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4 | How do games go about designing weapon damage? In Action RPG games, I was wondering how weapon damage numbers and attack speeds are decided on. Do most games come up with their own or do they "steal" numbers from other games? How would I go about coming up with my own numbers? |
4 | What are easing functions? I found this cool website for game development and it has a list of easing functions Although the site contains a description of what they're for, it goes over my head. What are easing functions and what are they used for? Update I found a better example of the functions themselves from Phaser.io's source code. These functions are much simpler than the answers here would suggest. They only take one parameter, k. As part of the answer, I'd like to know how to use these. |
4 | How does 2D Game Physics work? Possible Duplicate How do I build a 2D physics engine? If we take the game Angry Birds that had big success lately I were thinking how do they implement the physics in a game like that? Your are shooting of your birds and they hit something that will fall off and in turn creating a chain reaction of things either falling or exploding.. Are all this happening with calculations with rules considering all collisions together with gravity etc.? |
4 | Mini Game Platform for PC similar to Warcraft III Custom Games I think it would be fun to make a game for pc that has an online community like Warcraft III (the RTS, not the MMORPG), aka there's lobbies and chat rooms and users can host games to play with eachother. And there's no seriousness, just fun mini games that last on average 30 60 minutes, more or less depending on the game. I searched google but it's really hard to find anything. Is there anything similar to this idea that's already out there? Or is this a first? Also, in making this, any recommendations, flaming, or random comments? (yes I know it is hard to make an online game and such, especially since I have no experience with networking. I do have 2 3 years of programming experience, however). Some more info on what I want to create. I want it to be easy for users to create games and play with friends. All of us game creators have ideas, and we probably draw them out on paper (graph paper for me). Wouldn't it be amazing if it was a matter of a couple hours to transfer that idea to a fully working game, even if it is in 3d? |
4 | MiniMax not working properly(for checkers game) I am creating a checkers game but My miniMax is not functioning properly,it is always switching between two positions for its move(index 20 and 17).Here is my code public double MiniMax(int board, int depth, int turn, int red best, int black best) int source int dest double MAX SCORE INFINITY,newScore int MAX DEPTH 3 int newBoard new int 32 generateMoves(board,turn) System.arraycopy(board, 0, newBoard, 0, 32) if(depth MAX DEPTH) return Evaluation(turn,board) for(int z 0 z lt possibleMoves.size() z 2) source Integer.parseInt(possibleMoves.elementAt(z).toString()) System.out.println("SOURCE " source) dest Integer.parseInt(possibleMoves.elementAt(z 1).toString()) (int )possibleMoves.elementAt(z 1) System.out.println("DEST " dest) applyMove(newBoard,source,dest) newScore MiniMax(newBoard,depth 1,opponent(turn),red best, black best) if(newScore gt MAX SCORE) MAX SCORE newScore maxSource source maxDest dest maxSource and maxDest will be used to perform the move. if (MAX SCORE gt black best) if (MAX SCORE gt red best) break alpha beta cutoff else black best (int) MAX SCORE the score if (MAX SCORE lt red best) if (MAX SCORE lt black best) break alpha beta cutoff else red best (int) MAX SCORE the score for ends return MAX SCORE end minimax I am unable to find out the logical mistake. Any idea what's going wrong? |
4 | Tweaking incentives for lottery with a twist I have been developing a game which is a lottery where your chance of winning is proportional to the square of your bet. To prevent people from overbetting the pot (optimal strategy shouldn't just be to bet as much as possible, I think), and to make subsequent jackpots appealing, I've made it so the winner gets (current round bets past round leftovers) 2. 48 of the jackpot goes forward, and 2 of the jackpot goes to the house. This is generally working, but when there are not many people on the site, one person will sit there and drain the pot every round with the minimum bet. Though I think the concept is pretty cool, I have the feeling that some small tweaks could make a big difference. Any ideas how to get the pot to grow as big as possible? Apologies if this is not the right place to post. |
4 | Match 3 game level generator I made match 3 game and now i trying to add level generator. Now I generate level by filling random cells with random blocks, but I want to create generator which for given number of moves and number of block kinds generate level. What algorithms I can use if they exists? |
4 | What is the best way to manage 'state' in Phaser? I have heard that this is not the best way to manage state in phaser var game new Phaser.Game(800, 600, Phaser.CANVAS,'YourGameName') game.state.add("Boot", Boot) game.state.add("Preload", Preload) game.state.add("MainMenu", mainMenu) game.state.add("Play", Play) game.state.add("GameOver", GameOver) game.state.start("Boot") so what is the best way to do it. I am newbie in Phaser game development. |
4 | Simultaneous game states I think I understand the basic idea behind a Finite State Machine based game loop. But I'm trying to write a little game in which the same object can simultaneously be in multiple, independent states. At least that's what I want to do. To give you an idea Robot may be in FleeState and FireLaserState at the same time, besides in each of them individually at any time. Would something like this be possible using the FSM pattern? Or ought I to look elsewhere? After all, does the whole idea make sense? Pasted from my comment below A little clarification of why I'd like states to be kept separate I want the player to have the ability to program simple state changes before a game... say "if (health is way too low) flee". But then I want multiple such rules to be active simultaneously in order to keep the game interesting, and cannot know beforehand which other states may be active. |
4 | How to prevent the "Too awesome to use" syndrome? When you give the player a rare but powerful item which can only be used once but is never really required to proceed, most players will not use it at all, because they are waiting for the perfect moment. But even when this moment comes, they will still be reluctant to use it, because there might be an even better moment later. So they keep hoarding it for a moment which will never come. In the end, they will carry the item around until it is outclassed by other, more readily available resources, or even until the very end of the game. That means that such one shot items don't provide any gameplay value at all. They are simply too awesome to use. What can you do to encourage the player to make use of their one shot items and not hoard them? |
4 | Does Pokemon use any deep A.I in battle? A Pokemon wild battle. The enemy may have up to 4 moves. I am wondering, is there any.. A.I going on here, or does the enemy simply take a random move and then executes it? Are there not any battle factors conditions that may change the enemy's behavior? I guess it makes sense to categorize moves by "Offensive" "Defensive" and or "Healing", and from there make choices depending on HP etc... dunno. |
4 | What's an appropriate difficulty scale for weapon efficacy vs difficulty to obtain? I'm writing up a design document for a voxel based adventure game, similar to minecraft, but fixing a lot of fundamentally broken game mechanics, or at least updating those mechanics to be more suited to an adventure game. I'm considering creating a weapon scale from 1 10, where weapons at 1 are least powerful, and weapons at 10 are most powerful. I was considering making the materials to make the weapon most common for the level 1 weapons, and 10x less common for the most powerful weapon, but if you look at minecraft, diamonds only occur in 0.1 of blocks and they still feel too common, unless you're prone to dying of course. In keeping with the adventure focus, would it be better to have the higher tiers of weapons only come from monster drops, or from a combination of a rare monster drop and a mineable item, or are there other common game mechanics I could use to have a super powerful weapon that's also hard to get, but worth your time to get? To state the question another way, for the time investment, should a weapon that's 10x as powerful take 10x as long to obtain, or 20x or higher? Are there any studies that show any correlation between "fun" in how long players will grind for an item and an appropriate time investment scale for obtaining equipment? |
4 | How to effectively gather info about how players play my HTML5 game? I'm finishing another HTML5 game, and this time I'd like to do some spying business on the players... Mostly just basic stuff when they are playing, for how long, what upgrades they are buying the most and so on. Now, my first idea was just to collect this information during the gameplay, and then have a Javascript function fire when they close the tab browser, and said function would send it to my server via Socket.io. This, of course, wouldn't work, because anyone who takes a look at the code would realize it and could start sending a tonne of false info which would mess up my statistics. Questions Is there a way to effectively do this? If yes, what kind of info should I be looking for, aside from stuff I already mentioned? |
4 | Averaging Camera Position I'm making a camera which tracks the player. I am using a basic algorithm to calculate a position for the camera relative to the player. Then I am taking an average of this over the last x number of frames. This creates a nice chase camera which always slightly lags and evens out the players movements. Where I am running into trouble is with delta Time. How can I weight each entry in my list of previous positions so that delta time is taken into account. Currently I'm having an issue where, when the frame rate is particularly slow, the camera lags really far behind the player. I should also mention that currently I am adding each entry ElapsedTimeInSeconds 0.01f times to give the weight. So the average is effectively over fewer frames if the frame rate is slow. I also tried entering values as Value DeltaTime, then keeping an average of delta time to divide the values by when I get them back out of my average tracking class but that didn't work. What I think I really want is an average over the last n seconds rather than the last n frames. |
4 | What are the other three "game dynamics"? Seth Priebatsch recently gave a tedtalk entitled Building the game layer on top of the world. In it, Seth described four game dynamics, techniques used by game designers to make games fun and addictive. The four dynamics that Priebtsch described were Appointment dynamic a dynamic in which to succeed, one must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. (Real life example happy hour) Influence and status the ability of one player to modify the behavior of another's actions through social pressure. (Example different color credit cards as a reflection of status) Progression dynamic a dynamic in which success is granularly displayed and measured through the process of completing itemized tasks. (Example linkedin profile progress bar) Communal discovery a dynamic wherein an entire community is rallied to work together to solve a challenge. (Example finding interesting content on Digg.com) Seth explained these four game dynamics in his talk and added that his company has an additional three. Does anyone know (or have any theories) about what the other three game dynamics are? |
4 | Is there any API that returns information about "all games"? I'm building a project about games and I need to make a "portfolio" of games. Something like a catalog of Netflix, but about games, and I need some basic information about the game, like Publisher, Genre, Developer, Release Date and some more information. Someone know a free API that returns the date that I need? I tried Steam API, but doesn't work for me. Obs Returns a JSON. |
4 | When creating a game engine, how should I define the position of objects? I'm building a custom game engine, in C using SDL, and I'm not sure how I should define the position of my game objects. I tried googling a bit, but I wasn't sure how to refine my search terms to get what I'm looking for. Should I define the position (x, y) of my object to be the top left of the object, for ease of rendering? Since my game is tile based, it also makes sense to have the position of the tiles as the top left position. Perhaps I should define it to be the center of the object, which seems to make more sense, logically? If we use width 2 and height 2 to calculate it, does the slightly truncated integer for even sized objects matter? How do other games do this? Right now, my objects are defined by the top left corner, and it's annoying to do operations that find the center of the object. |
4 | What is the better way to speed up gameplay as the level rises? I started with game programming couple of weeks back. For the starters I tried to develop ZigZag (link takes you to 2 min gameplay). I am done with the logic of gameplay by now. It runs well and all. Now I want to speed up the gameplay as user passes some score. Say after 100 points increase the speed of the ball. I have two options Control the speed using time delay by varying time.delay(var). Actually increasing the speed of the moving ball Not sure which one is a good idea in long term, I'm looking for help from experienced game developers. You can checkout the source code https github.com ravi ojha zigway blob master zigway.py |
4 | What are the cons of a 3 team FPS? In creating a video game concept, there are very little video games that offer a 3 team multiplayer FPS (think like Overwatch Call of Duty but with 3 teams instead of 2). The only 'mainstream' games that offer this are RTS games. What are the cons of implementing a 3 team multiplayer FPS game? |
4 | Help developing a scoring system for a tech tree based game I'm working on a tech tree based project in which the player would select "advancements" to effect several measurement stats, or "basic stats". I have a working excel model that will calculate the "scores" for these basic stats based on advancements selected, but I'd eventually like to use these measurement stats that I have to calculate higher level measurements like population or total production power. For example in the case of calculating "Population", I'd like to take the (current pop (current pop. fertility rate)) death rate. Fertility rate would be calculated based on the "basic stats" of "health" and "food supply", and death rate on metrics like "health" and "squalor". I'm not really sure how to use these measurements though... If health and food supply both start at 0 and increased by 5 over the course of a few turns, how should I use these scores in a meaningful way to do what I'm trying to do in the case of fertility rate? Fertility rate should be expressed as a certain percentage of total pop. but I'm not sure how to get there from two scores of 5. I don't think this will be a simple process, but I feel like I'm missing some basic concepts to put this into place. Is there a name for this kind of scoring system? Any ideas would be appreciated! Thanks. |
4 | Prototyping a puzzle game for solvability of levels I am in the prototyping phase of making a puzzle game for iOS. The basic premise of what the player has to do is get from point A to point B by navigating through a maze like setup, while moving blocks out of the way, and avoiding enemies. This is my first approach to a game like this so I am wondering how others have made sure that the levels they create are solvable. For example take the classic Unblock game where you have to move the red block off the game board by moving the other non red block pieces out of the way. It gets difficult because they are all in a tight space with not much movement to be had. Has does the creator know that the arrangement of puzzle pieces are placed in a way that makes it possible to solve the puzzle? Do they start with paper prototypes and work from a solvable end state backwards to make the initial game board layouts? |
4 | Factors to consider when building an algorithm for gun recoil What would be a good algorithm for calculating the recoil of a shooting guns cross hairs? What I've got now, is something like this Define min max recoil based on weapon size Generate random number of "delta" movement Apply random value to X, Y, or both of cross hairs (only "up" on the Y axis) Multiply new delta based on time from the previous shot (more recoil for full auto) What I'm worried about is that this feels rather predicable, what other factors should one take into account when building recoil? While I'd like it to be somewhat predictable, I'd also like to keep players on their toes. I'm thinking about increasing the min max recoil values by a large amount (relatively) and adding a weighting, so large recoils will be more rare it seems like a lot of effort to go into something I felt would be simple. Maybe this is just something that needs to be fine tuned with additional playtesting, and more playtesters? I think that it's important to note, that the recoil will be a large part of the game, and is a key factor in the game being fun challenging or not. |
4 | Is there a rule of thumb to scale up the environment by 33 ? I was reading an article on Gamasutra called A Rational Approach to Racing Game Track Design, and I found the following A commonly acknowledged rule for third person games is that the environment should be scaled up by a factor of around 33 percent (on page 2) I am just curious has anyone else heard of such a rule, and if so, where else could I find references to it? |
4 | Representing feelings such as temperature, pain, smell, taste, hunger, and thirst immersively In a totally immersive, simulation type role playing game, the player should not look at bars or numbers to keep track of his or her stats, so another method of showing these stats is needed. For example, the player needs to know when to eat, because games (currently) cannot incite a real feeling of hunger. The player also needs to know if they are hurt, so they can take appropriate measures. Somehow, these feelings must be represented visually or audibly. I'm not a fan of coloring and blurring the screen to show feelings like how most first person shooters show that you have been shot. What are some ways to represent these feelings immersively? |
4 | How is game difficulty tested balanced? How is game difficulty typically tested or balanced so that there's a steady progression of difficulty how do I ensure that no level is too difficult or too easy for its point in the game? Are play testers of various skills brought in, or a random sampling of people? What considerations are should be taken into account during the actual level design process? |
4 | Pairing algorithm for the Elo rating system Imagine a 1 on 1 (not teams) competition between AI bots, like the Google AI Challenge. The various bots are assigned an ELO rating based on the outcome of the various versus matches. The reason I specify AI bots as they can compete 24 7 without regard for player fatigue, geolocation, etc. Given limited server resources only so many bouts can be run per day. I'm looking for a heuristic (or an optimal algorithm) to choose which two bots should compete next. All the past competitions have been tracked. By this I mean that the algorithm has more to work with than just the ELO ratings. The use cases I'm partitularly interested in The competition has been pairing randomly for while and now I want to make intelligent pairing decision. The Elo rating have stabilized and a bot is updated. The Elo ratings have stabilized and new bot is introduced to the competition. Update I need to clarify. I'm not looking for an algorithm that will provide fair matches. I'm looking for an algorithm that will find matches most likely to update the Elo ratings of the bots to their "true" ratings with the least number of matches. |
4 | Why do some videogame sequels become bigger? Sometimes I'm wondering why sequels in games usually strive to have new features, making them more complex, taking much longer to finish and also sounds much harder to keep motivated into it. I understand that it's needed because gamers don't want to buy the same game with just a different story. but occasionally these features seem to make the original intention of the game more complex than I think it should be. If a developer is always with the thought to make his next game bigger than the previous, then that means that they'll become overly cluttered with tons of features that a gamer may or may never use. That sounds like a waste of effort to me. Maybe it's just that I prefer a simple style from indie games, but when I look at the larger companies, then sometimes I've a feeling they're trying out a lot (if not too much) to sell well. Just take a look at Mario Kart 8, Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey as example. They're all so complex compared with what the series used to be. Now imagine how large their next game has to be in order to top that, if that's even possible. So my question is what leads game developers to focus on making the next game even bigger? And are there viable ways to avoid this trend? I'm used to the phrase 'less is more', but I wonder if that also fits in this situation. |
4 | Game Design Education I am very interested in a career as a video game designer. to clarify i mean one of the people to figure out how the mechanics, story, levels and art all work together. To any designers on the website what post secondary education should I look for? I know that typically they have knowledge of all different parts of game development but is there anything specific I should be looking for that would helpful as a base? |
4 | How to develop and optimize the illusion of meaningful character development between the player and NPCs? How to develop and optimize the illusion of meaningful character development between the player and NPCs? It's very hard for a game developer to create unlimited dialogue options for just one NPC for the player to interact with, and develop some type of meaningful relationship with. Instead most developers create the illusion of choice in order to minimize the amount of dialogue an NPC has, yet maximize the player's illusion of meaningful development with that NPC. I am pondering the idea of creating a Skyrim Mod that implements a clever way of reusing pre spoken dialogue of all NPCs and to create the opportunity for the player to interact with the NPCs and create an illusion that the player makes meaningful dialogue choices to develop some type of relationship with NPCs later imposing consequences on the either player, the NPC, or both later in the game. I am not asking of a way to create new dialogue, but rather how to cleverly reuse dialogue to achieve the same effect for different and new events. This is not just specific to Skyrim. The same ideas can still be useful for games under current development. The illusion of choice is a very difficult concept to think about. A web series titled Extra Credits provides an excellent definition for this. For convenience I have copied very important terminology from Extra Credit that will help fortify answers to this game development question. What is agency? to have some control of an outcome What is choice? any moment during play that the player could perform 2 or more distinct actions but has to pick some number of actions less than the total number available to execute What is consequence? making you realize the impact of something you did What is the difference between choice and consequence? choice makes you think about what actions you will take, yet consequence makes you think about actions you have already taken What is meaningful choice? when the decision making process isn't arbitrary, when the player understands the choice their making and has some system to weigh their options, this does not by any means mean they have to fully understand what the consequences of each option will be only that they believe they have what the need to weigh the choices presented to them meaningful choice is not a logical calculation with a definitive answer What is illusion of choice? any moment in a game where you as a player feel as though you're making a choice when in reality theres either no alternative option actually being presented or the consequences of that choice are negligible players hate it when they notice the illusion of choice |
4 | Engaging ways to include party members in a fast paced action RPG Imagine a dynamic action RPG, where you constantly need to use your reflex to avoid bullets and fight against hordes of enemies. What would be a best way to incorporate other team members? I can think of several ways but all have disadvantages Giving them orders manually is out of questions when there's so much going around that you need all your attention just to make sure your main is not hit by any incoming attack Using a dynamic pause like in classic cRPG such as Baldur's Gate makes the game slower and interrupts action that ideally should be quick, dynamic and engaging Making them autonomous is difficult to balance. If they're too weak or ineffective, then the player will constantly gets annoyed at them, that they can't get anything right and die constantly. If they are too efficient then they can ruin the game because player could just sit back and watch them defeat all the enemies. If they just pretend to engage the enemy to left the action to the player this can happen Most action RPGs seem aware of these difficulties and prefer to have a single character for the player to run and control. This simplify things greatly but I don't want to lose the party, for plot related purposes, banters, interactions etc. What would be a good way to have the best of both words? How can I best include side characters in a fast and dynamic gameplay? |
4 | How to move around in a map and remember position? I am working on sound labyrinth game. My game is about a person getting trapped in the basement and the only way to navigate and get out is through sound. I have created a map over the basement and for each square there has to be a sound. The player starts in b5 with an intro sound and then has to move forward using the arrow keys. I've created this bit of code that plays a sound when forward arrow (keycode 38) is pressed var thriller new Audio("thriller.mp3") document.addEventListener('keydown', function (background) if (background.keyCode 38) thriller.play() , false) My question is How does the code know in which square the player is situated? Is there some smart way in which I can systematize the squares and the sounds they represent? |
4 | Choosing Language on Mobile Game Currently I'm trying to localize a mobile game into popular language. Apart from technical stuff (like how to store string and including supporting fonts), I'm a bit confused about designing two things choosing first language when they play game for the first time and changing between them Currently, I already have several options about choosing first language Language is chosen programatically based on user's default language font Ask user on first time run to choose which language thay want Just set default language to english About changing language, is it necessary to give user the option to change language? (assuming that my localization team is really good without any flaw when localizing this mobile game) |
4 | Techniques for building out a game idea and mechanics I've been finding that many of my projects fall into the abyss of my "game mechanic tests". That is, they aren't really "games", but rather sandboxes where I try out various things and find some mechanics that would be fun. Now, I'd like to actually create a game out of some these ideas. Since so many of my "games" end up turning into additional sandboxes when I get distracted by a new idea("whoa, that's cool", and suddenly the whole game completely changes.. twenty times.. sometimes back and forth between several competing ideas), I'd like to actually plan out the mechanics, how they will fit together, and altogether how the game will work as a whole, even though I know I still need to be semi flexible for when things play test differently than expected. This is compared to my usual strategy of, "Let's just get started and then I will build a game out of whatever I create" mindset. What techniques are used for planning out a game idea (even if just roughly), before actually just jumping in? Is there specific software which helps? How do I go about managing the planning phase in general and keeping things up to date if things start to change? See this great answer on a separate question for the type of actual design I would like to work on for my game, opposed to the programming focus I generally approach things with. |
4 | What are the advantages of putting cheat codes into a game? Some games have cheat codes in them, but I'm not sure I want to add some to mine because I fear they'll ruin the game by making it too easy to beat. What would be the advantages of putting cheat codes into my game? |
4 | Ethical F2P monetisation methods I am just starting out in indie game development and one thing that seems clear to me is that in the mobile space at least, unless you are already a famous developer, have a well known brand franchise or are just plain lucky, then you need to price your game at zero to stand any chance of being installed on devices. So to make money you must use Free to play (F2P) monetisation methods. In my own experience with myself and my kids plus reading around on the Web a lot of these methods are not appreciated by the players... My questions is Which F2P methods do players find ethical and acceptable? I am looking for specific game mechanics and an answer which references or is based on data research (if there is any) and not personal opinions or anecdotal references to successful, money making F2P games like Candy Crush Saga or Clash of Clans etc. |
4 | iOS gaming with copyrighted characters? Can I use animate characters in an iOS game if I do a citation in the credits. Ex Steven univers in a fighting game and I list Rebecca Sugar in the Credits or by the character bio. |
4 | Practical balance of "chance" video game mechanics I've been a small games developer and designer for years, and I've recently begun working on more serious design documents for bigger projects. A common theme I'm running in to is imbalance when it comes to "chance" RPG mechanics. Critical Strike Chance. Chance to Hit Dodge Miss Parry Block so on. The biggest problem in modern RPG games is factoring in Haste (Attack Speed), since it compounds so aggresivly with the other base mechanics. Obviously, the more times a player attacks, indirectly increases their "rate" of critical strikes, or hits. This creates an immense imbalance, and most of the solutions come in the form of capping haste or utilizing diminishing returns or to killing the big stat increases. As a designer and player, I don't feel this is a healthy way to deal with the issue. It's not a "fun" solution. Recently, gamers seen Blizzard's answer to this Haste issue in Diablo3, by halfing the stat increases on most all items. Here is a practical example 50 chance to critically strike, with 1 attack per second on average 0.5 critical strike per second. 50 chance to critically strike, with 2 attacks per second on average 1 critical strike per second. The second situation is by far favorable, rather than increasing your Critical Strike Chance alone, since not only will you see more larger numbers (or hits in terms of a miss chance mechanic) per unit of DPS, you'll also be hitting more and games with Proc Chance mechanics also benefits. More Complex games balance such things with Internal Cooldowns and Weighing the stats against each other, but often times Haste still comes out on top as being the supremely powerful stat. Is it practical to instead use a Rate to decide weather or not something happens vs stat weights, capping and cooldowns? My simplified example is Critical Strike RATE Crit Chance Attacks Per Second The result is basically a simple stat weight system. Mechanics such a proc chances still benefit from Haste, however it may be easier to change the damage output of attacks and abilities to reflect the balance. This keeps enjoyable haste mechanics in the game, which are fun to play. It also creates more depth for slower attack builds, rather than just an ability or proc benefiting from slow weapons. Is this a near sighted solution? Are there working examples of games currently on the market that don't cap or punish "haste" character builds? |
4 | Procedurally splitting and merging paths I'm making a text based adventure which sends the player along different paths depending on their choices. Each scene is like a node in a directed graph. Each node has a time step which is equal to the number of nodes prior 1. There is a maximum of Tn nodes per time step, say 5, and so you can visualise this in this way I want to generate paths like these. Where a node points to more than one other, that could be called a fork and where two point to one, that could be called a merge. At any particular timestep there will tend to be Tn 2 paths, only rarely going down to one or up to Tn. Does anyone have ideas or know of any similar work? (One small issue paths never cross that is, those on the left stay on the left until merging to the right. And there's no wrapping from far left to far right. Because of this, it seems like nodes on the far left or far right of a timestep will have a smaller probability of merging. Is this avoidable?) |
4 | Ideas for attack damage algorithm (language irrelevant) I am working on a game and I need ideas for the damage that will be done to the enemy when your player attacks. The total amount of health that the enemy has is called enemyHealth, and has a value of 1000. You start off with a weapon that does 40 points of damage (may be changed.) The player has an attack stat that you can increase, called playerAttack. This value starts off at 1, and has a possible max value of 100 after you level it up many times and make it farther into the game. The amount of damage that the weapon does is cut and dry, and subtracts 40 points from the total 1000 points of health every time the enemy is hit. But what the playerAttack does is add to that value with a percentage. Here is the algorithm I have now. (I've taken out all of the gui, classes, etc. and given the variables very forward names) double totalDamage weaponDamage (weaponDamage (playerAttack .05)) enemyHealth (int)totalDamage This seemed to work great for the most part. So I statrted testing some values... enemyHealth ALWAYS starts at 1000 weaponDamage 50 playerAttack 30 If I set these values, the amount of damage done on the enemy is 125. Seemed like a good number, so I wanted to see what would happen if the players attack was maxed out, but with the weakest starting weapon. weaponDamage 50 playerAttack 100 the totalDamage ends up being 300, which would kill an enemy in just a few hits. Even with your attack that high, I wouldn't want the weakest weapon to be able to kill the enemy that fast. I thought about adding defense, but I feel the game will lose consistency and become unbalanced in the long run. Possibly a well designed algorithm for a weapon decrease modifier would work for lower level weapons or something like that. Just need a break from trying to figure out the best way to go about this, and maybe someone that has experience with games and keeping the leveling consistent could give me some ideas pointers. |
4 | How to make a simple escape the room game? I want to make a very simple "escape the room" game. I was hoping for something that looks something like this. You would see images of some room and you click around to move or to add things to inventory. Then, you can select something in your inventory to use that item with something on the screen. During the whole game there would be a text box describing what is happening (probably in really broken English instead of Japanese). I am looking for something that can be quite simple. I would prefer to have the ability to play sound (probably mp3's) when something happens. It can be web based or a downloaded executable or .jar file. It doesn't have to be perfect, just a proof of concept really. What is the best approach to get this game working with minimal effort? Are there some libraries that can help? I have plenty of Java experience and some C , PHP, and others. I'd rather avoid Windows based technology as I primarily run Linux. I am willing to learn other languages if they have a huge advantage. Ideally, if someone could point me to an example program that I can modify. I'm not expecting to sell or distribute this game. |
4 | Welcoming new players to an MMO game with veteran players who have amassed lots of wealth One of the main problems in the game Knight Online has been that the servers that have been open for a long time have users with a lot of items. If I want to join as a new player, it is not logical for me to play the game in those servers because there is no way that I can catch up with the players there (unless I buy a lot of item with real money). Because, in order to obtain "good" items, you have to be in the regions of the game where you will fight with other users, so as a newbie, there is no chance that you can compete with those users. For example, there is a trend in KO a new server opens, after two years people get quite strong and almost no new user joins the server, and then those strong users just gain more and more items and sell them. Then the server dies practically, with no new blood joining it and old users eventually leaving. What is a strategy I can use in my MMO to regulate the wealth distribution, or keep it accessible to new players, even when other players have been accumulating wealth for a long time? |
4 | What can be a game play element in a game with Shakespeare's plays as the main theme? I was thinking of learning about making games, so I thought of an idea about making a game on a play, since the content is already there. I actually found well parsed XMLs of Shakespeare's plays. I thought of a few rather simple game play elements, but none seem fun. I thought of a 'word shooter' but it wouldn't be much fun since there are so many speech lines. Then I thought of a game where you have to match which of the characters currently on the screen said a particular dialog. I know that this game probably will not be much fun, but I could try to make it fun. What I may be able to do right now is make an application which 'enacts' the whole play. You can skip right to any act or a scene in an act etc. It will be a 2d game and i will use pygame. |
4 | How can I make text based combat more engaging? I'm making a text based adventure in Java, and currently I have a fairly limited combat system where you can do one of 3 things attack with your sword attack with magic(if its unlocked) drink a health potion This system works but is fairly boring and uninspired. I want to make the combat enjoyable yet given the limitations of a text based game, but I don't know how to accomplish this. If anyone knows how to make this system more engaging fun, it would be greatly appreciated. |
4 | How to resolve combat of stacks of units to mitigate numerical advantage I just started designing an strategy game where player's armies consist of stacks of units. For my design I was aiming to reproduce the following behaviour for a full combat of multiple turns (for simplicity assume both stacks are the same unit) 1 vs full stack the single unit is killed, the full stack hardly notices. half stack vs full stack the half stack is killed, the full stack sustain noticeable damage. almost full stack vs full stack full stack wins but gets almost wiped out. If randomness is involved, any of both may win, although the bigger one has statistical advantage. My first approach was to add up the stats and treat each stack as a single unit, resolve the combat and then calculate how many units are killed. That didn't produced the expected results, as even the slight numerical advantage in one side produced it to win by a huge margin. The reason is that after each turn, the bigger stack would kill more enemies than the smaller, widening the power difference for the next turn. This different increases exponentially until the smaller stack is quickly obliterated. As a second approach I treated each unit in a stack individually for the combat (something that I wanted to avoid), which produces much better results. However now I have many choices about how to resolve the combat. Should it be a series of 1 vs 1 or should I allow units to gang up on others? Should I pair each evenly or randomly? Should I leave extra units unpaired as "reserve", or all units should fight at least once? |
4 | What benefits does a game design degree have for a hobby game programmer? I am interested in studying game design, not because I want a job in the games industry, but because I am interested in the subject itself. I read the following questions, but they mostly deal with the effects on your career in game industry. Should I consider a graduate degree in game development? Game Development Degree vs Computer Science Degree First I thought a game development degree could be beneficial. But from the websites of colleges that offer such degrees, I feel like its more about basic programming with examples from games. This college offers game design degrees, for example. My question is, can I benefit from such a degree when I already have a degree in Computer Science, I already know programming, I'm already developing a game and finally, I have this site to help me when I get stuck? |
4 | Creating Level iPhone I am thinking about a new game idea for the iPhone and presumably all the levels would have to be made programatically. So Im wondering what the best method to approach it? Say I have a game with a standard typical 2d, top down maze. Thise maze is simply made up of walls, multiple rectangles on screen, making paths. Do I have to manually work out the position of every rectangle and put it in with an x and y position or is there a better way? I see this taking, forever, there must be certain ways developers approach these situations to get by them efficiently and quickly surely? Thanks. |
4 | Why has it become commonplace for NPCs to have one weapon per class instead of variants? For instance, in Half Life 2 you have Civil Protection, Combine Soldier and Combine Elite. Each class has a weapon. Is there a shift away from this at all, where the NPCs are matched with the player in the sense that the weapon they choose to use is based upon their advantage, while still maintaining some sense of competitiveness? Is there a reason this became the norm? Does it have to do with all the variables and complications that can arise from doing that? |
4 | Turning a board game idea into a browser based, slow paced gameplay Suppose I want to create a strategy game with global mutable state shared between all players (think game board). But unlike a board game, I don't want it to be real time action and or turn based. Instead, players should be able to log in at any time of the day and spend a fixed number of action points per day as they wish. As opposed to a few hours, game sessions would run over a few weeks. This is meant to reward good strategy rather than time spent playing (as an alternative, hardcore players could always play multiple games in parallel instead) as well as all kind of issues related to live playing like disconnections and synchronization. The game should remain addictive still have a low time investment footprint for casual players. So far so good, but this still leaves open the question of when to solve actions and when they should be visible. I want to avoid "ninja play" like doing all your moves just a few minutes before daily point reset to take other players by surprise, or people spamming F5 to place a well timed action which would defeat the whole point of a non real time game. I thought of a couple of approaches to that Resolve all events in a single scheduled process running once a day. This basically means a "blind" gameplay where players can take actions but don't see their results immediately. The thing is, I played a similar browser game a few years ago and didn't like the fact that you feel disconnected and powerless until there's that deus ex machina telling you what really happened during all that time. You see the world evolve in large increments of one day, which often doesn't seem like seeing it evolve at all. For actions that have an big impact on the game or on other players (attacks, big achievements), make them visible to everyone immediately but delay their effect by something like 24 hours. Opposing players could be notified when such an event happens, so that they can react to it. Do you have any other ideas how I could go about solving this ? Are there any known approaches in similar existing games ? |
4 | How to make a simple score system for my game? I'm making a simple game and I can't seem to impliment a simple score system. As the object moves 10 units forward the score should increase by 10. My issue is that when I turn the object around and move backwards the score decreases. |
4 | How do I fairly distribute new powerful cards to players in a collectible card game? I'm writing a game in which users start with a few cards. They use those cards to play against other players. The winner can steal a card from the other player. The aim is to get more different rare higher powered cards. If everyone starts with 10 low powered cards, how would anyone ever get higher powered cards? They'd just be playing against people who have the same type of cards as them. How do you fairly distribute these more powerful cards among players? |
4 | Need a reference to an unusual? RTS setting Imagine an RTS game where so called basic units play the main role throughout a whole game session. In my game basic units are actually programmable by a player (like in Colobot Ceebot), that's why it is so important to keep them significant from the first to the last second of each session. Problem I found out that end game of a typical session is quite boring, no impression of... say, development of a game since middle game. Don't know how to describe this feeling correctly. I'm looking for reference to other games where such problem of end game was resolved. Thanks in advance. UPDATE Some more background The game is about splitting tasks which are best solved by chip and by brain. Player does not have to micromanage, he or she writes algorithms (in advance) instead. Players are to make strategic decisions and give high level orders. I.e. if you have better combat algorithms for a group of bots you're better at micromanagement. The same goes for engineering units in home front. The typical border between middle game and end game is when all "free" resource sources are conquered by one of players, resources are being drilled, roads a constructed and factories produce bots at full speed (everything is automated by players in a way they want). Frontier line is more or less clear and stable. From this point there is no choice of rush produce defend, you are to collect forces, invent tricky maneuvers and attack. At this moment there is only one work for players brains tricky tactics. It is something human brain excels at (in comparison to algorithms). Balance is so that frontal attacks are very costly (good defense can destroy a great amount of units if an attack is frontal). Therefore attacking from multiple directions, "red herring" fast relocation along the front line become very important (exactly like at wars in the middle of XXth century, e.g. WWII). Again, this is where the human brain is much better than any program, so it makes no sense for players to write algorithms for such tasks. My concerns is that in end game it becomes just like a hexagon game with a very limited amount of units since all underlying tasks are "encapsulated" by algorithms. Supreme Commander resolves such problem by introducing experimentals, Populous does it with spells (I remind, Populous The Beginning has only five basic units). Again, thanks in avance ) |
4 | Pairing algorithm for the Elo rating system Imagine a 1 on 1 (not teams) competition between AI bots, like the Google AI Challenge. The various bots are assigned an ELO rating based on the outcome of the various versus matches. The reason I specify AI bots as they can compete 24 7 without regard for player fatigue, geolocation, etc. Given limited server resources only so many bouts can be run per day. I'm looking for a heuristic (or an optimal algorithm) to choose which two bots should compete next. All the past competitions have been tracked. By this I mean that the algorithm has more to work with than just the ELO ratings. The use cases I'm partitularly interested in The competition has been pairing randomly for while and now I want to make intelligent pairing decision. The Elo rating have stabilized and a bot is updated. The Elo ratings have stabilized and new bot is introduced to the competition. Update I need to clarify. I'm not looking for an algorithm that will provide fair matches. I'm looking for an algorithm that will find matches most likely to update the Elo ratings of the bots to their "true" ratings with the least number of matches. |
4 | What colors to choose for colorblind people? I'm creating a game. Color coding is its main gameplay feature. What colors should I choose so the game will be colorblind friendly? (I need 4 colors) |
4 | Articles about a plot in an open world There are plenty of articles about open world game design and writing plots. But have you guys come across articles or blog entries about designing an engaging plot in an open world game? What i mean by this? In TES Morrowind you're introduced to mechanics and are given the "main quest" within the first 5 minutes and then you're free to go, learn, kill, do whatever you want. I've spent hundreds of hours playing the game, but i have never got to doing the "main quest" and i'm sure alot of people are in the same situation, be it Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim. Maybe it's the power of TES games and a true testiment to how great RPGs they are, however for me, thinking as a designer, it seems like a massive design failure. Maybe it's the fact that there's no actual threat that needs to be dealt with, maybe it's that, amongs all the well designed and interesting quest within the game, the "main quest" just doesn't seem so interesting. I've got a game idea in the back of my head, i want to create an action platformer, but the "level selection" would be open world style "dunegons" like you find in MMOs. This is a vague and undeveloped idea, so don't focus on it, i didn't give this design much thought, however an issue arose, i can't figure out, in general, how to make the player care about the open world aspect (f.e. dealing with roaming, pillaging parties, doing a gauntlet run to get some special armor, clearing a water source from enemies, etc.) while "forcing him" to finish the game, carrot on a stick kind of way. There are "crazy" people who will go search everywhere between cutscenes in FF games, but i'm aiming at the general audience. I want to create a subtle system for guiding people throughout the game to a goal, while giving them an option of gaining power any way they want. This may aswell be impossible, but it doesn't hurt to ask. I'm looking for articles or musings on this matter. Not solutions (since there's no design document, no direct solutions matter at this point), just thoughts from other people, probably with other games as a reference. |
4 | What is the difference between framerate independent vs framerate dependent? What is the difference between framerate independent vs framerate dependent? Can you please give an example. |
4 | How can I make sure all army compositions are counterable in an RTS game? Most RTS games I played have some kind of rock paper scissors system that ensure that there is no single best unit you can mass and win with all the time. However this breaks down when players start to combine different kinds of units. Just make one unit type then make the counter of its counters to protect it. Eventually players will find the best pairing that mutually protect each other, then everyone will copy that and all other combinations become inferior to that and won't see play. We can see this in Empire Earth 1 for example, where up to middle ages all you need to do is just mass chariot cavalry archers and swordsmen. Although spearmen and knights wreck the swords, they are destroyed by arrows. And archers are destroyed by swords, but your swords are blocked by enemy swords so you'll have hard time reach enemy archers... So all you can do is just try to make more swords and archers than the enemy. You can also use area of effect siege weapons against archers, but they are expensive and totally wrecked by swords. So all players use just swords and archers against everything including buildings. This what I would like to avoid and I would like to make sure other units also see play. So the question is How can I make sure that not just individual unit types but but all possible combinations of them have a counter combination that costs less resources than the opponent's army? Is there a mathematical framework for that? |
4 | Time limit on puzzle games yea or nay? Of course, it goes without saying that this can only work when the puzzle is randomly generated (say, something like minesweeper bejeweled) and not hand designed levels (such as trainyard, theseus amp the minotaur etc). I am currently thinking that this can instill a sense of urgency to the player and make them feel more challenged. Along with increasing the actual puzzle difficulty, a time restriction could be another way to increase difficulty, and the combination of both can be used as a way to give a sense of progress. Also possibly, incremental time increases when solving parts of the puzzle (like time extensions in racing games) could be used for these games. What I'm wondering about is, what's the accepted thought about using time limits? Would they work as I'm currently thinking or am I missing anything? |
4 | How to prune an AI game tree for a game like Magic? I've got a game tree structure for my AI that I need to trim in order to gain some depth. It is a single player game of perfect information. A good analogy would be a single player game of Magic the gathering with an oponnenet that plays no card but automaticaly deals you some damage per turn. Since I don't have an opponent I don't need either minimax (I can do a pure MAX) or a b pruning. I got an evaluation function I can use on nodes if necessary. I'm trying to plan ahead and find good combo's of cards to play. I dont want to hard code these combos. I'm finding hard to prune any branch at all since even a branch with bad scoring node can potentially lead to a good combo that will completely change the game (you know, like play 5 shitty cards and be almost dead but the 6th card will grant you a win). Any idea on how to approach pruning in a game tree like that? |
4 | Should cooldown be time or tick based? In the past I've done cooldowns as a specific time in ms, but I was thinking isn't having tick based cooldowns better. This would be more accurate and efficent(not sure). The bad side I can think about is that if the tick rate is increased, it would affect the game logic. While having a base update rate and a multiplier(that can be applied to everything that is tied to tick rate) would probably fix this, I am not sure if this is a good approach. |
4 | What makes a computer opponent feel alive? Are there any recommended blogs or whitepapers that talk about making the AI in an RPG game feel more real? (Specifically in turn based combat.) I know something must be out there, but I am only finding papers that talk about algorithms behind the AI. I am looking more along the lines of "this is what makes a computer opponent feel alive". Taking risks, going easy, retreating, etc.... So many awesome answers, and I wish I could accept several of them. Thanks everyone! |
4 | creation of a meta game OK, I feel like this should be on meta, because it is a very meta question, but I thought it would be interesting to discuss here. it is relevant and it might provide a little break from coding. Using these sites you can essentially get a very good answer to any problem. In fact I think it would be safe to say you can pretty much get people to discuss the best algorithm for any given problem. I was wondering if it would be interesting to create a whole game this way. you would ask the first question for instance What type of game would be the best game to make if the project was going to be worked on by an unknown amount of designers and developers? The answer would be subjective, but people could discuss and after a time the answer with the most votes could be chosen and the question locked out. This would be the hardest question I suppose, because after that you would get more and more technical and the questions would become more and more like the questions you ask on these forums. What would be the best class structure for this segments of a game? What would be the best way of testing for collisions etc.. Do you think it would be possible to create a whole game this way? Sorry if this seems bizarre or annoying, but I think it might be worth a try! Think of this as the zeroth question. What do you think? |
4 | Game Level Design Career translations in other fields Although I would love to get a job in the gaming industry I can't help but feel I should have a backup plan. What I wanted to ask is game level design a marketable skill that translates to other industries? For example if your a programming in game development, you can be a software engineer in business, health care, finance, scientific etc, industries If your an artist in game development, you can be an graphic artist, web designer, animator, advertisement, etc. Do game level designers have other industries they can get into other than gaming? If you think so, what are some industries that level design (or game design) would be marketable for? |
4 | Designing interface for interacting with game objects I'm making a roguelike ( like) game, somewhat like Project Zomboid or Don't Starve. In my game, there are many different object in the world that the player can interact with there are also many items, some of which may be required for a particular interaction. Physically, all I have to trigger the interaction is the mouse click when player clicks on an object, something happens (adding right click is an option too, but staying with just one button is preferable). There are several problems here For a given object, there might be several interactions possible. I might want do drive the car, or access its truk, or refuel it etc. Some interactions may require an item I need an axe to chop down trees or a fuel source to refuel a car. Some interactions may be non obvious, so I need to have some sort of discovery mechanism. Some way to say to the player "You could chop down this tree if you had an axe". Some interactions should be very quick. Whacking an enemy with a bat should NOT require clicking and then choosing an action from menu just clicking should work. Added The list of objects, items and interactions is pretty open ended. I'm still developing the game, and in the future players might make mods. This means that the interface must be generic enough to adapt to new interactions automatically. Given these constraints, I'm really struggling to devise a good interface for interactions. I can't show a menu of all possible actions on click, because that would break (4). I can't just leave one single on click action, because that would break (3) and probably (1). How can I present all options to the player in a usable and preferably obvious way? |
4 | Application of Game trees in AI My specific area of interest is designing the AI of real time multiplayer games, for example, RTS games. Moves by players happen simultaneously, so I was wondering whether or not it would be modeled with a sequential (extensive form) game tree or something else. I don't know if this is even the correct approach at all, and if some other algorithms are more applicable. How much of Artificial Intelligence design is based off of game trees or extensive form games, and are there any suggested textbooks which thoroughly cover the subject game tree application to AI or AI of RTS games? |
4 | Balancing players between air land fields in a PvP match Background In my game there are two teams per PvP match, and those two teams are further divided into air land fields. Each team has 12 players on the ground and 6 patrolling the sky. The goal of the game is for the air land units to work together to win the match. Players are matchmade into games randomly, without taking into account skill field preference etc (the short explanation is that we don't have control over this). The problem If I allow complete freedom in choosing fields, I might end up with no players in the sky or vice versa on one or both teams. If I don't give players a choice, they won't be happy when they aren't assigned to the field of their preference. Overall I imagine the fields would balance out on their own if they're equally enjoyable, but there's little room for error there if either field gets a bad first impression, it'll be difficult to recover from. I want to ensure there are some constraints in place to prevent death by conjecture. I thought of adding 1 or 2 landing pads at either team's base, and that way players who wanted to play the land field could land, and players who wanted to play the air field could take a parked aircraft on the landing pad. This could breed tension between players where more than 2 players are competing for landing pads though. What are some approaches I can take to resolve this, which avoid forcing player behavior as much as possible, but still ensure gameplay is predictable and reliable? Specifically I'm looking for what key issues an answer takes into account and how it resolves them. If you're drawing experience from something that's already been put into practice and already has tangible results, those results would be a wonderful addition to your answer. |
4 | Progression in a Sandbox Game (to xp or not to xp) I'd like to know the strengths and weaknesses of different progression methods through a game (or a part of a game), where they're suited best, and where they should never appear. I have several subsystems a player can progress through in a project I'm working on and I'd like to be able to work out if any of them would benefit from tallying xp. Not sure why this is on hold, I'm asking about the concrete merits of things not simply asking everyone for their favourite?? At the moment the player's character becomes more powerful by equipping better and better gear as they progress through randgen levels however they like, but are given clear indication that going in a particular direction will increase difficulty and the quality of items. I'm not sure in what circumstances I would add in xp for fighting monsters, or which I'd have the monsters drop good gear, or parts to make good gear out of. On top of that I have a magic system and a crafting system that I'm considering progressing though with xp but I wouldn't want to implement it if the side effects don't suit the rest of the game. As far as I know games usually progress in the following ways, often in combination Level by Level Like in old school Mario, you go through a sequence of levels which become more difficult and require you to master the basic techniques of game play. Power by Power You gain new abilities which makes it possible to access more and more difficult content. Metroid comes to mind for this. Xp Growth Your stats increase every level so you can fight the harder mobs in further content. You may or may not be able to choose where your stats go. Xp Talent Tree You get points to put into learning new skills, often from increasingly better pools of skills. Item by Item Equipment determines what content can be accessed next, either because the item unlocks something (including methods of transportation), or it increases player abilities such that they can survive certain areas. The distinct thing about items is that they can be removed from a player at pretty much any time. A grappling hook that can't be removed is a Power, not an Item. Quest by Quest Like Level by Level, only what triggers the newer content isn't getting to the end of a stage, it's the completing the requirements of a quest (explicitly stated or not). Zelda would be an example of a game that does both LbyL and QbyQ. Each dungeon is a level and between levels you have to do a bunch of little quests to unlock the next level. Score You just rack up points like in pinball, it doesn't really have an effect on the game. If you have a clear idea of the underlying purpose of these or others, I'd like to hear it! At the moment I only know that these systems exist, but only vaguely what they're for. As an aside, I'm also interested in your thoughts on how to display progression to a player. When is it best to give them numbers, if ever? Are visual demonstrable displays preferred for certain things? What is the function of doing it one way or another? |
4 | How do you prevent inflation in a virtual economy? With your typical MMORPG, players can usually farm the world for raw materials essentially forever. Monsters mineral veins etc are usually on some sort of respawn timer, so other than time there really isn't a good way to limit the amount of new currency entering the system. That really only leaves money sinks to try to take money out of the system. What are some strategies to prevent inflation of the in game currency? |
4 | Future of Julia in game development industry I read in many posts that Julia is faster than many languages especially C , What's the future of Julia in game development industry ? Will it replace all legacy C ? |
4 | Discussion about Serious Games Their lacks and forces I would like to start a little discussion about serious video games. Do you think serious games DO have their place in today's world ? What kind of serious games do you think the most interesting in term of education work tools ? I've recently read an article about the educational power of such games in early ages. Do you think serious video games could become a ubiquitous learning tool in primary school ? Any experience, title share or ideas are heightly appreciated, I want to get a feel of this question from experienced game developper that are interested of writing an answer ! |
4 | Where to hire a scenario writer for a small interactive story game? I need a scenario for a small dialog based game interactive story. The game would be used as an example to be shipped with a middleware tool we're developing. I would like to buy an existing story (it should be dynamic of course with branching dialogs etc.), or hire someone to write a new one. Please advise, where to go to find such person service? We're based in Russia, so getting a talented enough native English writer locally is a bit of a problem. Update To be extra clear We must get all necessary rights to reuse the story and make a derived work (i.e. the game we're talking about) from it. This is a commercial product. Borrowing someone else's work at random and using it just not going to work. WARNING Please do not post "I can do it" answers here. This is not a job board! You will get downvoted and your answer will be deleted. If you really want to contact me, look into my profile. |
4 | Removing ads but maintaining opt in video ads I have a game for iOS that will show advertisements. One form of advertisement offered is a rewarded video (a video that the user can watch by choice). This is actually an important aspect of the game because watching these videos allows the user to continue playing after running out of a certain resource (balls, in this case). Now, the user can remove the advertisements via In App Purchase. Question Is there anything wrong with keeping the rewarded videos as an option for the user, even though they paid to remove ads? If I disallow the rewarded videos, the user will lose a really useful feature of the game, but I'm worried about initializing the advertisement SDK and therefore tracking users who probably think they've disabled any tracking for advertisements. Thank you for your thoughts! |
4 | What are the accessibility implications of requiring a button press or time out on a game over screen? For simple games, is there a de facto standard that game over screens time out after a few seconds before, or require some sort of input in order to, transition back to the main menu? Time out pros Accessibility. Mobility impaired users may have difficulty pushing the buttons so the game should advance for them. Time out cons Accessibility. Vision impaired users may have difficulty seeing any post game information displayed within the allotted time. Tweaking the time out so it's not too long as to be annoying if the user happens to game over a lot. Also quot Don't make QA mad quot Input pros Accessibility. Vision impaired users may take as long as needed to see any post game information displayed on screen. Makes time outs skippable. Input cons Accessibility. Motor impaired users may have difficulty pushing buttons. I remember reading a Microsoft article about certain best practice design decisions regarding accessibility a long time ago but can't recall the specifics. |
4 | How to evaluate a user against optimal performance? I have trouble coming up with a system of assigning a rating to player's performance. Well, technically there is is a trivial rating system, but I don't like it because it would mean assigning negative scores, which I think most players will be discouraged by. The problem is that I only know the ideal number of actions to get the desired result. The worst case is infinite number of actions, so there is no obvious scale. The trivial way I referred to above is to take score ( optimal moves players moves), with ideal score being zero. However, psychologically people like big numbers. No one wants to win by getting a mark of 0. I wonder if there is a system that someone else has come up with before to solve this problem? Essentially I wish to score the players based on How close they've come to the ideal solution. Different challenges will have different optimal number of actions, so the scoring system needs to take that into account, e.g. Challenge 1 max 10 points, Challenge 2 max 20 points. I don't mind giving the players negative scores if they've performed exceptionally badly, I just don't want all scores to be lt 0 |
4 | Drawing to create game drafts Man, I'm really bad at drawing... I feel myself really ashamed because I cannot draw even a little nice sword... ( The problem is, on game development (I will be on the programming part, relax!) I will need to explain some game ideas to game artists, like "I need that city like this" or "that character needs to have that look and feel". My idea is, I really need some BASIC skills on drawing some draft of what I'm thinking... I'm bad in pen paper drawing and photoshop corel drawing, but I'm convicted to learn photoshop or corel to draft something... Someone has passed that problem? What you recommend? |
4 | Complex, yet simple crafting system model I'm working on some arcade shooter slasher, and the main logline is "Kick'em with everything you want". There's not so many enemies in GDD, main focus is on tons of weapons and gadgets to cause mayhem. To get weapon, you need to craft it, and now crafting system looks simple, like 1) You got three slots for weapon parts (like A, B, C) 2) You collect misc weapon parts, and when you got atleast one for every slot, you can craft a weapon (for example, if you got A1, B1, B2, B3 and C1, you can craft such models A1B1C1, A1B2C1, A1B3C1) As for me, this crafting system is too simple, because weapon parts will just fall from the top of screen, often enough. That's why I'm thinking about adding some more crafting system levels, like resources (collect 10 scrap pieces to make part A1 or C3), etc. My question is How can i add some more complex, still simple, transparent levels in crafting system? upd. For example, in Minecraft or Terraria, first 5 10 crafting recipies quite transparent and simple IMHO. But then it turns into huge mess to understand, how to craft this or that (for example, fishing rod) upd. Okay, somehow i've figured out mechanics like this 1) Player gather resources (while playing game, automatic gathering from loot) 2) When there's enough resources to craft some weapon part, dedicated icon flashes, so player can craft weapon part in one click (automatic crafting) 3) Having several weapon parts, player can adjust different parts to create weapon (manual crafting) I think, this will be complex and simple enough, now over weighted by to many buttons and receipes, still, enough of freedom and manual creativity, trying to mix this and that. |
4 | What are good, simple action games action RPGs to emulate? There is standard advice for game development to start off emulating simple games you know and build up from there. Which makes me wonder. What are good examples of action games or action RPGs that are very simple to begin with to try and emulate? What is necessary and what is superfluous? Please link to the game's site (or Wikipedia page if it's defunct) if you can, and only one game per answer please. |
4 | How to make something happen every N seconds in game? I want to have something happen every N seconds, how would I do that? Maybe use a timer but how? |
4 | Where do you search look for game developers for an indie game startup? I just recently saw stackoverflow had a game dev sister site so here I am, wondering if you experienced fellows know where one can search look for game developers for an indie game startup? In other words I have a game idea which I've written down with as much detail as possible (so anyone else can understand how it works) and now I'm looking for a heavy php programmer with whom to pair up in order to go from idea to reality. I'm a front end interface designer and an intermediate programmer. I recognize my project requires heavy programming skills which I do not have as of today ) So, what websites, communities or places do you recommend I go look into? Where do good programmers interested in indie games go look for projects if they don't have their own? Thanks in advance G.Campos |
4 | Professional game design documents Possible Duplicate How should I structure a design document? I'm planning to apply for a game designer position at a big company. But the problem is, according to my CV, I'm not fit for being a game designer. (I'm a programmer). But, I don't like this and still would like to try my chances. Even though I'm a programmer, I have lots of ideas which I can put on paper in any detail depth imaginable. (It's not like "bro, I have this cool game idea in which you fly a spaceship and you see these scary monsters just like in ....", I can really make it professional). To be able to achieve this, I want to send a game design with my application, written in proper way, that will make it easy for them to accept me. Question is, what is the proper format for game design documents? Is there a template? What is the detail level? Where can I find a final game design document for a released professional game? |
4 | How to prevent players from getting lost during the onboarding phase of an RPG? I've created a new RPG and tested it with some players. They like it, but get lost at certain points. For example, I'm using hotkeys to open modals, T to talk, and other buttons that do various things. Moreover, some of the quests aren't entirely clear. To fix this, I'm trying to think of a good onboarding approach. I'm implementing three methods for onboarding 1) Cutscenes The cutscenes, especially the opening scene, will give the backstory and explain where they are 2) The NPC dialog Through conversations with NPCs, they will give hints as to what you should do. Right now, I include, somewhat awkwardly, things like "Hi there, I'm Bob. You can press T to talk". 3) Onscreen Tooltips These blink on screen until the player completes the current onboarding task. For example, the tooltip disappears when the player clicks their minimap I'm looking for a more cohesive strategy for onboarding users to the game, or good tutorials for this. Two things I'm weary of are I don't want to be overbearing with help, and am attempting a good Discovery Phase to let the player explore. I don't want the player to leave the game out of frustration with being lost I've seen a lot of techniques for various game genres, and even things like Google apps, where they have a glowing choice for the user to click on. I'm a sole developer, and some of these techniques seem quite complicated to implement. Thanks! |
4 | What would be a good sport game for a beginner intermediate game dev to make for practice? I'm interested in making a sport game for practice, but giving it some fun twists sort of like nintendo does, (super strikers charged, mario golf.) I'm planning on using unity, but since I am by no means an expert I'm trying to figure out a sport that will be reasonably easy to create. I'm aware that its not going to be easy, but, for instance I'm not going to make a game like madden, which would have a ton of difficult stuff like play calls which involve predetermined paths and intelligence on both sides, in general way to difficult. What would be a good sport to try a stylized version of? I'm aware that this is a subjective question, but it isn't a question where any answer is as good as another, so I think it's allowed according to the guideline, but correct me if I'm wrong I guess. |
4 | Where can I find sources on how many people play on silent etc. This is probably more a problem with me being unable to find statistics which i am absolutely certain must exist in some form How many people play with the sound off on when playing browser games or very casual mobile games. Because in my experience nobody, but that is too subjective. The question i want to answer for myself Is it worth adding sounds to my game. But I dont want to base that decision off of my personal experience (sound is always off), but rather some cold hard fact. They must exist somewhere, someone must have compiled that data, but I cant find it anywhere... |
4 | Is there a concept of "pasted on theme" in video games? I've prototyped an idea and so far it's quite fun to play. However, it's still abstract and uses placeholder art. I've been thinking about a theme story to add to the game, but I don't want to make it too obvious it was added almost as an afterthought. There's a concept of quot pasted on theme quot within the board game community which basically refers to a game which is easy to reskin without redesigning some of the mechanics. I was wondering how big of an issue this is with video games (indie games in particular of course) and anything else I could do about a story for my game. |
4 | Implementing traffic conditions in TORCS I am working on a project about "Effects of Traffic conditions and Track Complexity on Car Driving Behavior". Is it possible to implement traffic in TORCS, or should I use another car simulator? By the word "traffic" I mean there are cars running on both tracks in both directions and I can detect the distances, direction and speed of these cars. Depending on this information I can decide whether I should slow down, speed up and calculate the correct timing to overtake. |
4 | Is story more important or the gameplay more important? Read this Slate article. In particular, the following struck me When he looks at video games from a critical distance, Bissell is concerned mainly with their lack of narrative meaning. Games ask us to save the princess, save the country, save the world, save ourselves but no one plays games to achieve those ends. We play for the puzzle, for the physics, for the sense of being embedded in a fully realized world. Indeed, for me, the quot story quot usually seems like filler, even in games like Grand Theft Auto and RDR Red Dead Redemption , whose stories are smarter than the rest of the video game pack. RDR begins and ends every mission with cleverly scripted movielike quot cut scenes quot that provide some explanation for why your character is doing what he's doing but the game also lets you skip the scenes, which I usually elect to do. Thus I can't really explain why my character is doing what he's doing. The real answer is he's doing it because I am making him do it, and I am making him do it only because I am having fun. quot This is one of the most suspect things about the game form, quot Bissell writes. quot A game with an involving story and poor gameplay cannot be considered a successful game, whereas a game with superb gameplay and a laughable story can see its spine bend from the weight of many accolades and those who praise the latter game will not be wrong. quot What's the solution to this quandary? Should games invest more in story, in an attempt to bring us narratives that are on the level of those of the other popular arts? Or should games abandon story is the video game, as a form, simply incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative, and must game designers instead find other ways to invest their creations with lasting meaning? As if Bissell's uncertainty is echoing throughout the game industry, there has arisen a tendency to make many big budget blockbuster games heavily story driven. Even Starcraft II has a fairly story driven campaign. Is a game without a high quality narrative bereft of true value and meaning? Must games have any meaning at all in the literary sense in order to be considered worthwhile forms of entertainment? What about emergent narratives, where the player has a decisive role in determining the plot (ideally much more decisive than we've seen in any games so far released)? If games do not need a higher literary meaning, do they at least need to have some lasting emotional significance for the player? Those are just some thoughts that the article raised. The real question can be summed up like this what is the true value of a video game? Is a game to be valued on its dynamic interaction with the player, on its ability to present a narrative in a way other mediums cannot, or on its ability to provide simple pleasure? |
4 | How to "hide" an adventure game in an RPG I have a shakey idea for a game, and I need help fleshing out what mechanics could make this work. I want to make a game that, on the surface, is a fun little exploration dungeon crawler rpg lite sort of game. There's some story, a large map, and basic quests to go off to various dungeons and defeat all the monsters that are threatening the kingdom. The idea is that a player can play through, and defeat the game by just going and defeating the monsters everywhere, and that should be a rewarding enough way to play the game. However, I don't want that to be the only way to play the game. What if the monsters attacking the kingdom from a nearby "dungeon" are just misunderstood, or are being provoked? What if they could instead be made into allies? For each set of set of monsters threatening the kingdom, I want the player to either be able to just go and kill them all, or find some other solution, but for killing all the monsters to be the only obvious thing to do. The idea being that finding a different solution should feel very rewarding, or a suggestion that there are other solutions should come late in the game and provide motivation for the player to replay the game. My question is What sort of game mechanics could be used to provide an alternative way of progressing through the game while not making it obvious that the alternative exists? I think if a dialog tree open up with the first monster you met in each dungeon, it would telegraph the idea that there's an alternative solution. So how could there be a dungeon of monsters that you can wade into and immediately start fighting, while at the same time there being a non violent solution? |
4 | Cartesian Coordinates Layout The way cartesian coordinations are presented and used is kinda confusing. When working with 2D the vertical axis is Y, though when working with 3D the vertical axis is Z and Y becomes the "depth" axis. Basically I'm thinking the correct way, and best way would be to use the layout of axis. Though Blender (3D modelling program) and other program, a lot games, present the axis in the "weird order" (my opinion) Also if you read on Wikipedia about cartesian coordinates, your are presented with that layout of axis. Wikipedia Cartesian Coordinates Is there any specific or logical reason for this "flip" of axis? |
4 | Can I use a translate function to implement a viewport? I read this great question and its accompanying great answer about rendering a viewport in a top down 2D game As for actually drawing the objects the camera can "see", you now draw all objects relative to the camera's world coordinates. To compute an object's screen position relative to the camera, simply do int screenX, screenY screen position of the object being drawn screenX object.x camera.x screenY object.y camera.y After thinking about this, it would be really invasive to change every place I render to run this object.coord camera.coord equation first. I'm wondering if this could be accomplished in one non invasive step that translates the coordinate system first. I'm rendering on the html5 canvas and this translate function says Moves the origin point of the context to (x, y). I'm having trouble visualizing this though. Does this mean I simply plug ( camera.x, camera.y) into the function? Should I use a translate function to render a viewport or is there a good reason to apply the equation on every thing I render? |
4 | Approaches on 2D top down track racing visualisation I'm considering writing a very simple management style game with the theme being motorsport racing. I've got a good idea how to do the 'management side', but the issue I'm having is how to visually render cars and move on a track (something a bit like) The key points (keeping it simple) the user won't control the vehicle directly, they are the 'manager' (think football manager) they can decide on a strategy but cannot control the vehicle the car should stay on track (visually) they may 'crash' (along with other events) though the speed it goes around the track is determined by vehicle performance a car will be aware of other near by cars around the track for example, if they're about to be overtaken, they may actually do a slower lap as they are defending they may collide, along with other events My initial thoughts are there are two key design elements here, the track and the car. The track a track is composed of many segments each segment is stored in an array a segment (I'm not entirely sure here) but one thing it might contain is a 2D array (From this (https gamedev.stackexchange.com questions 149966 approaches on 2d top view racing game track design) answer gave an approach of using multi dimensional arrays) d d x x x d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d r r r d d d d d e e e d d d d d x x x d d d d d r r r d d d d d d r r r d d d d d d r r r e d d d d r r r e d d d d d d r e d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d d Above is a straight and a 90 degree corner x exit, e entry, r racetrack and d dirt. Maybe I could create a bunch of these and create a track. Or maybe a simpler version where I define just an entry and exit d e d d r d d e d d x d d r e d d d The simplified version where I define an entry e and exit x. I can add additional points r and then construct a curve straight line based on the x, e and r coordinates? My idea is that the vehicle will then move across each segment and I can calculate the time it takes to complete that segment. I can then add up all segments which will give me the lap time. With this approach, I can also check the previous current next segment to determine if there are other vehicles it needs to defend attack against. The car store all vehicles in an array each vehicle will always be in a segment speed it completes the segment is determined by its performance (and segment characteristics) vehicle can 'see' if there are other vehicles in previous current next segment and decide whether to overtake defend. I think I could make this work, but I'd be really interested to know if there are better simpler approach bearing in mind it's mostly a visualization and the speed and events are determined by my program. |
4 | How to break the feeling of busywork in a game I don't know if this topic has been explored before but in a handful of games I've played there comes a point where trying to explore everything, doing sidequests, or even trying to get gear starts feeling like busywork. That sort of feeling makes me less interested in the game, and I usually wind up either just stopping playing altogether or just breezing through the rest of the game just to get it finished and out of the way. This feeling seems to happen mostly with RPGs from my own personal experiences. How do you prevent activities the player can do (sidequests, exploration, item crafting, etc.) from feeling like artificial time padding or busywork? |
4 | Creating an illusion of stress and danger I'm currently experimenting with an adventure game setting where at some point the game is quite calm and the player has to solve puzzles and at some point there are enemies or environmental traps. I don't want to have any surprising danger events coming out of nowhere that would scare the player, so I would like to build up the players' tension before a section of the game starts which will contain multiple "player killing" obstacles (may they be enemies, or the ground falling apart..). My sound artist made some really good music and sound effects to slowly build up the tension, but game elements during this phase are missing. It's like the player is running from a puzzle zone to danger zone through a boring plain section. Beside sound, what are some generic ways to build up the players' tension? Can i aid with special Visuals, or do i have to improve the story or possibly invent some pre danger zone easy obstacles? |
4 | Other than the ESA are there other sources for demographic data? I'm pretty interested in seeing demographic data as I find them good targeting tools. But other than the ESA reports (free) and NPD numbers (paid) does anyone know any other sources for such data? |
4 | How can I handle the difficulty level between co op and single player? I'm working on an action adventure game, and I was considering adding a co op option. What I'm trying to decide is if when another player joins the game, if the game should get harder. On the one hand, I don't want the game to just get easier. On the other hand, I don't want to break continuity by making enemies suddenly stronger, eg I was able to take this down it two hits before, why does it take four all of the sudden. I do not want there to be an "AI co op" that comes with you in single player, I think that would make the game worse since it would detract from player agency. How can I handle this? How can I keep the game challenging when a second player joins in? |
4 | Is it possible to design a multiplayer game which can be played from different devices? I want to design a online multiplayer game for all gaming devices e.g. Desktop PC, Internet browser, Android phones, Android tablets, iPhone, iPad, XBOX 360 etc. Now my main requirement is that, I want all devices can be used to play the game in multiplayer mode together i.e. One player can be connected using PC another using Android phone and other may be with iPhone or iPad. My doubts are How to make all devices to connect to common game server? What will be the logic for graphics and texture because all devices screen will be of different aspect ratio? |
4 | Appropriate database schema for heroes' skills in a Tower Defense game? In a Tower Defense game, each hero (or character) has some skills. Each skill has some quot chance of appearance quot (CoA for short) when attacking enemies and if appeared it has some quot hit accuracy quot (i.e. hit on enemies) (HA for short) and has effects on the enemies (if hit by the skill) (EoH for short). Examples Skill 1 Frost 1, CoA 50 , HA 100 , EoH (1) slow enemy down for 4s and (2) yield 200 damage points. Skill 2 Frost 2, CoA 100 , HA 50 , EoH (1) make enemy frozen for 8s. I first tried to breakdown skills into quot atomic quot effects and come up with tables as below All looks good? But now we want to update Skill 1 a bit to make it more complicated Skill 1 Frost 1, CoA 50 , HA 100 , EoH (1) slow enemy down by 40 for 4s and (2) yield 200 damage points. (Please pay attention to the 40 here!) Or even coming up with more complicated skills Skill 3 Frost 3, CoA 20 , HA 100 , EoH (1) frozen enemy for the first 4s then slow enemy down by 50 for next 4s and (2) yield 200 more damage points. Skill 4 Frost 4, CoA 10 , attack enemy 3 times continuously, each time HA 50 , EoH (1) frozen enemy for the first 2s then slow enemy down by 50 for next 2s and (2) yield 400 more damage points. Each effect now has more parameters to be specified which makes my current schema not fit anymore. Please help deal with this! |
4 | Implementing cheat safe loot algorithm at clientside I am developing a "city building" type of browser based flash flex game. I was checking some of the implementation of existing one of the popular games in facebook using decompilers. I noticed they have implemented the loot algorithm the client side and sending the loot item to the server which I think is not cheat safe. Knowing the fact that there are cheaters every where and it is easy to manipulate the messages and send the best loot always, is there any way we can counter this type of cheats? I dont have a concrete solution designed for it yet but I am thinking to track the drops by maintaining the loot history. So instead of mere updating the resources inventory, I will implement a logic which will compare the loot with history to see if the player is receiving the rare drops excessively and flag the user or take a smart decision (which I don't have yet) Or Is it a good idea to implement the loot algorithm in the server side? Since this is "city building" kind of game, where it will not have extensive user actions like in typical RPG games which can trigger loot events. |
4 | What are the common character animation techniques used in tile based hack slash games? I wonder what kind of animation techniques are used for creature and character animation in modern hack amp slash type tile based games? Keyframing for different actions may be one option. Skeletal framing may be another. But how about the physics? Or do they use a totally hybrid system of inverse kinematics supported with a skeleton,physics and mixed with interpolated keyframing for more realistic animations? If so, how and for what reasons? I can think of many different solutions for the issues below but I wonder what's used and best suited for issues like Walking or moving on an uneven terrain Combat interaction, combat physics and collisions Attaching rigid items to character and their iteractions ih physics world Soft body dynamics like hair, vegetation, clothes and fabric in line with animations and iteractions. |
4 | Finding next experience level using the square root? I recently asked this question on how to calculate a level based on experience Algorithm for dynamically calculating a level based on experience points? I am using the following calculation to determine the players level decimal experience 1829 decimal rawLevel (decimal)(.06 Math.Sqrt(experience)) decimal level Math.Floor(rawLevel) For my test, 1829 experience points equates to 2.56600857364117M, which I floor to level 2. My question is, how can I figure out how many points it would take to get to the next level based off of the calculation above? I know the next level is 3, so I would need to figure out how many points equate to level 3 so that I can find the difference. What formula would I use, given the constant .06 above? Update Solution int experience 150777 decimal rawLevel (decimal)(.06 Math.Sqrt(experience)) decimal level Math.Floor(rawLevel) decimal nextPoints (decimal)Math.Pow((double)(level 1) 0.06, 2) |
4 | Usage of standardized syntaxes in gaming yea or nay? TL DR Using CSS as an element in defining rulesets in Civ style turn based strategy games Madness or just plain old insanity? Real question Designing ruleset parse rules is a pain. Every single game out there seems to define its own ruleset for how rulesets are to be parsed (insofar as the game features customizable rulesets, of course). Is it time for the game dev. community to embrace standardized synatxes for rulesets? Is CSS a viable option for customizable games? Example Consider a Civ like with customizable rulesets how nice would it not be to be able to design rulesets as follows artillery era(modern) range 2 sprite url( isophex artillery.png) artillery era(classical) range 1 sprite url( isophex cannon.png) |
4 | How to determine the amount of experience needed for leveling up Related questions under this topic might include How should I base how much experience points it takes to get to the next level? What factors are involved in this? How do I keep the player not entertained long enough till he levels up? How can I vary the way the player gets experience points? |
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