00:20 Introduction 00:35 (2008) _Braid_ game 00:38 (2016) _The_ _Witness_ game 00:42 (2001-2004) Jon wrote the Inner Product column for _Game_ _Developer_ _Magazine_ 00:48 (2000's) Jon was the primary host of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC. 00:59 (2000's) Jon was a regular participant in Indie Game Jam. 01:03 (2010-) Jon is a founding partner of Indie Fund 01:12 What was it like, with a passion for game development, studying at university? 01:50 Were you building video games at that time, or did that come later? 02:22 What kind of tools were you using to develop games at that time? 03:05 Is there anything you wished a mentor during university told you regarding game development? 04:35 What are resources are available to learn the game development knowledge that's not covered in university? 06:05 Is Game Developers Conference (GDC) fulfilling that gap in game development knowledge? 07:00 [Jon discusses the effects on project quality when game & technology companies are large.] 09:45 What can one do to evaluate what game features and design features might need changing? Which features survive the prototyping phase? 12:08 Can you breakdown your prototyping process at Thekla? 14:30 How does your process allow for core ideas (like line drawing in _The_ _Witness_ arising from the spellcast tracing from an earlier prototype) to bubble up and push aside other non-pivotal ideas? 19:28 If you don't find that purpose in prototyping, what inspired you to make these games? How did you find the 'abstract mechanic'? 23:18 What's the big thing that gets in the way of some indie games being either financially or creatively successful (or both)? 25:43 If an indie game developer cannot see ahead, is that your role (in Indie Fund) to go in and help identify those hinderances? 27:12 So, maybe as game developers, we're a little resistant to people coming in and changing parts of our games. 27:30 What's your advice for student game developers to better handle critique or feedback for the first time? Audience Q&A: 30:07 How can we proactively make our games work well for multiple players or social experiences? 32:00 [Jon discusses architectural design of buildings.] 34:12 Do you think the onus is on us as game developers to create all the tools to enhance the game experience? (In reference to Jon writing a slideshow program in his upcoming programming language Jai) 36:33 Do you see AAA game studios in the future making indie game titles? 41:45 Do you feel there are topics in other media (books, films, ...) that games have not touched yet? 46:05 Are there any game ideas that you feel have not been fully explored yet? 47:45 How can we stay nimble and flexible in the games industry that moves so fast? 47:55 [Jon discusses CPU & GPU performance over the years.] 49:15 [Jon discusses game consoles over the years.] 51:20 [Jon discusses his upcoming programming language Jai.] 52:00 How long did you originally scope the development time for _The_ _Witness_ ? 53:30 What is your advice towards planning a small game project (within a college semester, for example)? 55:30 What was it like to weave narrative into your past game projects? 1:00:20 What elements compose an experimental game? 1:01:20 What are your favorites games, and how did it inspire you? 1:01:45 (1986) _Trinity_ game by Infocom, designed by Brian Moriarty 1:02:10 [Jon discusses art.] 1:03:33 (1988) _Netrek_ game 1:04:20 (2000) _Counter-Strike_ game by Valve 1:06:40 Is virtual reality (VR) the future, and can that help us push past hardware limitations? 1:08:35 Do you have a secret repository where you dump all your game ideas? 1:09:47 Do you see pitfalls that may impede someone from creating games for social change? 1:11:57 What's the point of games? 1:14:15 Wrap up
I have to confess that I might be enjoying Mr.Blow's interviews more than his games, but it's very important to have a spokesperson for creative game designers and an inspiration to them.
Same here actually. I respect the guy immensely. But wasn't as blown away by his games so far (especially when it comes to the Witness, a game that's really fairly overrated IMHO and falsely compared with the Myst series).
I think the Witness is polarizing because if you're not into the basic concepts of the game, you're not going to enjoy the experience. I think there is one thing that's not easy to argue with, though, and that's the fact that The Witness has a staggeringly huge amount of thought, precision, and game design behind it. I'm not trying to imply that the people who dislike it "don't appreciate it" or "aren't judging it fairly," because as I said earlier, there are legitimate reasons to not like the game. On the other hand, I do have a bone to pick with people who think that it's pretentious/condescending, because even if you don't like it, it should be fairly obvious that one of the major themes of The Witness is "figuring out the truth for yourself," which completely goes against the idea that it's pretentious.
@@superwild1 I would never play the thing, I only like games that attempt to simulate reality, why is there an island? why is there puzzles on screens? they lost me right there. But I can appreciate its a great game, just like some movies are great but they have some minor historical inaccuracy that ruins them for me
One of the things I enjoy most in Jon's answers is how he structures them. Just like the point he makes about the experimental games conference, I feel like he is doing his best to provide a couple of contexts in his answers so that you get a workable grip on the problem. It seems more like giving you paths to explore than just some information to finish off the answer. Also some might find it distracting that he sometimes seems to cut short his own sentence, but to me it seems like this is the same type of exploratory approach: there is not necessarily a fully formed answer to a question immediately (except maybe if the question came up before, but the context, the people you are talking to will be different, and you may have changed your mind since then), but rather you discover the answer as you go along. For me it is interesting to see this process happen. (Kind of reminds me of listening to Elon Musk interviews.) In a way it is a shame that at present our language is so linear and you cannot communicate all the paths of thought at once.
Yeah, this definitely happens any time I listen to any incredible mind speak. I also had thought of Elon Musk. Gary Vaynerchuk does this incredibly often when he speaks. This investigative and exploratory approach to discussion and answering questions is a direct result of the deep thought processes occurring within these highly intelligent individuals.
Would have been nice if he had more time to think about his answers. But guess it would be boring for the audience for him to sit still for 5 minutes before answering. There where some really good questions and John gave some really thoughtful answers. Thank you.
He's also quite inexperienced compared to say someone like Carmack when it comes to public technical speaking. There's an order of magnitude of difference in how he spoke here and how clearly he speaks in his Twitch streams.
Mistakenly thought this said "Bonfireside Chat" and was briefly excited, thinking it was over an hour of Jonathan Blow talking about Dark Souls... Oops :p
He keeps subtly hinting at something he's working on now. A project on scope with the Witness or maybe larger, something very narrative focused. I must know.
I don't think JAI is a DSL, I'm no expert but to me domain specific languages are written to be almost single use, they get their value in their specificity, JAI by all means is a general purpose language.
Jai isn't a DSL. It might have nice features that are best used for making games, but at the end of the day it fills a very similar role as C, C++, or Rust, none of which are DSLs.
He talked about "doing something out of the box to publicize your game" before the game is actually finished. And he says this is important and makes a success or fail difference. That's soo horifying to me, because I Despise With An Incredibly Intense Passion the way movie, TV and game producers do that. I don't care what's coming in 3, 6 or 9 months or next year or something! I want to know what I can go see or play Right Now! I hate ads that waste my time telling me way way more than I want to know about something that's "coming in July" when it's freaking February! I change the channel when I see those things! Skip the ad! Turn it off! I don't &*^ care what's @#$ coming in July! And I really hate publicizing something I haven't even done yet. And oh man have I hated it when people I've worked for promised things to the world, without even asking me, that I'm just maybe toying with but haven't really proven yet. Oh gawd I hate that so bad. Just shoot me instead, seriously. But he says producers who don't do that flop. And from what I've heard elsewhere too, I guess that's apparently something that's actually pretty well known and understood in the industry. Which is why they all @#$ do it. You have to give people a chance to build something up in their minds so that when they finally consume it there's a release of some kind of built up tension just because they've been &^@ waiting for it. A whole lot more people go get something that's been "in the wings" for a while then something that's "available in stores now." So.. I'm about to finish this game I'm working on. And he's right, I'm absolutely not going to take that advice, I'm Not going to go publicize it before it's done, there's just no way I'm going to do that. But - I guess what I will do is, after I'm done, I'll publicize it and say "Coming on July 13!" or some date that's like 2 or 3 months away. I'll put up a web site with a couple of little trailers, videos of people playing the game, qutoes from testors, and put a Big Blazing Date up there with a ticking count down. Ha, it's already done, but I'll have a 2.5 month count down just to prime the public pump. And then I'll go do a bunch of things to try to get some traffic flowing to the site. Maybe half way through the waiting period I'll offer a "preorder" since it's something I'll already have. Ok, if that's what the (financially) successful people say you have to do to succeed, I guess I'll swallow my incredibly intense contempt for it and do same gdmf thing right along side them. I'm super glad I watched this. That little nugget right there could easily spell the difference for me. Thanks Jon!
yeah it sucks. it puts unnecessary stress and pressure on people and that type of artificial deadline pressure of overhyped promises is a large reason people hate corporate
@@kecksohn Yes it is. And it's.. full of over-emotional drivel, too. I should've just said "Maybe a good thing to do, if you can afford it, is finish it first, and then market and advertise it for a few months while you're putting in the finishing touches before releasing."
I have to disagree with the idea that triple A companies would never make 'indie' games. Companies who are able to spend hundreds of millions on videogames for really single titles and sequels, probably would have like 10 million they could spend on an 'indie type' game. And frankly, they already do! Look at games like the mobile stuff based upon big franchises. The fact they do not do this more regularly has more to do with a certain short-sightedness than only the fact they focus on the 'Transformers movie' level of videogames. In other words, just because they have the bigger budgets to spend, doesn't mean they couldn't spend less money on a smaller game. I also think people underestimate how unbelievable amounts of money are wasted in triple A game development. All it takes for publishers to get interested again in amazing concepts that made past more original games like Max Payne or Messiah or Evolva 'hot' again, really is enough indie developers putting a strong emphasis on gameplay resulting in way higher sales in relation to their budgets than any COD game ever could. I think we might actually be much closer to that point than you'd think. Problem is, people who buy games often don't seem to either realise the gameplay in games like COD is fairly 'dumb', limited and samey or they are just completely unaware to what games *can be* with a larger focus on more original gameplay. In a lot of ways, the triple A crap we get now, is a direct result of consumers who continue buying that 'crap'. It actually pains me to see games like DayZ and PUBG are so stupidly popular. Because if there's one direction popular gaming shouldn't go, it is probably that. It is also false to suggest indie videogames are only 'experimental'. Nowadays, if you look at 'experimental' games, you'd most likely look at game jam level stuff and gameplay that's way way out there, instead of perhaps more matured games that focus on more complete or more original gameplay overall. Last but not least, VR gaming is definitely a DOA type of thing *because* of how the tracking is broken, if not inferior to what we had in the late 80s, early nineties. Blow is actually correct in how VR has potential, but we really knew that already since the 'last time' it was made a part of videogaming. I also think the push for high-end visuals for VR and choosing essentially low-end mobile-phone grade sensors that are cheap, is exactly what crippled it. Invest in better, more accurate positional tracking if you want gaming to be without nausea issues. No way around that. As long as games need teleportation for movement to circument tracking issues, VR won't be ready for any true VR games really.
I hate youtube tutorials! Everything is explained too slow until I don't understand something and then I have to keep repeating it over and over. You shouldn't teach with videos, written tutorials are far better, they're fixed in time.
I usually prefer videos. It's very useful to hear what someone was thinking through voice, and I find the teachers to be much more honest. [Good] written works are generally more precise and edited, but that editing process can remove a lot of empathy and humanity from the topic. They're different mediums and each has its benefits for certain tasks.
This interview is an odd one. Jon and the other guy seem disconnected and the questions are a bit strange. There are some really abstract questions that don't really ask anything.
I think the guy expected Jon to talk about game Dev as hes used to teaching it. I believe Jon takes a negative view on the way all computer science is taught today so framing it in those ways was never going to work. Jon is great, I felt like he was kind of constrained by these questions in a way.
Jon isn't doing art. He thinks he is doing art, but he isn't doing art. This methodology whereby he finds the germ of an idea through exploratory programming, then scraps everything to make it the foundation, then builds the right world around the idea to articulate all aspects of it perfectly and have the idea discover its own ramifications like growing a crystal isn't art... it's design. It is the same process as creating a corporate logo, like the one for Apple which is an apple with a bite taken out of it to represent the apple from the tree of knowledge in Genesis, to then convey the sense that Apple products are about providing knowledge to their customers. Now. Take that message and think up an alternative logo that doesn't use an apple. What can you come up with. Nothing as good I would suspect. You also have to think about the logo working on a letterhead in B&W and at billboard scale. When you get into other company logos based on the text of their name the choice of font is crucial, and sometimes specially designed to convey a certain status and personality to the brand. So, you should see from this short description an affinity does exist between graphic design and Jonathan Blow's _The Witness_ and _Braid._ Their narrative elements aren't design, and sit atop the core design as a form of cringe artwork, but few like the games for their audio logs and prose sections. In _The Witness_ Jon designs aesthetics that have a dynamical space of possibilities accessible by the very simple mechanics of invisible line tracing (not line drawing as everyone says it is as that would be more like the spell casting mechanic that he developed and then realised wasn't part of an RPG but enough to be the foundation of a tight design explored thoroughly), where one of these possibilities (occluded by the mystery of your own false assumptions as you have incorrectly inferred the rules of the puzzle, or where the puzzle can be, or how a puzzle's local state must be a constant and can't be subject to indirect change from some other mechanism within the global environment, none of which you have been told you can't do, as you have never been told how to do anything - past engaging with the first door as the line tracing is a mode, when the CONTROL key could have halted player movement when held down and acted as a Quasimode to avoid lock-in and be better designed mechanically, or be hold RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON, or be hold LEFT TRIGGER on a gamepad), is the solution and yields positive feedback and a sense of progression and an incremental recognition that assumes you have understood some underlying rule that can be relied on in similar puzzles later on (which isn't the case if you brute forced the solution or followed a walkthrough or speedrun played back in slow-mo because you mistakenly assume, again, that it is a puzzle game where the goal is about getting to the end, and there will be some satisfyingly revelatory pay off about the island the-re rather than what seems to many to be a pretentious troll as they had the wrong expectations that _The Witness_ was a puzzle game, and not actually about something else that required the island environment, as the panel puzzles they rushed through as they got too incrutable for them with the aid of a speedrun walkthrough just to get "their money's worth' by seeing the ending for themselves, or skipping all of THAT and finding a video of the ending cutscene, as people did with _No Man's Sky,_ leaves them frustrated and bitter as they haven't understood what the world of the island was created for, as the panel puzzles could have been hosted on a website and still been non-linearly accessed, including the sound puzzles), is intended to give rise to an "Epiphany" of understanding, to learn the real rules without being told anything beyond where to start tracing the line on the first locked door and highlighting the exits of the maze and flashing red the parts in error to help narrow the dynamical space of possibility to be more restrictive than every possible path traceable, followed by the major meta epiphany that the traces aren't limited to just the panels, not that you were told that was the only place you could interact with the world, which was then, for me followed by the meta-meta epiphany that the island and the objects that are in it avoid circles everywhere that is not the start of a trace and how unimaginably complicated it must have been to avoid these "null" cases, as everything that looks like an affordance becomes distracting clutter during interaction (i.e. you don't want to add buttons and switches and levers to a control panel that aren't connected to any functionality even if they aren't labelled, and you have to figure out their combined action on the system's state through trial and error as if messing about with the T.A.R.D.I.S.' octagonal console which was designed to be used by eight trained Gallifreyan pilots), with the best case of this anti-design being the wheels of the mine cart in the Town. Art elicits an emotional reponse by communicating a theme. So, the very fact that many don't get to the meta-level of _The Witness_ and just solve the panel puzzles, thinking that is all there is, represents an artistic failure. The audio logs are optional and avoidable. The stuff beyond the Hotel which interconnects with some philosophical ramblings that could have been strewn in the grass of _PUBG_ as audio logs to pick up and be just as ""existential"" about man's relationship to the world as an observer and there being no difference in a Berkelerian sense between living in a simulation and reality isn't profound and is undercut as anything to be seriously entertained or philosophically explored by it being immediately acknowledged that Blow is taking the piss, quite literally, obsessed with circular biscuits, and now unfit for society due to spending too much time in some ""Buddhist"" VR, which kinda completely misses the point about Maya. So, _The Witness_ doesn't even convey the philosophical depth of a short poem and at best comes across as an insincere time wasting limerick. His advice is frankly dangerous, as most games can be grown over time so that they are playable and fun and challenging and engaging at every stage in their elaboration. _Civilisation VI_ didn't need to have every feature finished before Sid Meier stepped back and thought to himself "Aha! Now I finally know what I needed to focus on all this time, and can now scrap all of this code I have written, and start from scratch and make something well designed that explores one idea thoroughly". There are a lot of systems underlying his game which probably don't even need to be there and don't contribute to what its players like about it, and could even detract from it, but they are so embedded that they are inextricably linked to code that would be too much work to change, and the whole point is to have a lot of code complexity because it can then be reflective of the complexity of geopolitical world history, technological innovations, economics and territorial invasions as a result of failed diplomacy. So, that's territorial expansion, resource acquisition, technological innovation, economic markets, governmental taxation, democracy and its alternatives, diplomatic relations with foreign nations, national defense or conquest leading to the management of military engagements in war... so that's eight interrelated things, not just one idea (line tracing) thoroughly explored in all possible forms it can take and then justified through some unifying quasi-narrative about observing the world, whatever the world is, which is in doubt, as it may be a simulation, even when you escape the island which is revealed to have been a simulation, and the bleed through those due to a form of temporary induced obsessive compulsive disorder leading to a cognitive sensitisation towards pareidolia. Then there is the less apparent "theme", so ineptly articulated and communicated to so few as to barely qualify as one, which is the observation not of the world outside of the observer, but of the world within, and the awareness of their own thought processes as they engage with puzzles and then consider whether their goal directed behaviour is itself an assumption that has been brought into _The Witness_ from other games, and actually _The Witness_ never claimed to be a game in the sense it would provide some reward for completion / recognition of THIS self-reflective Buddhist theme. Yet, this is at odds with it having Achievements and Trophies. You don't get to have a Platinum be a goal that can be acquired and then have the super subtle hidden message of your game be don't strive to achieve as you have all that you need within you already. Blow's advice blows.
Continued... Build a game world up in layers with an interactive feedback loop at every stage as early as possible with prototypal graphics so that you can pivot away from a foundation that isn't fun having found out soon that it wasn't fun, whereas creating an entire new 3D engine for it would have deferred any testing of ideas made with that 3D engine. You need to recognise that you are making a game, not making a program. If your goal of a game G was a fixed design D and all you had to do was figure out how to write the program P then you would be done as soon as you got P built, but that is never the case, you have better ideas and insights along the way, you have feedback from other players about what works for them (try not standing over them when they play talking up what you want them to like or notice about your game as this is your only opportunity to observe the reaction of a person prepared to try your game and give their opinion on it and you need to not shape their reaction, and probably not ask a friend who will be afraid of hurting your feelings and just say nice things, if you don't get constructive criticism "I'd like it better if you did X" rather than "X sucks", at least accept "X sucks" if "Y is great", as in asking eight people where five like Y and seven hate X should persuade you to change your game that way to emphasise Y and remove or reduce the impact of X even if you like X more than Y, which is fine if that is the case, make a copy of that build for you to play, and continue with the Y > X version for everyone else), but it isn't all you have to do, as it isn't a matter of just writing P to achieve G with a fixed design D, but iterating the design D to make a better G2, G3, G4... which can involve P2, P3, P4 and will usually make most devs limit themselves to D2, D3 out of exhaustion as they can't implement it more than three times given the complexity of P whether it is rewritten from scratch, or worse from D's perspective, is reshaped to be a bit more like D2 but not really as good a D2 as if it were rewritten from scratch, with D3 almost certainly not a reboot even if D2 was a reboot of D's spell casting idea. _The Witness_ had to reshape the island multiple times to be coherent in the expression of its aesthetics which restricted the space of possibilities of its dynamics that was explored by its very simple mechanics. This is unimaginably hard, and basically the wrong way to make games (not that it is a game - at best it is in an existential crisis over whether it is a game or an experience, trophies and Diamond Sutras cause cognitive dissonance on that metric), and no Stanford student should follow his advice. It is better, but not "right" to focus on the mechanics and leave the aesthetics to much later (i.e. do a _Sokoban_ game in 2D before making it 3D to see how the idea works, _PUBG_ could be prototyped as a flat landscape seen top down, and of course elevation does play a part in the 3D game: so you have stairs in houses and undulating terrain, and people parachuting in, but that is just an extra dynamical space on top of the space of possibilities that can be adequately assessed on the "Flatland" prototype, even a game like _Star Citizen_ would have benefited from being top down 2D vector graphics with a camera that zooms back the faster you move as the monetised articles in shops and social dynamics of the collaborative MMO ship piloting and repair would have been able to be assessed as being fun rather than just assume it will be like _Faster Than Light_ for example, and hope for the best, as no one has yet playtested _Star Citizen's_ final socioeconomic vision despite all the money raised to make it, so it is still a possibility it won't even now result in a fun game that will hold a large population, just look at the number of people now playing _Halo: Infinite_ multiplayer after its $500,000,000 budget was blown on making it Free 2 Play). The problem with a mechanics focus is that you either obsess over a "juicy" jump mechanic, or making something original about a robot who solves puzzles with a giant horseshoe magnet (ignoring the fact that the robot is metal, nevermind), or you over elaborate the mechanics of your stay-in-one-place shooting gallery masquerading as a stealth adventure stuck-behind-enemy-lines sniper sequence of scenarios each with their own 'framing narrative' that could be played with just the Right Thumbstick and the Left and Right Triggers, and then you get carried away with wanting the D-Pad to adjust the scope so you can take account of the wind and then factor in the Coriolis Effect at extreme range, and before you know it every button on the controller has a function to elaborate the mechanics and make it a more faithful simulation, and therefore (you think) a more atmospheric and immersive experience to act as the foundation to your shooting gallery gameplay wrapped in a slideshow of narrative locational skip aheads. This could work, but simulation games don't sell as much as other genres for a reason. The depth in the mechanics is... interesting... but unless its mastery is rewarding (which requires a lot of testing and tuning and iteration), it is more likely to default to being arbitrarily frustrating and overcomplicated and in the way of whatever the story has to offer. As your character can't move it restricts the gameplay to being either one high-value target, one-shot, move on to next scene... or... take out all of the soldiers who would otherwise search the surrounding hills to find you in a short window of time when they are all exposed out in the open away from cover (the fail condition). Having it be that the enemy take cover and eventually find you (with mortars) an hour later, may be tense the first time, but ought not to be because once you lose the advantage of surprise and they start hunting for you it isn't like you can sneak away as this game is so simple you can not use Left Thumbstick to move (as that mechanic would make the engine more complicated and less of a shooting gallery). Here, I am choosing this artifically restrictive example to show the situation in which a developer may feel it is justified to elaborate the controls to enrich the mechanics and make the simulation more nuanced in hopes the game will be better (check out the control scheme for _Star Citizen_ for the XBOX Elite gamepad if you want a good laugh as it is very instructive on what not to do... that is WAY too complicated for a player to grok). All this leaves out of Aesthetics, Mechanics and Dynamics is the latter, which is the space of possibilities where the gameplay takes place. Having Dynamics be your focus results in _Halo 3_ or _Super Mario 64._ Those games aren't really about their stories, or characters (which barely talk). There is a simple framing narrative and the controls elaborate contextually in intuitive ways, so that Look will Steer the Warthog in _Halo 3_ (whereas _Battlefield 4_ unnecessarily presents you with entirely new control scheme to learn in the "I am driving a Jeep now" context), and the Wall Climb is just a Jump off the surface you are heading towards, with the only slight weakness being Mario in the water and it being slightly counter intuitive how to get him to surface for air; and that game came with a full manual (so I really shouldn't complain). These are, in my opinion, the best realised examples of their genre. _Robotron 64_ may be the best twin stick shooter, with _Geometry Wars_ a close second, only held back by it sometimes killing you with its excessive visual clutter of particle effects. They wouldn't keep remaking _Skyrim_ if it wasn't popular as an RPG, and the scale of the world, and the Radiant Quests, still seem to cohere to create a dynamical space of possibilities for adventure.
Continued... So, you should not make P to make G with D a fixed D as D will likely be unsatisfactory, but instead make p (a prototype of P ideally in 2D) and see whether _Dark Souls_ works effectively in a large open world that necessitates horse riding before committing to the effort to write the program P for _Elden Ring._ Maybe there is something about _Dark Souls_ being a claustrophic one or two player version of _Gauntlet_ where every encounter is an unforgiving boss that you lose by making it open grasslands dotted with rocks. Why are the enemies staying where they are and not all converging on you _en masse?_ This weakness undermines the aesthetics, as it blunts the anticipated dramatic stakes. Do the enemies all have cataracts and can't see me until I get close? At least have an explanation in game for their weird behaviour. _Shadow of the Colossus_ didn't have this issue because it had you ride for miles and miles between bosses. That is why the bosses aren't seen fighting each other. That allows them to roam around during an encounter and still be separated from other regions containing other bosses. _Dark Souls_ has a hidden staircase snake around the rear of a tower down into the depths and soon leads to a new out of line of sight encounter with an initially lethargic cursed foe. They aren't like NPCs in _GTA V_ that are circling the block, or those in _Cyberpunk 2077_ who make use of a cross walk, sit to eat food from a street vendor and then end up taking a phone call. It is reasonable that they aren't roaming about from where you find them first, but the same can't be said of enemies in _Elden Ring_ on horseback. Mocking this up in 2D would have identified this issue early, and maybe the solution would have presented itself in that context (or various fixes that reshaped the dynamical space could have been tried resulting in one which could be inferred to be aesthetically more credible in terms of enemy motivations). So, this prototype p needs to be simple aesthetically (potentially 2D programmer art or vector graphics or ASCII characters) so it takes minimal time to get to a playable build of the game g expressing the design d. This can then be iterated far faster with d4 being the result of p, p2, p3, p4 having been done, and when d4 gets somewhere good the whole thing can be programmed from scratch with aesthetics that best suit d4 -> D -> P -> G (which doesn't need much of any further refinement other than some minor tuning). Rapidly iterating on a prototype p will guide you to what you need to make to achieve a dynamical space of possibilities existing in the tension between the constraints of what the mechanics allow the user to articulate and what the aesthetics allows their actions to mean in the context of world and its themes / characters / and (optional) narrative.
![GDS 2017: Jonathan Blow - Keynote [EN]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/v_A3T-MLWJ8/mqdefault.jpg)
![GDS 2017: Jonathan Blow - Keynote [EN]](/img/tr.png)
00:20 Introduction
00:35 (2008) _Braid_ game
00:38 (2016) _The_ _Witness_ game
00:42 (2001-2004) Jon wrote the Inner Product column for _Game_ _Developer_ _Magazine_
00:48 (2000's) Jon was the primary host of the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC.
00:59 (2000's) Jon was a regular participant in Indie Game Jam.
01:03 (2010-) Jon is a founding partner of Indie Fund
01:12 What was it like, with a passion for game development, studying at university?
01:50 Were you building video games at that time, or did that come later?
02:22 What kind of tools were you using to develop games at that time?
03:05 Is there anything you wished a mentor during university told you regarding game development?
04:35 What are resources are available to learn the game development knowledge that's not covered in university?
06:05 Is Game Developers Conference (GDC) fulfilling that gap in game development knowledge?
07:00 [Jon discusses the effects on project quality when game & technology companies are large.]
09:45 What can one do to evaluate what game features and design features might need changing? Which features survive the prototyping phase?
12:08 Can you breakdown your prototyping process at Thekla?
14:30 How does your process allow for core ideas (like line drawing in _The_ _Witness_ arising from the spellcast tracing from an earlier prototype) to bubble up and push aside other non-pivotal ideas?
19:28 If you don't find that purpose in prototyping, what inspired you to make these games? How did you find the 'abstract mechanic'?
23:18 What's the big thing that gets in the way of some indie games being either financially or creatively successful (or both)?
25:43 If an indie game developer cannot see ahead, is that your role (in Indie Fund) to go in and help identify those hinderances?
27:12 So, maybe as game developers, we're a little resistant to people coming in and changing parts of our games.
27:30 What's your advice for student game developers to better handle critique or feedback for the first time?
Audience Q&A:
30:07 How can we proactively make our games work well for multiple players or social experiences?
32:00 [Jon discusses architectural design of buildings.]
34:12 Do you think the onus is on us as game developers to create all the tools to enhance the game experience? (In reference to Jon writing a slideshow program in his upcoming programming language Jai)
36:33 Do you see AAA game studios in the future making indie game titles?
41:45 Do you feel there are topics in other media (books, films, ...) that games have not touched yet?
46:05 Are there any game ideas that you feel have not been fully explored yet?
47:45 How can we stay nimble and flexible in the games industry that moves so fast?
47:55 [Jon discusses CPU & GPU performance over the years.]
49:15 [Jon discusses game consoles over the years.]
51:20 [Jon discusses his upcoming programming language Jai.]
52:00 How long did you originally scope the development time for _The_ _Witness_ ?
53:30 What is your advice towards planning a small game project (within a college semester, for example)?
55:30 What was it like to weave narrative into your past game projects?
1:00:20 What elements compose an experimental game?
1:01:20 What are your favorites games, and how did it inspire you?
1:01:45 (1986) _Trinity_ game by Infocom, designed by Brian Moriarty
1:02:10 [Jon discusses art.]
1:03:33 (1988) _Netrek_ game
1:04:20 (2000) _Counter-Strike_ game by Valve
1:06:40 Is virtual reality (VR) the future, and can that help us push past hardware limitations?
1:08:35 Do you have a secret repository where you dump all your game ideas?
1:09:47 Do you see pitfalls that may impede someone from creating games for social change?
1:11:57 What's the point of games?
1:14:15 Wrap up
Great Q&A. Interviewer did a great job and most of the questions were thoughtful.
I have to confess that I might be enjoying Mr.Blow's interviews more than his games, but it's very important to have a spokesperson for creative game designers and an inspiration to them.
Same here actually. I respect the guy immensely. But wasn't as blown away by his games so far (especially when it comes to the Witness, a game that's really fairly overrated IMHO and falsely compared with the Myst series).
I think the Witness is polarizing because if you're not into the basic concepts of the game, you're not going to enjoy the experience. I think there is one thing that's not easy to argue with, though, and that's the fact that The Witness has a staggeringly huge amount of thought, precision, and game design behind it.
I'm not trying to imply that the people who dislike it "don't appreciate it" or "aren't judging it fairly," because as I said earlier, there are legitimate reasons to not like the game. On the other hand, I do have a bone to pick with people who think that it's pretentious/condescending, because even if you don't like it, it should be fairly obvious that one of the major themes of The Witness is "figuring out the truth for yourself," which completely goes against the idea that it's pretentious.
@@PHeMoX witness haters be like "muh wheres da story ??? "
@@PHeMoX Did you complete the witness? To me, it's a masterpiece, and I can't say that about any other game I've played.
@@superwild1 I would never play the thing, I only like games that attempt to simulate reality, why is there an island? why is there puzzles on screens? they lost me right there. But I can appreciate its a great game, just like some movies are great but they have some minor historical inaccuracy that ruins them for me
One of the things I enjoy most in Jon's answers is how he structures them. Just like the point he makes about the experimental games conference, I feel like he is doing his best to provide a couple of contexts in his answers so that you get a workable grip on the problem. It seems more like giving you paths to explore than just some information to finish off the answer.
Also some might find it distracting that he sometimes seems to cut short his own sentence, but to me it seems like this is the same type of exploratory approach: there is not necessarily a fully formed answer to a question immediately (except maybe if the question came up before, but the context, the people you are talking to will be different, and you may have changed your mind since then), but rather you discover the answer as you go along. For me it is interesting to see this process happen. (Kind of reminds me of listening to Elon Musk interviews.)
In a way it is a shame that at present our language is so linear and you cannot communicate all the paths of thought at once.
Yeah, this definitely happens any time I listen to any incredible mind speak. I also had thought of Elon Musk. Gary Vaynerchuk does this incredibly often when he speaks. This investigative and exploratory approach to discussion and answering questions is a direct result of the deep thought processes occurring within these highly intelligent individuals.
Non-linear communication. I love it.
Intelligent human being with well structured language. The clarity of his answers tells you how clarified are the concepts in his mind he refers to.
Thanks for the interview! Jon is a true artist!
"They hardly do anything. And they spend soo much money hardly doing anything."
Hahaa, wow, that's quite an indictment. Quotable, too.
He's just talking about the Pareto principle.
Great interview! The host asked all the follow-up questions I had :D
This host is amazing.. wow.
Very excited to watch this. Mr. Blow is a huge inspiration.
Jonathan Blow's The Witness is the most profound and mind blowing video game ever made. Jonathan is a humble genius.
What the fuck are you smoking
@@rambammer2000 Its tru
Thank you Jon , You changed my life , And thank you MediaXstanford for the interview.
Amazing job by the interviewer
Would have been nice if he had more time to think about his answers. But guess it would be boring for the audience for him to sit still for 5 minutes before answering.
There where some really good questions and John gave some really thoughtful answers. Thank you.
He's also quite inexperienced compared to say someone like Carmack when it comes to public technical speaking. There's an order of magnitude of difference in how he spoke here and how clearly he speaks in his Twitch streams.
"I had a file with 120 game ideas in it"
Great interview. Thanks for posting this!
Great to hear the perspectives of very established developers! Listening to this talk opened up a bit of a roadblock that I had with my game.
Great host too
Mistakenly thought this said "Bonfireside Chat" and was briefly excited, thinking it was over an hour of Jonathan Blow talking about Dark Souls...
Oops :p
He keeps subtly hinting at something he's working on now. A project on scope with the Witness or maybe larger, something very narrative focused. I must know.
Daniel Gilchrist the language?
oh man that last answer is great
Great chat.
2:54 Yea, Jonathan Blow is doing exactly that.
I don't think JAI is a DSL, I'm no expert but to me domain specific languages are written to be almost single use, they get their value in their specificity, JAI by all means is a general purpose language.
Jai isn't a DSL. It might have nice features that are best used for making games, but at the end of the day it fills a very similar role as C, C++, or Rust, none of which are DSLs.
I've been working on my game for thirty years and I don't know what the foundational idea is.
The moment he made that statement about BR2 he lost me. How do you not catch the philosophical underpinnings of that movie?
He talked about "doing something out of the box to publicize your game" before the game is actually finished. And he says this is important and makes a success or fail difference. That's soo horifying to me, because I Despise With An Incredibly Intense Passion the way movie, TV and game producers do that. I don't care what's coming in 3, 6 or 9 months or next year or something! I want to know what I can go see or play Right Now! I hate ads that waste my time telling me way way more than I want to know about something that's "coming in July" when it's freaking February! I change the channel when I see those things! Skip the ad! Turn it off! I don't &*^ care what's @#$ coming in July!
And I really hate publicizing something I haven't even done yet. And oh man have I hated it when people I've worked for promised things to the world, without even asking me, that I'm just maybe toying with but haven't really proven yet. Oh gawd I hate that so bad. Just shoot me instead, seriously.
But he says producers who don't do that flop. And from what I've heard elsewhere too, I guess that's apparently something that's actually pretty well known and understood in the industry. Which is why they all @#$ do it. You have to give people a chance to build something up in their minds so that when they finally consume it there's a release of some kind of built up tension just because they've been &^@ waiting for it. A whole lot more people go get something that's been "in the wings" for a while then something that's "available in stores now."
So.. I'm about to finish this game I'm working on. And he's right, I'm absolutely not going to take that advice, I'm Not going to go publicize it before it's done, there's just no way I'm going to do that. But - I guess what I will do is, after I'm done, I'll publicize it and say "Coming on July 13!" or some date that's like 2 or 3 months away. I'll put up a web site with a couple of little trailers, videos of people playing the game, qutoes from testors, and put a Big Blazing Date up there with a ticking count down. Ha, it's already done, but I'll have a 2.5 month count down just to prime the public pump. And then I'll go do a bunch of things to try to get some traffic flowing to the site. Maybe half way through the waiting period I'll offer a "preorder" since it's something I'll already have.
Ok, if that's what the (financially) successful people say you have to do to succeed, I guess I'll swallow my incredibly intense contempt for it and do same gdmf thing right along side them.
I'm super glad I watched this. That little nugget right there could easily spell the difference for me. Thanks Jon!
dude thats a lot of text
welcome to a capitalist society dawg
yeah it sucks. it puts unnecessary stress and pressure on people and that type of artificial deadline pressure of overhyped promises is a large reason people hate corporate
@@kecksohn Yes it is. And it's.. full of over-emotional drivel, too. I should've just said "Maybe a good thing to do, if you can afford it, is finish it first, and then market and advertise it for a few months while you're putting in the finishing touches before releasing."
I have to disagree with the idea that triple A companies would never make 'indie' games. Companies who are able to spend hundreds of millions on videogames for really single titles and sequels, probably would have like 10 million they could spend on an 'indie type' game. And frankly, they already do! Look at games like the mobile stuff based upon big franchises. The fact they do not do this more regularly has more to do with a certain short-sightedness than only the fact they focus on the 'Transformers movie' level of videogames. In other words, just because they have the bigger budgets to spend, doesn't mean they couldn't spend less money on a smaller game. I also think people underestimate how unbelievable amounts of money are wasted in triple A game development.
All it takes for publishers to get interested again in amazing concepts that made past more original games like Max Payne or Messiah or Evolva 'hot' again, really is enough indie developers putting a strong emphasis on gameplay resulting in way higher sales in relation to their budgets than any COD game ever could. I think we might actually be much closer to that point than you'd think.
Problem is, people who buy games often don't seem to either realise the gameplay in games like COD is fairly 'dumb', limited and samey or they are just completely unaware to what games *can be* with a larger focus on more original gameplay. In a lot of ways, the triple A crap we get now, is a direct result of consumers who continue buying that 'crap'. It actually pains me to see games like DayZ and PUBG are so stupidly popular. Because if there's one direction popular gaming shouldn't go, it is probably that.
It is also false to suggest indie videogames are only 'experimental'. Nowadays, if you look at 'experimental' games, you'd most likely look at game jam level stuff and gameplay that's way way out there, instead of perhaps more matured games that focus on more complete or more original gameplay overall.
Last but not least, VR gaming is definitely a DOA type of thing *because* of how the tracking is broken, if not inferior to what we had in the late 80s, early nineties. Blow is actually correct in how VR has potential, but we really knew that already since the 'last time' it was made a part of videogaming. I also think the push for high-end visuals for VR and choosing essentially low-end mobile-phone grade sensors that are cheap, is exactly what crippled it. Invest in better, more accurate positional tracking if you want gaming to be without nausea issues. No way around that. As long as games need teleportation for movement to circument tracking issues, VR won't be ready for any true VR games really.
Games should go back to being like centipede. Original simple and fun.
22:33 Witness 2 verified ;)
omg
Looking forward to this fartside shat
I like 58:10
I think Jon should have gotten more sleep haha
When did Carl Pilkington start making games?
Interviewer looks uncomfortable.
I hate youtube tutorials! Everything is explained too slow until I don't understand something and then I have to keep repeating it over and over. You shouldn't teach with videos, written tutorials are far better, they're fixed in time.
I usually prefer videos. It's very useful to hear what someone was thinking through voice, and I find the teachers to be much more honest. [Good] written works are generally more precise and edited, but that editing process can remove a lot of empathy and humanity from the topic. They're different mediums and each has its benefits for certain tasks.
This interview is an odd one. Jon and the other guy seem disconnected and the questions are a bit strange. There are some really abstract questions that don't really ask anything.
I think the guy expected Jon to talk about game Dev as hes used to teaching it.
I believe Jon takes a negative view on the way all computer science is taught today so framing it in those ways was never going to work.
Jon is great, I felt like he was kind of constrained by these questions in a way.
Jon isn't doing art. He thinks he is doing art, but he isn't doing art. This methodology whereby he finds the germ of an idea through exploratory programming, then scraps everything to make it the foundation, then builds the right world around the idea to articulate all aspects of it perfectly and have the idea discover its own ramifications like growing a crystal isn't art... it's design. It is the same process as creating a corporate logo, like the one for Apple which is an apple with a bite taken out of it to represent the apple from the tree of knowledge in Genesis, to then convey the sense that Apple products are about providing knowledge to their customers. Now. Take that message and think up an alternative logo that doesn't use an apple. What can you come up with. Nothing as good I would suspect. You also have to think about the logo working on a letterhead in B&W and at billboard scale. When you get into other company logos based on the text of their name the choice of font is crucial, and sometimes specially designed to convey a certain status and personality to the brand. So, you should see from this short description an affinity does exist between graphic design and Jonathan Blow's _The Witness_ and _Braid._ Their narrative elements aren't design, and sit atop the core design as a form of cringe artwork, but few like the games for their audio logs and prose sections. In _The Witness_ Jon designs aesthetics that have a dynamical space of possibilities accessible by the very simple mechanics of invisible line tracing (not line drawing as everyone says it is as that would be more like the spell casting mechanic that he developed and then realised wasn't part of an RPG but enough to be the foundation of a tight design explored thoroughly), where one of these possibilities (occluded by the mystery of your own false assumptions as you have incorrectly inferred the rules of the puzzle, or where the puzzle can be, or how a puzzle's local state must be a constant and can't be subject to indirect change from some other mechanism within the global environment, none of which you have been told you can't do, as you have never been told how to do anything - past engaging with the first door as the line tracing is a mode, when the CONTROL key could have halted player movement when held down and acted as a Quasimode to avoid lock-in and be better designed mechanically, or be hold RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON, or be hold LEFT TRIGGER on a gamepad), is the solution and yields positive feedback and a sense of progression and an incremental recognition that assumes you have understood some underlying rule that can be relied on in similar puzzles later on (which isn't the case if you brute forced the solution or followed a walkthrough or speedrun played back in slow-mo because you mistakenly assume, again, that it is a puzzle game where the goal is about getting to the end, and there will be some satisfyingly revelatory pay off about the island the-re rather than what seems to many to be a pretentious troll as they had the wrong expectations that _The Witness_ was a puzzle game, and not actually about something else that required the island environment, as the panel puzzles they rushed through as they got too incrutable for them with the aid of a speedrun walkthrough just to get "their money's worth' by seeing the ending for themselves, or skipping all of THAT and finding a video of the ending cutscene, as people did with _No Man's Sky,_ leaves them frustrated and bitter as they haven't understood what the world of the island was created for, as the panel puzzles could have been hosted on a website and still been non-linearly accessed, including the sound puzzles), is intended to give rise to an "Epiphany" of understanding, to learn the real rules without being told anything beyond where to start tracing the line on the first locked door and highlighting the exits of the maze and flashing red the parts in error to help narrow the dynamical space of possibility to be more restrictive than every possible path traceable, followed by the major meta epiphany that the traces aren't limited to just the panels, not that you were told that was the only place you could interact with the world, which was then, for me followed by the meta-meta epiphany that the island and the objects that are in it avoid circles everywhere that is not the start of a trace and how unimaginably complicated it must have been to avoid these "null" cases, as everything that looks like an affordance becomes distracting clutter during interaction (i.e. you don't want to add buttons and switches and levers to a control panel that aren't connected to any functionality even if they aren't labelled, and you have to figure out their combined action on the system's state through trial and error as if messing about with the T.A.R.D.I.S.' octagonal console which was designed to be used by eight trained Gallifreyan pilots), with the best case of this anti-design being the wheels of the mine cart in the Town.
Art elicits an emotional reponse by communicating a theme. So, the very fact that many don't get to the meta-level of _The Witness_ and just solve the panel puzzles, thinking that is all there is, represents an artistic failure. The audio logs are optional and avoidable. The stuff beyond the Hotel which interconnects with some philosophical ramblings that could have been strewn in the grass of _PUBG_ as audio logs to pick up and be just as ""existential"" about man's relationship to the world as an observer and there being no difference in a Berkelerian sense between living in a simulation and reality isn't profound and is undercut as anything to be seriously entertained or philosophically explored by it being immediately acknowledged that Blow is taking the piss, quite literally, obsessed with circular biscuits, and now unfit for society due to spending too much time in some ""Buddhist"" VR, which kinda completely misses the point about Maya. So, _The Witness_ doesn't even convey the philosophical depth of a short poem and at best comes across as an insincere time wasting limerick.
His advice is frankly dangerous, as most games can be grown over time so that they are playable and fun and challenging and engaging at every stage in their elaboration. _Civilisation VI_ didn't need to have every feature finished before Sid Meier stepped back and thought to himself "Aha! Now I finally know what I needed to focus on all this time, and can now scrap all of this code I have written, and start from scratch and make something well designed that explores one idea thoroughly". There are a lot of systems underlying his game which probably don't even need to be there and don't contribute to what its players like about it, and could even detract from it, but they are so embedded that they are inextricably linked to code that would be too much work to change, and the whole point is to have a lot of code complexity because it can then be reflective of the complexity of geopolitical world history, technological innovations, economics and territorial invasions as a result of failed diplomacy. So, that's territorial expansion, resource acquisition, technological innovation, economic markets, governmental taxation, democracy and its alternatives, diplomatic relations with foreign nations, national defense or conquest leading to the management of military engagements in war... so that's eight interrelated things, not just one idea (line tracing) thoroughly explored in all possible forms it can take and then justified through some unifying quasi-narrative about observing the world, whatever the world is, which is in doubt, as it may be a simulation, even when you escape the island which is revealed to have been a simulation, and the bleed through those due to a form of temporary induced obsessive compulsive disorder leading to a cognitive sensitisation towards pareidolia. Then there is the less apparent "theme", so ineptly articulated and communicated to so few as to barely qualify as one, which is the observation not of the world outside of the observer, but of the world within, and the awareness of their own thought processes as they engage with puzzles and then consider whether their goal directed behaviour is itself an assumption that has been brought into _The Witness_ from other games, and actually _The Witness_ never claimed to be a game in the sense it would provide some reward for completion / recognition of THIS self-reflective Buddhist theme. Yet, this is at odds with it having Achievements and Trophies. You don't get to have a Platinum be a goal that can be acquired and then have the super subtle hidden message of your game be don't strive to achieve as you have all that you need within you already.
Blow's advice blows.
Continued...
Build a game world up in layers with an interactive feedback loop at every stage as early as possible with prototypal graphics so that you can pivot away from a foundation that isn't fun having found out soon that it wasn't fun, whereas creating an entire new 3D engine for it would have deferred any testing of ideas made with that 3D engine. You need to recognise that you are making a game, not making a program. If your goal of a game G was a fixed design D and all you had to do was figure out how to write the program P then you would be done as soon as you got P built, but that is never the case, you have better ideas and insights along the way, you have feedback from other players about what works for them (try not standing over them when they play talking up what you want them to like or notice about your game as this is your only opportunity to observe the reaction of a person prepared to try your game and give their opinion on it and you need to not shape their reaction, and probably not ask a friend who will be afraid of hurting your feelings and just say nice things, if you don't get constructive criticism "I'd like it better if you did X" rather than "X sucks", at least accept "X sucks" if "Y is great", as in asking eight people where five like Y and seven hate X should persuade you to change your game that way to emphasise Y and remove or reduce the impact of X even if you like X more than Y, which is fine if that is the case, make a copy of that build for you to play, and continue with the Y > X version for everyone else), but it isn't all you have to do, as it isn't a matter of just writing P to achieve G with a fixed design D, but iterating the design D to make a better G2, G3, G4... which can involve P2, P3, P4 and will usually make most devs limit themselves to D2, D3 out of exhaustion as they can't implement it more than three times given the complexity of P whether it is rewritten from scratch, or worse from D's perspective, is reshaped to be a bit more like D2 but not really as good a D2 as if it were rewritten from scratch, with D3 almost certainly not a reboot even if D2 was a reboot of D's spell casting idea. _The Witness_ had to reshape the island multiple times to be coherent in the expression of its aesthetics which restricted the space of possibilities of its dynamics that was explored by its very simple mechanics. This is unimaginably hard, and basically the wrong way to make games (not that it is a game - at best it is in an existential crisis over whether it is a game or an experience, trophies and Diamond Sutras cause cognitive dissonance on that metric), and no Stanford student should follow his advice.
It is better, but not "right" to focus on the mechanics and leave the aesthetics to much later (i.e. do a _Sokoban_ game in 2D before making it 3D to see how the idea works, _PUBG_ could be prototyped as a flat landscape seen top down, and of course elevation does play a part in the 3D game: so you have stairs in houses and undulating terrain, and people parachuting in, but that is just an extra dynamical space on top of the space of possibilities that can be adequately assessed on the "Flatland" prototype, even a game like _Star Citizen_ would have benefited from being top down 2D vector graphics with a camera that zooms back the faster you move as the monetised articles in shops and social dynamics of the collaborative MMO ship piloting and repair would have been able to be assessed as being fun rather than just assume it will be like _Faster Than Light_ for example, and hope for the best, as no one has yet playtested _Star Citizen's_ final socioeconomic vision despite all the money raised to make it, so it is still a possibility it won't even now result in a fun game that will hold a large population, just look at the number of people now playing _Halo: Infinite_ multiplayer after its $500,000,000 budget was blown on making it Free 2 Play). The problem with a mechanics focus is that you either obsess over a "juicy" jump mechanic, or making something original about a robot who solves puzzles with a giant horseshoe magnet (ignoring the fact that the robot is metal, nevermind), or you over elaborate the mechanics of your stay-in-one-place shooting gallery masquerading as a stealth adventure stuck-behind-enemy-lines sniper sequence of scenarios each with their own 'framing narrative' that could be played with just the Right Thumbstick and the Left and Right Triggers, and then you get carried away with wanting the D-Pad to adjust the scope so you can take account of the wind and then factor in the Coriolis Effect at extreme range, and before you know it every button on the controller has a function to elaborate the mechanics and make it a more faithful simulation, and therefore (you think) a more atmospheric and immersive experience to act as the foundation to your shooting gallery gameplay wrapped in a slideshow of narrative locational skip aheads. This could work, but simulation games don't sell as much as other genres for a reason. The depth in the mechanics is... interesting... but unless its mastery is rewarding (which requires a lot of testing and tuning and iteration), it is more likely to default to being arbitrarily frustrating and overcomplicated and in the way of whatever the story has to offer. As your character can't move it restricts the gameplay to being either one high-value target, one-shot, move on to next scene... or... take out all of the soldiers who would otherwise search the surrounding hills to find you in a short window of time when they are all exposed out in the open away from cover (the fail condition). Having it be that the enemy take cover and eventually find you (with mortars) an hour later, may be tense the first time, but ought not to be because once you lose the advantage of surprise and they start hunting for you it isn't like you can sneak away as this game is so simple you can not use Left Thumbstick to move (as that mechanic would make the engine more complicated and less of a shooting gallery). Here, I am choosing this artifically restrictive example to show the situation in which a developer may feel it is justified to elaborate the controls to enrich the mechanics and make the simulation more nuanced in hopes the game will be better (check out the control scheme for _Star Citizen_ for the XBOX Elite gamepad if you want a good laugh as it is very instructive on what not to do... that is WAY too complicated for a player to grok).
All this leaves out of Aesthetics, Mechanics and Dynamics is the latter, which is the space of possibilities where the gameplay takes place. Having Dynamics be your focus results in _Halo 3_ or _Super Mario 64._ Those games aren't really about their stories, or characters (which barely talk). There is a simple framing narrative and the controls elaborate contextually in intuitive ways, so that Look will Steer the Warthog in _Halo 3_ (whereas _Battlefield 4_ unnecessarily presents you with entirely new control scheme to learn in the "I am driving a Jeep now" context), and the Wall Climb is just a Jump off the surface you are heading towards, with the only slight weakness being Mario in the water and it being slightly counter intuitive how to get him to surface for air; and that game came with a full manual (so I really shouldn't complain). These are, in my opinion, the best realised examples of their genre. _Robotron 64_ may be the best twin stick shooter, with _Geometry Wars_ a close second, only held back by it sometimes killing you with its excessive visual clutter of particle effects. They wouldn't keep remaking _Skyrim_ if it wasn't popular as an RPG, and the scale of the world, and the Radiant Quests, still seem to cohere to create a dynamical space of possibilities for adventure.
Continued...
So, you should not make P to make G with D a fixed D as D will likely be unsatisfactory, but instead make p (a prototype of P ideally in 2D) and see whether _Dark Souls_ works effectively in a large open world that necessitates horse riding before committing to the effort to write the program P for _Elden Ring._ Maybe there is something about _Dark Souls_ being a claustrophic one or two player version of _Gauntlet_ where every encounter is an unforgiving boss that you lose by making it open grasslands dotted with rocks. Why are the enemies staying where they are and not all converging on you _en masse?_ This weakness undermines the aesthetics, as it blunts the anticipated dramatic stakes. Do the enemies all have cataracts and can't see me until I get close? At least have an explanation in game for their weird behaviour. _Shadow of the Colossus_ didn't have this issue because it had you ride for miles and miles between bosses. That is why the bosses aren't seen fighting each other. That allows them to roam around during an encounter and still be separated from other regions containing other bosses. _Dark Souls_ has a hidden staircase snake around the rear of a tower down into the depths and soon leads to a new out of line of sight encounter with an initially lethargic cursed foe. They aren't like NPCs in _GTA V_ that are circling the block, or those in _Cyberpunk 2077_ who make use of a cross walk, sit to eat food from a street vendor and then end up taking a phone call. It is reasonable that they aren't roaming about from where you find them first, but the same can't be said of enemies in _Elden Ring_ on horseback. Mocking this up in 2D would have identified this issue early, and maybe the solution would have presented itself in that context (or various fixes that reshaped the dynamical space could have been tried resulting in one which could be inferred to be aesthetically more credible in terms of enemy motivations). So, this prototype p needs to be simple aesthetically (potentially 2D programmer art or vector graphics or ASCII characters) so it takes minimal time to get to a playable build of the game g expressing the design d. This can then be iterated far faster with d4 being the result of p, p2, p3, p4 having been done, and when d4 gets somewhere good the whole thing can be programmed from scratch with aesthetics that best suit d4 -> D -> P -> G (which doesn't need much of any further refinement other than some minor tuning). Rapidly iterating on a prototype p will guide you to what you need to make to achieve a dynamical space of possibilities existing in the tension between the constraints of what the mechanics allow the user to articulate and what the aesthetics allows their actions to mean in the context of world and its themes / characters / and (optional) narrative.
Nah it's art.
@@firstnamelastname-yu2td I am 100% persuaded by the quality of your verbose and articulate argument.
@@____uncompetative Brevity is the soul of wit. Nice blog post.