Thread: Whatever happened to gameplay?

I have been playing and genuinely enjoying arcade type games lately...I've been playing deimos rising and getting high scores on that instead of playing any 3d games.

Games push the forefront of computer technology, and that creates a bias to appreciate the computer games and personal projects that have the absolute best technology implemented.

Even on sites like gamedev there are more personal projects and aspiring game projects than actual finished games.

I believe the reason there are more threads about implementing graphics (and other technical aspects of computer games) is that it's just a lot more difficult to get these things implemented. Not tons of people actually make it far enough in the technical aspects of game programming to actually get into, you know, programming a game.

I think there's a common mentality among game developers. It goes like "I must have the best technology in my game, otherwise it will be crap."

I think the only way to actually create a computer game that is fun, and also has all of the latest technology implemented, is to use third party software to take care of the graphics, physics, collision detection etc. The only actual computer games finished by small teams of amateur coders use this method, i.e. they'll use the ogre engine for rendering, novodex for collision detection, havoc/newton engine for physics...etc.


The goal for my own computer game is to just make something that's fun to actually play. A big inspiration for it was the computer game 'Cube,' an amateur 3d first person shoot-em-up that has relatively simple AI/graphics/collision detection, but it's pretty fun to play (well, the gameplay isn't great, but good enough overall to inspire me). I'm consistently, on a daily basis, thinking of cool things that I know I can implement, and making the decision not to implement them so that I can actually get stuff done. I'm not currently implementing shaders or a realtime lighting model, the collision detection is extremely simple and straightforward as is the physics, because my goal isn't to write the next quake or doom i'm just trying to actually finish a damn game.

I couldn't agree more. There are certainly more important aspects of a game than graphics.
The reason many games are so focused on graphics are screenshots, which make people interested in a game. Whithout good screenshots, your game will sell badly, but it can sell very well without a good AI (and most do).

Originally Posted by howzer

i think the reason there are so many posts about graphics problems is because graphics are the most complex part of a game

That mustn't be true. AI isn't trivial. There are no limits on how much effort you can put into the AI of a game.

I agree with the idea that games can be good without great graphics. It's true that graphics are the focus for commercial games because that's what sells, but it doesn't have to be that way for indies like ourselves. I say pick one part of your game (graphics, ai, sound, gameplay, storytelling, whatever), and put most of your work into that, making it as good as possible while just bringing everything else up to a level such that they don't detract from the focus of your game. This way you can have a game that's unique from other games and shows off what you're best at.

In my case, my eventual goal is to develop a large scale rts with heavy control abstraction. That is, I'd like to have each unit represented, but have a control hierarchy on the field so that I can give increasingly abstract commands to increasingly ranked commanders in my army (and have a pure AI side work in a top-down way). To do this, I need some basic building blocks like a renderer, user interface, sound, and networking, etc, but they don't have to be state of the art. If my AI is really good, I can sell the game (especially to potential future employers) with it as the focal point and say "Look, I researched the ai in this and used some really high end stuff to implement it in this game that is a fully functional base for my research and also displays my basic abilities in other areas. Don't you think that makes me an excellent candidate to work as an expert in this specific field for you?". But then again, not everybody is a soon to graduate cs major with a resume building obsession.

Humans are naturally designed to be 'turned on' by visual stimuli.

I admit I'm a sucker for flashy graphics but if the gameplay isn't there I get bored with the game a whole lot quicker. Sometimes I can be picky about the control system too - FEAR was a good game: nice graphics, challenging AI and made me jump a couple of times, but the aiming felt weird, kinda sludgy. Even if I turned down the mouse sensitivity I didn't like it.

I'm easily put off by replay value & length too. Apart from great gameplay, another thing which I find is a deciding factor is the length of the game and the willingness to go back and play it again. I'm also a sucker for games with statistics / rankings of any sort.

I like a bit of realism in my games too, but some games overshoot that fine line between what is real and what is fun. The damage models in Raven Shield are pretty unbalanced - you die realisiticly quickly but you can sometimes unload a whole magazine into a terrorist before he goes down.

Another thing: customisation. I'm the bigest sucker for games where you can customise something in such a way that it allows to play the game according to your taste and / or style. Hitman: Blood Money is the only game I intend to get this year (Oblivion would kill my PC) - apart from it being what looks to be the final installment in my favouritest 3rd person series ever () you can customise all of your equipment and sucklike to suit your gameplay style. I think customisation can go a long way.

In case you were wondering Timesplitters in my favouritest 1st person series

Just think of breakthrough games, such as Ultima Online, which now has been out there for 8 years, people still buy this game in the stores even today!

The graphics are 2d, isometric, outdated, but the gameplay, is excellent.

This was the first MMO thought up by Richard Garriot, he had a vision, and even 8 years later, he is still basking in the glory of his trademark Lord British, as well as the avatar himself.

The mayor game developing companies today puts so much effort in their game engines that they need to show it off. For example Half Life 2 where you once reach a puzzle where you should drop rocks on one edge of a board to make the other end go up so you can go further into the game. It's the same thing with Far Cry, they want to show off their physics engine as much as possible with silly things. By this I don't want to say that Half Life 2 or Far Cry are bad games, they can sometimes be quite amusing but not as much as the old 2D classics, you get bored a lot faster with them.

I know what you mean. Many (most?) of the puzzles in HL2 (I haven't played far cry) are very physics-oriented, as if they had finished the physics engine thinking it was the most important part of the game. Sure anything is better than the old "get to locked door, search hours for key, unlock door" thing, but I think the "use our clever physics engine which adds little except eye candy to solve this puzzle" is just as bad / worse. I didn't think the physics in the "actual" gameplay made much of difference. Yeah it looks more interesting than a death animation and more realistic than a rigid body card-like over a flight of steps, but it doesn't add enough to the game to warrant that amount of use. Not in my book anyway.