This is from a few years back, but now that I'm playing The Witness (which may be the most engaging thing I have played since Firewatch) it seems relevant to me. It reflects a lot of my thinking about "fun" in games (finally someone else saying it), and talks about the modern indie landscape, design philosophy and the sense of discovery in opposition to be led by the hand. It's a wonderful piece of commentary from an exceptionally talented game developer.

Link:

Jonathan Blow How Mainstream Devs Are Getting It Wrong

Etsu wrote:This is from a few years back, but now that I'm playing The Witness (which may be the most engaging thing I have played since Firewatch) it seems relevant to me. It reflects a lot of my thinking about "fun" in games (finally someone else saying it), and talks about the modern indie landscape, design philosophy and the sense of discovery in opposition to be led by the hand. It's a wonderful piece of commentary from an exceptionally talented game developer.

Link:

Jonathan Blow How Mainstream Devs Are Getting It Wrong

Thanks Etsu, I shall look forward to hearing this later.

Hope you like it. I certainly did.

Here is a longer video about Deep Game Design. (You will need to watch the video to know what that is because I don't trust myself enough to explain it right. ) This is particularly aimed to game designers, so if you are one or want to be one you may find this very useful. (Josh may find it interesting me think. ) It's also very interesting from the point of view of the current LT situation, and particularly enlightening for people who may don't like the apparent delay the game is suffering, because LT is clearly a Deep Game and one of the points made in the video is that you shouldn't rely on schedules when working in this kind of games due to the fact that you are going where no one has gone before (can you see what I did there?) so you don't know the destination and the obstacles you may face. (Even if eventually you may need to set some schedules close to the end of the project in order to finish it.) It talks also about how to avoid burnout working in long projects and beating the illusion of no progress, among other stuff.

I usually don't enjoy this kind of talks. I start watching them and eventually get bored, particularly when is a very technical talk or the guy is trying to explain things from the point of view of the "industry", because, y'know, you surely want to work in the industry, right? However this guy talks mostly from a creative point of view (you primarily want to make good games, not money), and it uses psychology extensively. It was actually difficult to stop watching it, so I hope you find it enjoyable too.

How To Design Deep Games with Jonathan Blow

Now I need to go and watch more Youtube videos from this man. (He has a lot of coding stuff in his channel, if someone is interested.)

Now I know how this game should look like. It may sounds weird, but I wasn't sure so far. Some things I had clear, some I didn't. Now I know, and it has to do with let myself get wild with what I want to do with this game. I was also inspired for something that Outlander said in June of 2014 (can you imagine?, almost two years ago), and closer to what Flatfingers at first though it could be. Trying to fulfill a "narrative" agenda was too difficult for this particular scenario without going for a "monster in a ship" subgenre (that's how my mind works anyway), and I can do it much better with other projects (like my western Point & Click script for example), so instead I will increase the exploration side of this thing. This however implies something else: I may get maybe too experimental with some mechanical stuff, and I'm unsure about how many people will want to play a game like this to completion. Some people say that most players never finish most games, but I may be pushing things maybe too far. More details someday.

Today is the second free day I have from work this month, so I haven't been working on anything. (In front of the computer I mean. Most of my creative work actually happens in my mind, and have been extremely active that one.) I will come back to my regular schedule next Tuesday.

Curiously enough, in his last interview for IGN, which I saw the other day, Sean Murray says that normally games don't find themselves until the last couple of months of development. My game is not near to the end of its development cycle just yet, so I wonder how many more of this "findings" I will get before is finished.

I at least am glad that I solved the problem of making space feel BIG and places be very far away from each other, even if I will do that in an abstract way (through game mechanics) instead of just simulating the cosmos as it is. (Games that do this, trying to generate really huge galaxies and such, usually suffer from ridiculously fast travel speeds which basically cancels any perception of size and distance the creators may be trying to achieve.)

This however -as I said before- will mean that the way the game will work may feel fairly alien to some people, but I like the idea of experimenting with weird stuff. I supposed that there is nothing wrong with creating new ways to play games.

Yes, Etsu.

Any chance of seeing some progress... soon.

I hope so. As I said I haven't been working on the game lately due to time constrains, but I hope to come back to it really soon. I want to work in the Big Ship (at least a prototype of big ship) next.

Weapons and "Telepods" are coming to SkyJunkers. The second of those were always supposed to be part of the game as a kind of surprise, but now I think they could be a more prominent part of the game.

Do you remember the time when every First Person something had portals or some kind of interdimensional thing? I always hated portals and teleportation stuff in those FPS from the nineties, but paradoxically I'm now planning to bring them back! (They never were anywhere though. There are these games called Portal, y'know.)

However, I strongly recommend against using them if you can avoid it. You need to be naked (something probably not very healthy if you are not in a planet with a breathable atmosphere) and there is always a chance of accidentally combine your DNA with the one of some local insect or bacteria, and you are not going to want that, probably.

In other news, my system to have astronomical distances (virtually infinite or at least very extensive maps) is now broken due to engine updates and such, and it possibly has something to do with some random bug that Epic seem to be unwilling to fix, so I will probably need to think in something else.

This may be unrelated, but perhaps some of you have something to say about it. I developed a method that let me give access to the player to every and all post-process settings. Basically, that would give the player the ability to create his own look for the game with practically the same freedom available to the game's creator. (That would be me.) Usually players have access to a few post-process settings at most: motion blur, depth of field, maybe reflections, but I think I have never seen a game that let you disable every single one of them or enable only the ones you want and configure every detail at will, basically using your own artistic vision to give the game exactly the look you want, if you are interested in that kind of thing.

There are reasons to avoid this, of course. Giving the game one specific look is part of the artistic voice of the author, and you may be even using post-process effects for narrative reasons for example, like giving a Winter scene a cold look, or making everything look like a videotape or an old film if the character is just happen to be watching one. But usually these are used as subtle aesthetic helpers that make everything look a little nicer, so why not to give the player, if that's the case, complete freedom to personalize the game however he wants? Of course, you don't need to do so and may just play with whatever default options the game have already implemented, but the possibility is there, if you want to use it. Additionally, disabling all post-process effects makes everything look sharper and will increase performance significantly, something you may use as a last result to get those extra few frames per second you need to make the game playable.

Some of the most popular mods for The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series are precisely to do that, to change the overall look and feel of the game, but usually that means that you need to install dlls files in your install directory and modify configuration files as well. What about having the opportunity to do that on your own using the options menu of the game, at any time, with every game? Sounds cool, ah?

Need to think about that a little longer.

Yep. My PInball game has two image effects right now, both of which can be turned on and off separately in the options menu. I think it's a good idea, since I always got annoyed when games like Blazing Angels would have a single toggle for all image effects. My then-potato PC had plenty of framerate without them and too little with, so I had wanted to just turn on the bloom.

--IronDuke

There is a difference however between giving the player the ability to turn things on and off (which should be always available I think considering how many people get annoyed by certain things, like lens flares or fringe) and unleashing the full power of configuring the game look however you want. That would give to the player an artistic stance on the game aesthetic itself. At least many Youtube videos for some popular games may end up looking quite different from each other.

Like having a slider for the bloom instead of a toggle, for example?
And maybe multiple options for lens flare style, since they're tied to bloom quite tightly.

--IronDuke

Yeah. Or directly writing whatever value you want, including brightness threshold and all kinds of extra configurations, choosing between multiple dirt masks, dirk mask intensity and others. For example, there are seventeen options for "film color" in the post-process settings, so you can change scene color however you want, and eighteen for bloom, twelve for ambient occlusion, ten for auto exposure, etc. You could expend hours toying with different values for everything to see what you get, basically giving you the same power available to the developer.

There are three different types of Depth Of Field in Unreal (I only use one of them, but players may choose one of the others, more traditional ones), and multiple values for every one of them, including focal distance, the opening of the camera lens, the scale, etc. There is even a new cinematic camera in Unreal Engine 4.12, and I could give access to the player to all its settings. I mean, it could mean giving the player access to a creative freedom that you never get in videogames.

Yes, most players are not going to deal with such things, but it could be there, waiting for the right player to go deep on its settings and create his own aesthetic. All for free. I don't know. It sounds cool to me.

Hello. Have been a while. I have been without a PC for a month. I'm here to share some news about why.

• I don't have Internet access anymore. I don't know when I will have it again. Sorry for that.

• My PC broke. Badly. First, my second power supply in a month died. Second, I burned my motherboard and/or CPU by accident. (I'm not sure which one.) Too expensive to replace those I'm afraid. Besides, my LCD screen is all white for some reason, so is now useless too.

• I was able to buy an old machine two days ago, a Pentium D with 2.66 Ghz and 2 GB RAM. (I will be paying for it for a year, basically.) I'm now here, in a cybercafé, trying to download the drivers for my old videocard, a MSI R5750. So I'm now as I was a few years back regarding technology.

• Unfortunately, this means that I can't continue working in my space game (or any other high quality graphic project if that matters) at least until I can get out of certain very difficult economic problems I'm facing now and buy something cool again. Maybe next year if I'm lucky, I don't know. Sorry for that too.

• That doesn't mean that I will not work in videogames anymore. My machine may be slow, but is far from useless, so provided that nothing new happens (like some ightning strike) I will do my best to work in something. (Maybe one of those Point & Click projects that I'm always thinking about.) I will be unable to use Unreal Engine 4, but I'm downloading the Unity 5 offline installer right now. Lets see what happens.

So, very bad news for me, but whatever. I'm not dead, in case someone was wonder about it.

I have missed your input here, Etsu. It's sad to read of all your misfortune with your hardware and your general financial circumstances.

No need to apologize about your game, I'm sure you will continue to make progress when you have the means to do so. Try not to lose contact with us, even if it's only to say hello and give us information on your hopefully improving circumstances.