An absolute hidden gem! As someone who is looking to take a hard pivot in life and start game design, I've been watching and reading as much as possible. A buddy of mine actually recommended the art of game design to me recently, and I've been reading as much of it as possible. Its such a well thought out book, and im happy to see its influence elsewhere!
Think about a lot of things to help influence how and what to study. Story based games? More involved with writing and studying storytelling, action based 2D platformer? More focused on level design and gameplay. Try to start out simple and go on from there, and that can help choosing your art style as well , (3D, pixel, vector or etc) and what engine would be the most helpful. From what I've found Gdevelop and Gamemaker tend to be the most newbie friendly. My problem (which I'm sure is normal) is I had a massive scope for my first game, far beyond my capabilities in every aspect (art, programming, and even music and voice over) don't let yourself get bogged down like I did and try to focus on something achievable to start with. -Not a professional but just my 2 cents been studying on my own for a few years, so far this guy seems like a really great resource.
I saw this video in my recommended tab and I saved it for later when I have some time for RUclips and now that I've seen it, why the heck does this have barely 300 views? Your video is quite motivating and as someone who's been interested in game development for years but never actually pushed trough to learn programming on a good enough level for it, this really gives a push towards it. Your drawings are cute as heck and I subscribed, looking forward to more of these. Though I do want to talk about "the purpose" because doing anything at all could be argued that it doesn't have a purpose for being done. Both creating and playing a game could be for no reason but also be for very specific reason and the difference is the perspective on that activity. I thought once about why I play games and my conclusion was that I never wished to be bored and games just happened to me as a very young kid so they stuck to me as the most entertaining thing to do around. I can do it by myself and seemingly endlessly. And the purpose of a game was to entertain me and maybe tell a story, teach me something or let me test my reflexes though all those were second priority. I thought a lot over the years about which games I could make one day and which type of audience I might attract but never the sole philosophical question of why should it exist and what is the purpose of it. And my answer is that it should be fun, first and foremost. It doesn't matter if it's a strategy card game, or an action packed fighting game, or a touching visual novel; if it isn't fun it's a bad game and there's nothing less important than that. Now, "fun" is also a subject to another philosophical thinking and varies from person to person, but I am leaving that as an exercise to the reader.
A game must be fun, until the games are arts. An art is an expression, and in its nebulous form there's no limit to one's expression. So there's no must.
This is giving me old Extra Credits vibes, back when it was a rag-tag production with more heart and focus on game dev. I still use the "fail faster" motto to this day. This is the highest of compliments; please, run with this, and inspire others. Those old videos and many more are what made me into someone able to help a friend start making the game of his dreams and what made me into the fantastic GM I am today. I can definitely tell you're a teacher, you have the empathy and hope of one. Milk this book dry of its content and then make more.
Read the book a few months ago and very recently, I understood that my game is going to be about following your dreams. Figuring out all of the art and narrative stuff is so hard though
I sort of had a sort of a crisis a while back where I wondered what was the purpose of doing anything playful or engaging with art at all, and it made me realize some of the things in this video, so I'm glad to see a professional validate me and put it more succinctly lol. Video games are art, and the point of art is to make you feel things, and the point of feeling those things is so that you can have the benefits of those experiences while living a life that wouldn't allow for them otherwise.
You've reminded me in a single video what I love about game development, playing games, and enjoying myself. Thank you so much and I can't wait to see the coming videos!
i loved this video, with the silly drawings aswell. i have been very thoroughly planning my game for like a year now, i have written books worth of "notes" that of course all invalidate each other the further back i read lol. despite that i never really thought about the purpose, which im really glad about that you pointed it out and made it into something positive, because "the purpose of games" can easily be played down imo. my game will give players the experience of being a shadow of yourself as an uploaded mind in a robot body on a rogue planet far away from earth and isolated from all that is regarded as human. beside being a vr game on mouse and keyboard and without the headset, its gonna be an immersive and authentic experience, actively pushing the player to think to survive, and to think about what truly is going on in the story and in the fictional world as a whole. this experience is valuable because thinking critically and figuring something out for yourself a mystery as big as this brings people together and is a cultural enrichment both as a gameplay experience and as a storytelling piece
absolutely, for me it was star wars on the Gameboy advance, ghost rider and so on, now when i think of making something, i look into the past of the experience i had and its influence on me, its not as deep, but you learn something from everything and experience something new, for those who didn't experience that childhood fun we can make something that will give them that joy.
Pokemon is the first game I thought of too. Thanks for this video. I've been making my game for the past 3.5 years and wondering if it's fun or a good enough experience to a gamer.
The absolute most fundamental reason humans play games is the same reason behind most of what animals do, acquiring power. We want more control over the world, and we want to know how much control we have over the world in relation to everyone else. There are many ways games can satisfy that evolutionary urge, it can do it through learning (facts, art, experiences), refining skills, creating/simulating relationships, making you compete and compare yourself with other people/npcs, etc.
Glad to finally find this channel very wise and extremely inspiring content there bro 👏 gonna re think my game and come up with an experience statement thanks man
Love the video! Bring a lot of cool thoughts into my head. My statement for my idea would be You are a scifi Bounty hunter working to stop a giant corporation from controlling history as we know it. This experience should allow people to feel like they are saving history 1 mission at a time. This game idea is a simple find the object style game with story elements kicked in.
To go a level deeper games are art and this video is a kinda simplified lesson in the philosophy behind art the purpose of all art and media from game to movie to painting to live performance is to elicit an emotion in the viewer that is why a game is nothing till someone plays it when making any art I feel it is important to ground yourself to what kind of feeling you are trying to make your art invoke I think is what makes the most memorable pieces of media
To use even pong as a basic example it is trying to elicit the emotion or completion or responding to a stimuli both of which make it a valuable enough experience worth having
Love the video! A game is definitely supposed to be a unique experience for the player that sharpens their life skills, so I’ll have to keep that in mind.
4:00 - This section here. Such a good thing to think on. (Oh, also, Golden Sun. The Djinn and how it interacted with Character Classes and the Psynergy available to them, even mid-battle? It's my white whale. I don't think I'm going to find a game with such an interesting Magic and Class system ever again.)
Devel… loop? The loop of game dev? Huh! I’m not sure entirely on the experience. May I want to help people learn about themselves and all the cool stuff about their sensory experience that they take for granted, and learn how to take hope when discouraged. At least that was yesterday’s game concept I drew on a page. A couple days before that, it was a little bit about how to judge between opposing sides of a debate. What wild concepts with so much opportunity for innovation. It occurs to me, however, that my particular vision for such a game sometimes contrasts with my internal expectations of what the external world expects or wants a bit like the Aesop about a father, his son, and their donkey.
My game (a breakout rippoff currently in development) should create the experience of being a skillful and powerful player, through building muscle memory and the ability to excecute precise hits of the ball. By mastering the flick of the mouse, you master a piece of the flick of the wrist in sports like ping pong and tennis.
You know, as a non taught game mechanic designer, it was validating to hear that the things I do are backed by people who have actually studied things. Like, I know what I do works, but good to know that it there is in fact method to my madness.
My game will give players the experience of climbing through dangerous areas with powerful movement abilities. This experience is valuable because it evokes a sense of exploration that can lead people to do bigger things in life.
i watched the whole video but i still have no clue what my experience statement is supposed to be... all i want is to bring to life a game that i had a dream about. well, a couple games i dreamt about... im not sure what the "experience" is meant to be?
Well think about: what does your game illicit in the player? Skyrim gives the experience of Adventuring across a vast world. Minecraft gives the experience of both exploring a world to find treasure and of being a powerful creator, able to make anything they can imagine. 5 nights at Freddy's gives the experience of working the night shift at a haunted place. My examples are all simple and direct, but I think it makes sense. And so features and mechanics that are added should facilitate and help these experiences to shine. I have heard of instead designing to always strip away any unused and useless aspect of a game, rather than add up game mechanics. So designing a carting game with this philosophy would be to identify your core experience, and shave every single thing that doesn't directly support it. Can I ask: what is one of your games about? Maybe we can identify the experience together?
@@aidanmarler7843 well, one of them for example was a puzzle solving game in a 2d grid with a neat mechanic of "moments". a "moment" was a time where _most_ other elements on screen wouldnt move and instead wait for your input... but if you take too long, the "moment" would pass anyway and any element that moves would move. moving in any direction would automatically end a moment, and moments were around a second or two long. the most frequent enemy in the game was snakes, who would appear on the grid by breaking into it from a wall (so, one moment where the snake isnt in the grid yet, the wall would be visibly cracked) and after getting in, it would "home in" on you as quickest as possible to kill you (each moment, the snake would move one square closer to you). there was also a rarer enemy that moved independently of moments, making it a deadly enemy, because it moved so fast. the other major mechanic was dying, when you would become a floating ghost brain who could move puzzle elements, make the enemies behave differently (such as changing paths the enemies would take to get to you), and access areas outside the main area thru tiny holes in walls, where you could find extra puzzle elements which would be part of each level's puzzle. sorry if this explanation is long and confusing. i find it hard to explain what i mean by text, and english isnt my first language to boot. theres a couple other details i remember from the dream, but theyre not super important. since the game had no story and no objective other than "solve these puzzles", im not sure what the experience statement "should" be. it really doesnt help that although i love _playing_ puzzle games, i really dont think i could _design_ puzzles myself...
My game is to give players the experience of exploring a new world and joining a community where you help each other with quests and do so regardless of vision disabilities. This is important so people with vision loss can still experience RPG and dungeon crawling in a game that is still attractive to the larger sighted community vs text only games.
Having played video games since virtually their inception, Pong through to Pacific Drive, being the latest I've played. I think there was something to be said for the abstractness of the early era home console games on the likes of the Atari 2600 or Philips Videopac for example, where the limitations of the technology itself meant the game experience was distilled down to what was absolutely necessary. Modern games too often seem to do things because they can, without ever really seeming to consider if they should. Which is one of the reasons I enjoy a lot of retro style indy games, that focus on the game mechanic of the game, rather than being concerned with the use of the medium of the game being used as a platform for political messaging - which seems to be the over-riding concern of modern AA game developers. When thinking about games, and I've made a few, just for my own amusement, I begin by considering what limitations I am going to put on the game, so it doesn't sprawl out of control.
A concept I feel sort of ties in to this budgeting. Being both economical with your time and wallet. Thinking about similar questions can you produce a game on schedule that fits in your desired budget. That sort of thing
Game development is a conversation with the players. You have to start the conversation asap. Start play testing asap. Paper prototypes if possible. But before that you need to understand what you/your team want to say in that game development. The biggest job for designers is listening to feedback and applying that feedback in a way that keeps with the pillars of the game.
Can you make a video on how to efficiently read the book. I have it but I couldn't to get the juice out of it very well, like what leave and what to read and should read then develop or develop while reading it😅😅
I also played GBA games for Hours even NDS Pokemon Games. I loved playing GBA Rom hacks of Pokemons. It almost fell like am Part of that world and wanted to live more and more. I played till my 11th grade My one of the rom hacks have been Pokemon Red Chapter Pokemon Gaia Pokemon saiph 1-2
I think I understand what some commenters mean here. A game is not an experience, it contains them. It contains many of them and sometimes it's up to the player which one to choose. You can play as mage, as healer, as tank, as trader, farmer, miner, .. the game isn't an experience in this case "living as person having any of the mentioned jobs, races, classes" isn't an experience, it's just a random sentence that doesn't really make any sense. xD Maybe it's better to categorize games and give each category (e.g. genre) their own meaning. Stealth games have the purpose of making players feel strong because of their brain and because they observe, while being hidden. Jump & Run games have the purpose of feeling good in the smallest movements. And so on. A definition for all games of all genres is probably pretty meaningless anyway.
Regarding the section at 1:48 about games as experiences, I must disagree that, fundamentally, games are experiences. Games CAN be experiences but not fundamentally, IMO. I also disagreed with Jesse Schell when I read that same book. It makes sense that Jesse Schell would view games as experiences since that was literally his job for ~7 years at Disney. That makes sense for a Disney theme park cause a Disney theme park IS TRYING to be a "magical" experience. How do I know that? Because Disney states it themselves in their mission statement: "to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling". Pay attention to that last word "storytelling". Disney, and therefore Jesse Schell, are trying to create experiences through storytelling. Here's my main disagreement: games are not fundamentally a storytelling medium, they are a medium of PLAY. Games , since humans were living in caves, have been about PLAY. Although I believe storytelling and play both attempt to serve the same purpose, which is survival through learning, they go about it through different strategies. Storytelling is about one person passing on knowledge that is embedded in the story, where as playing is about a person learning the knowledge themselves through cautious exploration and tweaking their behavior based on feedback from the thing their playing with. Here's one example, of many, to debunk your, and Jesse Schell's, theory of games as experiences: a Rubik's Cube. It's a game because it has a goal, and rules to constrain how you meet that goal: the cube must start in a random configuration, and you must twist it along one if it's many axis until each of the 6 sides only have only 1 color assigned. You can't remove the colored stickers from the cube faces and re-arrange them, that would be cheating. So, it's a game, yet completely devoid of all storytelling aspects, or "experiences". It's just a box with colored stickers on it. Yet, it's extremely engaging to some people to play with. Why? Every twist, and resulting state of the cube, gives you feedback. It tells you that you're either closer or further away from the goal. Which allows you to start *learning* patterns. The more you *learn* the patterns the better you get at solving the cube. There are many secrets the cube has to offer, if you're willing to play with it.
@@floast If you make that argument though then games and stories lose all their meaning because everything is an experience technically. So to carve out a space for "game" then you have to show how it's distinct from other experiences. Games are distinct because there's a goal and a set of rules to achieve that goal. I just think if you design a game from the angle that it's an experience first, then important aspects of goals, rules, progression, difficulty, rewards for meeting goals, etc., get missed/overlooked. You end up with an interesting story and world but not an interesting game.
Like... you know how this Indigo Park hyped? Lot's of people say "That's a bad game, no cool graphics, no interesting gameplay, puzzles made for two yo. It's just that stupid raccoon hypnotized people". But actually it's because games are not about gameplay, puzzles or other stuff. It's about experience. If someone made a cool experience of going through abandoned theam park with a friendly AI assistant and they nailed it. It's not cheating, it's just that game delivers me interesting experience and I'm happy. Look at fallout 1 and 2 graphics, boring clicking on enemy to shoot gameplay. Stupid, booring? But it delivers the experience of going through the post-apocalyptic wasteland that I couldn't get anywhere else. That's why those fallout games are so legendary. Not because of graphics :P
I disagree with your fundamental premise. It's not about novel experiences, it's about "fun" (defined as meaningful inputs over time) and engaging gameplay above all. Nintendo is the proof of this, as the "experience" is most always secondary to gameplay. Additionally, gameplay is what creates the experience, and thus experience devoid of gameplay is meaningless.
@@johnleorid "a game is meant to convey an experience" implies one thing, while being safe in so far that it can be backpeddled to apply to everything. Solitaire and soccer aren't meant to convey an experience; If you do categorize that as "conveying an experience" that what does it say? Then cheese is also meant to convey an experience. The pong line rubs me the wrong way too. So we have simulators and the pizza game where the experience would be simpler and better than in real life, as opposed to pong?? Pong can easily be categorized as a simple tennis simulator. The claim "pong is about the experience of playing a videogame" also destroys any value the experience definition could hold. Worse than that it doesn't say anything about the actual experience of playing pong. Most of us haven't started playing games with pong. It's still fun. The real experience of pong is in it's actual gameplay. The rise and fall of tension when the ball approaches your paddle, the score as a goal, the (simple, but effective) AI that simulates competition, The skill of predicting the balls path etc. That is the experience of pong if one cared to look for it. The "Games can make you a better person" chapter gives me the vibe that I see so often. It tries to legitimize games by saying they can help you grow as a person. While in itself not wrong, we would easily recognize the fault in it with more matured and respected artforms. A song or painting can help you grieving, but noone would require it to be legitimate, because with those we understand that it's quite futile to require your art to have a practical semi educational purpose. People make art not only for someone else to experience, but for themselves, because they felt it, or whatever. Implying purpose comes from other people growing from playing it is most of all ... pointless because you don't control someone elses growth. There are people growing while playing "troll"-games that were intended only to frustrate/annoy. You can grow while staring at a black screen. You can grow because someone had the discord notification sound in their video and you realize you're lonely or whatever. Making games isn't making a virtual therapist and trying to do so will probably lead to you making neither.
The word fun hasn't been mentioned once in this video. Sorry but no, experiences are not the point of games, is a nice outcome than can happen. Fun is the absolute first and most important thing.
@@I-OGameDev No. In the context of game, "Fun" is a result of well designed reward mechanisms within games. These reward mechanisms can be of course created using frustration fear and competence. But fun is not an aesthetic, is a goal.
@@soloshottie Whats your point my lad? Every single sensory stimulation is an experience. Not all of them create a "good" experience. Much less and experience that a player will enjoy or pay for. If you are not triggering a sense of accomplishment, progression or joy. Your game is unfun. No matter how many experiences you put in, and it will get nowhere.
Serious please lower the background music or just remove it entirely, it’s useless and annoying. You have good content but the music is pushing me away.
I'm going to take this positive motivation you've given me and go work on my game
An absolute hidden gem! As someone who is looking to take a hard pivot in life and start game design, I've been watching and reading as much as possible. A buddy of mine actually recommended the art of game design to me recently, and I've been reading as much of it as possible. Its such a well thought out book, and im happy to see its influence elsewhere!
Think about a lot of things to help influence how and what to study. Story based games? More involved with writing and studying storytelling, action based 2D platformer? More focused on level design and gameplay.
Try to start out simple and go on from there, and that can help choosing your art style as well , (3D, pixel, vector or etc) and what engine would be the most helpful. From what I've found Gdevelop and Gamemaker tend to be the most newbie friendly. My problem (which I'm sure is normal) is I had a massive scope for my first game, far beyond my capabilities in every aspect (art, programming, and even music and voice over) don't let yourself get bogged down like I did and try to focus on something achievable to start with.
-Not a professional but just my 2 cents been studying on my own for a few years, so far this guy seems like a really great resource.
I saw this video in my recommended tab and I saved it for later when I have some time for RUclips and now that I've seen it, why the heck does this have barely 300 views? Your video is quite motivating and as someone who's been interested in game development for years but never actually pushed trough to learn programming on a good enough level for it, this really gives a push towards it. Your drawings are cute as heck and I subscribed, looking forward to more of these.
Though I do want to talk about "the purpose" because doing anything at all could be argued that it doesn't have a purpose for being done. Both creating and playing a game could be for no reason but also be for very specific reason and the difference is the perspective on that activity. I thought once about why I play games and my conclusion was that I never wished to be bored and games just happened to me as a very young kid so they stuck to me as the most entertaining thing to do around. I can do it by myself and seemingly endlessly. And the purpose of a game was to entertain me and maybe tell a story, teach me something or let me test my reflexes though all those were second priority.
I thought a lot over the years about which games I could make one day and which type of audience I might attract but never the sole philosophical question of why should it exist and what is the purpose of it. And my answer is that it should be fun, first and foremost. It doesn't matter if it's a strategy card game, or an action packed fighting game, or a touching visual novel; if it isn't fun it's a bad game and there's nothing less important than that. Now, "fun" is also a subject to another philosophical thinking and varies from person to person, but I am leaving that as an exercise to the reader.
Your comment is gonna be the reason i continue this series! (Eventually)
A game must be fun, until the games are arts. An art is an expression, and in its nebulous form there's no limit to one's expression. So there's no must.
Wish my high school offered game design
Right! I thought the same thing when I got the job
You don’t need a course at your high school luckily. You have everything you need online for free
Oh man, what a precious little gem of a vid I have stumbled upon.
This is giving me old Extra Credits vibes, back when it was a rag-tag production with more heart and focus on game dev. I still use the "fail faster" motto to this day. This is the highest of compliments; please, run with this, and inspire others. Those old videos and many more are what made me into someone able to help a friend start making the game of his dreams and what made me into the fantastic GM I am today. I can definitely tell you're a teacher, you have the empathy and hope of one. Milk this book dry of its content and then make more.
Read the book a few months ago and very recently, I understood that my game is going to be about following your dreams. Figuring out all of the art and narrative stuff is so hard though
We just finished an entirely art/narrative based game for a game jam and it is extremely hard!!!
I sort of had a sort of a crisis a while back where I wondered what was the purpose of doing anything playful or engaging with art at all, and it made me realize some of the things in this video, so I'm glad to see a professional validate me and put it more succinctly lol. Video games are art, and the point of art is to make you feel things, and the point of feeling those things is so that you can have the benefits of those experiences while living a life that wouldn't allow for them otherwise.
I had several epiphanies about my own game I'm working on while watching this video. Thanks, I'll go plan my game better now :3
You've reminded me in a single video what I love about game development, playing games, and enjoying myself. Thank you so much and I can't wait to see the coming videos!
Very interesting video! I'm going to have to think about my games purpose now.
Thanks! What kind of game are you working on right now?
@@floast I'm working on a museum management game, like the vein of rollercoaster tycoon, theme hospital and the sims.
Awesome video! Loved the illustrations as well
What an incredible video! This is really helpful! I'll have to check out that book.
Excellent video - looking forward to checking out Ambit. :D
Thanks! I will have to keep working on Ambit :)
This video is an absolute gem. Please keep it up!
Nice video. Looking forward to more stuff from you ✨
thank you! I am going to space them out but each video should be slightly better quality than the last :)
@@floast Good luck! :D
Great video! Will def share with other game devs!!
i loved this video, with the silly drawings aswell. i have been very thoroughly planning my game for like a year now, i have written books worth of "notes" that of course all invalidate each other the further back i read lol. despite that i never really thought about the purpose, which im really glad about that you pointed it out and made it into something positive, because "the purpose of games" can easily be played down imo.
my game will give players the experience of being a shadow of yourself as an uploaded mind in a robot body on a rogue planet far away from earth and isolated from all that is regarded as human. beside being a vr game on mouse and keyboard and without the headset, its gonna be an immersive and authentic experience, actively pushing the player to think to survive, and to think about what truly is going on in the story and in the fictional world as a whole.
this experience is valuable because thinking critically and figuring something out for yourself a mystery as big as this brings people together and is a cultural enrichment both as a gameplay experience and as a storytelling piece
Just saw this now and I really like this video. Awesome stuff!
absolutely, for me it was star wars on the Gameboy advance, ghost rider and so on, now when i think of making something, i look into the past of the experience i had and its influence on me, its not as deep, but you learn something from everything and experience something new, for those who didn't experience that childhood fun we can make something that will give them that joy.
Yes! I also feel inspired after watching videos like yours, and I would like to work on my game now. Sadly I have to get back to my 9/5 job now …
Thank you, currently I am stuck working on my game not sure where to go and what to do, I will try your advice in the video.
This video is sick dude
Pokemon is the first game I thought of too. Thanks for this video. I've been making my game for the past 3.5 years and wondering if it's fun or a good enough experience to a gamer.
Exactly this helped me actually start designing the game instead of just brainstorming ideas.
The absolute most fundamental reason humans play games is the same reason behind most of what animals do, acquiring power. We want more control over the world, and we want to know how much control we have over the world in relation to everyone else. There are many ways games can satisfy that evolutionary urge, it can do it through learning (facts, art, experiences), refining skills, creating/simulating relationships, making you compete and compare yourself with other people/npcs, etc.
Fantastic lessons here. Cheers!
Banger video
Ty!!!
Very good deep dive into the themes of the book 👍
Glad to finally find this channel very wise and extremely inspiring content there bro 👏 gonna re think my game and come up with an experience statement thanks man
Love the video! Bring a lot of cool thoughts into my head. My statement for my idea would be You are a scifi Bounty hunter working to stop a giant corporation from controlling history as we know it. This experience should allow people to feel like they are saving history 1 mission at a time. This game idea is a simple find the object style game with story elements kicked in.
To go a level deeper games are art and this video is a kinda simplified lesson in the philosophy behind art the purpose of all art and media from game to movie to painting to live performance is to elicit an emotion in the viewer that is why a game is nothing till someone plays it when making any art I feel it is important to ground yourself to what kind of feeling you are trying to make your art invoke I think is what makes the most memorable pieces of media
To use even pong as a basic example it is trying to elicit the emotion or completion or responding to a stimuli both of which make it a valuable enough experience worth having
Love the video! A game is definitely supposed to be a unique experience for the player that sharpens their life skills, so I’ll have to keep that in mind.
4:00 - This section here. Such a good thing to think on.
(Oh, also, Golden Sun. The Djinn and how it interacted with Character Classes and the Psynergy available to them, even mid-battle? It's my white whale. I don't think I'm going to find a game with such an interesting Magic and Class system ever again.)
Devel… loop? The loop of game dev?
Huh!
I’m not sure entirely on the experience. May I want to help people learn about themselves and all the cool stuff about their sensory experience that they take for granted, and learn how to take hope when discouraged. At least that was yesterday’s game concept I drew on a page. A couple days before that, it was a little bit about how to judge between opposing sides of a debate. What wild concepts with so much opportunity for innovation. It occurs to me, however, that my particular vision for such a game sometimes contrasts with my internal expectations of what the external world expects or wants a bit like the Aesop about a father, his son, and their donkey.
Interesting thoughts on the experience to be offered. :)
My game (a breakout rippoff currently in development) should create the experience of being a skillful and powerful player, through building muscle memory and the ability to excecute precise hits of the ball. By mastering the flick of the mouse, you master a piece of the flick of the wrist in sports like ping pong and tennis.
I'll have to playtest it again when i get home!
A piece of advice: Even if you make a good system, always “cheat” on the player's side. Make it easy for them, and also fun.
You know, as a non taught game mechanic designer, it was validating to hear that the things I do are backed by people who have actually studied things. Like, I know what I do works, but good to know that it there is in fact method to my madness.
Also, thank you, I'm off to go work on the game more lol
My game will give players the experience of climbing through dangerous areas with powerful movement abilities.
This experience is valuable because it evokes a sense of exploration that can lead people to do bigger things in life.
This was an amazing video, thanks!!!
i watched the whole video but i still have no clue what my experience statement is supposed to be... all i want is to bring to life a game that i had a dream about. well, a couple games i dreamt about... im not sure what the "experience" is meant to be?
Well think about: what does your game illicit in the player? Skyrim gives the experience of Adventuring across a vast world. Minecraft gives the experience of both exploring a world to find treasure and of being a powerful creator, able to make anything they can imagine. 5 nights at Freddy's gives the experience of working the night shift at a haunted place.
My examples are all simple and direct, but I think it makes sense. And so features and mechanics that are added should facilitate and help these experiences to shine.
I have heard of instead designing to always strip away any unused and useless aspect of a game, rather than add up game mechanics. So designing a carting game with this philosophy would be to identify your core experience, and shave every single thing that doesn't directly support it.
Can I ask: what is one of your games about? Maybe we can identify the experience together?
@@aidanmarler7843 well, one of them for example was a puzzle solving game in a 2d grid with a neat mechanic of "moments". a "moment" was a time where _most_ other elements on screen wouldnt move and instead wait for your input... but if you take too long, the "moment" would pass anyway and any element that moves would move. moving in any direction would automatically end a moment, and moments were around a second or two long. the most frequent enemy in the game was snakes, who would appear on the grid by breaking into it from a wall (so, one moment where the snake isnt in the grid yet, the wall would be visibly cracked) and after getting in, it would "home in" on you as quickest as possible to kill you (each moment, the snake would move one square closer to you). there was also a rarer enemy that moved independently of moments, making it a deadly enemy, because it moved so fast. the other major mechanic was dying, when you would become a floating ghost brain who could move puzzle elements, make the enemies behave differently (such as changing paths the enemies would take to get to you), and access areas outside the main area thru tiny holes in walls, where you could find extra puzzle elements which would be part of each level's puzzle.
sorry if this explanation is long and confusing. i find it hard to explain what i mean by text, and english isnt my first language to boot. theres a couple other details i remember from the dream, but theyre not super important. since the game had no story and no objective other than "solve these puzzles", im not sure what the experience statement "should" be. it really doesnt help that although i love _playing_ puzzle games, i really dont think i could _design_ puzzles myself...
My game is to give players the experience of exploring a new world and joining a community where you help each other with quests and do so regardless of vision disabilities. This is important so people with vision loss can still experience RPG and dungeon crawling in a game that is still attractive to the larger sighted community vs text only games.
@@AliciaGuitar love the accessibility! So is the whole game just language based?
@@floast there are mostly text menus and audio descriptions, but there are graphics and icons with the gui for sighted players
Ambit looks sick. I could see a Canoneer simulator being hilarious.
0:51 Lets pretend like I didn't make a game about snails just for no one to play it
And lets pretend you dont leave paper scraps all around my room from it :)
Congrats on gaining more views on this video today
"We will watch your career with great interest."
Having played video games since virtually their inception, Pong through to Pacific Drive, being the latest I've played. I think there was something to be said for the abstractness of the early era home console games on the likes of the Atari 2600 or Philips Videopac for example, where the limitations of the technology itself meant the game experience was distilled down to what was absolutely necessary. Modern games too often seem to do things because they can, without ever really seeming to consider if they should. Which is one of the reasons I enjoy a lot of retro style indy games, that focus on the game mechanic of the game, rather than being concerned with the use of the medium of the game being used as a platform for political messaging - which seems to be the over-riding concern of modern AA game developers. When thinking about games, and I've made a few, just for my own amusement, I begin by considering what limitations I am going to put on the game, so it doesn't sprawl out of control.
A concept I feel sort of ties in to this budgeting. Being both economical with your time and wallet. Thinking about similar questions can you produce a game on schedule that fits in your desired budget. That sort of thing
Game development is a conversation with the players. You have to start the conversation asap. Start play testing asap. Paper prototypes if possible. But before that you need to understand what you/your team want to say in that game development. The biggest job for designers is listening to feedback and applying that feedback in a way that keeps with the pillars of the game.
That is part of what the next video will be about!
man i love that book it changed me
Can you make a video on how to efficiently read the book. I have it but I couldn't to get the juice out of it very well, like what leave and what to read and should read then develop or develop while reading it😅😅
I read it over a week long vacation ehile i wasn't doing anything else, just front to back as is, but i'll keep making videos deconstructing it!
I also played GBA games for Hours even NDS Pokemon Games.
I loved playing GBA Rom hacks of Pokemons.
It almost fell like am Part of that world and wanted to live more and more.
I played till my 11th grade
My one of the rom hacks have been
Pokemon Red Chapter
Pokemon Gaia
Pokemon saiph 1-2
I also read a game design book. Books are really awesome.
Audio is a little low!!
Will be louder next time ;-;
Be careful with the background music, although good video :)
I think I understand what some commenters mean here. A game is not an experience, it contains them. It contains many of them and sometimes it's up to the player which one to choose. You can play as mage, as healer, as tank, as trader, farmer, miner, .. the game isn't an experience in this case "living as person having any of the mentioned jobs, races, classes" isn't an experience, it's just a random sentence that doesn't really make any sense. xD
Maybe it's better to categorize games and give each category (e.g. genre) their own meaning. Stealth games have the purpose of making players feel strong because of their brain and because they observe, while being hidden. Jump & Run games have the purpose of feeling good in the smallest movements. And so on.
A definition for all games of all genres is probably pretty meaningless anyway.
2:00 I'm 37, and I still wonder what is it like to date a girl )
99% of mobile app games have the intended experience of oblivion. They're not worth your time.
They're primarily skinner boxes, kinda the same thing.
Those games' intended experience is either to mainly make you feel inconvenienced (MTXs) or to retain you for as long as they can (Ads).
It's funny how a lot of games use XP to level up while each game on it's own is an experience (point) for real life. xD
Regarding the section at 1:48 about games as experiences, I must disagree that, fundamentally, games are experiences. Games CAN be experiences but not fundamentally, IMO. I also disagreed with Jesse Schell when I read that same book. It makes sense that Jesse Schell would view games as experiences since that was literally his job for ~7 years at Disney. That makes sense for a Disney theme park cause a Disney theme park IS TRYING to be a "magical" experience. How do I know that? Because Disney states it themselves in their mission statement: "to entertain, inform and inspire people around the globe through the power of unparalleled storytelling". Pay attention to that last word "storytelling". Disney, and therefore Jesse Schell, are trying to create experiences through storytelling.
Here's my main disagreement: games are not fundamentally a storytelling medium, they are a medium of PLAY. Games , since humans were living in caves, have been about PLAY. Although I believe storytelling and play both attempt to serve the same purpose, which is survival through learning, they go about it through different strategies. Storytelling is about one person passing on knowledge that is embedded in the story, where as playing is about a person learning the knowledge themselves through cautious exploration and tweaking their behavior based on feedback from the thing their playing with.
Here's one example, of many, to debunk your, and Jesse Schell's, theory of games as experiences: a Rubik's Cube. It's a game because it has a goal, and rules to constrain how you meet that goal: the cube must start in a random configuration, and you must twist it along one if it's many axis until each of the 6 sides only have only 1 color assigned. You can't remove the colored stickers from the cube faces and re-arrange them, that would be cheating. So, it's a game, yet completely devoid of all storytelling aspects, or "experiences". It's just a box with colored stickers on it. Yet, it's extremely engaging to some people to play with. Why? Every twist, and resulting state of the cube, gives you feedback. It tells you that you're either closer or further away from the goal. Which allows you to start *learning* patterns. The more you *learn* the patterns the better you get at solving the cube. There are many secrets the cube has to offer, if you're willing to play with it.
Well, isn't solving a problem an experience too? Or having fun? They aren't related to story, but they to convey those experiences right?
@@floast If you make that argument though then games and stories lose all their meaning because everything is an experience technically. So to carve out a space for "game" then you have to show how it's distinct from other experiences. Games are distinct because there's a goal and a set of rules to achieve that goal. I just think if you design a game from the angle that it's an experience first, then important aspects of goals, rules, progression, difficulty, rewards for meeting goals, etc., get missed/overlooked. You end up with an interesting story and world but not an interesting game.
my experience statement
Like... you know how this Indigo Park hyped? Lot's of people say "That's a bad game, no cool graphics, no interesting gameplay, puzzles made for two yo. It's just that stupid raccoon hypnotized people". But actually it's because games are not about gameplay, puzzles or other stuff. It's about experience.
If someone made a cool experience of going through abandoned theam park with a friendly AI assistant and they nailed it. It's not cheating, it's just that game delivers me interesting experience and I'm happy.
Look at fallout 1 and 2 graphics, boring clicking on enemy to shoot gameplay. Stupid, booring? But it delivers the experience of going through the post-apocalyptic wasteland that I couldn't get anywhere else. That's why those fallout games are so legendary. Not because of graphics :P
"What it's like to date a girl" dude knows his audience
(This is a joke)
Ah yes. Dating a girl. Truly something no one can experience outside the power of interactive fiction
I disagree with your fundamental premise. It's not about novel experiences, it's about "fun" (defined as meaningful inputs over time) and engaging gameplay above all. Nintendo is the proof of this, as the "experience" is most always secondary to gameplay. Additionally, gameplay is what creates the experience, and thus experience devoid of gameplay is meaningless.
@@themichaelconnor42 right, so you want your players to experience having fun :)
😂😂😂 I also said Pokemon
I hope I strongly misunderstood you, but this sounds like such a narrow view of games.
What kind of games do you work on and why do you think you are working towards something else, than what was mentioned in the video?
@@johnleorid "a game is meant to convey an experience" implies one thing, while being safe in so far that it can be backpeddled to apply to everything. Solitaire and soccer aren't meant to convey an experience; If you do categorize that as "conveying an experience" that what does it say? Then cheese is also meant to convey an experience.
The pong line rubs me the wrong way too. So we have simulators and the pizza game where the experience would be simpler and better than in real life, as opposed to pong??
Pong can easily be categorized as a simple tennis simulator. The claim "pong is about the experience of playing a videogame" also destroys any value the experience definition could hold. Worse than that it doesn't say anything about the actual experience of playing pong. Most of us haven't started playing games with pong. It's still fun. The real experience of pong is in it's actual gameplay. The rise and fall of tension when the ball approaches your paddle, the score as a goal, the (simple, but effective) AI that simulates competition, The skill of predicting the balls path etc. That is the experience of pong if one cared to look for it.
The "Games can make you a better person" chapter gives me the vibe that I see so often. It tries to legitimize games by saying they can help you grow as a person. While in itself not wrong, we would easily recognize the fault in it with more matured and respected artforms. A song or painting can help you grieving, but noone would require it to be legitimate, because with those we understand that it's quite futile to require your art to have a practical semi educational purpose.
People make art not only for someone else to experience, but for themselves, because they felt it, or whatever.
Implying purpose comes from other people growing from playing it is most of all ... pointless because you don't control someone elses growth. There are people growing while playing "troll"-games that were intended only to frustrate/annoy. You can grow while staring at a black screen. You can grow because someone had the discord notification sound in their video and you realize you're lonely or whatever. Making games isn't making a virtual therapist and trying to do so will probably lead to you making neither.
The word fun hasn't been mentioned once in this video. Sorry but no, experiences are not the point of games, is a nice outcome than can happen. Fun is the absolute first and most important thing.
to me, having fun is an experience
Fun is an aesthetic of play, as is frustration, fear and competence
@@I-OGameDev No. In the context of game, "Fun" is a result of well designed reward mechanisms within games. These reward mechanisms can be of course created using frustration fear and competence. But fun is not an aesthetic, is a goal.
fun is an experience
@@soloshottie Whats your point my lad? Every single sensory stimulation is an experience. Not all of them create a "good" experience. Much less and experience that a player will enjoy or pay for.
If you are not triggering a sense of accomplishment, progression or joy. Your game is unfun. No matter how many experiences you put in, and it will get nowhere.
Serious please lower the background music or just remove it entirely, it’s useless and annoying. You have good content but the music is pushing me away.
@@paklong2556 that bad huh? ☠️
@@floast Well, sometime we can't even hear you...