Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#.
EDIT: That sounds snide but I'm actually being sincere. I'm planning on including items in my game from a procedurally generated tech tree with location-dependent item availability.
Right, but if that gooey puke colored special snowflake was the only source of a power coupling compatible with a laser amplifier that could work with your rare Blatovian power generator that only has the 0.025 inertial penalty and enables your new fighter's super hit and run tactic, then you would totally give a bunch of !@$%&#.
No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms. I care about "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen and blah blah blah but if I castle kingside then I won't have to worry about a quick a5 strike with the potential to undermine my b pawn." These choices (with chess only as an example) are interesting because they have serious consequences that can be reasonably foreseen but are not totally obvious.
It's sometimes the case that the space between reasonably foreseeable and totally obvious is a very fine narrow one, but then your game might be lacking in depth. Adding procedural puke special snowflake enemies doesn't add any more depth than "rare Blatovian power generators" does, unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.
Star wars galaxies was a game with some rather complex economic models that truly did effect your outcome in battle. For example only certain players in the galaxy (it was an MMO) had the skills to craft the very best items. They could do that because they knew where to mine or buy the very best materials (randomly generated in those areas).
So I as a budding star ship pilot had to seek out the best vendors in order to buy the right equipment to competitive.
There was a lot more to it but it was the complexity of the emergent gameplay that gave the psuedo randomness of some aspects a real role, and drove your personal story.
"I managed to find a vendor who has access to large amounts of high grade titanium, and he crafted me this engine with 10kj/s faster recharge time, which allowed me to escape that bounty hunter.." was a story that emerged and happened to me in the game, for example.
In some ways the randomness was abstracted away enough to not be obvious, and I think that helped sell the feeling.
For example only certain players in the galaxy (it was an MMO) had the skills to craft the very best items. They could do that because they knew where to mine or buy the very best materials (randomly generated in those areas).
I am going to have a procedurally generated tech tree in my MMO. I'll only know statistically that certain powerful combinations in crafting are possible, but even as the dev, I won't know precisely where they will be, what they look like, or exactly how to get the components for them.
No, I still don't. Games to me are about interesting choices. I don't care about rare "loot", or about finding yet another key to open this lock, or about improving some score by 0.35 angstroms.
That's totally not what I was getting at. It's more like, "do I castle kingside or queenside? Because if I castle queenside then my rook will be opposite his queen...?" The low inertial penalty is probably the rare (actually statistically, as opposed to "rare") quality of that particular item -- and it would still come with some other form of penalty. (Like a really PITA set of compatibility requirements and high fragility.)
unless the tradeoff over using a "Snargglemoofian power generator" is that your ship can no longer turn left or something.
I hadn't thought of "your ship can't turn left." It might be a great tradeoff for something that would otherwise be an overpowered weapon, combined with another kind of movement penalty. I have thought of things like a shield upgrade that gives you really high resists across 120 degrees of arc, but which isn't configurable. "Your ship can't turn left" might be a really good penalty for a high resist/partial arc shield augment that mostly covers your right side.
EDIT: An even better idea: you get high resists over a 120 degree arc, but then you also get a susceptibility penalty over the rest!
My point about chess is that the benefits and tradeoffs of a particular move are not always immediately quantifiable. I think too many computer games have this habit of presenting a whole bunch of quantitative information to the player and then letting them go nuts with comparisons. In a lot of these cases, it comes down to the player deciding "I prefer to maximize armor at the cost of cold resistance because none of the enemies in this area use cold attacks" and then all equipment choices are no longer meaningful, they're merely a continuation of that original choice which in itself was fairly obvious once the player had access to the data.
With chess, on the other hand, the choice of 1. d4 vs 1. e4 is a huge one with TONS of implications, none of which are immediately obvious at a glance, but which are so rich and diverse that you have players literally identifying themselves as "d4 players" or "e4 players".
I hate to keep leaning on chess examples but they're the easiest since almost everybody knows about chess. I'd have slipped in a Battle Line example but almost nobody knows about that!
"Calculations are decisions based solely on reason, with a clear correct answer." That'd be the decision to chose armour instead of cold resistance.
"Choice is overcoming internal conflict. Without conflict, there is no choice, only decisions."
This actually is a good example for the "only turn left" gun, as there's a conflict between maneuverability vs firepower, which are rather incomparable.
So basically, you want the challenge of dealing with highly nonlinear, even chaotic, emergent effects. I'm all about such emergent effects. Hell, my project is called "Emergence Vector." The specific point is to see how many emergence fostering features you can workably combine into one massively multiplayer online game. The point being: that I find most MMOs insulting to my intelligence. Their power seems to come more from variable schedule of reward than from any genuinely intellectually interesting complexity. I really want to change that.
How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex? The original Star Wars MMO had some cool crafting mechanics, but I don't know enough about them to really explain.
Eve Online has emergent gameplay but most of that is space politics and metagaming - almost despite the game itself rather than because of it.
Heck, vanilla minecraft has incredibly complex outcomes from basic rules - vis a vis redstone and automation and so on.
I've played hella grindy Korean MMOs, they were just a case of spend x time get y thing. No real challenge, just a willingness to keep trying until complete. I'd strongly suggest highly complex systems restrict player innovation and emergence, in a way simpler rulesets do not.
How does making rare item combinations available based on willingness to grind them out become intellectually complex?
One ethos of my game is going to to be "work smarter, not harder." The kind of player who feels entitled to succeed just because they've spent enough time mindlessly grinding resources, so feels entitled to have awesome stuff dropped -- I hope those people spend their time elsewhere.
The player will be able to find very pointed capabilities that come with big disadvantages. The point will be to improvise around those weaknesses while exploiting contextual advantages. Others may choose to exploit in-game scripting and manufacturing capabilities to automate the search for certain technology combinations, but this will entail maintaining installations and the combat force to defend them.
I'm writing the game servers in Golang, with the client in Javascript in browsers. I have a cluster of server processes that currently runs on the same AWS EC2 instance, but which could easily run on different instances. I currently have the procedurally generated universe up. If you are interested, I can let you log on. It is very much a work in progress. (My email is in my HN user profile.)
Remember randomness doesn't add content. It just spreads it out. You still have to create good base content yourself.
A lot of games basically have useless 2%-5% modifiers. Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty. It just wastes the time of the player checking their loot. In the real world a weapon or armor is either effective or useless. Nobody takes down tanks with a glock.
I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.
Nobody cares about the difference between 0.025 and 0.027 inertial penalty.
I was thinking more along the lines of the difference between 0.025 and 2.5. There's also stacking.
I would recommend you to have several types of items even if that means the items have fixed statistics instead of having one item type with flexible statistics.
Darn. I was going to have just one type of item, called "Object." Everything would be a variation on that, and inherit behavior from it.
But seriously, I am going to have very specific functions for a set catalogue of items. The procedural generation is all about their potential for interaction when incorporated into a crafted item.
You are right sir. Playing in procedurally generated world is like going for a walk in the forest. Trees you see are unique and rich in detail but since they have no use for you you don't care about how different they are.
If you ware a primitive man from long ago when those different kinds of trees were unique resources to craft the specific things that your existence depends on then you'd notice the difference between them and you'd care.
That kind of assumes that trees can't be resources for other kinds of value than tooling. For example, aesthetic appreciation, healing contact with nature, etc. These things are subjective - I certainly don't necessarily seek forests for those exact reasons, but they, and others, do exist. Pretty much none of these values is extractable from a fecking random polygon.
Joerg Sprave of the "Slingshot Channel" might be interested in how the grain is formed in the crooks of certain branches, because those might make for good slingshots. Most of us wouldn't even notice.
So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy.
All those components you mentioned could appear right near the users spawn point, or they could all be impossibly hard to gather, due to procedural randomness.
So, how do you create benefits that stack like that, without making the game too easy? With a procedural generator, it's difficult to determine what accomplishments will be hard and what will be easy.
There are geometrical properties that let me tune how hard certain combinations will be to find, statistically.
EDIT: Also, almost all benefits will come with some kind of penalty or incompatibility. It will be impossible to build a perfect ship that does everything well. Instead, you will be able to easily build a ship that does one very narrow thing rather well, one thing badly, but generally sucks otherwise. Also, you should be able to make something that does 2 things above average, one thing non-sucky, but otherwise sucks.
I was going to suggest some form of automated testing during development and monte-carlo simulation of games to run a batch of "10,000 playthroughs a night", paired with a cost-function to "evaluate" the strength of a character-build (it can be as simple as "total damage" or "total DPS") and see if some outlier(s?) appear.
But you can also pre-empt a lot of problems by designing the system around physical limitations. Many games have done that for a long time. E.g. I believe Terminus included things like mass for components, so adding all kinds of extras had a cost in fuel usage and maneuverability. So if you did build a ship loaded with the most powerful weapons, you could, but it'd also be a slow, hard to control, big target.
Mass, volume, energy expenditure, waste heat - there are lots of factors you can add to make it hard to exploit. Of course, you need to tune those factors, but it makes it less likely for really extreme effects.
Yes, but even well designed games (from a gameplay pov) can have unexpectedly powerfull builds, like what happened with Starcraft 2 and the genetic-algorithm build order[0]. So simulating builds/gameplays can give you another edge at detecting strange/powerful scenarios.
I also think you should rely on player feedback and community to spot this kind of things, but that could become time consuming if you're a lone developer.
Absolutely - you can't get away without testing, and I agree simulation is probably a necessity given the complexity no matter how much the design tries to counter it.
If you go too far into that direction you might end up with the same problem as "Inside a star filled sky".
If you have three attack upgrades you are very powerful but only have one live. If you die one of your upgrades will be replaced with a health upgrade ruining your build. Therefore if you want a three attack upgrade build you need to make sure that you don't die. The only reliable way is to just have two range upgrades and a bounce upgrade. Most enemies can't get into your range but it's still possible to get hit by being overwhelmed from too many enemies. If you die you get a health upgrade which also happens to solve this weakness of the build. It turns out if you want to get good at the game this is the only viable build despite there being thousands of possible upgrade combinations.
Even random lock/key puzzles become boring quickly.
Procedural tools is a great way of amplifying artist creativity, but don't generate fun games on their own.
Not until we solve "hard" AI, at least. Once we do, I expect that will be what they do to keep us pets happy.
Borderlands is another good example of this. Procedurally generated guns, but they fall into buckets of terrible->ok->good->amazing, and the particular uniqueness of that weapon becomes stale after a few minutes. I enjoyed about the game until about halfway through until it started turning into a slog. (Although this is probably a matter of MMO mechanics not meshing well with FPS).
EDIT: That sounds snide but I'm actually being sincere. I'm planning on including items in my game from a procedurally generated tech tree with location-dependent item availability.