inselaffe on 12/10/2008 at 00:16
Indeed, what he was talking about is really not as much work as everyone makes out. Granted you need to have good access to modify the game, so maybe it's not really possible in bioshock (i don't know how open it is) but the things you would be doing are to general game mechanics here. Quite where you got the idea of models and suchlike i do not know.
Jason Moyer on 12/10/2008 at 01:29
Quote Posted by ZylonBane
Papy didn't say he could turn Bioshock into SS2. He said he could turn it into "
an SS2". What that means is leaving the existing structure of Bioshock, but stripping off all the training wheels that Irrational bolted on to make it palatable to moronic focus testers. The end result would presumably be the true spiritual sequel to SS2 that Irrational originally intended.
I see your point, although I wonder how SS2-like Bioshock could be made without significant changes to the level design and the engine mechanics itself. Changing it from a slightly emergent run-n-gun into a real FPS/RPG hybrid would require adding things like an inventory system, some sort of skill-based aiming accuracy, etc. And you'd still be left with the final 1/3 of the game being utterly fucked without serious story and level redesign.
Fafhrd on 12/10/2008 at 03:58
The inventory system is already there, you just have to run around to a bunch of different machines to use it.
Chade on 12/10/2008 at 04:18
Quote Posted by Papy
The gameplay is now only a very small part of the game development. Give me the source code of BioShock and a map editor and I will make an SS2 out of it in less than three months. Give me a team of 10 people and it will be 2 weeks.
...
A game cost several million dollars. How much money do you think goes into gameplay?
(Later in thread)
Personally I think the problem is developers and publishers are very, very short sighted.
Hint: when an entire group of people, whose life is dedicated to tackling issues who know nothing about, say something you disagree with - consider the possibility you are wrong.
Now, how much frigging money is being spent on gameplay? Well let's see ... the people designing the gameplay are play testing and focus testing every single fricken thing they do. That's a shit load of money right there. What's more: they are making decisions based on moving targets (like: what is fun?). They are prototyping a large number of possible changes and game systems. Most of which will get thrown out. They are building assets to support this entire process. Most of these will also get thrown out. The bulk of the game's development is spent finding out what the game is going to be. That's spending money on game design right there. Much of the same money is also being spent on assets. That's because you can't separate the two.
That's the difference between creating a cohesive single player gaming experience, and doing a mod. Creating a single player story driven game is about crafting a set of assets to work together and produce an experience that is greater then the sum of each part. It's achieving this in an economically responsible way that will provably appeal to a wide selection of people. It's about starting out with next to nothing and not having the faintest idea what the end result will be, but with the faith that after blundering around and spending a shit load of money you will finally approach something that looks like fun to a lot of people.
Modding efforts like your are about taking a pre-defined and well understood game experience and changing it a little bit of it to appeal to a narrow selection of people who are interested in seeing this particular thing changed for it's own sake. There is a high degree of certainty about what the end result should be, and it doesn't matter if it doesn't quite gel with the rest of the game, because the mod is almost an end in itself.
Large modding efforts for which this is not true often run into exactly the same problems that real game designers do. How many of these large-scale mods start off with grand intentions and get nowhere? Almost every single one that I know of. The true scale of the problem is hidden from casual observers through selection bias.
Papy on 12/10/2008 at 05:55
Quote Posted by Jason Moyer
some sort of skill-based aiming accuracy
So you think creating a function adding two dispersion vectors to the original aiming vector is something difficult? Or is it multiplying those two dispersion vectors with two random numbers, which are themselves multiplied with a variable representing skill, which you think is difficult?
Quote Posted by Chade
consider the possibility you are wrong.
I always do. Do you consider the possibility you miss something important with your reasoning?
To me, either you don't understand what I'm saying, or you really need to get down to earth a bit. Game design is not some kind of perfect engineering where all elements are unique and must be in perfect harmony with one another. If you look a bit at the gaming history, maybe you'll realize that most games, from a gameplay point of view, are clones of others with, at best, only some slight variations from their predecessors. They vary a lot on other assets, but ultimately the gameplay is mostly the same. And you know what, most of the time it works without a problem.
Ok, I'll give you a simple example. Vita-Chambers are a major part of BioShock. I'm sure level design, splicer strength, plasmid and even the color of the floor tiles were made with Vita-Chambers in mind (I really think they were tackled on, but I'll pretend for now BioShock was a perfectly engineered game like you say games are). So based on your theory, I guess it means that without Vita-Chambers the game would not work and would be unplayable, right? Well... I played with them disabled and that was the only way I could appreciate the game. How could that be?
Obviously you can separate a lot of things and the best part is you don't even have to really tweak anything that much, you just let the player do his own tweaking by making him select a difficulty level (which generally doesn't do much except change damages done and received). This is cheap, but that's all the industry, with all its money, was able to do up to now anyway.
DDL on 12/10/2008 at 10:13
Quote Posted by Papy
So you think creating a function adding two dispersion vectors to the original aiming vector is something difficult? Or is it multiplying those two dispersion vectors with two random numbers, which are themselves multiplied with a variable representing skill, which you think is difficult?
Probably designing an entire skill system from scratch, I suspect. Applying the numbers is nothing, but designing all the requisite cross-referential skill windows, recoding everything to incorporate them, hell: even working out when and where to allocate skillpoints in the first place...seems like quite a lot of work.
ZylonBane on 12/10/2008 at 12:40
I think it's worth mentioning that pretty much every UI screen in Bioshock is implemented in Flash. Specifically, Flash 6 (MX). Since the UI presumably has access to all global data, with a copy of the Flash IDE and a good decompiler, one could make whatever RPG-ish changes you wanted.
Papy on 12/10/2008 at 19:25
Quote Posted by DDL
Probably designing an entire skill system from scratch, I suspect. Applying the numbers is nothing, but designing all the requisite cross-referential skill windows, recoding everything to incorporate them, hell: even working out when and where to allocate skillpoints in the first place...seems like quite a lot of work.
How much time do you think it would take to implement? What "quite a lot of work" means to you?
I just finished a small program for a client. They are using Simply Accounting and unfortunately this piece of crap is not able to meet one of their need (as if being a piece of crap was not enough). The goal is to manage loans and produce a file which is transmitted to the bank to withdraw money from their clients' accounts, as well as produce a report containing the list of data entry that must be made manually with Simply Accounting (I didn't want to mess directly with Simply Accounting database). There is of course a window for general configuration (interest rate, data to format the bank file...), one window to view and enter customer information, one window to enter and view loan information (actually it's a tab in the customer window), one window to enter the summary the bank send back about transactions done (automatic processing was not possible as it is a PDF file), as well as the main window which include a summary of last transactions, info about when the next transactions are due and some general info about money loaned (mainly a nice graph showing past, present and future amount of money loaned). There is the report for the bank and the report for Simply Accounting data entry, there is a report to give to customers (list of past and future payments, cumulated interest...), there is a report with a summary of each customers and there is finally a report about money loaned.
how much time do you think it took me, including meeting with the client and debugging, to make this?
Eabin on 12/10/2008 at 19:53
To be fair, I think DDL was talking more about the design phase of all this.
Implementing it all is a very different matter. Once you exactly know what to implement, you can do a serious estimation of how long it will take you. But knowing how long it takes to design game mechanics (which skills should there be? what should they change? how much skill points does one get for doing which task? and so on) that are actually fun to play, that's a whole different story.
DDL on 12/10/2008 at 21:43
Exactly! And then manually allocating skill awards throughout the entire game, which would be a really tedious task...
