I think maybe you just found a bad game or two. The boxing game looks pretty lame to me in videos. I can see a lot of work went into it… at least on the graphics side and trying to make a kind of story it seems. But gameplay wise it just doesn’t look “fun” and engaging to me. The other game in videos looks more interesting to me at least.
I think maybe what you are calling grind is just the game loop. Repetition. My last two games suffer from the same thing. When a game is good solid and simple the repetition stands out.
All games I’ve played suffer from this sooner or later. The only way I know of to get around that is to add more depth. More interaction. More mechanics. More strategy. Etc. In a way that fits naturally. And this is the hard part of making games. So I think most devs just focus on getting a solid core game loop in place and then try to “juice it” to add excitement because that is a lot easier than adding real depth and gameplay experience.
The problem is both of those are well known games.
The issue with starbound grind is that the game loves to send you on a “find X different items of race Y somewhere in the infinite procedural universe”, then this a whole nonsense with crafting chain straight out of minecraft.
The Punch Club had absolutely amazing quality of 2d art, and a lot of attention to detail (scenes have things like pixelart squirrel trying to hide nut in a tree in backgroudn). But the grind is pretty horrible (game has stats that need to be raised, and will decay every day. So you end up doing same thing over and over and over and over).
Basically I get impression that in both cases developers got distracted by visual side of things while gameplay wasn’t that well tested.
Well you know by now I think this happens a lot. People get so wrapped up in how things look they kind of forget they are creating a game not a painting or an animation. It’s easy to see when the details are obviously all in the visuals (little bits of detail that serve no purpose other than something to look at). That is time that could have went into the game itself.
On the other hand, these games are made by amateurs. And I think it is quite likely they just didn’t know how to improve the game itself as far as playing goes. But they could think of many little things to make it more interesting to look at.
I suppose some folks will be offended by that but basically I see us all as amateurs trying to figure out how to make better games. Whether someone has released a game for sale or not. After releasing multiple games and making money from them then I not see them as amateur any more. Anyway I think that has a lot to do with why the games are as they are.
When I read that line of reasoning I always think “Can’t people just make poor gamedesign choices without the visuals being the reason for that?”. There are tons of games with horrible game design that also look like garbage. The reason you notice it more often in games with high visual appeal, is that they have a shot at becoming popular enough for you to notice them, unlike the ugly + bad games.
It is a lot easier to iterate on visuals because you can just sink in x amount of work, hold the before and after version next to each other and after a few seconds of looking at it you most likely will be able to decide whether that change made it better or not. Then just repeat that process for every asset until you run out of time…
With gamedesign you do the work on your iteration and then how do you know if it made the game better or not? You won’t be able to make another start to finish playthrough of the game for every progression balancing change you make. Also the more often you play the less enjoyment you’ll get out of your own game anyway. You’d need a large supply of fresh testers that play your game and give qualified feedback. That’s a resource that basically no indie has access to. Even if you do Early Access I bet most feedback will be crap because… I’ve been to steam forums.
7 Days to Die imho had poor graphics and fine gameplay when I started to play it. Later it had better graphics but poor gameplay in my opinion. They’ve added tons of stuff to make the game more grindy and artificially limit your progression. Work on art is not the reason for that. I’ve read the devblog for a while. This is exactly how they wanted the game to be. When I started playing I thought “this is amazing gamedesign, everything has a purpose and fits well together” and after all that grind got added I’ve just had enough of the game. I’d rather play Rust on a modded server with 5x resource farming speed. I just don’t like grind and vanilla Rust has too much of that for my taste as well.
Hitting trees and rocks gets real old really fast for me, but there must be people who legit like that most monotonous grind. It gets them in some kind of zen state. Like playing Minecraft and just digging a 32 x 32 square hole down to bedrock. Different strokes for different folks I guess. I’ve once farmed enough dirt in Minecraft to build a flying island for my next fortress, so I kind of understand, but it seems I want less and less grind in games the older I get.
My impression is that most people are just really bad at gamedesign (myself included, it’s one of my weakest skills for sure!). Some people that make a lot of money with games still are really bad at gamedesign though… (cough cough DayZ cough cough).
@Martin_H That’s basically what I was trying to say. If a person… anybody… looks at a game I think it is easiest to see how the visuals can be improved. It is just right there immediately visible. Where the actual gameplay well that part needs testing and testing and tons of experimenting.
That’s not to say people don’t do a lot of experiments on graphics iterations as well. I just think it gets the focus it does because it is the easiest thing to do from the perspective of seeing how / what to improve.
EDIT: I guess that is why I view games the way I do. I always look at the gameplay and don’t care what the game actually looks like. Because I see that as something that can be easily improved. I think gameplay can be easily improved in most cases as well but it almost always takes more work than it does to figure out how to improve the visuals.
So if I play a game with rectangles or cubes and it is fun I disregard the rects and cubes. Because I know they can easily and obviously become something else.
I think this line of reasoning happens because when you see amazing art you sorta automatically expect the developers to be as good at making gameplay as they’re at making art. Which is not very logical.
I think basically it all comes down to where people focus. And they probably focus where they do because that area is their strength or because that area is simply easier in general.
This is probably why some people come away from discussions thinking I hate nice graphics when that is really not the case at all.
I spend a lot of time studying and focused on the gameplay experience. What I consider to be the actual game itself. The reason I view it this way is because you could take a game, say No Man’s Sky and it could have offered the same basic gameplay experience if all of the art assets were substituted for ultra low poly. The same way you can take a game like Minecraft and using the mods have the same game except now it has higher quality visuals.
So I see dressing the game (so to speak) as being different than the actual game itself.
Some of the games I find most impressive are things like this (based on raw gameplay / design). Such simple things but the entire game is focused around the one mechanic / the one unique aspect.
When the visuals are stripped down to this degee it causes a person to focus on the actual game. And (at least this is what I believe) a great game is a game that is enjoyable because of how it plays. Of course, that doesn’t mean that improving the graphics wouldn’t improve the overall game experience and make it appeal to more people. I think it would but the focus should always be on the actual game first and foremost. Again that is just what I think. Because once you have the game itself perfected you can more easily focus on the graphics and jack them up as desired.
Yes, these examples are all from shmups. But there are all kinds of games out there. I found an online version of Legend of Zelda done in a solid colored rectangle style for example.
I am currently working on one more simple solid retro inspired game (and another collaborating with another dev). After this next game is done I am focusing on a bigger game. I’ve pretty much decided to make the game nothing except colored rectangles for the visuals so I can focus on the gameplay experience. Get some depth going on. Kind of a roguelike game is what I am thinking with different classes and a variety of gear to find and so forth.
I’m thinking about building this one on Steam as a WIP just to see what kind of reaction the game gets. Personally, I am kind of fascinated by the idea of a sort of CubeRogue (3D) or RectRogue (2D) game done completely in this visual style. If nothing else it should be fun to read some of the comments. lol
There is some pressure to add hours of gameplay. Grinding is an easy way, low cost to add more hours of gameplay without adding more real content to the game. The problem with using grinding this way is that most players don’t actually enjoy that. A shorter game without the grinding would often be a more enjoyable experience for the player. With the sheer flood of games to choose from these days, players often don’t want to feel locked into a grindy game.
I wish I knew more about gamedesign and game designers. The whole thing still is a bit of a mystery to me. I’m not even sure if throwing more work and time straight at a gamedesign problem always leads to a better game. Is this accepted as a fact among game designers? I feel like there’s no shortage of examples where people think “game x used to be great, but they ruined it with y”. Of course those things are highly subjective and others (maybe even more people) might prefer the changes.
When I think how painting works for noobs, there’s a cap on how good of a painting someone can make. The noob’s 1 hour painting is crap and when he throws 10 more hours of work at it, it still is crap (albeit more detailed crap). An additional per asset time-investment has a horrible payoff for a noob. Reading up on fundamentals for 9 hours and doing another 1 hour painting instead, will most likely have visually better payoff in the areas that count. But I really don’t know how well any such analogy transfers to gamedesign, if at all.
Agreed.
It would certainly be interesting to see how well it is received!
Well, I think you are making a good point. There are books on nearly every aspect of game design. At a minimum, a noob could read about game design, and learn more of the fundamentals. That is how many programmers and artists learned the skills they needed.
I think one problem that game design suffers from is that very few noobs take game design skills seriously. A lot of noobs assume playing a bunch of games automatically makes them an expert at game design, which is no more true than a guy who thinks he is a medical expert simply because he has been to the doctor’s office. By contrast, a lot of noobs do see how building a game requires art and programming skills.
I think we need to make a distinction between bad game design and game design which maximises things other than pure ‘fun’. A lot of people like grinding for progression even if the grind itself is not fun (hello to nearly every MMO). If fun is the only measure one could easily argue Chess is a bad game design because for the most part its not fun, its hard work.
Punch Club is a successful game with a mostly positive rating over many thousands of reviews and with generally positive reception from critics too, particularly on mobile. Across all devices you can extrapolate to sales of around 200k. Look like a pretty good design to me, even if it isn’t personally to my taste (I’m not a fan of ‘tactical combat’ ).
To the OP’s question, I’m not really sure grinding is a new trend( I remember a lot of grindy games from the 90’s), although maybe the nature of mobile devices and the freemium model has made it a bit more prevalent.
The main reasons for adding grinding is that many people like it and it’s cheap to implement. Indie developers are heavily constrained by their tiny budgets and minuscule teams. Grinding can add a lot of play time, making your game appear more lasting and thus seem to have more value.
This is sort of the way I’ve approached games so far. Not setting out to create a “grind” / repetition but just completing games. Get the core game loop done and spend time balancing & tweaking which takes a good chunk of time. And I reach a point where the game is playable, the amount of time I budgeted is up and I’m just ready to move on to the next game… so the tiny game is finished.
I thought @neginfinity was referring to games where there was obviously a lot of time and care put into the graphics compared to the actual game, balancing and so forth. That’s what I was referring to in previous posts.
But just having grinding (as in repetition) I think is just sort of inevitable in games by their nature. Although the more depth, unique interactions (challenges, environmental stuff, etc) added the less repetitious the game feels. I suppose it might not be that way for every person. Or might not feel that way for certain games. But even something like checkers and chess is basically a series of repetition. Chess probably doesn’t feel that way due to the depth, the focus on the strategy.
Starbound is basically a clone of Terraria which is inspired by Minecraft. Grindy gameplay is somewhat par for the course because the only other time heavy activity is building things. What would you replace the grind with though?
In case of starbound I would ditch scanning missions and their ridiculous mechanic where upgrading your ARMOR somehow magically increases your weapon damage. This mechanic sends you chasing ore around galaxy, and feels artificial. Another thing would be putting a lot of stuff into shop. For example, to craft a turret you need to find memory sticks. The thing is, you can’t craft those and can’t buy them either. YOu need to hunt robots instead. Robots live somewhere in the endless procedural galaxy. However, you absolutely can craft silicon boards yourself. Just not memory sticks. Because reasons. At some point you just get fed up with it and start using admin cheats instead.
I was, in case of starbound and punch club there’s quite obvious dis
balance and specific “unfun” kind of grind. For example, grinding in disgaea, shin megami tensei: nocturne was much more interesting and fun.
No, unless they’re forced to do that.
For example, let’s say a player needs an item to proceed, the item costs $10000, and the only source of income are missions, with maximum payoff of $100. So to proceed further, the player would need to go through the mission 100 times. THat would be grinding. Bad kind of grinding.
I think the goal should be to have a core gameplay loop be so fun, that players get sidetracked into grinding/sidemissions without any need to seek them out. In Fallout 3 I was having so much fun exploring, looting and killing things, that I totally forgot about the main story and didn’t make any progress there for days. In Shadows of Mordor I got immersed in murdering Orcs for a while and started following the mainquest more seriously when I felt that there’s a risk of me burning out on the game before finishing it. Mad Max had a very satisfying core gameplay loop too. The things I wanted to do in those games aligned perfectly with the things that I needed to do in those games to progress. It only really starts to feel like grind, when you start doing things that you don’t really want to do, to achieve some specific goal. Like in Skyrim where I crafted and enchanted daggers and jewelry for a whole day to power-level my blacksmith and enchanting skills. The Skyrim system is designed to make you excell at the things you do all the time, probably under the assumtion those things are what you are having the most fun with already. But that also funnels you down whatever road you happen to have picked at the start.
Seen this linked somewhere very recently but it feels appropriate again:
I gave the 2 first games a quick play and looked at the video of the third. They all seem to have 1 unique gimmick that feels “fresh” in the genre. But that keeps my attention for like 2 minutes, and then I’m bored again. I think that wouldn’t be different with fancier graphics. I’m not a shmup fan, so that might be the reason. I did play Raptor again in recent years, but that might have been nostalgia-fueled.
I still haven’t figured out fully, why some games bore me after barely 5 hours, and another one I still like after 500 hours. Especially when both are about shooting people. The 500+ hour playtime game is “Insurgency” which doesn’t have any grind/unlock mechanic. You have access to all weapons from the start and the only thing you ever unlock is steam achievements (which I don’t care much about). All grindy games usually bore may way before I have unlocked everything. I don’t think it really is a good mechanic to keep interest up, at least it doesn’t work well for me. My second most played shooter is CS:GO (270h) which did not have any meta progression when I played it. Now it kind of has.
Seems relevant as well, though I’m not sure I agree. I was bored during the Destiny demo already. It felt like one of the blandest shooters I’ve ever played:
I’m not sure if I fully agree. It would make more sense to keep reasonable average amount of fun per hour of gameplay, without extremely low dips on per-minute curve.
“Awesome per second is the only thing that matters” sorta encourages making one-second long games.
