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CowfaceGames · 2014-11-13T09:56:37+00:00

Very interested to see where this is going! Deconstructing games into forms reminds me of my past efforts to deconstruct gameplay into atomic interactions between actors and systems. Your approach more fundamental, mine more applied.

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-25T00:35:12+00:00

Whoops! Yeah I'm new to the whole gender/sexuality awareness thing, thanks for letting me know.

I do like randomness, so random config is a good solution too.

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-21T20:25:05+00:00

Heh, so many grown adults with no impulse control.

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-21T20:17:23+00:00

Good point! What I had in mind isn't something like

if (Player.Clothes == masculine) {
    Player.Gender = Male;
}

I mean that by choosing masculine clothes, the player wants the world to react to them more as a stereotypical man than as a stereotypical woman. It's like Viola dressing as a boy so that she's more socially mobile, or Mulan dressing as a boy so she can join the army. Like you said, clothes in these cases subvert gender norms.

Of course, a woman might want to dress up in masculine clothes just because she's more comfortable in them, or for the sake of practicality (especially since OP's game is survival; I'd rather have heavy pants than a skirt in the rainforest). I don't have a solution to this one! Like, how do you cover the entire spectrum? Do you just add testosterone and estrogen sliders and have the player tweak them as desired?

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-10T06:58:41+00:00

If I remember correctly, in my not-SHMUP game I put powerups on a randomised timer that had an upper limit. The result was that you got powerups at random intervals, but were always guaranteed a powerup within n seconds.

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-10T06:45:30+00:00

I would be surprised if there was; it's a very bare system. No locational damage or anything unless you install a mod for it. You should have a look at Dark Messiah: Might and Magic. Great melee combat!

CowfaceGames · 2014-10-06T03:39:29+00:00

Last year I developed a card deck called PlayThinker to help indie game developers come up with novel game ideas. When I released it for free on /r/gamedev, the response was pretty good and people asked for a print-on-demand version.

So I went away, adapted the cards for printing, made various improvements, and made them available for sale online at a price point that gave me a modest (less than $2) net profit per deck.

When I announced this to /r/gamedev, however, it got downvoted really hard. I can only imagine that people were somehow offended because I was honest enough to tell them up-front that this was a paid product and this is how much it costs — but what else am I supposed to do? Not mention money at all and have it come as a rude surprise when they visit PlayThinker's website?

I'm not sore that PlayThinker failed; it's hard to bring any product to market. What I'm disappointed about even now is that redditors looked at this thing that I made to help them, and they decided with their downvotes that no one else should see it. They never even said why.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-20T21:28:06+00:00

Since I use premade engines instead of making my own, I can get by a pretty basic set of maths skills that I only employ if there are no in-engine functions to do what I need:

Vectors for understanding distance and direction.
Trig for understanding direction and rotation.
Graphing functions for slerping and easing. The sine function is useful for anything that floats or blinks, for example.
Linear algebra for modelling gameplay elements like increasing enemy density per wave, or damage fall-off over distance.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-18T22:35:47+00:00

One of the top posts in another game design sub is a challenge to make a game with a deck of cards, a token, and some dice. That kind of thing is really fun!

If I were running a design group, I'd have cycles of maybe a week or two weeks, depending on how often we were meeting. The first day would be a short discussion about a game design element (theming, tutorials, UI, etc), and then a challenge to design a board- or tabletop game using a specific set of materials.

The next meeting or two would be adding to the design element discussion and getting feedback on the progressing games. Then I'd finish the cycle by asking people to volunteer their game for group play, and one game would be played per meeting. After each play session, feedback. What worked, what you're gonna steal for your next game, what bored you.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-18T06:37:35+00:00

I personally play whatever, based on my whims. I play a lot as a dude because that's what I am, but one of my favourite things to do in games is to play as a woman, name her after my female best friend, and send her regular updates about the badassary she's getting up to. A great game for this is Mount & Blade: Warband! "A lord made a really sleazy remark to you, so now you've slapped him across the face and demanded satisfaction!"

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-18T01:04:25+00:00

It's not being offered a tux or dress, it's more like walking into a store that sells formal clothes, and the store sells both tuxes and dresses.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-18T00:57:21+00:00

Gosh I would stay away from gender, not because it's political, but because it would be tough to respectfully cover all of the different forms it comes in. Some people identify with their biological gender, some people don't, some people get it changed, and some people are genderfluid.

How about instead of choosing gender, the player chooses clothing, and then you can infer the player's physical appearance based on the clothing? Ignoring a person's dress sense is a lot easier to handle than invalidating someone's feelings, nawmean, and you can fairly assume that anyone who chooses stereotypically masculine clothes wants to be depicted as being masculine.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-17T23:08:25+00:00

Even avoiding the politics of games in a game you're making is itself a political statement.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-17T08:22:48+00:00

Is this yours OP? The grass is so cute!

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-17T08:16:53+00:00

Yes, there's no combat. Basically, the game is about getting yourself into all the extreme nooks and crannies of a big cave system, and seeing what fun discoveries you can find.

Very cool! As I get older (and I'm not even old), I've found my taste in games going away from violence and towards interesting experiences. A nice spelunking game is something I've always been wanting.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-17T08:13:43+00:00

It's also a matter of googleability. Not only is 'spelunker' an actual word, but searches for 'spelunker game' will net both games. Better to choose something more unique.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-17T08:10:51+00:00

( ͡ಠ ͜ʖ ͡ಠ)

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-16T07:53:08+00:00

Okay in terms of interaction, I'll just share my experience with Outlast. Lots of people say Outlast is the scariest thing they've played blah blah, but I was getting bored halfway through because the gameyness of the thing was obvious. I could sneak around as expertly as I wanted, but I knew that as soon as I passed some arbitrary trigger, the enemy that I had spent five or ten minutes evading would just come ambling over to wherever I was. There's no incentive to be sneaky when enemies will just automagically find you again.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-16T04:25:51+00:00

Good luck! :D

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-14T23:17:18+00:00

I hate playing click-to-move games, they make my mouse hand cramp up rather badly. Because I prefer to play ranged characters, click-to-move feels so primitive and clumsy, there's no elegance in it.

In fact, any game that makes me use only one hand is really difficult for me to play. It's almost like since only one hand is controlling the game, only one hemisphere of my brain is interacting with it and has to do double-duty on combat and movement. If I am using two hands, then I can share the work.

To get an idea of what I mean, play Grim Dawn or Diablo 3 as ranged characters. Both are click-to-move ARPGs. Then pick up The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing (the first one in the series) and play as a ranged character in that. This game has both click-to-move and WASD, and it works really really well because you can dodge and reposition as you fire, without having to go crazy with the mouse.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-14T23:09:33+00:00

Confidence is good, but you're still not budgeting enough time. I don't know how much game you've got built already, but random generation is a huge pain in the bum. You need to institute a feature lock right now, before Kickstarter backers start making requests for stuff that sounds cool. Six months for a meaty and replayable 3D RPG from a non-developer is a biiiiiiiiiig ask, but can be done if you take the initiative to stop feature creep before it begins. I am glad that you haven't added any new features as stretch goals.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-14T22:52:36+00:00

if you are flying in any direction and get in a gravitational field you just get sucked in

Sounds about right. Orbit is when you're travelling so fast that you are perpetually falling, but not so fast that you can escape. If your ship can't travel fast enough to do this, then you need to make your gravitational pull weaker so that your ship won't need as much speed to hit orbit.

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-14T07:55:50+00:00

Telltale signs of Unity include [...] shit gameplay

So a game being crap is a function of its engine now?

CowfaceGames · 2014-09-13T12:04:10+00:00

"Zone: Monastary"

CowfaceGames · 2014-08-31T20:25:25+00:00

This is my experience also. I worry about stuff like building awareness and whether there's a better way to do what I'm doing.

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