#gameplay loops

[villainousintent]

The concept of "end game" is a scam to get you to bang your head against a wall after exhausting the core progression of a game. It's always built around exhausting loops of gameplay that end up tiring the player anyways. Theoretically you can play some of this shit forever but nobody does/wants to. Now we build games where the core is a superfluous prologue that keeps you from the "end game" that's a mind numbing carousel.

"Congratulations! You've finished the main quest, now the real game begins: farming bosses until you puke or until the new patch drops!"

[sonic7ischaos]

Everyone talks about what Sonic Team can do to fix Sonic. Hire fan devs or bringing back the chao garden or "mix boost and Adventure" (this one drives me fucking nuts), but you wanna know what'll actually fix things? What'll make Sonic as great as we all know he can be? If they FOCUS. ON. THE PRIMARY. GAMEPLAY. LOOP! What can the player do in the span of 1-10 seconds? Whatever it is, iterate on it until it is as fun as possible, then, build the rest of the game around it.

AAAAAAAALLLLLLLL that other shit? Doesn't matter. Open world? Lots of characters? Ambitious story? Icing. MAKE THE FUCKING CAKE GOOD FIRST. If what you can do in those 1-10 seconds of gameplay isn't fun, tweak it until it is. If it's not fun in a flat, empty plane, it won't be fun when you have actual level design, tweak it until it is. Then, add a single bit of terrain, and do it again. Then add another, and do it again. Every new type of interaction, do this. I DO NOT CARE HOW GOOD YOUR ICING IS IF IT'S ON A CAKE THAT TASTES LIKE MUD.

All of the above? Exactly why I'm not a fan of the boost. If you put Generations Sonic in an empty plane, moving around would be totally boring. Your movement options limited to variations on left, right, up and down (yes even in the 3d sections). Drifting adds a little nuance to those movement options but not much. The boost is almost entirely reliant on its level design to engage the player, dodging obstacles. Conversely, I could (and basically do) mess around with Adventure 1's controls every time I boot it up. I have spent an ungodly amount of time just goofing around in the Adventure fields, 1 of which mostly IS just a flat plane with some small ramps (station square).

Didn't start this with the intention of dunking on the boost again, but here we are.

[askagamedev]

Hi Gamedev! My question is: when you want to test if a game idea you have has potential, what do you do? Where do you begin? Thank you!

I would start at the beginning - by prototyping the core gameplay. Open up Unreal, Unity, GameMaker, RPG Maker, or whatever tools, and start building simplified versions of the core gameplay systems. What kind of activities will the player be doing from moment to moment? Minute to minute? Core gameplay mechanics are the activities that the player must perform in order to reach any secondary or tertiary objectives, like leveling up or advancing the story. They’re the foundation upon which the rest of the game is built. In this sort of situation, I would try to build out each of these core mechanics as quickly as I can and see how it feels to play with it. 

Maybe I want a free-form combat system. What does that mean to me? How can I approximate it? What is the smallest possible prototype I can build to illustrate this? Maybe I decide that free-form combat means a brawler-style combo system that lets me choose which attacks to perform and have additional attacks open up as part of the combo. The result might be a combat tree-like structure, like this:

Maybe I can approximate this by setting up a single bad guy to play some basic hit reactions and a player character with a light attack and a heavy attack, and I build a combat state machine using some free animations and assets from the Unreal marketplace to map out my combo trees. Then I can try it and see how it feels. Is it fun? Why or why not? What needs to happen to make it fun? Maybe I want more input options at each branch point. Maybe I want more combo tree depth. I can try making adjustments and seeing if it is more fun. But whatever is there should be engaging at the prototype level. If it isn’t fun at the most fundamental level, adding complexity to it probably won’t make it cross that threshold to fun.

I then repeat this process for each of the core gameplay elements for the game idea. Maybe I want a skill system that lets the player choose how they approach the game. How many different skills do I need in order to prove that giving the player these choices will play sufficiently differently? What will each of these skills do? How will I test whether they feel different? Let’s build it and see how it feels. Maybe I want a combo bonus system that gives me great gameplay bonuses for maintaining a high combo count. How big is the combo window? What kind of bonuses do we give the player? Let’s build it and see how it feels. And so on and so forth. Once all of the core gameplay is prototyped, I can start integrating into one whole to see how all of the core mechanics interact with each other. Is the overall experience fun? Do these mechanics feel like they belong together? Is this game idea still worth pursuing?

I can’t count the number of gamers who don’t understand the difference between an idea for a story and an idea for a game. They often come to me with this elaborate idea about this world, these characters, this setting, and so on and tell me it would make a great game, and then I ask them what the player actually does along the way and they have a totally blank look in their eyes. A story has characters, a setting, a structure, a beginning, middle, and end. A story does not necessarily have gameplay mechanics or engaging activities for a player to perform. Without interesting and engaging core gameplay, even an absolutely amazing story won’t hold the player’s attention. It’s probably better off as a movie, book, or television series. A game idea has to have a solid and engaging core gameplay loop, and that means the core gameplay mechanics have to be fun and engaging on their own and when put together. Build a prototype that proves out these core gameplay mechanics and you’ll have the beginnings of a real game.

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[shokoladny]

Medieval Dynasty est un city-builder médiéval aux accents RPG et survie, où le cycle des saisons structure l'ensemble du gameplay. Construire, récolter, gérer ses habitants et payer ses taxes : chaque décision s'inscrit dans des boucles imbriquées qui donnent au jeu son rythme organique et sa profondeur.

Medieval Dynasty: Le City-builder que j'ai complètement loupé

[godahlpresentslizziesmithson]

I saw the title of this blog post and expected it to annoy me, but I actually agree with most of it. At least in my head, my vision for my own games is that people take em out once in a while to ease their anxiety or give themselves something to do with their hands while they let their mind wander--i feel like using these sorts of things to pull hours of peoples' time away from them is kind of questionable behavior, (that's part of why I hate the meta progression systems in something like vampire survivors--i guess call of duty represents the original sin wrt that stuff) like I worry that the way I'm setting up failure/restart states on my recent games might be somewhat unethical design but I could be so much worse, fwiw

[equalproj]

Examples of shapes being used in games

Gameplay loops (Circle) - For example, in a game called Minit, the game resets every 60 seconds back to the start. This also counts in games like Call Of Duty Warzone and other multiplayer fighting games.

Grey Boxing(Square/Cube) - A very very simplified level design which allows for designing how the level is going to look before adding the art, making it much less annoying as you don't have to go back and change art an absurd amount of times.

Polygons(Triangle) - Used in character design to make the mesh. The more polygons, the higher quality mesh. Take Lara Croft for example, in the original Tomb Raider she wasn't very defined at all and you could clearly see she was made up of triangles. Now though, she's made up of so many she looks almost real.