@@einhasadvtuberclips or maybe zippers are pretty hard to manufacture, but not hugely better in any practical way than buttons or toggles or ties, all of which are much easier to make. Yes, I play Rimworld, although I'm pretty crap at it!
11:38 "You can even flee your base in a caravan and go somewhere else entirely. This creates that Western story trope where the protagonist flees their village thats burning behind them with their family dead or enslaved, looking to get revenge or start a new life or whatever goal you choose". Fuck. I always just start a new colony entirely when my base gets raided and taken over. It never once crossed my mind to pick up and start somewhere new with the same people (that survived). But it makes so much sense. That's still the "game" part of my brain taking control. I obviously need to let the "story" part take over more.
@@antonioscendrategattico2302 Well, you can honestly play rimworld how you want, if you want a more videogame approach to it, where you figure out how to overcome challenges and get the perfect outcome for everybody, then you very much can do that. It wont really take away from the experiance if you dont want to accept everything that comes your way.
@@therealbubble4696 Yeah, but I was answering to the guy's complaint that he paid for a video game, not a video story with the fact that the stated goal of Rimworld is to create stories.
I've had this game for about 36 hours now I've captured a man who tried ambushing my caravan Took his right kidney Shot him everytime he tried escaping Wouldn't recruit him Recruited a prisoner infront of him Took his left arm whilst he was resting from being captured Kept him for so long he went from 10% alchohol withdraw to being fully withdrawn from it Finally allowed him to be free And by that i mean i took him on a day walk where he had to carry his own kidney in a box whilst i sold him back to his own tribe to become a slave along with his kidney
This statement that: "Rimworld is not a story, it's a story generator." Reminds me of a statement by Tarn Adams about Dwarf Fortress: " We didn't want to create another generic fantasy world, we wanted to create a generic fantasy world generator."
And that was when my cocaine selling banana republic leader with bionic limbs. Went into a coma after surviving a shot to the head but left him with a scared brain from a raid. Because we kept kidnapping Indians for spare parts and to feed the meat to our turkey farm. And he eventually died of malnutrition because people were too goddam lazy to feed him a turkey sandwich every now and then.
I've played the game for more than a thousand hours now, but I'll never forget one of my very first colonies. I took in a young girl, I think her name was Vera, who was great at shooting. During one specially hard raid she saved our lives by taking the attention of most of the enemies while some guys with knives got close enough to take them down, but at the end she received a bullet that destroyed her spine. She survived, bur couldn't walk anymore, and since everyone would bring her meals and visit her to chat eventually everyone was at +100 relationship with her. One day some pirates tried to take us down, I managed to kill them, but in the process all my guys also died, and then I had to watch, unable to do anything, as Vera starved. Memorable stuff.
There is a dubiously sourced (but very nice) quote that does the rounds on the internet on how Margaret Mead claimed the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur, as it shows people took the time to care for their wounded in the considerable time it took to heal a bone like that.
But you have 15 in shooting.... How did you manage to shoot your friend in the eye.... Five damn metres away from the intended target.... WITH F$&%*NG SNIPER RIFLE?
Once you beat the game a few times, you almost welcome the challenge. Play on commitment mode and STICK WITH IT, don't get frustrated because your fastest builder/crafter got killed, or your doctor died of an infection make you hard reset. Man does that game improve when you welcome the insanity. I had one where I started and had 8 colonists who were fairly skilled in their area, then I had a plague hit 3 of top growers, then blight hit my plants, I had to pull them from bed rest to kill the blight, which meant I lost 2 of them to plague as I hadn't had sterile materials yet. So my food supply was LEAN, then Toxic Fallout hit, so I butchered 2 prisoners and then had to butcher 2 pets, then 1 of my own colonists to get through. That was all an amazing survival test that would have made me save scum or just reset before.
@@indestruct1bl3 I definitely started having way more fun when I just let things happen instead of trying to play the most optimal way. Because, at the end of the day, RimWorld is a cruel, unforgiving bitch. You can have months where you're BOOMING, and then one raid hits you're not prepared for, or mechanoids drop into the center of your base and the traditional way of thinking is "well, im fucked time to reset". Learning to cope with the failure really DOES make the game feel way more personal and "humanistic".
I think the social system of Rimworld is a lot like... The Sims series without player input. Characters babble abstract things at each other, which you're free to interpret however, and that results in them having a better or worse relationship. And it honestly is a lot like playing with dolls, but these dolls have their own simple agency to be interpreted. And that's wonderful, I love it a lot.
A great game, a great designer, and a great talk. I use his Designing Games book with my students, and think it's absolutely fantastic. Mr Sylvester may be hesitant to call RimWorld a game, but I cant think of any other experience engine across any media outside of real social interactions that I've invested as much time in (1000+ hours) or reaped as much enjoyment from. I hope he continues to see success.
This startingly similar to the priorities one has when running a TTRPG (e.g. DnD) story. It's that weird middle point between running a game and generating a story
This is why I love games that have a healthy modding community. The devs can say no more often for new features knowing that, if players really want it, they can mod it in themselves.
A lot of mods are great, but should have never been base game features. That's the good part of it. If a game dev adds something that might be contentious or only liked by 50% of people, it's awful for their design direction, but if a modder does it everyone wins
Tynan, I'm playing your game on a lower difficulty level than I'm capable of handling and with helpful mods because I hate failure, I hate losing. My whole life I've been losing things. Losing friends, family, money... I come into the game to relax. And before Royalty DLC I severely lacked content in my experience, because before then there's been just your loss story generator and not much else. And I thank you for expanding game in a way that makes winning also as interesting as losing
That last point, it's hard to imagine agreeing with something more. I've spent hundreds of hours on Rimworld. And the only goals have been ones I have set for myself... And I want to spend hundreds more. But so many games these days turn into a grind. Do this until the numbers tick up and the sound plays. Find all the feathers, gain experience to unlock the next mission, etc etc. Its ruins some games that without achievements and without the padding of random collectibles would be really much more fun. But then, in general, this whole talk showed how drastically different from the mainstream gaming industry Rimworld's development has been.
That's a point that I've seen pop up in a few of these talks and it seems to be trend in marking standout developers and games. There are of course people who love the carrot on a stick game (even when getting there is mostly filler) or whatever and all kinds of other elements, but making something that's appealing simply because the act of playing the game is fun and compelling enough is something special.
I know sandbox games aren't for everyone (often seem to bring reviews like "what? where's the story?! I've been ripped off!") but IMO they can be really fun. In Rimworld in particular, even if you set out to do the same thing there's so many factors that change the story, so it can still be fun. Rather than one static goal, a periodic press to do something. If you've already got something in mind, some mods can let you shape the game in that direction, and if you don't, you're offered a goal so you don't have to come up with everything by yourself, while still being given enough room to if you wanted to.
@@mossclawcat1065 aaaaagh, comment keeps getting deleted. Got a discord I can contact you with or something? Because I typed out a pretty long reply but it keeps disappearing.
@@Simmonsumers35 That's because anything worth doing and worth doing well, takes a lot time to do. RimWorld is a prime example of this, I can't wait for whatever he has in mind for his next project.
I really like this idea that "story generator" is a separate medium from video game, regardless of how serious he is about it. As an artform we haven't seen anything close to its true potential yet.
I still remember my first time playing RimWorld. It was a hard time for my group as they landed in a terrible location that made growing crops quite difficult. They barely survived through trading and building relations with a nearby faction. One day the faction we were trading with sent a bulk goods trader on a especially hot day which made my melee fighter tôko go into a berserk rage attacking everything in sight, I had my whole group try their best to stop him from attacking the traders so they fell to him one by one. By the end of the day all but two people were dead on my side and tôko just sat there burying his dead friends as the traders left our now desolate base. The other survivor lost every single limb and ended being the only one to make it from the original group.
Not me but the first time my friend played RimWorld he kept dying because he didn't know how to add bills to a butcher table and stove this was og 2016 rimworld
One of the best games ever made! Over 2000 hours still haven't made a spaceship and escaped. Brilliant man. Sold me on a game and book. Solid community for his games too.
"Contrarian, Ridiculous and Impossible Game Design Methods" aka what your boss fires you for because it's unconventional and doesn't include payment systems.
It is really interesting for me to see what was the goal of the creator of the game and how differently I approached it. With over 400 h and a dozen of different colonies, I never cared about my colonists, barely new their name, just assigned them to the task they were good at. My only goal always was to escape the planet as soon as possible. I find it very hard to get attached to colonists since they mostly do stupid things when not directed and have mental breakdown every 2 weeks XD
But the interesting thing in that is even if they are doing stupid things and having mental breakdowns you are getting attached to them, maybe not in the conventional way, but they are sort of becoming an antagonist to the story!
About your comment that something like a more realistic system of building using materials. The process itself does not invoke story or emotional response - no one would say something like "oh man remember that time I made steel ingots?" But, it does lend itself to emotion. A good example of this is Minecraft. Many people who build in creative mode will build extravagant things, but they don't tend to care about them. On the other hand, someone who had to mine, refine (once twice or more), then prepare and build with those things, they tend to be much more attached to the things they build. If someone blows up your house in creative, no problem. You fix it for free or you don't care enough about that one to even bother. In survival, you might have to go to the ends of the world again to get the things you need to re-construct what you built before. It's frustrating, because you lost something you invested time and effort into. Honestly I would say Space Engineers is a better example of this, because in Minecraft you get many/all of the blocks back and in Space Engineers you mostly just get scrap, which needs to be refined again, most of the valuable resources are gone, and you won't get much from your recovery efforts. But Minecraft is a more well understood example. Either way, my point is that investing time is a very important aspect of emotional investment and emotional response; if it took twice as much effort to build a base, losing it would have that much more emotional impact. There are obviously limits to the level of how much you want to negatively impact the emotions of players; if it took you 10 hours to build your base and it's completely annihilated, you will feel defeated. If it took 20 minutes, rebuilding it is not really a problem.
Exactly, I found that assertion very, very odd. I would actually go even, further, and say the process it self DOES invoke story & emotional response... I mean really we have plenty of stories about people like the early 18th-20th century industrialists & innovators... Eg. Eddison & Tesla, or the history of coal mining & the associated human success & suffering in the UK. Those real-world stories hinge on the details of the relevant technology, and the emotional responses of the participants to what that tech could & couldn't do... and the quality of life tradeoffs to using it. I really have to ask what is going on in peoples heads that they think a digital pet cat is more emotionally meaningful than an increased complexity steel-industry, because increased complexity means increased investment of time & energy, at increased potential of failure for the in-game colonists. It's Mr. Sylvester's game, and he is free to seek whatever aesthetic he wants... ditto the Minecraft devs too, who I remember also tended towards a very opinionated approach to what got implemented & how. But let me be blunt: Your 'Story Generator' is obviously deficient at generating stories about industrialism... despite how very well that theme should fit into the setting.
Only half true. Watching others refining things is a different experience than doing it yourself and wont give so much story value. Whereas watching others build things does probably give you more story value. I mean people can melt steel chunks into steel and thats fine, but polishing that into a more complex system wouldn't be any good for a spectator I guess
I hope that he inspires other creators to make great games. He has demonstrated without a doubt that this is possible even with a tiny team of developers. I bought the game on Kickstarter and I still play it today, I'm pretty bad at it, but even failure makes for a good story.
The Story Generator concept is super interesting, I feel like the future of really great games, design wise will try to incorporate this concept as a its core mechanic. I've observed many huge titles try to implement something like this or have it as a core concept but bow out to their other lackluster conflicting mechanics that bog down the game as a whole instead of sticking to one design philosophy. For example most BGS titles like Skyrim or Fallout 4 focus on exploration as their emergent gameplay mechanic, "the player can go wherever they desire in this gigantic map and do whatever they wish." The structure of each playthrough is fairly unique, regardless if the content is exactly the same. Simultaneously creating a world that(due to their "player can go everywhere anytime" design structure) can't really be designed with a tangible progression of difficulty or structured engaging narrative. 9/10 times I play these games I completely ignore the main quest because the game is designed to allow me to or better put, the game with its set of rules hasn't given be a reason to care enough. And with stakes like the dragons are returning to destroy the world or your one and only son has been kidnapped before your very eyes, it just comes across as silly, illogical and completely unbelievable.
Also, really good call on the bubble sort. I think managing creeping or shifting bias while applying numbers. The numbers seem 'true', but they were written by past you. One reason I break up complexity estimation into relatively short time periods. Future me will know more. Value estimation is even harder to get write, even in non-gaming, pure data things. Ergo, it's probably much more reliable to do a constant buble sort on the list. Compare with what you know know.
One thing I'm starting to contemplate is the balancing act of an open ended game is between developing a story in game and managing the mechanics. To this end at least for what I had in mind I personally preferred more skill systems thus reducing the developing story a bit but the idea was to introduce randomness in other systems but reduce player frustration, specifically around that randomness, (making it clear and visible, well explained and communicated, and straightforward to manage) so they are willing to deal with a defect in their despite failure, for example don't introduce annoying game over states and don't just kill off the primary player character(s), instead try to defer as much of primary player character harm to be emotionally investing or to grow the character or player themselves. I've wondered as some solutions and I've been curious to try out my ideas to see if they are worth attempting and to see how effective they are at mitigating frustration and such things as save scumming. (which I think need to be solved design-wise, not mechanics-wise, what War Horse decided for example was a terrible manner of trying to solve save scumming without making the game actually better)
i remember my first game on rimworld, stray cats join my settlement, they mass breed, all of a sudden my mass food has gone... colonists start going a lil coocoo. cats go crazy eat my colonist. left with 20 evil cats around colony nobody alive but those evil cats... moral of the story cats are dicks.....get a dog
Yea. That's definitely something that would happen in your first game or 2. Eventually the "___ Joins" prompt translates into "Food Joins." Same with self tame. You get to the point when those prompts come up you instinctually open the Animal tab, send to Home, queue for slaughter.
Imagine my surprise the very first time I played and a Boomrat joined my colony. I had no idea that its name was so literal. Burned the whole place down.
Love the game. My girlfriend and me play it on a daily basis. Hard to hear tho that everything we wished that would come to the game just won't.. Storytelling is nice, but having more depths in some game mechanics would be really cool. The relationshipa between colonists felt pretty much impactless and actually useless. Would be cool to know more and have more options when suddenly your "husband" from an advanced technology tribe visits you, while you actually started as a prehistoric tribe. Kinda weird sometimes. Still love it.
When he was talking about developers putting enormous amounts of time into things that are really difficult and dont amount to much, all I could think about was Project Zomboid (still) spending years of dev time on animations. Glad devs have learned from that painful example.
to be fair, build 39 graphics were what i'd call "ugly" and indiestone likely came across the story generator concept before tynan with the whole "this is how you died" and abstract moodles used to give players a sense of apothenia in their characters.
Ya, I think I'll use that, myself, except in a text editor that allows me to hotkey swapping adjacent lines. I'm thinking VS Code with some sort of extension.
I played 16 hours when I first picked up rimworld. I was confused, frusturated, annoyed, but was ok with the money I spent because I though the game deserved it, even if I didnt have that much fun. then Ideology came out and reminded me it existed... I put in 100 more hours since then... they have been very fun. Also shoutout to the hygiene mod and vanilla expanded, very nice.
Damn. Rimworld is one of my favorite 'games' of all time. Close to 3k hours. Only now do I realize why. Tynan is genius. I hadn't realized the degree of conscious thought put into how the game does what it does, and what it doesn't do on purpose.
It's interesting how some things changed in Rimworld from some of the attitudes he had in this talk. For instance, players ended up having a good amount of control over characters, or at least were able to override what characters were doing to have them do what the player wants on the fly. I'm not sure if difficulty levels were in the game at the time of this conference, but they were in the game after this for sure and some of the settings were meant for relaxed gameplay that wasn't intended for the player to lose. I have to wonder if his methodologies evolved and changed some since this talk, because it seem that way.
IMO it would be pretty boring if all you could do is sit back and watch. Seems like the game strikes a good balance now, where the player is given goals and tools to achieve those goals, while still giving the player a push from time to time and making the world seem alive.
For a story generator the only thing Rimworld really lacks is ... Character development. Yes my dude ... the 'narrative' in rimworld sorely lacks character development. Traits are static and don't evolve, character backstories create static pawns, the characters don't evolve or change over time, they don't grow organically like living beings, they are and will always be the exact same nitwit that crashlands at the Rim except with slightly higher skill levels or missing/replaced a few body parts on the way. That loner or banished pawn that has disabled/terrible social skills will always have disabled social skills. That factory worker even if he has fast learner trait still will be incapable of performing intellectual, artistic or even simple cooking tasks ... because he is and will always have been a factory worker. None of that makes sense and none of that creates interesting stories. Perhaps that factory worker never got to develop his skills and as it turns out, as a fast learner he can actually turns his life background from a factory worker to an inventive scientist. That loner we talked about earlier, perhaps he had a bad past but now on the Rim forcedto interact with people who depend on him, he has opened up and learned to socialize and it turns out, he's an excellent leader. These are stories ... but in Rimworld you have to make sure your loner will never ever get any kind of social interaction because you'll just be wasting your time on it. In fact he's entirely incapable of socializing ... now it's your job to imagine how he'll always be like that and how to 'game' around this quirk.
@@TheDispiteous my point being, that the essence of good story telling is character development. Tynan sees his game not as a game but as a story generator but it actually sorely lacks in actual story telling. Most of the events in-game are gimmicky such as the packs of manhunting animals. Yes that is fun ... like 2 times ... but by the 40th time you've gotten a 100 or so crazy manhunting ducks going around, it stops being funny and just becomes a nuisance. And no you shouldn't expect mods to fix everything. Not when someone markets their game as a story generator but lacks in actual story content and development.
@@BrutusAlbion oh your point is and was clear, but lets be honest - the game lacks so much more, from essential to quality of life stuff which is added in through mods. Should a game dev expect such things to be changed through mods? No! Would RW be where it is without mods? Hell no! I made another comment about his "can it ship without it" stick which made me laugh out loud when he talked about it. So much of what makes Rimworld what it is is added in through the work and effort of other people that I find it remarkable that he is lecturing about game dev appoaches while essential standing (at least partially) on the free work others have made for him and his game. I love Rimworld, but lets be honest - Ludeon Studios really did the bare minimum to develop it, so it is no surprise that it shows even in essential parts as you point out.
@@TheDispiteous oh my mod list of 300+ certainly and completely agrees with you. The default interface is atrociously bad. The game is riddled with annoying pawn mechanics from idiotic behavior to outright stupidity which is really down to bad or inadequate coding. So many QoL features just straight up missing or not even properly considered. You need to build an amazon styled warehouse just to store a few pants and shirts in this game, ridiculous. The game really isn't amazing without the mods but with the mods its quite great, it's the sugar in the cake for sure.
I struggle to describe RimWorld that accurately represents what the game is entirely about when trying to convince my friends to buy it. It's one of those games you truly just have to experience to understand what it's all about. Anything else just describes it as "another generic survival game", but it's SO MUCH MORE than that.
I really love what you're saying and thinking through here Tynan. This stuff resonates deeply with me, as someone who loves games like Thief or Dishonored, which while still having tension, triumph and defeat, are very much about being on a stage together with other actors, in a world rich with different sorts of scenes and events. :D I'm interested in creating those experiences myself, so your ideas here are fantastic. Thanks for such a great talk. :D
Only 7 minutes in and this has already sort of changed my perspective on the game. (I only just installed it a few days ago, but admittedly during that time I have obtained quite a lot of hours.) I have a really bad habit of ending up turning on developer mode and 'cleaning up' some mistakes or things I justified should not have happened or were unfair to me. I was aware of how Rimworld advertises itself as a 'story generator', but I wrote it down as mostly something used as an advertisiong gimmick, and didn't really thinki about how it affected the game. I'll try and have some runs where I disable dev mode near the start of the game and do a large run sometime soon. I always loved watching thigns from the sidelines, and some forms of micromanaging things can be interesting, like how I enjoy Prison Architect and logistics games (haven't played Factorio just yet), so I should try and just observe. Anyways this sounds cheesy and stupid and I just wrote my thoughts down or whatever, time to resume the video.
You should left mistakes untouched, because even bad decisions have good influence on story in your colony. For example if your first colonist died by accident or raid, you can make a big grave for him and his friends and family would remember and continue his will, even after a hundred years in game.
I Had a colonist die, by a raid by Void. She was buried. And 2 game years later one of my colonists snapped after combat , she dug up the corps. Slapping the body on the dining room table like a dessicated fruit basket for all to admire. One of my other colonists was eating breakfast when it happened.
@@leion800 heeey. Rimworld gived me one lesson. If somebody bad happened remember - its can be worse...like one of colonists have bad mood, using drugs and going psycho, literally breaking everything including food supply, meds... Try third scenario, when you playing as a rich guy from utopian world. That how i hooked into.
My current colony has an architect lady that is super pretty and an absolute goddess at anything art and construction but absolutely REFUSES to do any menial work, including simply transporting materials. She's also really antisocial. One of my other survivors, Chumbo, is a big, burly miner who's dumb as rocks and absolutely smitten with her. In any other game, the permanent mood drop Chumbo gets from getting romantically rejected on a near daily basis would be infuriating. In Rimworld, this is hilarious. Tynan managed to make a game/story generator where losing is fun and problems something to look forward to. Mad respect.
Actually the game mechanics, numbers and gameplay is what i like the most. The 'emotions' and relationships are the worst and more annoying part of the game.
24:30 Speaking as a horticulturist and game designer/project manager ... Seeding plants can be emotional asf my dude 😂 that's why horticultural therapy is a thing, or people enjoy farming simulators (which harks back to the same emotional context he grounded his story generator philosophy in: the universal tribal-magical environment shared by people for hundreds of thousands of years of anatomically modern human history). 31:50 my 'project scope creep.txt' is at ~230 pages tho :')
Problem: you want players to be emotionally engaged in characters but you want characters to die all the time for ridiculous reasons Solution: make players hate all characters
The only thing on Rimworld that was a let down on my exception is when I read of the "story teller" (coming from DF) I didn't think of it as a fancy name of the RNG, I thought similar to inscriptions in DF some (simple) AI that actually writes down a novel type story text of your colony... Right now the "story generator" actually doesn't create stories, it still needs the human to write a story about what they experienced in game.
When you create things like sculptures they will have a description of an event that previously happened DF style, so it is recording events, it's just not as explicit as dwarf fortress.
I now know this isn't the case, but I initially thought when he was commentating over the trailer at 0:25 the audio we were hearing was from the trailer, which makes it absolutely hilarious.
After Royalty and Ideology I can say Rimworld is one the best games I've ever played and that is along side gems like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7, Castlevania SotN and others
Remember that time the janitor with the bad back was throwing a tantrum and breaking shit from chronic pain? yeah, one of our corpse disposal guys responded with a Molotov to the face, which horrifically and irreparably scarred his face, and making the chronic pain worse. Not only that, the corpse disposal later got into art, and made a statue about the time he burned the janitors face off. We put it in the cantina.
I had an issue where a mechhive appeared that I could not defeat. Each time I went to a prior save, the mechhive would re-appear (it was attached to a quest). It never occurred to me that I could pack up my dudes and leave. I quit the game instead. Maybe adding a hint that re-establishing your base elsewhere is an option (in the quest language) could have helped. I should also add that I had 800 hours playing Rimworld when this happened, so I’m no rookie. Thanks for a great game.
But what's the difference between leaving your base to build another one from scratch and just starting a new game entirely? (Apart from keeping the same guys over which I don't find to be any appealing)
@@fritter67 You can keep many resources with you, also faction relationships and fresh map. Also its good for colonists mood. Not sure about tech tree, but i guess you keep it.
This guy is an absolute genius of a game developer. I would love to have a chance to just to talk with him and hear all his fucking ideas. It's incredible how efficient he is, he identified exactly what parts of the game need to be prioritized, and what parts of the game you can minimally invest in. This one guy and his small crew are more talented than the AAA corporate garbage that is constantly spewed out.
Well... To be honest... The methodology only works in a project that is perfect tailored for it. I don't know if this video is or no about explaining Rimworld and why it is a success, but, If the game fails, no one will be interested in his particular methodology. In my point of view, the secret of Rimworld success, is not mentioned even once. It is the engagement of the mod community. Rimworld is relatively easy to mod, and was embraced it in ways that I never seen before. If Ludeon studios have only 3 people on his payroll, I can assume that at least another thirty community members are modding the game at same time. So, this creates a scenario where each user can create his own game, by selecting the game features that match his expectations. This shields Ludeon of lots and lots of negative feedback, the content that the players want, are somehow modded in many different ways! Tynan and his crew can focus only on the core aspects of the game, and let the community fill in all possible secondary systems in any different approaches! And make a game and build a community that works so well together is, in my opinion, the greatest achievement of Rimworld.
Same could be said for minecraft i guess. But that doesn't mean minecraft or rimworld isn't enough of a game on their own. It took a while for me to get into mods in rimworld, same with minecraft. They were already good games from start, atleast for me...
This is a conference specifically about making games so a talk about an unusual and unique method of making a game is infinitely more interestingly to hear about than "great modding community sells games". We already know that since morrowind, oblivion and minecraft. If anything his method profits exponentially from a good community because if somebody makes something great you just drop it down the list next week and never waste time on it while you bump up something they need to make it even better.
@@pascal6871 The metodology should mention the extra free labor force provided by the comunity, just because It is a important variable on 100% of the projects where the metodology was applied.
Wtf are you talking about? The success of the game is mainly due to the modding community? 90% of RimWorld players probably never even installed a single mod, I know I haven't, and I have hundreds of hours in the game. If anything the mods are a cool little extra for experienced players or a mere convenience, in the case of the "quality of life" mods, but it's really insulting to suggest that the success of this amazing game is due to anything but the genius and hard work of the developers.
1:18 1st off this talk is surprisingly great. 2nd, this point makes me think of Starcraft which I'm playing/replaying right now. you are often fighting uphill battles just to survive a bit longer or race to an objective before you are overrun during the gameplay, and because you get to take turns playing as the 'bad guy' or good guy, you get to take turns being the underdog or oppressor :D
Sure, in the campaign, but most of the active players play multiplayer, which is highly skill dependent. (Starcraft 1 is actually the game that created esports and progamers)
According to Stephen king, notebooks are the best way to keep a log of all your worst ideas. Little ideas come and go from your mind, but the good ones; the ideas that are worth using, those stick in your mind forever.
In Aaron Sorkin's biography-drama "The Story Generator", about the rise of a war-crimes / tower-defense / lo-fi-farming-simulator to the all-consuming metaverse that players spend 100,000 hours in before feeling like they really "get" bedroom design, the lead role will be played by Zach Woods.
That satisficing shopping way I have started doing that a while back now. Never truly understood why I changed. I thought I was just getting lazy in my old age. But your right it is less stress.
7:54 Neo is getting a hard pushback in the Matrix, but he is not starving to death, having a deadly desease while the doctor is having a tantrum spree and has to fight an incoming man hunter pack (at the same time)! That would be not a dispropriate pushback, but a bad Ending before the story has a chance to begin!
Yet if people were interested in story generators then everyone would be playing text adventures on NovelAI or ChatGPT. I think Tynan definitely had a goal in mind but the gamification of the story generator is definitely something in the core design of the game. Royalty, Biotech, and the very mechanics of the game (hoarding resources and skill progression and advanced weapons and armaments) all support encourage the player to climb the power ladder for the sake of continuity. The war crimes are definitely also quite gamey as people are doing it primarily for cash and not for roleplaying necessities... IDK. I play Rimworld because I like basebuilding and perfecting utopia like in Stellaris. The story generation is a side for me but idk about others.
Well, that explains why i run out of enjoyment quite quickly each time i play RimWorld. It's because this abstraction makes me think of people differently, as work outputs and their importance to the colony rather their emotional value, where i get upset at losing a colonist not because of it's story but it's gameplay value. Losing a researcher means losing a certain amount of research that they could've generated, not a person, at least to me Perhaps one day i will be able to actually connect with he colonists rather than seeing them as people who just do my work
@@superduck-chan6230 yeah, i guess it is After thinking about it, it's probably this level of control you have with the lack of AI and the abstraction that makes it like this. The colonists are just completely dependent on you, and while they perform some tasks automatically it all needs either an amount of input from the start or continuous input to maintain it simply because they don't have the functions to do things themselves. That is not a bad thing, but it does make me view them less as people and more like working drones. A greedy pawn won't beat out the fire near his bedroom but rather the one that's closest; their traits don't influence them. And when, say, a social fight happens or relationships happen, it's either just a notice or a short moment if both people hurting each other and it's over, management wise. You don't look at their relationships and memorize them, because they do not matter that much to you. Playing wildermyth i was able to connect to the characters was more because they each have a personality and a story, and they act upon both - that guy who touched a gem is now crystalizing, and you see that - it affects both his stats and look, and actions sometimes too. They also build relationships and during events you see them act upon it, and some events are even caused by those relationships. It makes me invested in the characters themselves, even if they are useless. However a thing you have that is a problem is the power/reward curve. If you are powerful you get more rewards, and more rewards make you more powerful. So it's either a win or lose I think a dynamic story simulation game would be the best, possibly. One where you and other people are there, where there may be a goal - clear out the horde, defeat the big bad evil guy, whatever it is, but where there is not this massive time restriction like in wildermyth where you have to finish the quests before the time runs out, or where at the last stage where tiles are flooded permanently and destroyed so that they do not give you any resources before the boss fight. Instead you might be restricted in a way that is not 100% win or lose at time run out but maybe, say, raids becoming more difficult over time. Where fleeing and abandoning everything can mean you survive and can rebuild rather than that you start from scratch, where you are not the main enemy for the big bad guy and thus the highest priority to be taken out like in an RTS or strategy game, but where you while not having to can still have the last stands and defend untill the end Where you are one of the people as well, so that the things that happen affect you as well. It's not just an event and some people get hurt, no, you actually see a social fight, maybe get hurt in it as well even if you are a bystander, see the anger they have for each other, the lasting effects. To see that someone is sad instead of just having a mood bar telling me their mood is low. To also still allow loss to happen without ending the game
See, I absolutely can feel for my colonists. But I still would enjoy Rimworld much more if it leaned a bit more into the game side. Caring about a colonist and then having them die in a way that doesn't represent your failure (because there is absolutely nothing you could have done about it) isn't satisfying as a game or as a god overlooking imaginary people. Having the attitude "whatever happens, happens" seems to me to be a separate axis all its own, that doesn't really map to any other term or category we already have.
I have the opposite problem. It get immersed in the stories of the colonists so when I spend a lot of time trying to take care of a pawn and then they die to something stupid, that can be annoying. otoh if I only cared about what they brought to the colony mechanically then it would be easier to have a revolving door since they're all replaceable.
I loved this talk. Great insight into the developer's mind. This is what i'm subscribed to this channel for. If anyone else liked this check out Zach's (from Zachtronics and Spacechem) talk.
Rimworld was a story generator, but then the min-maxers attacked. They took the staggeringly ugly pawn behind the shed and let the bloodthirsty pawn kill him.
I feel like if it was any other developer saying those ideas I'd disagree with them more, but it being Tynan, creator of a game on a similar magnitude as Minecraft, at least in my opinion, really solidifies his position as clearly, he must be right somewhere to get to this point.
This is interesting. Especialy the mechanic where events happen and you don't get to see it. Like how characters get an emotional breakdoen cause a sister or mother died. A character i never seen or met before. (No idea how my characters found out they died but whatever. They somehow did) But yeah. Having sudden breakdowns of their family dying while you never seen these characters before. Is like real life where friends or collegues live their own lives and sometimes get happy or sad on event you did not get to experience. It shapes a story. A seperate life outaide your own. And it can be nice. But also sad.
Is that a human leather jacket (good) Tynan is wearing?
No, Plainleather.
No, its masterwork. As everything Tynan touches
@@einhasadvtuberclips or maybe zippers are pretty hard to manufacture, but not hugely better in any practical way than buttons or toggles or ties, all of which are much easier to make.
Yes, I play Rimworld, although I'm pretty crap at it!
@@Andarus this tynan we're talking about, of course that is human leather (masterwork)
Pretty strange attire for a nudist.
11:38 "You can even flee your base in a caravan and go somewhere else entirely. This creates that Western story trope where the protagonist flees their village thats burning behind them with their family dead or enslaved, looking to get revenge or start a new life or whatever goal you choose". Fuck. I always just start a new colony entirely when my base gets raided and taken over. It never once crossed my mind to pick up and start somewhere new with the same people (that survived). But it makes so much sense. That's still the "game" part of my brain taking control. I obviously need to let the "story" part take over more.
i do wish you could flee your base well you are being raided
I don't know about you, but I paid for a video game, not a video story.
@@warpzone8421 Dude the whole "Rimworld is not a game, it's a story generator" thing is right on the store page.
@@antonioscendrategattico2302 Well, you can honestly play rimworld how you want, if you want a more videogame approach to it, where you figure out how to overcome challenges and get the perfect outcome for everybody, then you very much can do that. It wont really take away from the experiance if you dont want to accept everything that comes your way.
@@therealbubble4696 Yeah, but I was answering to the guy's complaint that he paid for a video game, not a video story with the fact that the stated goal of Rimworld is to create stories.
Tynan: Rimworld is a story generator.
Every else: Rimworld is a WAR CRIME GENERATOR
They are not war crimes if it there is no official declaration of war!
I've had this game for about 36 hours now
I've captured a man who tried ambushing my caravan
Took his right kidney
Shot him everytime he tried escaping
Wouldn't recruit him
Recruited a prisoner infront of him
Took his left arm whilst he was resting from being captured
Kept him for so long he went from 10% alchohol withdraw to being fully withdrawn from it
Finally allowed him to be free
And by that i mean i took him on a day walk where he had to carry his own kidney in a box whilst i sold him back to his own tribe to become a slave along with his kidney
Still forcing my Rimworld pawns to eat without tables. I truly am a monster.
@@mikem2849 Aight mate now that's a step too far
@@Delta547
So Rimworld is regular crime story generator?
This statement that: "Rimworld is not a story, it's a story generator." Reminds me of a statement by Tarn Adams about Dwarf Fortress: " We didn't want to create another generic fantasy world, we wanted to create a generic fantasy world generator."
And that was when my cocaine selling banana republic leader with bionic limbs. Went into a coma after surviving a shot to the head but left him with a scared brain from a raid. Because we kept kidnapping Indians for spare parts and to feed the meat to our turkey farm. And he eventually died of malnutrition because people were too goddam lazy to feed him a turkey sandwich every now and then.
Its the story we made along the way
Rim world is following in the footsteps of the greats
A generic fantasy world generator is the most generic fantasy world possible.
I've played the game for more than a thousand hours now, but I'll never forget one of my very first colonies. I took in a young girl, I think her name was Vera, who was great at shooting. During one specially hard raid she saved our lives by taking the attention of most of the enemies while some guys with knives got close enough to take them down, but at the end she received a bullet that destroyed her spine. She survived, bur couldn't walk anymore, and since everyone would bring her meals and visit her to chat eventually everyone was at +100 relationship with her. One day some pirates tried to take us down, I managed to kill them, but in the process all my guys also died, and then I had to watch, unable to do anything, as Vera starved. Memorable stuff.
There is a dubiously sourced (but very nice) quote that does the rounds on the internet on how Margaret Mead claimed the earliest sign of civilization is a healed femur, as it shows people took the time to care for their wounded in the considerable time it took to heal a bone like that.
I liked Rimworld already but I would get angry at what I thought were random and cruel events in the game. This has changed my perspective.
Totally agree man.
But you have 15 in shooting.... How did you manage to shoot your friend in the eye.... Five damn metres away from the intended target.... WITH F$&%*NG SNIPER RIFLE?
Once you beat the game a few times, you almost welcome the challenge. Play on commitment mode and STICK WITH IT, don't get frustrated because your fastest builder/crafter got killed, or your doctor died of an infection make you hard reset. Man does that game improve when you welcome the insanity. I had one where I started and had 8 colonists who were fairly skilled in their area, then I had a plague hit 3 of top growers, then blight hit my plants, I had to pull them from bed rest to kill the blight, which meant I lost 2 of them to plague as I hadn't had sterile materials yet. So my food supply was LEAN, then Toxic Fallout hit, so I butchered 2 prisoners and then had to butcher 2 pets, then 1 of my own colonists to get through. That was all an amazing survival test that would have made me save scum or just reset before.
@@Mgrow Think of it as, he didn't miss, the other guy moved like a moron. lol
@@indestruct1bl3 I definitely started having way more fun when I just let things happen instead of trying to play the most optimal way. Because, at the end of the day, RimWorld is a cruel, unforgiving bitch. You can have months where you're BOOMING, and then one raid hits you're not prepared for, or mechanoids drop into the center of your base and the traditional way of thinking is "well, im fucked time to reset". Learning to cope with the failure really DOES make the game feel way more personal and "humanistic".
I think the social system of Rimworld is a lot like... The Sims series without player input. Characters babble abstract things at each other, which you're free to interpret however, and that results in them having a better or worse relationship. And it honestly is a lot like playing with dolls, but these dolls have their own simple agency to be interpreted. And that's wonderful, I love it a lot.
Rimworld is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, it is a time-vampire like none other.
It's how my friend described stellaris "It's not a game, it's a time machine that takes you to the end of the day."
This guy is telling me why procrastinating is good. Its not procrastinating, it's "Future decision making"
A great game, a great designer, and a great talk. I use his Designing Games book with my students, and think it's absolutely fantastic. Mr Sylvester may be hesitant to call RimWorld a game, but I cant think of any other experience engine across any media outside of real social interactions that I've invested as much time in (1000+ hours) or reaped as much enjoyment from. I hope he continues to see success.
This startingly similar to the priorities one has when running a TTRPG (e.g. DnD) story. It's that weird middle point between running a game and generating a story
This is why I love games that have a healthy modding community. The devs can say no more often for new features knowing that, if players really want it, they can mod it in themselves.
A lot of mods are great, but should have never been base game features. That's the good part of it. If a game dev adds something that might be contentious or only liked by 50% of people, it's awful for their design direction, but if a modder does it everyone wins
THIS is why I'm subbed to GDC!! Tynan is a legend!! Industrious, Iron-willed, hates bumb labor, yet is a fast learner optimist!!
Victor Custódio His living idea list is his Great Memory.
Tynan, I'm playing your game on a lower difficulty level than I'm capable of handling and with helpful mods because I hate failure, I hate losing. My whole life I've been losing things. Losing friends, family, money... I come into the game to relax. And before Royalty DLC I severely lacked content in my experience, because before then there's been just your loss story generator and not much else.
And I thank you for expanding game in a way that makes winning also as interesting as losing
feeling of not wanting to lose is stronger than wanting to win, keep going brother you can do it
That last point, it's hard to imagine agreeing with something more. I've spent hundreds of hours on Rimworld. And the only goals have been ones I have set for myself... And I want to spend hundreds more.
But so many games these days turn into a grind. Do this until the numbers tick up and the sound plays. Find all the feathers, gain experience to unlock the next mission, etc etc. Its ruins some games that without achievements and without the padding of random collectibles would be really much more fun.
But then, in general, this whole talk showed how drastically different from the mainstream gaming industry Rimworld's development has been.
That's a point that I've seen pop up in a few of these talks and it seems to be trend in marking standout developers and games. There are of course people who love the carrot on a stick game (even when getting there is mostly filler) or whatever and all kinds of other elements, but making something that's appealing simply because the act of playing the game is fun and compelling enough is something special.
The fact that the game isn't mainstream explains how Tynean managed to hardcode his bigotry into the game.
I know sandbox games aren't for everyone (often seem to bring reviews like "what? where's the story?! I've been ripped off!") but IMO they can be really fun.
In Rimworld in particular, even if you set out to do the same thing there's so many factors that change the story, so it can still be fun.
Rather than one static goal, a periodic press to do something. If you've already got something in mind, some mods can let you shape the game in that direction, and if you don't, you're offered a goal so you don't have to come up with everything by yourself, while still being given enough room to if you wanted to.
@@RaeIsGaee Genuine question, what bigotry are you talking about
@@mossclawcat1065
aaaaagh, comment keeps getting deleted. Got a discord I can contact you with or something? Because I typed out a pretty long reply but it keeps disappearing.
Tynan, if you read this please make another game. Your mind is a beautiful thing
It took him almost a decade to make this one so I doubt it'll be anytime soon.
@@Simmonsumers35 That's because anything worth doing and worth doing well, takes a lot time to do. RimWorld is a prime example of this, I can't wait for whatever he has in mind for his next project.
Beautiful mind lmao. He copied and streamlined DF and now he thinks he is some sorft of game design professor lmao.
In 10 years, RimWorld is going to be an ASCII enigma and Tynan is going to be apologizing for the interface at the beginning of every talk lol
@@MrMartonez ?
I really like this idea that "story generator" is a separate medium from video game, regardless of how serious he is about it. As an artform we haven't seen anything close to its true potential yet.
Dwarf Fortress is also story generator first and a video game second, but it's much less palatable than RimWorld
I still remember my first time playing RimWorld. It was a hard time for my group as they landed in a terrible location that made growing crops quite difficult. They barely survived through trading and building relations with a nearby faction. One day the faction we were trading with sent a bulk goods trader on a especially hot day which made my melee fighter tôko go into a berserk rage attacking everything in sight, I had my whole group try their best to stop him from attacking the traders so they fell to him one by one. By the end of the day all but two people were dead on my side and tôko just sat there burying his dead friends as the traders left our now desolate base. The other survivor lost every single limb and ended being the only one to make it from the original group.
Not me but the first time my friend played RimWorld he kept dying because he didn't know how to add bills to a butcher table and stove this was og 2016 rimworld
One of the best games ever made! Over 2000 hours still haven't made a spaceship and escaped. Brilliant man.
Sold me on a game and book. Solid community for his games too.
Same.
I also have 2k hours and didn't leave the planet.
400 hs
Same
the outro is worth making the star ship for
Game book?
The bit halfway through about the ideas higherarchy and not forcing a status quo just because the idea's old and already in the thing? Brilliant.
"Contrarian, Ridiculous and Impossible Game Design Methods" aka what your boss fires you for because it's unconventional and doesn't include payment systems.
If it's not a Ubisoft sandbox with loot boxes, ya fired!
I never knew Tynan had a book (excellent), might have to pick it up just for the novelty since I don't do game design but love his work.
One of the best GDC process talks
It is really interesting for me to see what was the goal of the creator of the game and how differently I approached it. With over 400 h and a dozen of different colonies, I never cared about my colonists, barely new their name, just assigned them to the task they were good at. My only goal always was to escape the planet as soon as possible. I find it very hard to get attached to colonists since they mostly do stupid things when not directed and have mental breakdown every 2 weeks XD
But the interesting thing in that is even if they are doing stupid things and having mental breakdowns you are getting attached to them, maybe not in the conventional way, but they are sort of becoming an antagonist to the story!
About your comment that something like a more realistic system of building using materials. The process itself does not invoke story or emotional response - no one would say something like "oh man remember that time I made steel ingots?" But, it does lend itself to emotion.
A good example of this is Minecraft. Many people who build in creative mode will build extravagant things, but they don't tend to care about them. On the other hand, someone who had to mine, refine (once twice or more), then prepare and build with those things, they tend to be much more attached to the things they build. If someone blows up your house in creative, no problem. You fix it for free or you don't care enough about that one to even bother. In survival, you might have to go to the ends of the world again to get the things you need to re-construct what you built before. It's frustrating, because you lost something you invested time and effort into.
Honestly I would say Space Engineers is a better example of this, because in Minecraft you get many/all of the blocks back and in Space Engineers you mostly just get scrap, which needs to be refined again, most of the valuable resources are gone, and you won't get much from your recovery efforts. But Minecraft is a more well understood example.
Either way, my point is that investing time is a very important aspect of emotional investment and emotional response; if it took twice as much effort to build a base, losing it would have that much more emotional impact. There are obviously limits to the level of how much you want to negatively impact the emotions of players; if it took you 10 hours to build your base and it's completely annihilated, you will feel defeated. If it took 20 minutes, rebuilding it is not really a problem.
Exactly, I found that assertion very, very odd.
I would actually go even, further, and say the process it self DOES invoke story & emotional response... I mean really we have plenty of stories about people like the early 18th-20th century industrialists & innovators... Eg. Eddison & Tesla, or the history of coal mining & the associated human success & suffering in the UK. Those real-world stories hinge on the details of the relevant technology, and the emotional responses of the participants to what that tech could & couldn't do... and the quality of life tradeoffs to using it.
I really have to ask what is going on in peoples heads that they think a digital pet cat is more emotionally meaningful than an increased complexity steel-industry, because increased complexity means increased investment of time & energy, at increased potential of failure for the in-game colonists.
It's Mr. Sylvester's game, and he is free to seek whatever aesthetic he wants... ditto the Minecraft devs too, who I remember also tended towards a very opinionated approach to what got implemented & how. But let me be blunt: Your 'Story Generator' is obviously deficient at generating stories about industrialism... despite how very well that theme should fit into the setting.
Only half true. Watching others refining things is a different experience than doing it yourself and wont give so much story value. Whereas watching others build things does probably give you more story value.
I mean people can melt steel chunks into steel and thats fine, but polishing that into a more complex system wouldn't be any good for a spectator I guess
Watching this gave me a +8 happiness bonus for 2 months.
This man is really intelligent, I understand so much of what is wrong with gaming today now
I hope that he inspires other creators to make great games. He has demonstrated without a doubt that this is possible even with a tiny team of developers. I bought the game on Kickstarter and I still play it today, I'm pretty bad at it, but even failure makes for a good story.
I was looking forwards to something like this; thank you so much for sharing!
The Story Generator concept is super interesting, I feel like the future of really great games, design wise will try to incorporate this concept as a its core mechanic. I've observed many huge titles try to implement something like this or have it as a core concept but bow out to their other lackluster conflicting mechanics that bog down the game as a whole instead of sticking to one design philosophy.
For example most BGS titles like Skyrim or Fallout 4 focus on exploration as their emergent gameplay mechanic, "the player can go wherever they desire in this gigantic map and do whatever they wish." The structure of each playthrough is fairly unique, regardless if the content is exactly the same.
Simultaneously creating a world that(due to their "player can go everywhere anytime" design structure) can't really be designed with a tangible progression of difficulty or structured engaging narrative. 9/10 times I play these games I completely ignore the main quest because the game is designed to allow me to or better put, the game with its set of rules hasn't given be a reason to care enough. And with stakes like the dragons are returning to destroy the world or your one and only son has been kidnapped before your very eyes, it just comes across as silly, illogical and completely unbelievable.
I agree. Shadow of Mordor has something kinda like that in its Nemesis system, but I think Warner Bros has it patented.
Also, really good call on the bubble sort. I think managing creeping or shifting bias while applying numbers. The numbers seem 'true', but they were written by past you. One reason I break up complexity estimation into relatively short time periods. Future me will know more.
Value estimation is even harder to get write, even in non-gaming, pure data things. Ergo, it's probably much more reliable to do a constant buble sort on the list. Compare with what you know know.
Hell yeah! been waiting for this! Tynan is a F****ing monster!
53:00 Tynan, Where is my Slug Alien that we can milk? We want it
One thing I'm starting to contemplate is the balancing act of an open ended game is between developing a story in game and managing the mechanics. To this end at least for what I had in mind I personally preferred more skill systems thus reducing the developing story a bit but the idea was to introduce randomness in other systems but reduce player frustration, specifically around that randomness, (making it clear and visible, well explained and communicated, and straightforward to manage) so they are willing to deal with a defect in their despite failure, for example don't introduce annoying game over states and don't just kill off the primary player character(s), instead try to defer as much of primary player character harm to be emotionally investing or to grow the character or player themselves. I've wondered as some solutions and I've been curious to try out my ideas to see if they are worth attempting and to see how effective they are at mitigating frustration and such things as save scumming. (which I think need to be solved design-wise, not mechanics-wise, what War Horse decided for example was a terrible manner of trying to solve save scumming without making the game actually better)
i remember my first game on rimworld,
stray cats join my settlement,
they mass breed,
all of a sudden my mass food has gone...
colonists start going a lil coocoo.
cats go crazy eat my colonist.
left with 20 evil cats around colony nobody alive but those evil cats...
moral of the story cats are dicks.....get a dog
Yea. That's definitely something that would happen in your first game or 2. Eventually the "___ Joins" prompt translates into "Food Joins." Same with self tame. You get to the point when those prompts come up you instinctually open the Animal tab, send to Home, queue for slaughter.
you had !!FUN!!
Imagine my surprise the very first time I played and a Boomrat joined my colony. I had no idea that its name was so literal. Burned the whole place down.
You should have killed the oldest cats for food and keep the younger ones for breeding
Just set up the animal area away from your food stash. Feed them Kibble whenever you feel like it.
Love the game. My girlfriend and me play it on a daily basis. Hard to hear tho that everything we wished that would come to the game just won't..
Storytelling is nice, but having more depths in some game mechanics would be really cool. The relationshipa between colonists felt pretty much impactless and actually useless. Would be cool to know more and have more options when suddenly your "husband" from an advanced technology tribe visits you, while you actually started as a prehistoric tribe. Kinda weird sometimes. Still love it.
29:30 HOLY SHIT, I have never found the words to explain how I feel when I'm in a store haha
This line made my day
When he was talking about developers putting enormous amounts of time into things that are really difficult and dont amount to much, all I could think about was Project Zomboid (still) spending years of dev time on animations. Glad devs have learned from that painful example.
Or Tarn Adams implementing a complicated weather simulation that amounts to "it's raining" or "it's clear"
to be fair, build 39 graphics were what i'd call "ugly" and indiestone likely came across the story generator concept before tynan with the whole "this is how you died" and abstract moodles used to give players a sense of apothenia in their characters.
PZ's problem is that THEY CAN'T FUCKING WORK EFFICIENTLY. I love them, but holy shit, it takes entirely too long for them to make an update.
Bubblesorting good or bad ideas is a pretty good idea.
Ya, I think I'll use that, myself, except in a text editor that allows me to hotkey swapping adjacent lines. I'm thinking VS Code with some sort of extension.
I played 16 hours when I first picked up rimworld. I was confused, frusturated, annoyed, but was ok with the money I spent because I though the game deserved it, even if I didnt have that much fun.
then Ideology came out and reminded me it existed... I put in 100 more hours since then... they have been very fun. Also shoutout to the hygiene mod and vanilla expanded, very nice.
Damn. Rimworld is one of my favorite 'games' of all time. Close to 3k hours. Only now do I realize why. Tynan is genius. I hadn't realized the degree of conscious thought put into how the game does what it does, and what it doesn't do on purpose.
It's interesting how some things changed in Rimworld from some of the attitudes he had in this talk. For instance, players ended up having a good amount of control over characters, or at least were able to override what characters were doing to have them do what the player wants on the fly. I'm not sure if difficulty levels were in the game at the time of this conference, but they were in the game after this for sure and some of the settings were meant for relaxed gameplay that wasn't intended for the player to lose. I have to wonder if his methodologies evolved and changed some since this talk, because it seem that way.
IMO it would be pretty boring if all you could do is sit back and watch. Seems like the game strikes a good balance now, where the player is given goals and tools to achieve those goals, while still giving the player a push from time to time and making the world seem alive.
For a story generator the only thing Rimworld really lacks is ... Character development.
Yes my dude ... the 'narrative' in rimworld sorely lacks character development. Traits are static and don't evolve, character backstories create static pawns, the characters don't evolve or change over time, they don't grow organically like living beings, they are and will always be the exact same nitwit that crashlands at the Rim except with slightly higher skill levels or missing/replaced a few body parts on the way. That loner or banished pawn that has disabled/terrible social skills will always have disabled social skills. That factory worker even if he has fast learner trait still will be incapable of performing intellectual, artistic or even simple cooking tasks ... because he is and will always have been a factory worker. None of that makes sense and none of that creates interesting stories.
Perhaps that factory worker never got to develop his skills and as it turns out, as a fast learner he can actually turns his life background from a factory worker to an inventive scientist. That loner we talked about earlier, perhaps he had a bad past but now on the Rim forcedto interact with people who depend on him, he has opened up and learned to socialize and it turns out, he's an excellent leader. These are stories ... but in Rimworld you have to make sure your loner will never ever get any kind of social interaction because you'll just be wasting your time on it. In fact he's entirely incapable of socializing ... now it's your job to imagine how he'll always be like that and how to 'game' around this quirk.
For this - like for so much else, mods exist
@@TheDispiteous my point being, that the essence of good story telling is character development. Tynan sees his game not as a game but as a story generator but it actually sorely lacks in actual story telling.
Most of the events in-game are gimmicky such as the packs of manhunting animals. Yes that is fun ... like 2 times ... but by the 40th time you've gotten a 100 or so crazy manhunting ducks going around, it stops being funny and just becomes a nuisance.
And no you shouldn't expect mods to fix everything. Not when someone markets their game as a story generator but lacks in actual story content and development.
@@BrutusAlbion oh your point is and was clear, but lets be honest - the game lacks so much more, from essential to quality of life stuff which is added in through mods.
Should a game dev expect such things to be changed through mods?
No!
Would RW be where it is without mods?
Hell no!
I made another comment about his "can it ship without it" stick which made me laugh out loud when he talked about it.
So much of what makes Rimworld what it is is added in through the work and effort of other people that I find it remarkable that he is lecturing about game dev appoaches while essential standing (at least partially) on the free work others have made for him and his game.
I love Rimworld, but lets be honest - Ludeon Studios really did the bare minimum to develop it, so it is no surprise that it shows even in essential parts as you point out.
@@TheDispiteous oh my mod list of 300+ certainly and completely agrees with you.
The default interface is atrociously bad. The game is riddled with annoying pawn mechanics from idiotic behavior to outright stupidity which is really down to bad or inadequate coding. So many QoL features just straight up missing or not even properly considered. You need to build an amazon styled warehouse just to store a few pants and shirts in this game, ridiculous.
The game really isn't amazing without the mods but with the mods its quite great, it's the sugar in the cake for sure.
@@TheDispiteous is there a mod that adds that?
I see Tynan Sylvester, I like the talk
Really like this way of designing on the fly. Gonna integrate it into my work flow.
I can't tell if this motivated me to work on my game or play rimworld more -__-
Compromise, work on a rimworld mod
so thats him...the mad lad. the legend. the gift that keeps giving. thanks you so much for this great game.
"Optimizing things that aren't slow" That hit me right in my noggin
I just ate without a table (-3) :(
40:22 Is it possible to ship without it?
*AAA industry*
"YES"
Man, his overview/pitch of Rimworld was....not great lol. Game is a million times better than how he described it in the intro.
good art is hard to describe
@@ALForb "Its like The Sims, but with drugs, organ harvesting, slavery and cannibalism" would've done it.
I struggle to describe RimWorld that accurately represents what the game is entirely about when trying to convince my friends to buy it. It's one of those games you truly just have to experience to understand what it's all about. Anything else just describes it as "another generic survival game", but it's SO MUCH MORE than that.
@@giveussomevodka and then Randy dropped a supply of milk.
One of the more interesting GDC talks out there.
I went this entire speech without a table!
You're just inviting -3 at this point...
@@MattHatter360 it Was a fine meal...
I didn't know that Gabe went into game design after Dunder Mifflin.
You literally can't unsee this once you see it
Its funny how they made a whole convention just to tell you why its better to stop save scumming
Thanks for uploading that. It is nice to hear a creator letting us to get an idea of what and how it happened behind.
I really love what you're saying and thinking through here Tynan. This stuff resonates deeply with me, as someone who loves games like Thief or Dishonored, which while still having tension, triumph and defeat, are very much about being on a stage together with other actors, in a world rich with different sorts of scenes and events. :D I'm interested in creating those experiences myself, so your ideas here are fantastic. Thanks for such a great talk. :D
Its so legendary how hes using internet explorer
Only 7 minutes in and this has already sort of changed my perspective on the game. (I only just installed it a few days ago, but admittedly during that time I have obtained quite a lot of hours.) I have a really bad habit of ending up turning on developer mode and 'cleaning up' some mistakes or things I justified should not have happened or were unfair to me.
I was aware of how Rimworld advertises itself as a 'story generator', but I wrote it down as mostly something used as an advertisiong gimmick, and didn't really thinki about how it affected the game.
I'll try and have some runs where I disable dev mode near the start of the game and do a large run sometime soon.
I always loved watching thigns from the sidelines, and some forms of micromanaging things can be interesting, like how I enjoy Prison Architect and logistics games (haven't played Factorio just yet), so I should try and just observe.
Anyways this sounds cheesy and stupid and I just wrote my thoughts down or whatever, time to resume the video.
You should left mistakes untouched, because even bad decisions have good influence on story in your colony. For example if your first colonist died by accident or raid, you can make a big grave for him and his friends and family would remember and continue his will, even after a hundred years in game.
I Had a colonist die, by a raid by Void. She was buried. And 2 game years later one of my colonists snapped after combat , she dug up the corps. Slapping the body on the dining room table like a dessicated fruit basket for all to admire. One of my other colonists was eating breakfast when it happened.
@@leion800 heeey. Rimworld gived me one lesson. If somebody bad happened remember - its can be worse...like one of colonists have bad mood, using drugs and going psycho, literally breaking everything including food supply, meds...
Try third scenario, when you playing as a rich guy from utopian world. That how i hooked into.
My current colony has an architect lady that is super pretty and an absolute goddess at anything art and construction but absolutely REFUSES to do any menial work, including simply transporting materials. She's also really antisocial. One of my other survivors, Chumbo, is a big, burly miner who's dumb as rocks and absolutely smitten with her. In any other game, the permanent mood drop Chumbo gets from getting romantically rejected on a near daily basis would be infuriating. In Rimworld, this is hilarious.
Tynan managed to make a game/story generator where losing is fun and problems something to look forward to. Mad respect.
Rimworld is one of my favorite games of all time. Stoked to watch this!
oh my oh my oh my! this makes me so happy!!!
Came for game dev, leaving to play more Rimworld.
Honestly such an incredible presentation
Actually the game mechanics, numbers and gameplay is what i like the most.
The 'emotions' and relationships are the worst and more annoying part of the game.
Cheat them away then
24:30 Speaking as a horticulturist and game designer/project manager ... Seeding plants can be emotional asf my dude 😂 that's why horticultural therapy is a thing, or people enjoy farming simulators (which harks back to the same emotional context he grounded his story generator philosophy in: the universal tribal-magical environment shared by people for hundreds of thousands of years of anatomically modern human history). 31:50 my 'project scope creep.txt' is at ~230 pages tho :')
Problem: you want players to be emotionally engaged in characters but you want characters to die all the time for ridiculous reasons
Solution: make players hate all characters
The only thing on Rimworld that was a let down on my exception is when I read of the "story teller" (coming from DF) I didn't think of it as a fancy name of the RNG, I thought similar to inscriptions in DF some (simple) AI that actually writes down a novel type story text of your colony... Right now the "story generator" actually doesn't create stories, it still needs the human to write a story about what they experienced in game.
When you create things like sculptures they will have a description of an event that previously happened DF style, so it is recording events, it's just not as explicit as dwarf fortress.
I now know this isn't the case, but I initially thought when he was commentating over the trailer at 0:25 the audio we were hearing was from the trailer, which makes it absolutely hilarious.
After Royalty and Ideology I can say Rimworld is one the best games I've ever played and that is along side gems like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7, Castlevania SotN and others
Remember that time the janitor with the bad back was throwing a tantrum and breaking shit from chronic pain? yeah, one of our corpse disposal guys responded with a Molotov to the face, which horrifically and irreparably scarred his face, and making the chronic pain worse. Not only that, the corpse disposal later got into art, and made a statue about the time he burned the janitors face off. We put it in the cantina.
I had an issue where a mechhive appeared that I could not defeat. Each time I went to a prior save, the mechhive would re-appear (it was attached to a quest).
It never occurred to me that I could pack up my dudes and leave. I quit the game instead. Maybe adding a hint that re-establishing your base elsewhere is an option (in the quest language) could have helped. I should also add that I had 800 hours playing Rimworld when this happened, so I’m no rookie.
Thanks for a great game.
You can even have multiple bases.
If you have less than 1k hours you're a rookie.
But what's the difference between leaving your base to build another one from scratch and just starting a new game entirely? (Apart from keeping the same guys over which I don't find to be any appealing)
@@fritter67 You can keep many resources with you, also faction relationships and fresh map. Also its good for colonists mood.
Not sure about tech tree, but i guess you keep it.
This guy is an absolute genius of a game developer. I would love to have a chance to just to talk with him and hear all his fucking ideas.
It's incredible how efficient he is, he identified exactly what parts of the game need to be prioritized, and what parts of the game you can minimally invest in. This one guy and his small crew are more talented than the AAA corporate garbage that is constantly spewed out.
Well... To be honest... The methodology only works in a project that is perfect tailored for it.
I don't know if this video is or no about explaining Rimworld and why it is a success, but, If the game fails, no one will be interested in his particular methodology. In my point of view, the secret of Rimworld success, is not mentioned even once. It is the engagement of the mod community. Rimworld is relatively easy to mod, and was embraced it in ways that I never seen before. If Ludeon studios have only 3 people on his payroll, I can assume that at least another thirty community members are modding the game at same time. So, this creates a scenario where each user can create his own game, by selecting the game features that match his expectations.
This shields Ludeon of lots and lots of negative feedback, the content that the players want, are somehow modded in many different ways! Tynan and his crew can focus only on the core aspects of the game, and let the community fill in all possible secondary systems in any different approaches!
And make a game and build a community that works so well together is, in my opinion, the greatest achievement of Rimworld.
Same could be said for minecraft i guess. But that doesn't mean minecraft or rimworld isn't enough of a game on their own. It took a while for me to get into mods in rimworld, same with minecraft. They were already good games from start, atleast for me...
This is a conference specifically about making games so a talk about an unusual and unique method of making a game is infinitely more interestingly to hear about than "great modding community sells games". We already know that since morrowind, oblivion and minecraft.
If anything his method profits exponentially from a good community because if somebody makes something great you just drop it down the list next week and never waste time on it while you bump up something they need to make it even better.
@@pascal6871 The metodology should mention the extra free labor force provided by the comunity, just because It is a important variable on 100% of the projects where the metodology was applied.
Wtf are you talking about? The success of the game is mainly due to the modding community? 90% of RimWorld players probably never even installed a single mod, I know I haven't, and I have hundreds of hours in the game. If anything the mods are a cool little extra for experienced players or a mere convenience, in the case of the "quality of life" mods, but it's really insulting to suggest that the success of this amazing game is due to anything but the genius and hard work of the developers.
Tynan specifically made the defs system with easy modding in mind, the good modding community is something that the devs helped cultivate
This dude a game designer and a philosopher!!
1:18 1st off this talk is surprisingly great. 2nd, this point makes me think of Starcraft which I'm playing/replaying right now. you are often fighting uphill battles just to survive a bit longer or race to an objective before you are overrun during the gameplay, and because you get to take turns playing as the 'bad guy' or good guy, you get to take turns being the underdog or oppressor :D
Sure, in the campaign, but most of the active players play multiplayer, which is highly skill dependent. (Starcraft 1 is actually the game that created esports and progamers)
According to Stephen king, notebooks are the best way to keep a log of all your worst ideas. Little ideas come and go from your mind, but the good ones; the ideas that are worth using, those stick in your mind forever.
Rimworld is the best game in the past 10 years by far ! Pure epicness !
In Aaron Sorkin's biography-drama "The Story Generator", about the rise of a war-crimes / tower-defense / lo-fi-farming-simulator to the all-consuming metaverse that players spend 100,000 hours in before feeling like they really "get" bedroom design, the lead role will be played by Zach Woods.
That satisficing shopping way I have started doing that a while back now. Never truly understood why I changed. I thought I was just getting lazy in my old age. But your right it is less stress.
Taking to Tynan like he will read this. LOL
It's almost like original ideas in creating games is a good thing.
7:54 Neo is getting a hard pushback in the Matrix, but he is not starving to death, having a deadly desease while the doctor is having a tantrum spree and has to fight an incoming man hunter pack (at the same time)!
That would be not a dispropriate pushback, but a bad Ending before the story has a chance to begin!
Cypher had a mental break: Murderous rage
The final straw was: Ate nutrient paste meal
Omfg I just realized that the base in the thumbnail background is the one I built long ago 😮😍
Very thoughtful, will happily watch.
Yet if people were interested in story generators then everyone would be playing text adventures on NovelAI or ChatGPT.
I think Tynan definitely had a goal in mind but the gamification of the story generator is definitely something in the core design of the game.
Royalty, Biotech, and the very mechanics of the game (hoarding resources and skill progression and advanced weapons and armaments) all support encourage the player to climb the power ladder for the sake of continuity.
The war crimes are definitely also quite gamey as people are doing it primarily for cash and not for roleplaying necessities...
IDK. I play Rimworld because I like basebuilding and perfecting utopia like in Stellaris. The story generation is a side for me but idk about others.
You can't be part of the story with chat gpt
I wish I never played this game, my life is entirely encapsulated by Rimworld and my colony’s struggle.
Well, that explains why i run out of enjoyment quite quickly each time i play RimWorld. It's because this abstraction makes me think of people differently, as work outputs and their importance to the colony rather their emotional value, where i get upset at losing a colonist not because of it's story but it's gameplay value. Losing a researcher means losing a certain amount of research that they could've generated, not a person, at least to me
Perhaps one day i will be able to actually connect with he colonists rather than seeing them as people who just do my work
I think that is just how you are, for me is like that too,and i have played for 2k hrs.For me frustation is just part of every game but is fun.
@@superduck-chan6230 yeah, i guess it is
After thinking about it, it's probably this level of control you have with the lack of AI and the abstraction that makes it like this. The colonists are just completely dependent on you, and while they perform some tasks automatically it all needs either an amount of input from the start or continuous input to maintain it simply because they don't have the functions to do things themselves. That is not a bad thing, but it does make me view them less as people and more like working drones. A greedy pawn won't beat out the fire near his bedroom but rather the one that's closest; their traits don't influence them. And when, say, a social fight happens or relationships happen, it's either just a notice or a short moment if both people hurting each other and it's over, management wise. You don't look at their relationships and memorize them, because they do not matter that much to you.
Playing wildermyth i was able to connect to the characters was more because they each have a personality and a story, and they act upon both - that guy who touched a gem is now crystalizing, and you see that - it affects both his stats and look, and actions sometimes too. They also build relationships and during events you see them act upon it, and some events are even caused by those relationships. It makes me invested in the characters themselves, even if they are useless.
However a thing you have that is a problem is the power/reward curve. If you are powerful you get more rewards, and more rewards make you more powerful. So it's either a win or lose
I think a dynamic story simulation game would be the best, possibly. One where you and other people are there, where there may be a goal - clear out the horde, defeat the big bad evil guy, whatever it is, but where there is not this massive time restriction like in wildermyth where you have to finish the quests before the time runs out, or where at the last stage where tiles are flooded permanently and destroyed so that they do not give you any resources before the boss fight. Instead you might be restricted in a way that is not 100% win or lose at time run out but maybe, say, raids becoming more difficult over time. Where fleeing and abandoning everything can mean you survive and can rebuild rather than that you start from scratch, where you are not the main enemy for the big bad guy and thus the highest priority to be taken out like in an RTS or strategy game, but where you while not having to can still have the last stands and defend untill the end
Where you are one of the people as well, so that the things that happen affect you as well. It's not just an event and some people get hurt, no, you actually see a social fight, maybe get hurt in it as well even if you are a bystander, see the anger they have for each other, the lasting effects. To see that someone is sad instead of just having a mood bar telling me their mood is low. To also still allow loss to happen without ending the game
See, I absolutely can feel for my colonists. But I still would enjoy Rimworld much more if it leaned a bit more into the game side. Caring about a colonist and then having them die in a way that doesn't represent your failure (because there is absolutely nothing you could have done about it) isn't satisfying as a game or as a god overlooking imaginary people. Having the attitude "whatever happens, happens" seems to me to be a separate axis all its own, that doesn't really map to any other term or category we already have.
the game is just not for everyone. i'm willing to say that majority of fanbase treats pawn like people. this is what makes this game work.
I have the opposite problem. It get immersed in the stories of the colonists so when I spend a lot of time trying to take care of a pawn and then they die to something stupid, that can be annoying. otoh if I only cared about what they brought to the colony mechanically then it would be easier to have a revolving door since they're all replaceable.
I've been close to tears when a pig died, she had been through so much with my colony.
So true.... The pork chops were good though ^^
when humility meets intelligence in game design
I loved this talk. Great insight into the developer's mind. This is what i'm subscribed to this channel for.
If anyone else liked this check out Zach's (from Zachtronics and Spacechem) talk.
when people start asking the questions at the end, feels like tynan is standing in the republic senate
Rimworld was a story generator, but then the min-maxers attacked. They took the staggeringly ugly pawn behind the shed and let the bloodthirsty pawn kill him.
I feel like if it was any other developer saying those ideas I'd disagree with them more, but it being Tynan, creator of a game on a similar magnitude as Minecraft, at least in my opinion, really solidifies his position as clearly, he must be right somewhere to get to this point.
He could be wrong about all this "story generator" mumbojumbo and "accidentally" just made a decent colony simulator.
On my 279th 500% threat commitment run
I'm very hype for this video
Wow, that was a really good talk, maybe one of the best I've seen.
man this is underrated...
In rimworld a freaking skirrell can kill all you colony because you are afk but a 80 years old human can lift A FREAKING TRUMBHO
This is interesting. Especialy the mechanic where events happen and you don't get to see it.
Like how characters get an emotional breakdoen cause a sister or mother died. A character i never seen or met before.
(No idea how my characters found out they died but whatever. They somehow did)
But yeah. Having sudden breakdowns of their family dying while you never seen these characters before. Is like real life where friends or collegues live their own lives and sometimes get happy or sad on event you did not get to experience.
It shapes a story. A seperate life outaide your own. And it can be nice. But also sad.
The things i learned from this talk:
- Why I hate shopping.
- That Tynan realy want to sell his book.
- ....
... and his game