7 ms·

Game developers share what they're most proud of making

166 points by danso 7y ago

hnick 7y ago
I had no idea Getting Over It had an ending like that. I'll never play it so don't consider myself spoiled but getting there entirely unaware must have been a great experience. I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;) When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV) which is also worth a read: https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/ https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/
- echelon 7y ago
  I don't have enough time to play it, so I spoiled myself. Wow. Just wow. That's got to be the coolest, most unique game ending ever. There's nothing that could ever top that. If you plan on playing the game, don't spoil yourself (you're in for a treat), but if you don't think you'll get to it, you must read about this. I'd really like to copy that some day.
- ecdavis 7y ago
  > I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;) I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off. EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s -- the whole presentation is worth watching.
A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago
I could not help, but smile at Divinity part. I absolutely despised Red Prince, but it only shows the writers did a good job creating non-bland character. Also now I know where the inspiration came from. Neat.
thedirt0115 7y ago
One of the featured games is Kine, a cool looking 3D puzzle game. The creator, Gwen Frey, just did a great GDC talk, "The Kine Postmortem": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ
- cableshaft 7y ago
  Kine looks awesome. Thanks for the heads up on it.
xwdv 7y ago
I would like to present – my son.
rl3 7y ago
>“Trigger Happy is a two-player deathmatch game I made when I was 12 years old, using the Klik & Play game-making tool. Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come back. The article conveniently has a download link included.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Klik and Play was great. I made a multi-minigame project with it for months ... until shutting down Windows 3.1 cut off the save process. No backups :(. I was experimenting with making an RTS by that point. EDIT: typos
itsthecourier 7y ago
It would be great to have Carmack entering that article and saying something like: "honestly I suck, nothing I feel proud of yet." :P Carmack hardcore fan over here.
lopmotr 7y ago
The Pirate Queen example doesn't really seem like something to be proud of - choosing the gender of a character and making it powerful aren't challenges are they? Couldn't you do that by flipping a coin? Surely the thing to be proud of there is getting to a position where you have the authority to make those choices?
- valesco 7y ago
  It's a decision she made that proved to be great, so she's proud of it. Strange how you targeted the only vaguely feminist achievement in the whole list.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Some insecure little boys feel extremely threatened and frightened by strong women in video games, and throw tantrums about it and viciously attack people in public, as we all know. She's brave to potentially subject herself to that kind of abuse and harassment by making such a decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
      Not that you're not correct but if I wrote a post with words like that, I'd get busted by the mods for flamebait. Bad behavior by others doesn't excuse more bad behavior.
  - mikekchar 7y ago
    Just to play devil's advocate, it's not really clear from the article what the designer is proud about. "The strongest and most expensive unit in our Pirate Faction is the Pirate Queen. She is kick ass, looks cool, and is even voiced by myself!" Why shouldn't she be kick ass and looking cool? Why shouldn't she be the most expensive unit in the faction? It's speaking to a narrative for which we have to guess the other side. I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some gamers do have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem that some people feel that gamers must be like that. In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that the audience has been hungering for. I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really demeaning.
DonHopkins 7y ago
I was going to give a talk at QGCon about what I was most proud of making in The Sims, but the conference was canceled due to Coronavirus of course. https://qgcon.com/ https://qgcon.com/ I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and a few notes and references. ---- How Inclusivity Saved The Sims. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software. Abstract: The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange. The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic. Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities. The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters. The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations. This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening. ----
DiabloD3 7y ago
There is no mention of Talos. This makes me sad.
Agentlien 7y ago
I love articles like this. And I can definitely relate. Game development allows for a lot of joy, frustration and eventually pride once you look back at it. Also reminds me of the old twitter thread where game developers shared their various tricks: https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 Summarized in this article: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112 https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112
benibela 7y ago
I wrote games when I was around 10 years old. I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not have internet to look it up.

166 points by danso 7y ago

I had no idea Getting Over It had an ending like that. I'll never play it so don't consider myself spoiled but getting there entirely unaware must have been a great experience. I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;) When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV) which is also worth a read: https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/ https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/

echelon 7y ago
I don't have enough time to play it, so I spoiled myself. Wow. Just wow. That's got to be the coolest, most unique game ending ever. There's nothing that could ever top that. If you plan on playing the game, don't spoil yourself (you're in for a treat), but if you don't think you'll get to it, you must read about this. I'd really like to copy that some day.
ecdavis 7y ago
> I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;) I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off. EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s -- the whole presentation is worth watching.

A4ET8a8uTh0 7y ago

I could not help, but smile at Divinity part. I absolutely despised Red Prince, but it only shows the writers did a good job creating non-bland character. Also now I know where the inspiration came from. Neat.

thedirt0115 7y ago

One of the featured games is Kine, a cool looking 3D puzzle game. The creator, Gwen Frey, just did a great GDC talk, "The Kine Postmortem": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ

cableshaft 7y ago
Kine looks awesome. Thanks for the heads up on it.

xwdv 7y ago

I would like to present – my son.

rl3 7y ago

>“Trigger Happy is a two-player deathmatch game I made when I was 12 years old, using the Klik & Play game-making tool. Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come back. The article conveniently has a download link included.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
Klik and Play was great. I made a multi-minigame project with it for months ... until shutting down Windows 3.1 cut off the save process. No backups :(. I was experimenting with making an RTS by that point. EDIT: typos

itsthecourier 7y ago

It would be great to have Carmack entering that article and saying something like: "honestly I suck, nothing I feel proud of yet." :P Carmack hardcore fan over here.

lopmotr 7y ago

The Pirate Queen example doesn't really seem like something to be proud of - choosing the gender of a character and making it powerful aren't challenges are they? Couldn't you do that by flipping a coin? Surely the thing to be proud of there is getting to a position where you have the authority to make those choices?

valesco 7y ago
It's a decision she made that proved to be great, so she's proud of it. Strange how you targeted the only vaguely feminist achievement in the whole list.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Some insecure little boys feel extremely threatened and frightened by strong women in video games, and throw tantrums about it and viciously attack people in public, as we all know. She's brave to potentially subject herself to that kind of abuse and harassment by making such a decision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    Not that you're not correct but if I wrote a post with words like that, I'd get busted by the mods for flamebait. Bad behavior by others doesn't excuse more bad behavior.
- mikekchar 7y ago
  Just to play devil's advocate, it's not really clear from the article what the designer is proud about. "The strongest and most expensive unit in our Pirate Faction is the Pirate Queen. She is kick ass, looks cool, and is even voiced by myself!" Why shouldn't she be kick ass and looking cool? Why shouldn't she be the most expensive unit in the faction? It's speaking to a narrative for which we have to guess the other side. I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some gamers do have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem that some people feel that gamers must be like that. In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that the audience has been hungering for. I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really demeaning.

DonHopkins 7y ago

I was going to give a talk at QGCon about what I was most proud of making in The Sims, but the conference was canceled due to Coronavirus of course. https://qgcon.com/ https://qgcon.com/ I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and a few notes and references. ---- How Inclusivity Saved The Sims. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software. Abstract: The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange. The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic. Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination. The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities. The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters. The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations. This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening. ----

DiabloD3 7y ago

There is no mention of Talos. This makes me sad.

Agentlien 7y ago

I love articles like this. And I can definitely relate. Game development allows for a lot of joy, frustration and eventually pride once you look back at it. Also reminds me of the old twitter thread where game developers shared their various tricks: https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 Summarized in this article: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112 https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112

benibela 7y ago

I wrote games when I was around 10 years old. I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not have internet to look it up.