Re: Friday Facts #365 - Future plans
Posted: Fri Feb 05, 2021 5:09 pm
Love the post, great outlook, keep pressing forward ^^
But that doesn't work without diluting the main game in the process. Terreria skirts that edge so hard, it got its leg stuck in the last few big updates. Pre-MS Mminecraft managed to avoid it, where as Post-MS Minecrafted dived in head first. Which says a lot, as both of those games are more freeform. The issue I recognize is how it prominently hijacks the entire rest of the game to serve a self perpetuation.... the kind that can spiral into unhealthy activity, and subjugate design choices away from things that aren't that loop. Thats super bad when the loop can be infinitely expanded, and the "mileage per content" starts hitting a trend of diminishing returns.Pawz wrote: ↑Fri Feb 05, 2021 11:38 amFrankly, a way to pull in some of the more.. ok I'll say it, the ladies --- that would be amazing. Something to itch that Stardew Valley type gameplay.. collecting, farming, caring for critters, dungeon diving...
Factorio has always been laser focused on 'the factory must grow' and I feel like they truly have achieved that. Something to suck in the other half would be amazing...
I'd love to hear kovarex talk about Wube's fix-bugs-first (and perhaps also fix-even-the-really-obscure-bugs) philosophy. I've worked at a lot of software shops, and I've never run across one that wholeheartedly believes that bugs need to be fixed before adding new features. Wube is unique in the software industry, and I'd love to hear a talk about what effect they feel that it's had on the game, on public perception, on how they work as a team, and so forth.psychomuffin wrote: ↑Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:12 pm-Do a TED talk! Now... maybe a lot of other games do operate like you, and we just don't see it, but for me, I loved your weekly FFFs and all your transparency about the development. I think you could do a talk on your work flow, or your design beliefs, or your dedication to coding the game to be VERY efficient on even low end computers. Too many other devs tell the players the plays what they should like, or blame players for not using interfaces correctly, or they just code and expect people to have high end computers because they just feed computations and hope players CPUs can brute force it. Anyways, there is a lot you can alk about that I think other companies really need to adopt.
yeah just clone Dyson Sphere Program.
.. that's really unfair to say they don't pay attention to what happens to the gameplay.Recon419A wrote: ↑Fri Feb 05, 2021 8:27 pmFirst, let me say that I'm excited for an expansion.
Second, people keep asking what the devs can add that modders can't, and as someone who's played tons of both vanilla and many different mods, the answer for me is balance. A lot of overhaul mods like AngelBob's or even SpaceX have issues with balancing - they strive to be realistic or flesh out a cool concept without really paying attention to what it does to the gameplay. In AngelBob's, for instance, you have a concept of ever more and more complicated production chains which add additional outputs, improving your production but causing things to jam if balanced improperly. At various phases throughout the game, however, there's nothing to do with the additional resources: things like Silicon, Geodes, or Slag end up backing up and not really contributing to the game. Similarly, Space Exploration is a really cool concept for a mod, and many of the things it adds are amazing, but it still struggles with balance: early on, rockets cost so much more than delivery cannon capsules that even if you're sending 500 stacks of a resource you effectively never want to use a rocket, which breaks the fantasy of the game. Time and again, I've come to understand that one or another modset which I thoroughly enjoy has glaring balance issues that make it frustrating to play, hard to learn, and unnecessarily complicated - adding complexity without difficulty and respective payoff. Frequently, such modsets also have things that make you heavily meta-game - such as by avoiding certain ways of making things or transporting them which then effectively become "dead research" in the tech tree. Even if Wube simply duplicated the gameplay of a mod like Space Exploration - which seems likely with them bringing Earendel on board - or AngelBob's, I'm sure they could do it better, bringing to bear all of their expansive knowledge of game balancing and intentional game design.
First, I want to clarify that I'm not hating on mod authors. I love Space Exploration and AngelBob's both and I've actually been involved with them to some degree.
That's more or less what I was trying to say when I talked about "unnecessary complexity." Some things, like going to other planets to get Holmium or setting up more complicated smelting chains to cast sheet coils, have a very clear tradeoff in that they reward additional setup and upfront cost with better performance down the line. You have to work harder, but your factory will benefit quite clearly from the additional time and effort you put in. In effect, you feel like your hard work has been rewarded. This is a cornerstone of good game design.