Comments on: Monday Space Shot

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 13:48:30 +0000

“Completely and utterly procedurally generated surface populated with entirely boring NPCs if i so choose. You will do your best to get off that rock.”

Note that the quickest way to get out of a boring game world is to stop playing and return the game for a refund.

As people have said, the engine is stunning, and should be used somehow. If the mechanics of the game are fun on their own, then they could complement it well, but equally barren rocks aren’t that interesting on their own.

Procedural generation can work very well if there’s user input into its creation, or indeed if it’s just designed well. For example, Sim City is very compelling and yet all the designers did was create the rules, not lead you by the hand – indeed, the designer-created scenarios were much less fun than making your own city.

By: mister slim

mister slim — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:04:48 +0000

Dwarf Fortress does very nice things with it’s procedural generation. It also demonstrates Kadayi’s point about starting small and building big. The key is tuning your generating systems well, which is hard and expensive, and better done iteratively so ‘customers’ can provide testing and feedback. The Sims got it mostly right while Fable 2 created a gesture/social-interaction system to produce interesting results that just mostly just produces ludicrous behaviors.

By: Kadayi

Kadayi — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 09:50:55 +0000

I’d second John Ts suggestion, start small, build big. Todays gamers expectations are for a much higher LoD both graphically and in terms of content than games like Elite remotely delivered, and shallow as that may seem it’s the reality of the market place. In order to make things stand out, you have to be purposeful in your design work.

By: Caiman

Caiman — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:19:24 +0000

What I want from a space game is the feeling of vastness, that there are no barriers to the universe. Even if it is artificial (which it really has to be, obviously), the impression of scale is enormously important. When I played Elite on the Spectrum, I knew the programmer had seeded the game with specific events, ships and species, but when combined with the vast model of the galaxy it all felt limitless, and that won me over. These days I can see the wizard behind the curtain and it spoils the whole experience. With the detail of Infinity, however, I can imagine getting lost once more.

By: john t

john t — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:37:51 +0000

If I were going to design a space MMO, I’d start small:

3 or 4 colony ships escape Earth just before some kind of catastrophe destroys the planet. You’ve got 4 or 5 earthlike planets around various stars and a colony to start — get to building — mines, farms, etc– you have to deal with local flora and fauna. With the first expansion, you have alien contact, and from then on out, more alien technology is introduced with each expansion, starships, etc, until gradually, you’ve got a full-blown 4X galactic conquest game.

By: tmp

tmp — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:35:31 +0000

Why would you put boring NPCs in martian cities ? To make a backdrop, to paint a believable environment. If this wouldnt matter MUDs would be still vastly more popular than WoW.

Very bad example, considering how hand-crafted and concise WoW is about its environments — if anything, it’s probably good example how less is actually more, and why you’d want to avoid extra filler in your game just for the sake of having “believable environment”. Since having it seems to maily make people bitch and demand you give them some means to fast-travel over it all to where the action is and where they want to be.

By: kert

kert — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 00:56:57 +0000

Look, we are arguing over the details of game design that needs to be put in. A good game designer will make sure his game will have the precisely the right little amount of boredom and right amount of story and action in it. Procedural content, whether its vast swathes of barren land or cities full of dull people ( hey that sounds like real life ! ) is just one of the tools at his disposal, and powerful one at that because you can control a lot of aspects of game world with it ( like already mentioned the simple graphic content itself, submissions etc )
I am not proposing procedural boredom. Im in favour of spending design effort in places where it matters but leaving the rest believable as well.
And this is already being done, with the foliage generated in lots of games and terrain chunks etc, it would be unthinkable to spend designer effort crafting every leaf and branch on every tree. The forest does not become more “boring” because of it being procedural. Quite the contrary.

This concept can and is being taken to larger scale.

Why would you put boring NPCs in martian cities ? To make a backdrop, to paint a believable environment. If this wouldnt matter MUDs would be still vastly more popular than WoW.

By: tmp

tmp — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:59:06 +0000

Have you seen any game where you spend 100% of your time following storyline ?

Yes; aside from sandbox games which are open-ended by their very nature, you’ll be generally led through series of missions/tasks/sub-plots from the starting tutorial (if any) to the end.

Completely and utterly procedurally generated surface populated with entirely boring NPCs if i so choose. You will do your best to get off that rock. If i, as a game designer, am generous i wont torture you for too long and offer a reward here and there though.

And if they are utterly boring NPCs put in boring environments, again why waste development time adding them in there at all? No, the player won’t care about either of these when they’re pointless and boring window-dressing for the actual task at hand that’s “make enough money to get out of here”. Consider EVE-Online where all the procedural boredom you propose is replaced simply with trading/production interfaces over few hand-crafted station environments. Is the game worse off because of it?

By: kert

kert — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:28:59 +0000

If these are places you don’t care about, then they will be places players have no reason to care about, either.
Wrong. Have you seen any game where you spend 100% of your time following storyline ? After you dig out my planted artefact from that mars cave my storyline can leave you piss poor running trucking jobs at worst on mars until you have figured out a way to collect enough dough and buy your way off that rock. Completely and utterly procedurally generated surface populated with entirely boring NPCs if i so choose. You will do your best to get off that rock. If i, as a game designer, am generous i wont torture you for too long and offer a reward here and there though.
Yes its “grind” in a way, but show me which games dont do that at all ?
BTW, there were procedurally generated missions in Privateer, Freelancer and others.

By: LEEDER KRENON

LEEDER KRENON — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:23:12 +0000

this needs to be single player. badly. for me.

By: Gap Gen

Gap Gen — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:16:27 +0000

Yes, the engine looks very pretty but colour me cynical until I see a game. Kadayi put it better than I did – procedural generation can make things interesting, but equally as he said, pattern recognition means that we work out roughly what the procedural algorithm is doing after a few times and get bored.

By: tmp

tmp — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 23:13:57 +0000

I could use procedural generation to generate an exact copy of our solar system, call it a game world, let the procedural stuff fill out the places that i dont care about (..)

If these are places you don’t care about, then they will be places players have no reason to care about, either. What is then the purpose of spending development time on systems… that ultimately produce something no one cares about? Other than getting an extra feature to print on the back of the box, maybe…