The most disheartening part of developing

News & General Discussion
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I have a pretty good habit about getting a solid 8 hours of work in most days, whether I’m feeling motivated or moopy.

But there is one thing that can really sour my mood. If I go on steam and see really low effort games that are crazy popular, that’s tough. I hesitate to name any games, but I think Unturned has been out long enough and made enough money it’s in no danger of my harming it’s reputation. But seriously, that is like a “my first unity game” game, and look how great it did.

I even tried to play it. I figured, “well maybe it’s just really fun to play.” It’s not. At all. And it’s pretty confusing too.

Well, the only thing to do is see what can be learned. Maybe because the game can run on any machine, is free to play, and has a kid friendly art style, it can reach the broadest audience possible. And then the basic survival game formula is intrinsically addictive, even if executed thoughtlessly.

I didn’t mean to make this a market analysis. I’m sure if this kind of thing bugs me, it probably bugs other people too. So what do you do when you’ve been working really hard to make sure your UI is simple and understandable? That you core game loop is full of interesting decisions? Or you spend a week making sure player input feels really good and provides satisfaction, only to see the market confirm that, no, none of that really matters. The consumers have no taste, you could be feeding them sand and they wouldn’t know the difference.

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Looking at achievements of other people is a great way to never get anything done due to crippling depression.

Unturned likely isn’t low effort, by the way. Actual low effort is hentai puzzles and asset flips.

I think this is a wrong way to look at it.

Either you’re working on a pet project which you plan to release when done, ignoring how it will sell…
Or you’re in it for profit. (Well, there is middle ground).

In case of pet project, you do whatever you want and assume that you never are going to earn anything.
In case of “for profit”, you playtest the hell of it, gather feedback and so on.

“Feeding them sand and them not seeing the difference” merely indicates that you spent a lot of time investing in a part of the game people do not really care about, meaning you could optimize your workflow there.

At least that’s how I see it.

Basically, see it this way.

Imagine you’re a chef in a restaurant and is capable of serving an edible replica of a Faberge Egg. Making that thing is a tedious process, and you want the customer to appreciate the effort … BUT.

Your customer is simply hungry and does not care.

Who’s at fault in this situation?

The way I see it, either you cater to the customer and offer them something that fills them up, OR you make the whole edible replica thing your main gimmick, jack up prices, get less people, but those who come will probably come for that gimmick. Or you do something in-between trying to keep everybody happy.

The incorrect solution is to blame the customer for not recognizing your effort. The guy has different priorities. And they’re the ones paying.

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All good points.

I have my own business strategy, residing some where in the middle ground you’ve described.

I should steer this away from just griping about people having poor taste. That’s not productive.

I think the main thing that upsets me and makes me feel like there is always a compromise between doing what I want and doing what will sell is that popular games almost always employ some kind of addiction mechanic. I’m not interested in selling people low-level drugs. And I’m not interested in playing that sort of thing either.

There is some games out there that market themselves as “positive”, but usualyl that just means they have a pleasant art style while the core mechanics are still copied from teh tried and true drugs.

I think in order for games to be more than an addictive drug, they have to provide real challenge and lessons that carry over into something positive a person can use elsewhere in their life. As an example, take martial arts. We all know the benefits a kid will carry throughout their life if they practice martial arts. I don’t see any reason why video games can’t be more like that. Give people something useful and positive so we aren’t just wasting their time.

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There are certain kinds of games that have the right balance of creativity and lack of finesse that are perfect for making popular youtube videos about and joking around with your friends. I suspect this is one of them.

From my perspective, it really isn’t an important data point, simply because who knows (or cares) why millions of people started playing a free game on the internet. It could be any number of reasons, since there is zero barrier to entry. Pewdiepie video maybe?

The point is that I know I won’t be making free to play, so people are actually going to have to think whether they really want it before they hand over their hard earned cash. And that’s the point where I expect quality comes in.

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This seems like too great of an exaggeration. What addiction mechanic is Devil May Cry V employing? Death Stranding? Final Fantasy XV? Factorio? Divinity Original Sin? And most fundamentally, where does “good design” end and “addiction mechanics” begin?

This is a totally different discussion than “low quality”, by the by.

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Its the fundamental experience of an artist @BIGTIMEMASTER . Been there, its not a fun feeling. In the eyes of your market though that mindset can finesse your product to near perfection. That said its not good to dwell on it. If you can turn that feeling into productive motivation while tempering it, your product will be stellar! Additionally marketing and market niche are many times big factors in a games success, its not just whose is better. Famous artists like Edgar A. Poe and many others didn’t receive recognition for their work until after their death, but we live in a different world today. Take that bit in italics to heart! It means that with the right strategy and hard work you can achieve your goals.

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You’re right, I am making an overblown exaggeration. I haven’t played any of those games so I can’t comment. I am just talking about feelings here :), but a lot of times it seems like anytime i try to fire up a new game, it’s the same old show.

I think it’s the whole “progression” idea. Developer is always goading you to work towards some new unlock. But am I having fun right now? Or is my lizard brain just being manipulated to chase future promise? And am I gaining anything useful at all from this experience?

Anyway, yeah it’s too big and vague to discuss really. @ has succeeded in making me feel better about things.

hey, wait a second, that’s just tenthousandhours with a different name!

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That game is nicknamed “Cracktorio” for a reason, due to incredibly high addictivity. The addictive elements are complexity and infinite possibilities for recombining elements with no obvious superior solution. It is a super-puzzle, the kind that can make some people forget to sleep for a couple of days.

Good design turns into addiction mechanics the moment where the game, rather than creating compelling narrative, interesting gameplay, and so on, focuses on easy targets like appeal to inner hamster (human hoarding instinct), preying on people vulnerable to gambling overspending, and so on. Basically, when the developer starts looking for a way to turn the gamer into ever-paying skinner rat.

Typical examles of that include pay to win strategies, loot boxes, gambling elements, time-limited items, incredibly high degree of grind, trying to forcefully trigger competition where spending cash would give you an edge, time gating, and so on.

Long story short, if there’s a counter, people will try to max ijt, if there’s harvestable items, peole will try to hoard it, an RNG-based looting mechanic will encourage people to try just one more time, time gating (wait unless you pay) will keep player thinking about the game while they’re not playing, and so on. And once people paid for an item, they become more attached to the game.

Less insidious examples are cosmetic items. Achievements, and community involvement. Those simply can rely on desire to compete and envy and do not have as profound effect.

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So is this good design or just “addictive mechanics”?

“Addictive” is just the mechanics. What the dev does with that is another issue entirely. A game can be addictive without being exploitative.

At that point it might be addictive AND good design (see - Factorio, or for me ONI).

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It’s a moral argument @EternalAmbiguity .Thus, it’s probably better if we don’t try to define what is right or wrong. We all have our own opinions so that’s all that can be said really.

To me, addiction with no value beyond killing time is not good design, even if it makes money. But that’s just hoity toity stuff - i can afford to think like this because I’m not struggling to pay rent.

I think we all can agree that if you actively use addictive mechanics to siphon money out of at-risk people, you’re a negative drain on society.

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The attitude that games you don’t like are somehow lesser will only hurt you in business. Something about those games resonates with players. It’s your job to discover what that is, to understand it.

I got my start in the industry in early social games over a decade ago. At the time a whole lot of people making AAA games were bad mouthing people like me and players who played our games. They failed to recognize the value in social games, they failed to see where the market was going.

Most importantly they dismissed and didn’t try to understand it, so it took years before studios started to incorporate some of what worked in simple social games back into AAA games. There were a lot of lessons to be learned that applied to a far larger surface area then just social games.

Mostly I think it’s about embracing change. You can’t get too attached to your own ideas. Easy to say not always easy to do especially if you have a lot invested in something.

I’ve worked on I think close to a dozen games that were released. Double that amount that never released, we canned them at some point in development. Our biggest game we got a year into and did a pivot where we redid the entire thing almost. Our biggest failure was a game we all liked and wanted to work, convinced ourselves it would work even when in retrospect it was obvious our biases clouded our better judgement. That was in a team of mostly very experience people, with probably 80% of us having worked on big name games most here would recognize. So it’s a trap anyone can fall into.

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It is unintentionally addictive design. Which is not exactly a good thing. It is possible to start hallucinating from playing this particular game too much.

Addictive originally has negative connotations.
Ideally the idea of the game would be to make the user have fun, enjoy the experience, relax, see the story, and so on. Once they’re done, they’ll go back to their usual activity. Games are meant to be a leisure activity, after all.

When you have addictive mechanics, you have a problem, because someone might die from heart attack after playing your title for too long. Those things can happen. If you’re intentionally seeking addictiveness, then I think the priorities are a bit skewed in a wrong direction. The effect is supposed to be positive on the user, as such it is a good idea to introduce stop point where the user can take a break or pause. If there are no such point,s an argument can be made that this is a bad design. Basically, you’re meant to create tools for leisure and not get people hooked.

At least that’s how I see it.

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Yeah, I probably shouldn’t say stuff like that publicly.

But I don’t mean to dismiss the gamers and what they like. In fact the whole reason I go poking around and even playing games like this is to keep in touch (hopefully) with the consumer base.

I’m just venting. When I make a lot of effort to enact common best practices only to see something which blatantly disregards all of it - and not seemingly as a refutation of design, but rather just laziness or apathy – and it does extremely well, that can be a downer.

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The thing about gambling really is its a game of chance. You can make big bucks off it just as easily as you can go broke. I don’t understand gambling, as I’ve never done it and maybe won’t ever. Its not a sustainable way of making money. Its hard to understand what value casinos and such have for society if one looks at it from a quantitative standpoint.

Yes I changed my name :stuck_out_tongue:

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So does “nuclear magnetic resonance,” but that’s just because of ignorance (not stupidity, just ignorance).

I’m not really talking about intentionally creating addictiveness, but rather that good design can have an addictive effect.

Probably worth considering what one means when they say addictive: when I use the word, I mean the same way chocolate or caffeine is addictive (in a biological sense). Not in a social (psychological?) sense where, yes, the word is negative by definition. Coffee can be addictive, but that isn’t really the intent and that’s not why millions drink it every morning.

And that ties into what exactly “addictive mechanics” are. A “skinner box” as it’s used in common parlance is just RNG with a reward. That’s every RPG (tabletop or digital) ever.

Hence, a design having an “addictive” effect (and that’s a consideration too–the effect is dependent on the person; some people get addicted to coffee, others don’t) doesn’t make it “bad.” Star Citizen has as many whales as gacha, without a rare drop in sight.

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The way I see it, it’s possible to argue value into anything, especially if there’s some element of ‘it brings you and your friends together for a good time’. On that basis the content of the game is sort of validated by default regardless of what it contains. And then there’s the fact that nobody is forced to buy/play a game, and almost all types of game content seem to fit some acceptable basis (it’s just joking around, sometimes you just want to zone out with mindless drivel, etc). And who are you to take it so seriously and judge someone for their preferences?

These are all valid to some extent, but for me personally they are pretty weak excuses. The reason being that a game developer does not create a game with the same casual attitude that a player might play it. A game developer works intentionally for long periods of time, and sometimes through great difficulty, to create something specific. For every two-second thought or feeling a player has, someone spent a full day creating the systems that produced it.

So for me, way that I judge a game for good or worse is on the basis of “what did the designers intend to give to the player?”. Because whatever you as the developer focus on will, as a whole, influence the player experience to a greater extent than any other part. Simply by being exposed to it, players will interact with it, and by interacting with it eventually they will conform to it in some way.

There are a lot of AAA games that I think have great artwork and sometimes great stories and atmosphere, that I feel interested in exploring. But when I play them with an observing eye, I find myself spending lots of time interacting with repetitive, grinding progression and levelling systems that are the actual guts of what the game really is. And over time, they make me want to accept them more because I associate them with the parts of the game that I actually find attractive.

And then I play a game like Subsurface Circular, and realize that accepting those kinds of things is actually a choice that I don’t have to, or want to, make.

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No. There’s a big difference between “there’s a chance of dealing awesome damage” and “you may be a winner!”.

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I’ve heard it said somewhere before but don’t remember where. “You can justify anything.”

If that wasn’t possible, we’d all have the exact same opinions by now I suppose.

For me, I try to reduce everything as simple as possible. What is the sum of the parts? Much of the time with games, it seems all parts are designed to build compulsion, but once that compulsion fades there is nothing meaningful that I am left with.

This isn’t the most correct way to look at things, but I think it’s the way all humans do look at things, even if they try to be objective. It’s inevitable, just how the brain works. It reduces and simplifies, otherwise it would blow up.

Anyway, so the black and white metaphor I come up with is : You could make a game that gets people addicted to cocaine, or you could make a game that gets people off of cocaine.

Which is more difficult and noteworthy to do?

But please, I recognize this is totally false dichotomy so no need to beat it to death. It just represents how I look at the sum of parts of a thing and judge it.

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I’m not sure if this is what you mean, but personally I’m not convinced that games are a great tool for attempting character development of the player. For one thing, I think it doesn’t work for the same reason that games where you do bad things don’t create bad character in the player either.

For me, the highest value that a game can have is as a way to experience an idea. The idea can be a concrete one, or it can be abstract. It can be the entire game setting, or a single event. But the game should not be a tutorial of the idea per se - it merely provides an interface of some sort for the player to interact with it.

I’m still savoring the experience of Subsurface Circular - this game is the epitome of what I’m talking about. Even though the idea in that game was, in my opinion, a bit rough and simplistic, the game did a perfect job of bringing it to me with the agency that a player deserves to get.

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But that’s where the opportunity is I think. Not big money opportunity, but it’s what I am going to try to do so we will see how it goes.

An example from my current project: What you do in the game is use map and compass to do land navigation exercises. Get from A to B in a time limit.

One method to determine how far you have gone is to count your pace. Each time one foot hits the ground, that’s one pace. You figure out how many per 100 meters, and use some simple beads on a string to keep track. This is just how you do it in real life (pre GPS), nothing arbitrary here.

But what this means is that you have to actually count in your head. It is tedious. It is hard to stay accurate. It’s akin to meditation almost. Seems simple but is actually really hard to do. But, if you commit to the mission and stick with this until you get good at it, what you gain is the ability to stay hyper focused for long periods of time. A very valuable skill that has wide applications.

Now, is it a wide audience who is actually going to want to do this? No. And how can I encourage people to take on a challenge which is fundamentally opposite of what games typically ask them to do? I don’t know really, beyond trying basic persuasion tactics.

But that’s just an example of how I think a game mechanic can be used to challenge players and leave them with something positive. In general, I think almost anytime you provide a real challenge - something where player must focus inwards on themselves and change the way they are behaving in order to overcome some obstacle - that is going to leave them with some positive residuals.

If your aim is to go more mainstream and make real living money, I think what you’d need to do is just limit the total amount of energy you are demanding players to exert towards “self improvement.” But I think if you add even just a little bit, it could lead to stronger return customers if they feel like they weren’t just entertained by your games, but also learned something useful.

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