Game design: resources, Q&A, opinions

[Astrobe]

The Extra Credits series

Explorers, Socializers, Killers, Achievers: Bartle taxonomy of player types

Drama, Game, Simulation: The Threefold model

[Astrobe]

Previous discussions related to game design:
Graphics vs content

[Astrobe]

From the previous thread:

[...] a player shouldn't ever feel that a game is too difficult or too easy, and they should create a "flow curve" of engagement.

One achieves that not by making the game averagely difficult (for whom?), but my making the game easy at first and then raise the difficulty. That's a common recipe for video games. It might not be obvious to apply it to an open world game.

I've heard of a mod that increase the strength of the mobs as you get further from the spawning point. That could work, assuming that the rewards are increased as well (in Mob Redo it seems possible to manipulate that way both the mobs' stats and the amount of items they drop; if you use Doom's dmobs that let you tame and ride dragons, players can also profit from this "megafauna").
It also seems to me that an "internal pressure" must exist that make players "flee" the spawning point area. Avoiding noobs can be one ;-), bragging about being able to survive easily in an area where all mobs are twice as strong can be enough of a reward for some. Resource depletion can be another motivation.

[dawgdoc]

I've heard of a mod that increase the strength of the mobs as you get further from the spawning point. That could work, assuming that the rewards are increased as well (in Mob Redo it seems possible to manipulate that way both the mobs' stats and the amount of items they drop; if you use Doom's dmobs that let you tame and ride dragons, players can also profit from this "megafauna").

A year ago duane made an update to nmobs that makes them more difficult to deal with as you get further from origin.

• "Mobs are now tougher, the farther they spawn from the center of the world. Mobs at the edges will have about five times the normal hit points and damage, and about 2.5 times the normal run speed."

[LMD]

The best games for Minetest are still the ones that are built for servers, such as rubenwardy's CTF. Therefore, KGM and I are currently creating Magic-CTF.

[Astrobe]

Well, that looks more like an advertisement than anything.

> The best games for Minetest are still the ones that are built for servers

I don't think so. As soon as you go multiplayer you have to worry about protection, team play and server performance. The latter can have a severe impact: you don't want to shoot yourself in the foot and introduce game mechanics that require loads of computations per player and per game tick. This is actually quite limiting.

[LMD]

The point is that every attempt I saw until now for making "smart mobs" "failed". In fact, the only interesting and smart mobs to beat are other players.

[Astrobe]

The point is that every attempt I saw until now for making "smart mobs" "failed". In fact, the only interesting and smart mobs to beat are other players.

AI is subject to the "uncanny valley" too: no matter how realistic you make the behavior of the mobs, there's always something that doesn't look right. It's convenient to only have "monsters" as enemies (as opposed to human-looking NPCs) because monsters can be dumb.

PvP has its problems too. I remember when I played a Quake Arena -style game that sometimes I had to move to another server because the players there were way too good for me (there was no ranking system). So if you don't have a ranking system (and a player base large enough to make it meaningful at all), one would rather have some handicap/advantage system. For instance, one could reuse the RPG character class tropes (melee tank, weak ranged DPS, support, flanker...) and present player scores by class - assuming one makes it so that there's a clear hierarchy on how easy it is to play each class.

I'd recommend to play some Cube2:Sauerbraten on an instagib-CTF server. Sauerbraten in my view captures perfectly the essence of CTF because it is as simple as a game of this genre can be. Starting from the "simplest thing that can possibly work" allows for a better view on the features one adds: what problems do they solve? What problems do they introduce?