How I Saved the Gaming Industry 252
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by
CmdrTaco
from the lazy-is-an-attribute dept.
from the lazy-is-an-attribute dept.
Jamie found a nifty blog entry where indie game designer Jeff Vogel writes about game engine and art re-use. He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade. It's an amusing little rant with thoughts that actually might apply to anyone working in engineering.
Exactly right! (Score:5, Interesting)
This guy has it exactly right. I don't need a new engine, just new levels or a new story. I would LOVE to pay for new high quality episodes for the original Doom engine. Game after game comes out on the Adventure Game Studio engine, and I love it. I never heard of this guy before, but the Avernum series seems to be supported by Wine (platinum!) so I'm going to give it a shot. When your formula is good, "more of the same" is a great thing.
TFA made plenty of sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Sorry, I actually read it. It got me thinking of the classic Infocom text games. Yes, there was an "engine" of sorts. It was, AFAIK, some kind of scripting language designed for text games. I bet they tweaked and reused it in every game too.
Graphics? No thanks. (Score:2, Interesting)
Remember that people played (and still actively play) MUDs - they are not played for the nice looks (ASCII maps is all you have to look at!!!), it's the story that catchy.
I think that the players who are there for the graphics play the games for the shortest time. The more valuable customers that are there for the story and would buy a sequel, updates whatever actually don't care about the looks after first 2 days.
Not just games (Score:3, Interesting)
This is good advice for practically every field. If you've done a good job of defining and documenting clean interfaces, it is almost always better to reuse a wheel than to reinvent it (usually badly). The only time a rewrite is in order is when it would actually take more effort to accommodate an existing subsystem.
(This applies mainly in a business context; for free software that is unconstrained by the need to turn a profit, the main question should be which choice will better serve the users, not which choice is quicker and easier for the developer.)
As far as games go, many of the games I've enjoyed most have had relatively primitive graphics but superb gameplay, while I've seen plenty of games that were visually stunning, but not all that much fun to play. For game developers, I'd recommend developing the game first with minimal placeholder graphics and then play it. Is it fun? If yes, then upgrade the graphics. If not, then no amount of eye-candy will save it.
Case in point (Score:3, Interesting)
Geneforge is great (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:TFA made plenty of sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Or the SCUMM engine which was originally developed for Monkey Island and now ScummVM boasts a repertoire of [according to the Wikipedia page] 28 from Lucas Arts & Sierra On-Line games and nearly 40 games from other developers. A huge proportion of them are still extremely playable and enjoyable today because the SCUMM engine let people focus much more on story, art and interaction than software.
Sure there were some changes over the years (better graphics, CD audio, speech, higher resolutions), but they're progressive improvements.