Full Of Little Ideas
I have a lot of silly small ideas for what would be cool in a video game. Normally these aren't about content as such, but ideas about how a game plays, or reacts, or handles things. These ideas are the ones that often crop up at game dev studios, and in the long torturous route from being a new idea, to a meeting, to a design doc, to a task list to QA, at some point they normally get killed.
It's often nobodys fault, its just the way of big companies by their nature.
For example, in the last big game I worked on, there were dogs. We thought it would be cool for dogs to wander round the world when they werent used. I thought it would be cool if they picked a 'master' to follow around. I had the idea that it would be cool if someone played the game and suddenly got suspicious thinking that the dog was always following X etc.
I coded it so that if you picked up and dropped the dog near someone, they would consider that person their owner, and follow them were possible.
It added zilch to gameplay, it was pointless, but it amused me, and it only took 20 minutes to code.
I LOVE things like that.
The best thing about black and white was the fact that it named the villagers from your address book. I nicked that idea and stuck it into starship tycoon. I'm 100% determined that for Kudos, when I have a silly idea about stuff like that, it's going in. And I'll make sure I'll leave it in too. There's already stuff like this I added to the game and forget about until it happens when I'm playtesting.
I have a lot of silly small ideas for what would be cool in a video game. Normally these aren't about content as such, but ideas about how a game plays, or reacts, or handles things. These ideas are the ones that often crop up at game dev studios, and in the long torturous route from being a new idea, to a meeting, to a design doc, to a task list to QA, at some point they normally get killed.
It's often nobodys fault, its just the way of big companies by their nature.
For example, in the last big game I worked on, there were dogs. We thought it would be cool for dogs to wander round the world when they werent used. I thought it would be cool if they picked a 'master' to follow around. I had the idea that it would be cool if someone played the game and suddenly got suspicious thinking that the dog was always following X etc.
I coded it so that if you picked up and dropped the dog near someone, they would consider that person their owner, and follow them were possible.
It added zilch to gameplay, it was pointless, but it amused me, and it only took 20 minutes to code.
I LOVE things like that.
The best thing about black and white was the fact that it named the villagers from your address book. I nicked that idea and stuck it into starship tycoon. I'm 100% determined that for Kudos, when I have a silly idea about stuff like that, it's going in. And I'll make sure I'll leave it in too. There's already stuff like this I added to the game and forget about until it happens when I'm playtesting.
posted by cliff at
6:34 PM
