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Desiging games is harder than making one

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Desiging games is harder than making one Empty Desiging games is harder than making one

Post by jobro13 Tue Jun 17, 2014 5:20 am

When I started creating Stranded the thing I thought would be the hardest would be to code. After 3 years of developing, I finally understand that that is NOT the hardest of all. The hardest thing about creating a good game is DESIGNING a good game. That may seem like logical but that was not the case for me - it took me too long to understand that.

Let me explain. You all know that we currently have two games - the old game and the new game. Both games are running at the same rate, which is surprising as I would have thought that the old game would have died.

It appears that our old fans like the old game more. It has a better setting according to them - the whole game feels different. The new game is too revolutionary and too "new". It doesn't feel like the old, cozy game anymore.

This brings me to a huge dilemma. Must I keep going to upgrade the new game with more revolutionary things, or must I stick with the old game..? This is extremely hard to decide. There is one thing I know for sure: the old game is technically dead. I must rewrite the old game in order to make everything available to upgrade as the code is an extreme mess. I have around 100 scripts running there and I totally have NO idea where I can find certain parts of the game. (As an example, the ocean moving code also has some code which handles chat...  Rolling Eyes )

I already started rewriting the new game as things are going wrong. It doesn't appear that a lot of people understand the new controls and I don't like the framework I wrote. It's too slow.

The new framework WILL be completely open source so everyone can actually help. It's currently closed source actually while that was not the intention.

This is what I am going to do. I am NOT going to focus on making things revolutionary. I'm going back to basics. What I am going to do is to create a little better user interface while keeping the old setting of the old game. Then I will slowly add new features which can eventually lead to new, awesome revolutionary features. In other words: I am going to take a step back.

The old game had 2 focus points: realism and balance.
The "old new" game had 3 focus points: realism, balance and fun.
The "new new" game has 4 focus points: realism, balance, fun and available for EVERYONE to play. (New players should be able to play this game too without a lot of irritations...)

In order to do so I am going to use the old world. We can improve this later.

I don't know how I must feel like now. To be honest, I feel some joy, but I am also sad that I failed with the new game. I hope I can turn this ship around and go back to our old location, to set sail to a new location which we may call "Utopia".

Signing off,
~jobro13
jobro13
jobro13

Male Posts : 250
Join date : 2013-06-02

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Desiging games is harder than making one Empty Re: Desiging games is harder than making one

Post by coolieman2 Fri Sep 12, 2014 10:35 am

Sorry for a late response.

Okay, for a "Meh" title, it's quite inspiring. Very Happy And I would agree on you on all points, and I like it, but again, I'm afraid it's been neglected. Maybe that's just me(Hence me being quite inactive). Not only have I also thought that designing is harder than doing the actual work, but I also agree that the old game has an "Aura" to it that makes it more atmospheric and cozy. I think we should strip all the code down a little further, and think it through, it's pretty frustrating, but if we take a second to understand what the old game had that made it so amazing, and apply them to the new game, wasn't the new game's objective to be less messy so we could update faster? Maybe I didn't like the fact that bronze took too long to get in the old game, I still had fun, I also like that it was challenging, so maybe we don't have to go so far after all, only apply what's needed. I'm not limiting what features we implement, but how we implement them. We need to think more about how the game is going to work in general, get the whole big picture ready, try to see what works, fix bugs, then to update. I'm saying that, you can keep the framework, which will help us a lot, just don't get ahead of yourself implementing hundreds of features without thinking twice about them, you can make them beta to get feedback on how to balance it, then you can apply the balance corrections one at a time, see how good they react, apply more changes if needed. So you want to make the controls less confusing, go ahead, see what works, apply those things, and upload it, see if it works. That's the whole point of beta, telling everyone that it is still under development so they can give you feedback, let's say you add an advanced metallurgy system, you upload it, it works great, but for example the solidification time for the metal is too long, or that a certain ore is too rare or too common.

SUMMARY:
Try to apply what is necessary, or what you want. See if the community likes it, and act accordingly.
coolieman2
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Join date : 2013-06-21
Location : Europe meaning i'm in a good timezone :)

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