What are your views about developing games that have no end? I’m currently developing one that has infinite levels(There’s an algorithm that takes in your level and then generates a battle with certain enemies with certain stats) but I have received some mixed responses.
I’ve always loved the idea of never ending games, but some people prefer endings. What do you think? What are the ups and downs of making a never ending game?
Creating procedural levels is easier on the developer and it works very well in certain games. Our game, Starfall: Ronin has procedural levels. Some people have requested that we include “storyline missions”, as any game can get repetitive over time.
However, I think, if you include player stats, that can alleviate some of that. Players can compete against themselves at that point; trying to improve their averages, times, etc.
Maybe you are looking at this wrong…what is wrong with “creating” content procedurally?
The more content you create procedurally is going to be usually more boring than something done by a human in most cases.
Although, I really prefer procedural games(That’s just my tastes though). Mainly because I’m into roguelikes (IE: Dwarf Fortress). If you can do procedural well, you can give the player a game that should provide endless fun.
I once toyed with this idea of a game without end, from the context of having a bit of an existential crisis. I was stuck in this philosophical thought that went something like, the universe is infinite, that means there is no end, which means anyone trying to reach an ‘end’ or closure is just doing so in vain. They will never reach the end, they are just going around in pointless loops, so whats the point of even trying to reach anything?
Well that existential crisis birthed this game: Domain name for sale - M2H
Which was the first game I ever made in Unity.
You fly around in a spaceship that is a drill, then you drill into the planets, and then the whole planet turns into a huge city, AKA you screw the planet. You go from one planet to the next, screwing as many planets as you can. Then if you fly into the center of the map there is sort of like a deity form that makes snide remarks like ‘Go Go Faster!’ or ‘Maybe heaven might be on the next planet!’, all the while the planets cycle through the deity’s mouth as the deity resets all the planets.
The point of the game was to illustrate in some weird way that the entire thing is pointless. I basically made the video game equivalent of like an emo / ‘slash my wrists now’ poem.
I purposely made an endless and ultimately pointless game, with the intention of it telling you that it is endless, pointless and everything is pointless. At the time I was thinking this is just how reality is itself, without end, and pointless.
Which after doing that I had to conclude, that games without points and games without ends just absolutely suck, as that game sucked. Which also sort of concluded my existential crisis on the issue.
Reality itself may be infinite. But reality itself I do think has a point, and it atleast has checkmarks, or validations, that your heading towards that point. Games should thus emulate this. I think its the objective of artists to help make artwork, and games, that help aim people at whatever that point is. Its our human nature to fabricate points, and then head towards them, it’s what makes the whole process enjoyable. People want the illusion that they are ‘doing something’ and that it is ‘going somewhere’, and the carrot can never be dangled so far away from you that it never gives you a hint of accomplishment. So there may not be an explicitly defined end, but the sense of doing something, going somewhere and getting some kind of accomplishment needs to be present.
It really depends on the game. I personally like linear stories with a beginning and end, but some games do well without one. If this is the game you put on Kickstarter, it seems like it would be better with a story, but you could even give it two modes, like some games do: story mode and arcade mode.
Kinetic Damage will have no “end”. It will not even have any “plot” (aka the overused power escalation towards a final boss). You’re just you, and you just want to master your art, period.
Sometimes a game doesn’t necessarly need a story, as long as the gameplay is made to entertain for a long time.
As a gamer, it depends on the genre for sure (RPGs can’t live without a plot), but for “instant games”, I’d prefer a good endless gameplay over a plot/start-end, as long as the game mechanics ecosystem is rich. Especially when most of the plots have been beaten to death … 
As a dev, I clearly prefer to pressure myself on spending time to enrich the game mechanics rather than a story / static content (gear, new bosses, dungeons for mmos, etc).
A story is a one-time consumption (whatever the number of branches it has). A game mechanic on the other hand is as varied as the situations where you trigger it. And it never gets old as long as it is relevant. (see MMOs mechanics for example)
Side thought : that’s something I’m really not satisfied with, in current videogames, most mainstream games seem to focus far more on delivering static content rather than new mechanics. Static content is vowed to age far quicker by definition. It does even cost far more to produce. So even from a business standpoint, I don’t understand why there are so few efforts to create new mechanics rather than new textured 3D models.
edit : Snap… Seems like I completely missed the topic… Procedural generation != Game mechanics… Sorry.
I really like you game. I also did thought about endless game not so long ago. What I would like to suggest you is don’t make it endless straight away. Let say all your character in the game can be upgraded until certain level only. Let the goal seems challenging and achievable. After that, after you think a few hard core had achieved that, then Bam! An update that’ll make your existing higher level character can be upgraded even more, but still in a reasonable range.
This strategy will make your player keep coming for more because they know they want to max out their skill rather than they know that they’ll never achieve the ultimatum which will hinder them from playing the game.
An example is a game called a pocket frog, which has 15000 different kind of frog, I don’t think most of us will play the game just to collect all of them which sounds daunting straight away.
Well maybe you could add some achievements to keep the player going. For example in ski safaria when you upgrade you can unlock better starting animals, different hills and the score multiplier will increase. I think as long as you are rewarding the player in some way it could keep them “hooked”.
As far as endless time concerned as opposed to endless space;
On the one hand, if a game is awesome, it’s cool to have that immersion of knowing that you can always come back to the world and new adventures will await you. On the other hand, I kind of need my life back. I hold old school games like Super Metroid in high esteem because you could beat it in a few hours or play it for weeks.
I think that massive games have corrupted the simple hobby of gaming and turned it into an addiction for many. I’ve seen one of my friends in college who was a straight A student, fall behind in his grades and ultimately drop out due to WoW addiction. The game just wouldn’t end even though he had played it in all his free time for months. He even skipped classes to play because of raids. I faced a similar addiction to online games, but I realized I was wasting my time and broke free of it, now I avoid them like an alcoholic avoids booze.
To me match based games like counter strike are fine because I can only tolerate so much of that crap before I go to do something else, usually more productive. So if a game doesn’t have an end or it’s not nerve wrecking PVP, I don’t go near it.
Procedural generation is great to extend an already-good game’s longevity, but usually doesn’t provide a fulfilling experience on its own.
What is generally good is when the same system of creation is opened up to the player, especially in the case of multiplayer games. No procedural system can ever match the sheer power that is a dedicated fanbase.
That said, all game types will vary.
If you are an indie/small/solo developer then procedural content can be a good move, given that you are basically automating the process of creating content, stuff that would take you a lot of time to do by hand such as making levels, animation, etc. That’s for YOUR benefit, though. The question is whether the user benefits. Some Spelunky players have said that the randomness of the levels presents a different dynamic/feel to the game where you never quite know what will happen next and there aren’t any predictable patterns, so it puts you more on edge and makes you anticipate more, which increases the tension and keeps you on your toes, which is good for gameplay. So it can be advantageous, but that’s more to do with how the randomized nature of the environment becomes the gameplay itself, which may be accidental. It’s good to know what effects your procedural content will have on the game design and whether you really want the game to follow that direction.
Another thing to always remember with any game is that human beings begin to memorize stuff right away. They familiarize themselves and start drawing upon their memories whenever they see new stuff, to say oh, that's just like xyz that I experienced before… and after a while, it doesn’t take long for people to be 90% looking at images in their mind that come from their memories, and 10% from the way that their present experiences is new. So having NEW stuff all the time is really important, and that can be hard to do if you are working within a narrow range of versatility. It also requires some lateral changes in gameplay and focus through the course of the game. You can’t just randomly generate every level with similar parameters because even then over time the player starts to get a feel for it, familiarizes themselves, learns the quirks, and starts learning what to expect. The game has to be clever enough to go off on a new tangent that they haven’t seen before. A really good example of constant freshness is in Plants vs Zombies, they break up the monotony/repetition by sprinkling in a variety of different levels which really deviate from the main gameplay a lot, with a whole different interface and screen layout etc. Over the course of time the game doesn’t get boring by just showing more levels, it makes quite large departures from the norm on a frequent basis. This keeps the player interested because there is always something new to learn. People flock to new stuff like birds to shiny objects. The issue he is if you want to keep things from being too predictable/same-same then you need to add some human elements, which means you’re now limited again by time constraints/resources.
There’s also a problem with some procedural content and it’s the fact that the algorithms may create odd results that are perfectly logical, fitting within the framework of the algorithm but creating scenarios/enviornments etc which perhaps are not fun or not interesting or too hard or don’t make sense. I think many people using procedural methods prefer to have some human input like creating small pieces of content and letting the computer randomize them, or implementing some rules that make sense and letting the computer work with it… sort of a hybrid of procedural and man-made. In many cases players can relate to those kind of approaches better and they might result in less weirdness.
The reason I’m talking about procedural content I guess is because most games without end tend to have procedurally generated levels, to increase longevity (important and overlooked). I was going to cite Ski Safari also. Another one I like is Robot Unicorn Attack - each piece of island is a pre-drawn shape but they are randomly organized. Having no end means you’re pitted more against your own skills to get as far as you can… and getting as far as you can becomes the main goal. But if you don’t like that as a goal and prefer some kind of fantasy story type of gameplay then most likely you’ll want more of an emotional conclusion. Games like mobile games where you have really really short levels that you might complete in a matter of seconds, then reward you upon your success, do feel satisfying, as the counter-approach to having no ends at all… but even long infinite games can have various smaller sub-goals that you can successfully complete along the way and get rewarded for.
Btw I believe the universe is finite not infinite, everything about it is limited. 