Game Development

Good afternoon ;)

Currently I am torn between keeping the project realtime or making it turn based (as i initially intended)

2:22 PM

hai

@Kay are you concerned with gameplay or development time more?

turn-based will be easier to develop.

Ithought you were making a FPS

Well I am personally not sure whether both take more or less time to develop.

Turn-based is WAY easier to develop.

I've made turn-based network games.

With real-time, you'll be pfutzing with network shit for a long, long time.

Game will be single player. Multiplayer currently just has an overhead which I dont want to deal with atm.

If the game will be successful and people demand it I will create a sequel with a multiplayer

I still think turn-based is easier

even for single-player

2:30 PM

I remember reading a Diablo retrospective where they realized "realtime is just really fast turnbased"

I can't say I agree. But maybe they know something I don't. :)

~~FAST PACED TURN BASED GAME~~

~~strikethrough support~~

~~strikethrough~~

~~hahahaha~~

doppelgreener

@Kay ---like this---

thank you

2:34 PM

> After everyone left for the weekend, Dave sat down at his computer and pulled up Diablo’s code. He scanned through and hit on something. The game was written so every action—movement, combat, quaffing a healing potion — took up a certain amount of time. Monsters moved immediately after the player initiated a command. Once the time to perform an action expired, the game turned back the clock and the player-monster turn cycle began anew. All he needed to do was whittle the time between actions down to nothing.

doppel is the nicest guy in the room

if he is the nicest then I am probably the most humble one here. I can't see anyone in here being more humble than I am

hahaha :)

talking about turn-based games, I am hyped as hell for artifact

I'll certainly give it a shot

I trust Richard Garfield more than Valve.

2:37 PM

yeah my coworker was all like "Richard Garfield ?, I am sold already"

I met him once at ubisoft

we hired him to evaluate some stuff we had designed for a new game we were working on

he liked my player-motivation systems

then the people above me said they didn't like it and changed it. :(

really sharp guy

It feels like 1/2 of the people in here work for ubisoft

I had him sign one of my MTG commons, my way of saying I understood his design.

I don't anymore

stopped in 2011

Most of the things I've learned game design-wise was due to Dota

lets all quit our jobs and go work for Ubisoft

2:40 PM

I used to play Dota on a high competitive level and its quite interesting the design choices that were taken

One thing you will not learn from DotA: "A design is not done when you've run out of things to add. It is done when you've run out of things to remove."

It's pretty seriously bloated in terms of design. Lots of things don't support its core gameplay

lots of holdovers from decisions made in the original mod.

Well not agreeing with all design choices of dota but I can see your point

after all i used to play dota

if you want to read my opinions on it: theaxenalmo.blogspot.com/2015/09/…

no need to agree. :)

I also wrote a comparison with HotS, which I quite like even though it's much simplified.

Regarding denies - "This is also a leftover from the mod, as in W3 you could attack anything, allied or not."

2:43 PM

theaxenalmo.blogspot.com/2014/12/…

In general Wc3 u could, in dota this was intersected

The mod made some changes to it as well over time. Like when they changed it so you couldn't skip towers.

there were strats where you'd go for the third turrets first.

i played the mod from when it was still on Reign of Chaos, before AllStars.

I miss the teleporting healer from that version. Also the asymmetric sides, only half the heroes could be chosen for each side.

You prefer systemic design over a giant pile of small tweaks? :)

I do :)

Well that was well beyond my time

2:46 PM

that's why I'm now a Systems Designer on Dead by Daylight

I started around 8 years ago. 6.59c IIRC

I think I started on Fluffy Bunny's 1.6 RoC

maybe it was 1.9

can't quite remember

do you think old games that remained balanced for many years despite huge metagame shifts from the players (I'm thinking Marvel vs Capcom, Brood Wars, etc) did something intrinsically right or they kind of lucked out the underlying unknown systems were unintentionally still about as balanced as the "designed" systems?

coffeemancer

i am also having PTSD

due to what kind of trauma?

2:52 PM

Did those games remain balanced?

For example, in MvC tournaments, what was the hero pick-rate like? were there a broad selection of heroes, or were some of them "top tier"?

well, there was a sub-balance, as in, there were at least a large selection available at top tier

I was thinking about this becuase I only reacently learned that modern fighting games are tweaked via balance patches so I wondered how the old games managed to hold up

ok so I'm not sure that's actually "balanced" then. But looking at it that way, few if any games with asymmetry are actually balanced. I mean, Chess isn't balanced due to the first move advantage.

People just dealt with the imbalances

an "OP" champ in LoL might have a 55% win rate. In other words, you gotta play 20 games, and in one of them, your win was because of the champ being overpowered.

that's really close to balanced, in my opinion.

DMGregory

@Jimmy Joiiiiinnnnnn usssssssssss.....

I think the definition of "balance" has just changed over the years. We have more access to data on winrates etc than we used to, and we can bitch about 5% imbalances.

Due to people like @DMGregory most people in here work for ubisoft :p

2:57 PM

hahaha :D

DMGregory

I honestly thought it was just me? Anyone else at Ubi currently?

Nah I think its just you, I was joking about it

Pikalek

I've never read all the way through Ubi's ToS - it's possibly I work for them & don't know it.

hahaha

worry not! you can check whether you work for ubisoft on www.doiworkforubisoft.com

3:07 PM

hahaha

good day for chat comedy

doppelgreener

> NO
You are however in an arrangement of indebted slave labor to them

haha

3:54 PM

cries in C#

2 hours later…

5:39 PM

@Almo In Go, Player 2 starts with 6.5 points, which is the estimated value of going first. Does that qualify as balanced?

3 hours later…

DMGregory

8:27 PM

In my game design & balancing course, I teach students that "balanced" isn't an end state in itself. Instead, we talk about reaching a state of "balanced for [this particular target experience]"

So if the target is "players of similar skill playing against one another can expect to get scores in a similar range, on average" then that 6.5 addition might be a way to achieve that target.