Hello everyone and welcome back, once again, to ThursDev.
I'm your host Luke, and today I'd like to talk a little bit about one way that you can
learn to flex and exercise your game design muscles.
Over the course of my career, I've always made it a point to be something of a lifelong
learner.
I aspire to be the best game designer that I can possibly be, and in the pursuit of that
goal, I have explored many, many avenues.
There are plenty of books and articles, and even videos like the ones I create for ThursDev
that can help you to understand the theory of game development.
You benefit yourself greatly by absorbing knowledge like this, but only so much can
be taught through words alone.
The savvy game designer also makes it a point whenever possible to be playing games and
analyzing them.
And creating games, and analyzing their creations.
Understanding the underlying rulesets of the games you're playing is a key factor in building
up your repertoire of game design tricks and methods, as even though there are still original
ideas to be had, generally speaking any design problem that you've run into, someone else
has as well and came up with at least a solution.
Whether a good one or not, having that knowledge as a point of reference is always valuable
for when you need to find a solution like that for yourself.
I play tons of video games.
Action, adventure, platformer, simulation, tactical, management, RPG, roguelike, MMO,
Quiz and everything in between, and every time I pick up a game, though I do it for
leisure as well, I always do what I can to understand the design decisions made in the
game that I'm playing, and try to figure out what's going on underneath the hood.
Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's impossible, but I love the exercise of learning game systems,
and as a designer, you should as well.
But video games shouldn't, however, be the be all and end all of what you are analyzing.
There's one game design resource out there, a type of game that if you're not actively
involved in, you're doing yourself a disservice, and that is roleplaying games.
Not video game RPGs, which honestly really only share a name, I'm talking about tabletop
- pen, paper, dice, Tom Hanks blundering around in the sewers, you know the ones I'm talking
about.
When I was a child, and honestly for as long as I can remember, my older brother was always
a roleplaying geek.
Even back when that made you a social pariah, he was ravenous and it seemed to me that if
there was a roleplaying system that you could get off the shelf of a small town hobby shop,
he had a copy and had used me as a guinea pig at least once to try it out.
Like many, we got our start with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 2nd Edition, but that
quickly blossomed outward to games within universal systems like Palladium with Rifts,
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Robotech, White Wolf and their Noun the Other Noun series,
GURPS, FATE, and more specialized games like Shadowrun, Eclipse Phase, Paranoia, Cyberpunk
and Human Occupied Landfill, and more.
We didn't play everything that was ever made, but we sure as hell tried, and through my
comprehensive exposure to these systems, I feel that my brother granted me the tools
to become a much better game designer.
Tabletop roleplaying games are, quite possibly, one of the greatest distillations of game
design out there, because of their innate requirement of relative simplicity, while
still needing to accommodate nearly anything that a game player might wish to do in its
setting of choice.
The basic conceit of nearly every roleplaying game out there is that any action that a human
can perform, can, with a couple numbered polyhedrons and a little math, be simulated.
The accuracy of the simulation and how complex the algorithms are varies from system to system,
but at the end of the day, usually it's roll one or more dice, add a couple of stats from
your character sheet, and you succeed or you fail.
Even Shadowrun, a pen and paper game whose character generation is notoriously complex
and difficult to get started with, ultimately comes down to rolling a big handful of D-6es
and counting how many of them turned up a 5 or 6, and then comparing that against a
target number of successes.
In a roleplaying game, anything significantly more convoluted would break the flow of the
actual roleplay, which is akin to a badly tuned negative feedback loop in a video game.
But even while maintaining a level of simplicity like that, the game must also account for
nearly anything that the player might, in the course of roleplaying their character,
want to do.
This trend of designing to keep things uncomplicated but versatile is a skill that any game designer
should strive towards, and adopt in even video game design.
If you, in the course of chiseling out a game design, can manage to find an elegant set
of algorithms that will cleanly allow you to accomplish half or more of the things you
want to allow the player to do in your game, that's a major win.
They have a tendency to front-load a lot of the complexity of the game in the process
of character creation, which is delightfully similar to defining game variables that will
be referenced by the game's code in the case of a video game.
They define how many of what dice to roll, and if they're well-designed, the player will
know exactly what to roll and when, in order to play their character with as little friction
as possible.
The best thing of all about the tabletop roleplaying game, though, from a designer that wishes
to analyze one, is that all of those complex rules are laid out bare in the pages of the
book, free for perusal at any time.
Every progression curve, every equation, every rule, written clearly on paper because it
has to be.
In video games, we frequently attempt to obfuscate our rules to keep players from gaming our
systems: Pen and paper games either accept their exploitability and roll with it, or
even embrace it, like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder or Shadowrun, and some attempt
to be modular, like FATE, Powered by the Apocalypse or Risus.
A knowledge of all of these systems, you will find, is extremely valuable to you as a game
designer.
But the greatest challenge for a designer, and an exercise that I have found to be both
rewarding and very useful, is that of designing a roleplaying game system yourself.
Pen and Paper games are limiting.
Generally speaking you have an option of a limited number of dice, or poker chips, or
playing cards, and you need to stretch the usefulness of whatever that is, as far as
humanly possible.
No complex simulations, no massive interconnecting matrix of game systems: It's an exercise in
stripping away a lot of the unnecessary extra layers, and designing simplicity.
If you're a game designer, or an aspiring one, I urge you to give it a shot - even if
you don't intend to distribute it - it's a great thought experiment at the very least,
and a lot of fun among friends potentially as well.
Find a friend or two that would be willing to troubleshoot your system.
Get feedback, learn how to make your systems sing.
The feedback is also instantaneous.
And pen & paper roleplaying game design is only a few very narrow degrees removed from
paper prototyping which this will also help immensely with.
So check out some roleplaying games.
If video games are your thing and you've somehow managed to get this far in life where you're
considering them as a career and you haven't experienced one before, consider giving them
a shot.
The worst that you can do is not enjoy yourself for a couple hours.
And that's it for me for today.
Thanks for joining me this week, and I hope that you found today's episode entertaining,
educational, enlightening, or any combination of those.
If you'd like to join our little community of video game, and otherwise, game enthusiasts
who love both the making and the playing thereof, you're welcome to subscribe to our channel,
and get in on the conversation.
Do you have a favorite roleplaying system, or a tabletop game you think exemplifies good
game design?
Let me know!
And if you're wanting to get into roleplaying and don't happen to have any dice, but you
do have an Android Device, I've got you covered there too.
Search the Google Play Store for "Dice" by Alexander Hicks - or just follow the link
in today's video's description.
It's a fantastic die rolling app that's also totally free, made by a good buddy of mine
who the Level 0 NPCs all roleplay with every weekend.
Anyway, thank you for stopping by, and I hope to see you around here again soon.
Take care.
For more infomation >> Toddler in critical condition after almost drowning - Duration: 0:49. 
For more infomation >> Girls May See Boys As Smarter Starting At Age 6, New Study Indicates | TODAY - Duration: 4:04. 
For more infomation >> Buildings evacuated after security concern at Hanscom - Duration: 1:55. 
For more infomation >> George And Amal Clooney Step Out With Twins, Caught On Camera | TODAY - Duration: 0:39. 
For more infomation >> President Donald Trump: On Foreign Soil, Trump Rips Intel, Press And Obama | Morning Joe | MSNBC - Duration: 15:45. 
For more infomation >> United Airlines Gives Toddler's Seat To Standby Passenger | TODAY - Duration: 0:57. 
For more infomation >> Amelia Earhart Mystery: New Details About Photo Emerge | TODAY - Duration: 4:12. 
For more infomation >> Elon Musk's Big Gamble: Tesla Set To Roll Out New $35,000 Electric Car | TODAY - Duration: 2:28. 
For more infomation >> This Dog Can Balance Just About Anything On His Head | TODAY - Duration: 1:24. 
For more infomation >> Unprovoked Killing Of NYC Police Officer: New Details Emerge | TODAY - Duration: 2:19. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét