@DMGregory These topics are entirely different from anything else I've come up with so far! I'm saving that thread and will also read Daniel Cook's entry in the following days. However, I can't seem to define what kind of "dynamics" are involved when talking about long-term dynamics... I really like the idea of developing technical solutions to design processes, and will be glad to read more about this topic. I could come up with an idea about streamlining one of these processes, who knows
Yeah... I think the term "dynamics" is used intentionally broadly there as "any interesting aspect of how things change over time/player behaviour variations"
For that, you may have to ask Jurie directly. I think it has to do with procedural generation. Jurie had recently worked on Watch_Dogs: Legion, and generating/adapting missions to fit where you were in the city / story / what faction members and relationships you've developed up to that point in play was one of the major challenges, so I suspect he's thinking of something in that vein.
One dynamics example: for Far Cry 6, I built an Excel model that would take our list of missions, side activities, and our rules for level progression and difficulty escalation, and simulate a player playing through the campaign doing zero, some, or all side activities. Then I'd compare the player's level against the target level for a mission by the time they got to it - aiming so they'd be under-level if they weren't doing any side content, but could still meet the level target through sides.
So the dynamic we're examining there is the relationship between player level and mission challenge level, trying to keep it tight enough to motivate play, but loose enough that the player still has choices and isn't railroaded into playing just one way to max out their level, and that they can't soft-lock by escalating the whole map into an unbeatable difficulty.
I built a similar model for Splinter Cell Blacklist, that would play through all our missions using various playstyle and skill parameters, and estimate the player's score and earnings in each category, so I could balance prices to keep up with that expected earning rate range.
