
We know. Glad you finally realized that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
And that also means, that non-professional people's highlevel ideas could be valid, if they are good enough. Which they often are not, but sometimes they are IMO.
Speaking only from watching the closing of forum "suggestion" box topics--99% of player ideas are crap.
It offends players to hear this (unsurpisingly). But suggestion box topics aren't commented upon (often) by devs, for a reason. Nothing is quite so angry as a back-seat developer who's been told why his pet idea won't really fly.Ticked off idea man sets out on a witch hunt, rally the troops, burn this forum to the ground...better off just leaving him be.
On official forums, probably, but not on sites like gamedev.net where discussions are more civil and ideas are from more informed people.
IMO Rasputin has the best response to the topic. Automatic rejection of any player idea is just as wrong as thinking someone's "good" idea is certain to make a game good.
Ideas aren't worthless but they aren't worth nearly as much as a working prototype.
And that also means, that non-professional people's highlevel ideas could be valid, if they are good enough. Which they often are not, but sometimes they are IMO.
Speaking only from watching the closing of forum "suggestion" box topics--99% of player ideas are crap.
It offends players to hear this (unsurpisingly). But suggestion box topics aren't commented upon (often) by devs, for a reason. Nothing is quite so angry as a back-seat developer who's been told why his pet idea won't really fly.Ticked off idea man sets out on a witch hunt, rally the troops, burn this forum to the ground...better off just leaving him be.
On official forums, probably, but not on sites like gamedev.net where discussions are more civil and ideas are from more informed people.
IMO Rasputin has the best response to the topic. Automatic rejection of any player idea is just as wrong as thinking someone's "good" idea is certain to make a game good.
Ideas aren't worthless but they aren't worth nearly as much as a working prototype.
Originally posted by FromHell Ideas are worthless, only execution counts
This is the dumbest phrase I've ever heard. You're basing all of mans creations off of impulse then. Sorry buddy but the biggest inventions and innovations start with a single idea.
And they only became the biggest inventions and innovations because the person was able to execute them.
I am still waiting on your example of ideas shouted by the community that isn't possible with current tech.. I ask you a few pages ago Lokto...just refreshing your memory.
I'm not the one that said anything was impossible with current tech, so you can "refresh my memory" all you want and it won't really help you get your answer.
Than what the hell you quoted me for originally? #confused
We know. Glad you finally realized that.
Glad to informing me about my confusion.
But perhaps you can assist by actually explaining the meaning of you originally quoting me, because it didnt point out anything that I ask originally.
I see this problem in a variety of industries. People love to consolidate roles to save time and money. But that is actually a large part of the problem. Once in a while, you will find someone who has a technically oriented mind AND is creative and abstract. That's just a really difficult combination of thought process to find in a single person.
Very creative people don't necessarily have the technical skills, nor do they have the capacity to gain those technical skills. But they are rarely invited to the table when it comes to things like game design. Look at almost any job description involving some type of lead world or character design and you'll see that they always want people who also understand the technical side.
Of course, we (the players) see the result of this limitation . . . meaning, look around at what's being done. We often credit those decisions with investor influence, but there's a clear fear of waste in hiring someone who isn't also doing the tech work. And we get lots of stagnation, lots of mimicry, and very slow design changes.
OP's post demonstrates this, he wants someone to not only come up with the idea, but also to think about every technical detail.
Some companies have hired psychologists and economists to help them figure out certain aspects, unfortunately psychologists have been used to determine how to keep people grinding rather than how to improve fun.
Except that creative game ideas aren't the problem. I'd be absolutely shocked if more than a tiny fraction of commercial games didn't have to chop out far more cool ideas than they actually implemented. (They'd likely think of most such ideas as never seriously pursued for being obviously too expensive or difficult, rather than things they planned on implementing but gave up far into development.) Time, money, and technical capabilities force you to chop out most of the cool, high-level ideas.
Originally posted by Cuathon People who say that having a person who is creative and technical is rare forget one thing. Money is rare. There are far more technically AND creatively proficient people than there are funds to have them make games, especially MMOs given that this discussion is in pub and not gg.
Bioware had tons of money. Floating in it basically.
where was this when they were designing SWTOR? Lets be real here....
money isn't the issue, especially hen Indy developers are pulling off better quality titles...
It's not just money. You need money AND time AND people with the technical capabilities. If you're lacking any one of the three, you're toast.
And even if you have all three, you've only got a chance at making a good game. Once you piece everything together, it's not going to work the way you imagined it. It probably won't seem all that close to the way you imagined it. That's partially because you had to scrap some ideas as being impractical or changed your mind on some ideas as you went along. It's likely to be partially because someone else implemented something very differently from how you expected it to be done. But even apart from those, sometimes systems just don't play together the way you expected them to.
So you go back and change things and try to make it better. Actually, you do this throughout the project, not just after you have a finished game. And you make the game as good as you can.
And even if you think that the end product of your game is really cool, your potential players might well disagree.
You just linked to a list. So pick something. Because seem like you are making the same argument that Quiz does, which is that any idea we post here is bad and can't be done. Seem to generalize, which is why I disagree. So please be more accurate and not link to a large list...
I linked to the quote that I pasted here as a reply. As explained several times to you by several people, there is a difference between what can be done and what can reasonably be done.
I keep asking you to post these ideas that can't be done. You still havnt shown me an example I requested....
that quote means little. It's meaningless without pointing out what can't be done.
You don't really know what can't be done, until someone does it to prove that it can be done. Can the Riemann Hypothesis be proven? Maybe eventually someone will. Maybe someone will find a counterexample. Maybe humanity will be destroyed before we find out either way.
But if people with the technical capabilities to do a lot look at an idea and have no idea how to implement it and make it work, they're probably not going to try to do it. You don't want to spend $10 million on something only to find out that you can't make it work.
Still, what's practical for one person to do isn't necessarily practical for another--even for professional game programmers. Different people have different skills. If you can do it, then it's practical for you to do.
Lots of people have ideas for games, including nearly all gamers and a lot of people who aren't gamers. Lots of gamers have ideas that they'd like to see made into a game. Those in the industry typically ignore those ideas as worthless, and rightly so.
Got this far and had to stop reading it seriously. I did skim the rest though.
I've played great games that are good because of their ideas more so than their execution. The OP suggest that minor things like the amount of damage dealt by an attack is more important than the original concept and I disagree. You don't need to refine an idea to the level that a good game designer would to make a decent game and ideas prior to that stage aren't worthless.
This is exemplified by the fact that game pitches don't start with a 50 page document they start with the concept. They start with it because it is the single most important aspect and most definitive aspect of the game.
Now I will concede that the execution is extremely important and for an unknown or armchair designer, that the idea will never see the light of day unless you can refine and probably do a lot of the actual work towards making it too. However that is far from saying they should be regarded as worthless as the OP says in the opening paragraph.
Cool ideas with rough-around-the-edges execution are one thing. Cool ideas with completely-doesn't-work-at-all execution are entirely another. The latter doesn't lead to great games, but it's what we'd mostly get if game designers chose ideas purely on the basis of what seemed cool without considering whether they could pull it off.
I countless times I have predicted what major problems major hyped up MMOs would have, based on design decisions alone.
my opinion the success of a MMO comes more from design.
You can make the most bug free MMO ever imagined. But if the game design is poor, it's also a poor game. No matter how well it was coded.
I would agree with this statement and line of thinking too.
It doesn't really matter if your attack hits at 1.5 meters versus 1.4 meters and in intervals of 2.1 seconds or 2.28 seconds - all of that can be tweaked and tweaked and perfected.
That is what testing is for.
But for actually DESIGNING a game, it really matters if those same attacks are done with a tab target system or with a free control FPS system or with a turn based timed system or positional grid RTS type system etc. etc.
The "ideas" is what resonates with the players, resonates with the investors and publishers too.
Yes, of course even with the best ideas if the implementation, the details, sucks - the game will fail.
But you can't HAVE the details without the design - without the ideas.
I keep asking you to post these ideas that can't be done. You still havnt shown me an example I requested....
that quote means little. It's meaningless without pointing out what can't be done.
Well, dipping back into the past...
A player proposed a certain change to the way crittur loot ("drops") was handled, which was actually quite a nice little idea that Marty (lead dev) really wanted to do.
Unfortunately, implementing this (fairly trivial, on paper) idea involved the full development team revising, individually, several thousand existing subroutines, and a few hundred thousand lines of code to correct a problem that affected virtually everything. Given that this player's idea was essentially cosmetic...too many man-hours, too little benefit.
Plausible idea (it could be done), but not terribly feasible (not quickly and not cheaply).
Those bug-fixes that hang around unfixed for years? Generally involve overhauls that are just too large in scale, in relation to a bug that's basically cosmetic-level...not a game-breaker, just irritating little screen display bug or somesuch.
Remember the Blizzard classic "Why can't we have armor dyes"? Hard-coded colors in the models. Cosmetic change, but one involving oodles of updates and a zillion man-hours. Cost/Benefit involves a lot of decisions for sensible-sounding ideas that could be done if we really wanted it badly enough, but don't expect it by next week.
How do you tell a player that his Pet Idea is cool, and we'd like to do it, but don't expect it for at least a couple of years? The usual answer is to say nothing. Saying anything yields message board firestorm. And the never ending litany of "you promised!', if (for wharever reason) you later decide not to do it after all.
I think he was asking more for examples for starting in a new game. Trying to implement something such as dyes for armor could be extremely simple in one game, or near impossible in another. That has more to do with coding. Daoc had no problem with dyes, but WoW, which came out later, nope, can't be done.
I think devs take short cuts when making the game, so there is not much flexability later on when they think of something good to add, but are unable to because they wanted to save a little time doing something in the beginning.
There are a lot of good ideas that can be done, and be done easily, for new games, but trying to add to existing games, probably not feasible. Of course there are a lot of bad ideas too that can be added, that 1 person thinks would be cool, but if you think of it in the overall scheme, it just sounds stupid, lol.
A lot depends on when you decide to do it. If, before the first artwork is created, you tell your artists that all armors absolutely must be dyeable, and you have to create the armor with a parameter for a dye color, then it adds some work, but it's manageable. If you have all of the artwork created and then decide it would be cool to be able to dye armors, then that means having to completely redo a bunch of work that you thought was done and would prefer not to have to go back and address.
So why hard-code things into a game, rather than leaving more flexibility later? One is that it's easier to implement. Don't think of it as no parameters versus one parameter. Different people may have different ideas about where the flexibility should be, and if you implement everything that you can think of, you could easily have 20 or 30 parameters for even fairly simple objects. That creates a lot more opportunities for bugs, and makes it a lot harder to read and understand your code later. It can also kill your performance if you get carried away with it.
Another issue is that if you're licensing a game engine rather than building your own from scratch, a ton of stuff is already done for you. If the game engine has something hard-coded in where you'd like to have had some flexibility, then it's a massive amount of work to change it.
Originally posted by evilastro The best ideas in the world are worthless if they can't be executed. Ideas probably account for 5% of the work, the rest is execution.
If ideas can't be executed, then are they really good ideas?
As I see it, figuring out what ideas you can implement is part of coming up with good ideas.
Making a game means you have to fill in the details. Suppose that you want your character to attack. Okay, how does he attack? If the player pressed a button to attack x milliseconds ago, then exactly where should every single vertex in the model be? We need a function of x, and we need it for every single vertex in the model. Oh, you did specify exactly which vertices were in your character model, didn't you? And what data a "vertex" consists of (position, texture coordinates, normal vectors, etc.)? And what color every single pixel in every single texture that your character uses should be. And what happens to the normal vectors as your character moves around.
This is absolute bollox. You would never need to mix implementation details into the design. What vertices? What data in the vertices? What would be the point? The mesh is only a graphical representation, and that can change over time. On low-end machines, a simpler mesh may be drawn. And when the game gets updated, a mesh can be completely replaced, without changing gameplay whatsoever.
I agree at some level of design you need to go into details around timing, range etc. But you cannot do this without having a working prototype to test it on. That means, that it is not something you can do up-front, but need to do in close collaboration with the programmers implementing it.
If you look today, you can see that games get changed on-the-fly. WoW has several times been altered so the balance changes. That means that a number of changes have taken place, that were not in the original documents. That such changes are needed can only be realized after hands-on experience. In this case a live game, but a working prototype with extensive testing can also do it - at least for a rough draft.
In other words: You cannot up-front design everything and like Moses from the mountain come down and hand over a divine design document, that just needs to be implemented. You can only make the high-level ideas up-front - a compass for the development - the rest will come as the development progresses. Designing at lower levels is a process intertwined with implementation.
And that also means, that non-professional people's highlevel ideas could be valid, if they are good enough. Which they often are not, but sometimes they are IMO.
Certainly, you don't have all of the ideas that will eventually go into a game before you start working on the game. Even some fairly high level ideas may get added, scrapped, or drastically altered well into development. But you do have to fill in all of the details before a game launches.
What really led to this thread was a project that I've been working on lately. I sit down to implement something in a game, and as I type out code, I realize that I need a bunch of details that I hadn't previously considered. Often I hadn't even realized what details were needed until trying to code a feature forced me to consider them. Sometimes it's major game design choices at a very low level, and I have to stop, go do something else for a while, and come back after I've had time to mull the choices.
Originally posted by evilastro The best ideas in the world are worthless if they can't be executed. Ideas probably account for 5% of the work, the rest is execution.
If ideas can't be executed, then are they really good ideas?
As I see it, figuring out what ideas you can implement is part of coming up with good ideas.
Teleportation is an idea that can't be executed with current technology so therefore is a bad idea?
Originally posted by Quizzical What really led to this thread was a project that I've been working on lately. I sit down to implement something in a game, and as I type out code, I realize that I need a bunch of details that I hadn't previously considered. Often I hadn't even realized what details were needed until trying to code a feature forced me to consider them. Sometimes it's major game design choices at a very low level, and I have to stop, go do something else for a while, and come back after I've had time to mull the choices.
You're going to encounter a lot of that, and it only gets more insane the bigger the game gets.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by evilastro The best ideas in the world are worthless if they can't be executed. Ideas probably account for 5% of the work, the rest is execution.
If ideas can't be executed, then are they really good ideas?
As I see it, figuring out what ideas you can implement is part of coming up with good ideas.
Teleportation is an idea that can't be executed with current technology so therefore is a bad idea?
Good idea depends on what context it is used.
Spending millions of dollars trying to implement it surely isn't a good idea.
Making a game means you have to fill in the details. Suppose that you want your character to attack. Okay, how does he attack? If the player pressed a button to attack x milliseconds ago, then exactly where should every single vertex in the model be? We need a function of x, and we need it for every single vertex in the model. Oh, you did specify exactly which vertices were in your character model, didn't you? And what data a "vertex" consists of (position, texture coordinates, normal vectors, etc.)? And what color every single pixel in every single texture that your character uses should be. And what happens to the normal vectors as your character moves around.
This is absolute bollox. You would never need to mix implementation details into the design. What vertices? What data in the vertices? What would be the point? The mesh is only a graphical representation, and that can change over time. On low-end machines, a simpler mesh may be drawn. And when the game gets updated, a mesh can be completely replaced, without changing gameplay whatsoever.
I agree at some level of design you need to go into details around timing, range etc. But you cannot do this without having a working prototype to test it on. That means, that it is not something you can do up-front, but need to do in close collaboration with the programmers implementing it.
If you look today, you can see that games get changed on-the-fly. WoW has several times been altered so the balance changes. That means that a number of changes have taken place, that were not in the original documents. That such changes are needed can only be realized after hands-on experience. In this case a live game, but a working prototype with extensive testing can also do it - at least for a rough draft.
In other words: You cannot up-front design everything and like Moses from the mountain come down and hand over a divine design document, that just needs to be implemented. You can only make the high-level ideas up-front - a compass for the development - the rest will come as the development progresses. Designing at lower levels is a process intertwined with implementation.
And that also means, that non-professional people's highlevel ideas could be valid, if they are good enough. Which they often are not, but sometimes they are IMO.
Certainly, you don't have all of the ideas that will eventually go into a game before you start working on the game. Even some fairly high level ideas may get added, scrapped, or drastically altered well into development. But you do have to fill in all of the details before a game launches.
I think you two are talking about two different things. Rasputin is talking about going from the high level doc to the actual development and you're talking about development to release.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein "Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Originally posted by evilastro The best ideas in the world are worthless if they can't be executed. Ideas probably account for 5% of the work, the rest is execution.
If ideas can't be executed, then are they really good ideas?
As I see it, figuring out what ideas you can implement is part of coming up with good ideas.
Teleportation is an idea that can't be executed with current technology so therefore is a bad idea?
Good idea depends on what context it is used.
Spending millions of dollars trying to implement it surely isn't a good idea.
I think you have a false assumtion that
1) a lot of the dev costs go into the initial development and testing
2) they don't have a clear and thorough plan of what they are going to develop
3) constantly high level design changes are made because your own personal experiance of 2)
Originally posted by Quizzical What really led to this thread was a project that I've been working on lately. I sit down to implement something in a game, and as I type out code, I realize that I need a bunch of details that I hadn't previously considered. Often I hadn't even realized what details were needed until trying to code a feature forced me to consider them. Sometimes it's major game design choices at a very low level, and I have to stop, go do something else for a while, and come back after I've had time to mull the choices.
You're going to encounter a lot of that, and it only gets more insane the bigger the game gets.
I don't doubt it.
My latest effort has been adding hills to my game, rather than making the ground completely flat as it has previously been. Which creates the question of, how high should the hills be and where?
Most AAA games make the ground rather jagged while stretching textures across it to try to make it look smoother. But I've got tessellation available, so I should be able to make the geometry smooth up close when I want to. That meant that I didn't just need to specify a height at a bunch of particular points. I needed to specify a height at every possible point, because there could conceivably be a vertex there after tessellation.
So I needed a real-valued function defined on the boundary of a truncated icosahedron that would be continuous and have continuous directional derivatives everywhere, and look like convincing hills. That last one ruled out my previous function of a height of 0 everywhere. Oh, and it needed to be fast to compute both on the processor and on the video card, practical to compute on a video card (which means that it can't see very much data at once), not have much branching or transcendentals in the formulas, and not need to pass very much data to the video card other than when loading the game. And, for good measure, it needs to have some major random components so that the map can look very different every time you play.
And then after I implement something, it's a case of, oh, it looks bad because of such and such--other than bugs, even--so I need to change the function.
Coming up with the right function to use was the hardest part, but now I'm happy with it. I broke the ground into a bunch of tiles and the formula for each tile is a quotient of two polynomials of two variables, with a polynomial of degree six on top and degree two on the bottom. The function has some removable singularities where the denominator is zero, so I had to give a piecewise definition of it.
I did kind of cheat by making the ground completely flat along zone boundaries and in cities. Trying to make zone boundaries hilly would break so many things, and I'm not eager to revist all of the fakery that I had to do to cover up that the world is round.
Comments
Er...Yes?
(brand new forum alt, just for me? Yay!)
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
Torik, you could probably make some decent cash selling sarcasm meters here.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Features and ideas brought up on gaming forums are just idle chat. It's meant to start conversation, I suspect most people take it with a grain of salt.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
I'm hoping some of these passionate gamers start prototyping their ideas. There are plenty of tools out there to do it. There was one guy several years ago that did that with his crafting idea and it turned out to be a fun little minigame on its own. I've been searching the web to try to find it but have been coming up empty.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Than what the hell you quoted me for originally? #confused
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
We know. Glad you finally realized that.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
On official forums, probably, but not on sites like gamedev.net where discussions are more civil and ideas are from more informed people.
IMO Rasputin has the best response to the topic. Automatic rejection of any player idea is just as wrong as thinking someone's "good" idea is certain to make a game good.
Ideas aren't worthless but they aren't worth nearly as much as a working prototype.
Pretty much sums up what I been saying.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Glad to informing me about my confusion.
But perhaps you can assist by actually explaining the meaning of you originally quoting me, because it didnt point out anything that I ask originally.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Except that creative game ideas aren't the problem. I'd be absolutely shocked if more than a tiny fraction of commercial games didn't have to chop out far more cool ideas than they actually implemented. (They'd likely think of most such ideas as never seriously pursued for being obviously too expensive or difficult, rather than things they planned on implementing but gave up far into development.) Time, money, and technical capabilities force you to chop out most of the cool, high-level ideas.
It's not just money. You need money AND time AND people with the technical capabilities. If you're lacking any one of the three, you're toast.
And even if you have all three, you've only got a chance at making a good game. Once you piece everything together, it's not going to work the way you imagined it. It probably won't seem all that close to the way you imagined it. That's partially because you had to scrap some ideas as being impractical or changed your mind on some ideas as you went along. It's likely to be partially because someone else implemented something very differently from how you expected it to be done. But even apart from those, sometimes systems just don't play together the way you expected them to.
So you go back and change things and try to make it better. Actually, you do this throughout the project, not just after you have a finished game. And you make the game as good as you can.
And even if you think that the end product of your game is really cool, your potential players might well disagree.
You don't really know what can't be done, until someone does it to prove that it can be done. Can the Riemann Hypothesis be proven? Maybe eventually someone will. Maybe someone will find a counterexample. Maybe humanity will be destroyed before we find out either way.
But if people with the technical capabilities to do a lot look at an idea and have no idea how to implement it and make it work, they're probably not going to try to do it. You don't want to spend $10 million on something only to find out that you can't make it work.
Still, what's practical for one person to do isn't necessarily practical for another--even for professional game programmers. Different people have different skills. If you can do it, then it's practical for you to do.
Cool ideas with rough-around-the-edges execution are one thing. Cool ideas with completely-doesn't-work-at-all execution are entirely another. The latter doesn't lead to great games, but it's what we'd mostly get if game designers chose ideas purely on the basis of what seemed cool without considering whether they could pull it off.
I would agree with this statement and line of thinking too.
It doesn't really matter if your attack hits at 1.5 meters versus 1.4 meters and in intervals of 2.1 seconds or 2.28 seconds - all of that can be tweaked and tweaked and perfected.
That is what testing is for.
But for actually DESIGNING a game, it really matters if those same attacks are done with a tab target system or with a free control FPS system or with a turn based timed system or positional grid RTS type system etc. etc.
The "ideas" is what resonates with the players, resonates with the investors and publishers too.
Yes, of course even with the best ideas if the implementation, the details, sucks - the game will fail.
But you can't HAVE the details without the design - without the ideas.
A lot depends on when you decide to do it. If, before the first artwork is created, you tell your artists that all armors absolutely must be dyeable, and you have to create the armor with a parameter for a dye color, then it adds some work, but it's manageable. If you have all of the artwork created and then decide it would be cool to be able to dye armors, then that means having to completely redo a bunch of work that you thought was done and would prefer not to have to go back and address.
So why hard-code things into a game, rather than leaving more flexibility later? One is that it's easier to implement. Don't think of it as no parameters versus one parameter. Different people may have different ideas about where the flexibility should be, and if you implement everything that you can think of, you could easily have 20 or 30 parameters for even fairly simple objects. That creates a lot more opportunities for bugs, and makes it a lot harder to read and understand your code later. It can also kill your performance if you get carried away with it.
Another issue is that if you're licensing a game engine rather than building your own from scratch, a ton of stuff is already done for you. If the game engine has something hard-coded in where you'd like to have had some flexibility, then it's a massive amount of work to change it.
If ideas can't be executed, then are they really good ideas?
As I see it, figuring out what ideas you can implement is part of coming up with good ideas.
Certainly, you don't have all of the ideas that will eventually go into a game before you start working on the game. Even some fairly high level ideas may get added, scrapped, or drastically altered well into development. But you do have to fill in all of the details before a game launches.
Teleportation is an idea that can't be executed with current technology so therefore is a bad idea?
Good idea depends on what context it is used.
You're going to encounter a lot of that, and it only gets more insane the bigger the game gets.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Spending millions of dollars trying to implement it surely isn't a good idea.
I think you two are talking about two different things. Rasputin is talking about going from the high level doc to the actual development and you're talking about development to release.
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
I think you have a false assumtion that
1) a lot of the dev costs go into the initial development and testing
2) they don't have a clear and thorough plan of what they are going to develop
3) constantly high level design changes are made because your own personal experiance of 2)
I don't doubt it.
My latest effort has been adding hills to my game, rather than making the ground completely flat as it has previously been. Which creates the question of, how high should the hills be and where?
Most AAA games make the ground rather jagged while stretching textures across it to try to make it look smoother. But I've got tessellation available, so I should be able to make the geometry smooth up close when I want to. That meant that I didn't just need to specify a height at a bunch of particular points. I needed to specify a height at every possible point, because there could conceivably be a vertex there after tessellation.
So I needed a real-valued function defined on the boundary of a truncated icosahedron that would be continuous and have continuous directional derivatives everywhere, and look like convincing hills. That last one ruled out my previous function of a height of 0 everywhere. Oh, and it needed to be fast to compute both on the processor and on the video card, practical to compute on a video card (which means that it can't see very much data at once), not have much branching or transcendentals in the formulas, and not need to pass very much data to the video card other than when loading the game. And, for good measure, it needs to have some major random components so that the map can look very different every time you play.
And then after I implement something, it's a case of, oh, it looks bad because of such and such--other than bugs, even--so I need to change the function.
Coming up with the right function to use was the hardest part, but now I'm happy with it. I broke the ground into a bunch of tiles and the formula for each tile is a quotient of two polynomials of two variables, with a polynomial of degree six on top and degree two on the bottom. The function has some removable singularities where the denominator is zero, so I had to give a piecewise definition of it.
I did kind of cheat by making the ground completely flat along zone boundaries and in cities. Trying to make zone boundaries hilly would break so many things, and I'm not eager to revist all of the fakery that I had to do to cover up that the world is round.