Ideas for Game Clones to Code (2012)
inventwithpython.com
inventwithpython.com
"This is my attempt to document three hundred different gameplay concepts of my own creation.
These ideas are free for anyone to use."
http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-brainstorming-session...
Edit: I thought they missed Breakout, but it’s in there, but they’re calling it “Arkanoid”. Bah.
Somebody make that, please?
It could even just be a github repository.
Edit: I don't mean to sound accusatory, but it is much more likely to actually happen if someone takes the first step.
I specified game design because I think it would benefit the most from such an "ideawiki"; there's still lots of untapped genres or cool things from 20+ year old games that haven't been reintroduced in a modern way, but really there must be all sorts of apps that people have ideas for but are unable to make themselves,
Simon is the easiest, in my opinion. Simple logic and graphics.
The difficulty of Pong depends to a large extent on how real you try to make the physics. For a classic-style implementation you flip some state bits to test a different axis depending on movement direction; all angles of travel and reflections are defined as a small LUT. The most complex test needed is the paddle boundaries.
Relying on LUTs and state machines to avoid complex behavior is the cheat that defines a lot of the early arcade games, however tutorials tend not to teach them in this way and just immediately dive into trig functions and AABB tests.
I love video games, but I honestly cannot comprehend how anyone enjoys being a gamer these days... I watch a lot of game trailers, reviews, and gameplay, and very close to 100% of the games being made seem to be about murdering other creatures. I am often like "wow, that looks like a cool world!" but then I never buy the game because the gameplay is just shooting people in the face.
Part of me thinks we should drop the pretext of a "Gaming Industry" and just start calling it the "Murder Simulation Industry".
Of course of the same people who enjoy murder games, many like to eat food from murder, and live on land that was taken via murder. I start to feel like we have to make murder a super normal, everyday thing like this otherwise we'd have to face how violent we actually are, through our government and corporate intermediaries.
Instead, we just crush virtual skulls and eat anonymous packaged food in our safe little boxes and pretend we're kind, gentle people. Feels good if you can keep the illusion up.
You might as well call the film industry the "Murder Voyeur Industry". Any complaint you have about the games industry can largely be applied towards the film industry, and the same arguments you can use in defense of the film industry apply as well.
The market for people with free time to spend utilizing these forms of popular entertainment is heavily skewed to the younger end of the spectrum. Video games have the additional problem that they were traditionally marketed towards males, but that's changing, as well as the overall demographic numbers, as gamers age and the industry finds the additional consumers that are under served.
In both cases, the independent studios are where you go to find the interesting, less derivative content. I would even go out on a limb and say that the video game industry has a more lively and robust independent segment, as the cost to both build and distribute video games can often be less than for film (or, at least the cheap development of video games serves more niches, very cheap filming is fairly limited by reality in many cases).
> Of course of the same people who enjoy murder games, many like to eat food from murder, and live on land that was taken via murder. I start to feel like we have to make murder a super normal, everyday thing like this otherwise we'd have to face how violent we actually are, through our government and corporate intermediaries.
Well, murder is a super normal, every day thing, and always has been. Almost every animal is either on the lookout for things to murder to eat, or to guard against things trying to murder it to eat, or both. That we find ourselves fascinated with our violent history and our own suppressed and refocused urges and emotions should come as no surprise.
I think I'm just not a very manly man, so I don't like games.
Either way, you convinced me. I spoke too broadly and too casually. I won't bring up the murder thing again unless I can think of a more specific thesis.
Not liking violence and sports does not make you less manly. That being said, there are thousands of completely nonviolent game that even a "wuss" (:p) can appreciate: from tetris to stardew valley.
I like to play a top-down 2D space RPG, which has lasers, missiles, and all of that. I want to find a way to justify that playing that game does not make a bad person. Is this possible?
Also, how would one make sense of enjoying movies like Star Wars?
You might as well bemoan the 'violence' of chess with its military units and combat. Video games can be enhanced through the use of violence just as books, film, and board games can. You're not a bad person for enjoying it. You're just a person.
Sure, all of these examples could be remade using other techniques to drive them forward but I can't imagine them being as good that way. It's not only because we're used to conflict being a driving force in entertainment. It's also because it's such an effective driving force for so many types of entertainment. For me, no other justification is needed for artist's to make an artistic choice. Video games with murder are not only fun.
* People who criticise such things are generally do it because they don't like it, not because it is bad. Although they will say they don't like it because games are bad, or maybe another media they don't participate in. There is no evidence being presented by these people that the media they don't like is bad.
* They are being dishonest and hyperbolic. Let's take a couple of quotes from the grandparent post. "very close to 100% of the games being made seem to be about murdering other creatures", and "Part of me thinks we should drop the pretext of a "Gaming Industry" and just start calling it the "Murder Simulation Industry"."". Obviously these are nowhere near honest. 'Murder Simulation Industry', I mean come on, could you make a more negative slant against games than that.
* They often say it to belittle other people so they can elevate themselves, at least in their mind. It is like people who say they don't play 'cliche' games and say that people who play mainstream games are retards. Same sort of belittling there as well. I wouldn't trust either of these people. Why would you care about what entertainment someone enjoys? Even if it is violent, it is not like they are actually being violent by enjoying some type of media.
I wish more people could just accept that we all do evil things, often unknowingly. Much evil happens through no ill will. Part of being human is doing terrible things. It's not a reason to panic, but it's also not something that should be swept under the rug.
All of the commenters saying "I think you are a good person" are like drug addicts. We can't handle the idea that we might be partly destructive, so we invent new moralities that are like drugs... they work in any situation to wash away the emotions of guilt. Stuff like "you tried your best" or "you did't know".
But, like addiction, the real solution is that we accept that not every day is going to be awesome sunshine rainbows and sometimes it's good to spend time thinking about the ways you are bad, and the harm that you do.
I think you're looking at a very narrow subset of available games. The nine "Popular New Releases" on the Steam front page right now are:
* A point-and-click adventure about an empathic healer (Resette's Prescription)
* A 4X strategy game where violence, diplomacy, and economics are all useful tools (Planar Conquest)
* A violent, profane combat game (Apocalypse: Party's Over)
* A game of bloodless slapstick violence where no one ever dies (Goat Simulator: Waste of Space)
* A racing game (Table Top Racing: World Tour)
* An idle game where abstracted combat happens offscreen (Idling to Rule the Gods)
* A political simulator where violence is one option among several (Power & Revolution)
* A shooting game (The Big Elk)
* A transportation simulator (Simutrans)
And, for the record, it's pretty damn insulting to imply that liking violent games makes me a violent person. And there isn't any land on earth that wasn't "taken via murder" at some point. You don't get to be smug because your birthplace was last conquered 500 years ago instead of 200.
> And, for the record, it's pretty damn insulting to imply that liking violent games makes me a violent person.
Nobody said that. Being someone who can sit still while war criminals dine is what makes us violent people, I'd say, and maybe that's what OP meant, too: "how violent we actually are, through our government and corporate intermediaries" = that is the violence (or accommodation of violence if you will) we are being charged with, and I for one am pleading guilty. We're at best super peaceful people that live on and operate a machine that kills day in and day out.
I think that for many, it's more that the "virtual murder" is a way to "blow off some... Steam", so that we can be "kind, gentle people" in reality. It's a way to vent all the anger, the stress, and the frustration of the real world in the virtual world, where there are no real consequences.
A big big factor of why games are amazing is because they are a form of interactive escapism. You get to explore and experience extremely viscerally fun actions that you cannot reasonably do in real life. Driving a car recklessly is fun not because one likes to destroy property and endanger life, but because it comes with a sense of freedom and power. Similarly, tracking an erratically moving object and trying to tag it with a projectile is a challenging act that rewards mastery (archery contests are fun not because they encourage murdering people). These are all important aspects of game design. The visceral satisfaction of acts and contexts that we cannot easily partake of in real life are why video games are as popular as they are.
It involves crushing of virtual skulls not so much to blow of steam or to allow us to pretend to be kind IRL, but because this is the simplest, no-frills context that's easy to communicate to a human living in our present world that has been raised on "action = violence" from movies and stories and wars. Yes, games have long been perpetrating this message too, but like say, the patriarchy, it didn't start here and probably wouldn't be here if the context it was born into was different.
This is why as another commenter mentioned, there are large amounts of indie games now that depart from this recipe -- between a more peaceful society, greater acceptance of gaming, higher level of maturity of the professionals working in it, and better technology to provide richer storytelling -- to make non-violent games that explore other viscerally satisfying mechanics, interactive storytelling, neat mechanics, etc. Yet the violent games understandably will remain fun for all its original reasons, and until violence truly becomes a truly abhorrible aspect of mankind (not in our foreseeable future).
You have inspired me to write a bit of a more in-depth blog post exploring violence and games, but I hope this colors the game industry as something better than merely a Murder Simulation Industry.
If you like RPGs at all, and you can have at least some ability to do some minor shooter-style dodging, I recommend playing Undertale. More than any other game, do not lookup any spoilers! Undertale is a game that you really need to play blind.
> the "Murder Simulation Industry"
One of the better discussions related to that topic is Innuendo Studios' essay "Blood Is Compulsory".
jackson_1 posted a list of what they feel is order of difficultly, just giving a little snippet:
1:Pong 2:Minefield 3:Tic-tac-toe 4:Memory Puzzle ... 44:Stratego 45:Risk 46:Go 47:Diner Dash 48:Fire ‘N’ Ice 49:Chess
I'd strongly disagree with this -- I'd prefer to do a Chess clone than a Pong clone myself. While doing a good chess A.I. might be hard, doing something reasonable is much easier than many other games on this list. Doing a good enough chess A.I. to beat 50% of people is fairly easy if you use the power of a modern machine.