Game developers share what they're most proud of making | Hacker News Reader

Game developers share what they're most proud of making

rockpapershotgun.com

166 pointsdanso26 comments

I had no idea Getting Over It had an ending like that. I'll never play it so don't consider myself spoiled but getting there entirely unaware must have been a great experience.

I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)

When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV) which is also worth a read: https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/

I don't have enough time to play it, so I spoiled myself.

Wow.

Just wow.

That's got to be the coolest, most unique game ending ever. There's nothing that could ever top that.

If you plan on playing the game, don't spoil yourself (you're in for a treat), but if you don't think you'll get to it, you must read about this.

I'd really like to copy that some day.

> I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)

I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse (cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the game took off.

EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s -- the whole presentation is worth watching.

>“Trigger Happy is a two-player deathmatch game I made when I was 12 years old, using the Klik & Play game-making tool.

Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come back.

The article conveniently has a download link included.

Klik and Play was great. I made a multi-minigame project with it for months ... until shutting down Windows 3.1 cut off the save process. No backups :(. I was experimenting with making an RTS by that point.

EDIT: typos

One of the featured games is Kine, a cool looking 3D puzzle game. The creator, Gwen Frey, just did a great GDC talk, "The Kine Postmortem": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ

Kine looks awesome. Thanks for the heads up on it.

I could not help, but smile at Divinity part. I absolutely despised Red Prince, but it only shows the writers did a good job creating non-bland character. Also now I know where the inspiration came from. Neat.

I love articles like this. And I can definitely relate. Game development allows for a lot of joy, frustration and eventually pride once you look back at it.

Also reminds me of the old twitter thread where game developers shared their various tricks: https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640 Summarized in this article: https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112

I was going to give a talk at QGCon about what I was most proud of making in The Sims, but the conference was canceled due to Coronavirus of course.

https://qgcon.com/

I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and a few notes and references.

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How Inclusivity Saved The Sims. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.

Abstract:

The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive, tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family Album and The Sims Exchange.

The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability, corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people, families, and communities.

The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.

The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their own educations.

This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion, identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.

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The Sims Design Documents

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

The Sims Design Document Draft 3 (1998-08-07)

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...

On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex relationships in the game:

The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other people.

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The Kiss that Changed Video Games

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth. Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost nobody outside of its development team believed in.

For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of 1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers, told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background characters made The Sims the talk of the show.

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Player Created Content

How to make the leap from smut to art, while continuing to support smut in a plausibly deniable way that you can sell through WalMart? Don’t do smut explicitly, but put the tools to create their own “artistic” content into the hands of the users.

"Time to Penis" -A phenomenon that online game developers had been aware of for years, which didn't have a name until someone came up with TTP. It's traditionally measured in nanoseconds.

Spore Penis Monsters.

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https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881

Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:

https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/

It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this

For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims (viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here

Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what these documents are saying

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss...

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736

Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal release of June 4, 1998.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_2sWbsXUAA5UtO?format=png

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218416393367554

The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY

https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218212353060871

The about dialog had a "No Shit!" button, and referred to it as "Project X":

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPm-ekxXUAAqi2a?format=png

    About Edith
    Edith Version 666 (motb) [No Shit!]
    Copyright (C) 1997, Maxis.

    Project X was designed by Will Wright, and programmed by
    Jamie Doornbos, Eric Bowman, Jim Mackraz, and Don Hopkins.

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Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Procedural rhetoric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007 book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.[2]

Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word. Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a game to convey a particular ideology.

[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798

[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646

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SimCopter Himbo Easter Egg was a SimAntics Programming Bug

https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamesp...

Indeed, SimCopter was shipped too soon, and as a result, it launched with one of the most controversial bugs in gaming history. A homosexual programmer at Maxis objected to the use of female characters as objects of affection in SimCopter. So, he decided to protest by putting what he termed "muscle boys in swim trunks" into the game. During the game, these characters would mysteriously appear and kiss each other, but only on very rare occasions. At least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, as the programmer told Wired magazine in 1996, "My random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the characters appeared with startling regularity. Upon discovery of the errant code, the programmer was immediately fired, but the transgression spoke volumes about the frenetic and fragmented state of affairs at Maxis.

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Scott McCloud

Reinventing Comics:

https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9780060953508

“Anyone involved in interactive entertainment (games, web, etc.) should read this book. Scott McCloud has once again transcended the world of comics and tapped into much deeper issues of creativity entertainment and economics. This time he’s looking into the future rather than the past.” — Will Wright

Understanding Comics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics

Masking, abstraction, concrete background, abstract ground, projecting the reader or player into the scene.

Show vs. Tell

Transition and Gutters

Abstract vs. Realistic

Masking.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration)

The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic, archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed, photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.

It is used in animation, comics, illustration, video games (especially visual novels) and other media. It is common in Western graphic novels and Japanese comics and animation. The psychology behind the masking effect has been extended to rendering antagonists in a realistic manner in order to show their otherness from the reader.

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Tension Between Realistic Models and Fun Game Play

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-...

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

Discussion of all the third parties who wanted a version of SimCity that ham-fistedly taught whatever they had on their agenda. Misunderstanding the potentials of Constructionist Education. Ham-fisted attempts at patronizingly didactic pedagogy.

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Nurture -vs- Nature Debate

Can you decide to change your sexual preference? Should you be able to? What makes a game more fun? Does a game need to be realistic? What are the technological limits of the model (complexity, privacy, AI, machine learning)? Do we even know what the correct model is?

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Columbine

The Sims made its debut days before the shooting at Columbine, which triggered a moral panic over video games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...

How did the Columbine shooting and subsequent backlash against violent video games affect the coverage and popularity of The Sims, as a counterpoint to Doom-type games?

Is The Sims a video violent game? There are numerous cruel and sadistic ways to painfully and violently kill people. Does that mean that The Sims is a violent video game?

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The Sims 4 Patch 34

https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims_4/Patch_34

The 34th patch for The Sims 4 was released on June 2, 2016. It updated the game to version 1.19.28.1010 for PC and 1.19.28.1210 for Mac. The patch allows players to customize a Sim's gender in greater depth and allows previously gender-specific assets to be used by any Sims regardless of gender.

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I wrote games when I was around 10 years old.

I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not have internet to look it up.

There is no mention of Talos. This makes me sad.

I would like to present – my son.

The Pirate Queen example doesn't really seem like something to be proud of - choosing the gender of a character and making it powerful aren't challenges are they? Couldn't you do that by flipping a coin? Surely the thing to be proud of there is getting to a position where you have the authority to make those choices?

It's a decision she made that proved to be great, so she's proud of it. Strange how you targeted the only vaguely feminist achievement in the whole list.

Some insecure little boys feel extremely threatened and frightened by strong women in video games, and throw tantrums about it and viciously attack people in public, as we all know. She's brave to potentially subject herself to that kind of abuse and harassment by making such a decision.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy

Not that you're not correct but if I wrote a post with words like that, I'd get busted by the mods for flamebait. Bad behavior by others doesn't excuse more bad behavior.

Just to play devil's advocate, it's not really clear from the article what the designer is proud about. "The strongest and most expensive unit in our Pirate Faction is the Pirate Queen. She is kick ass, looks cool, and is even voiced by myself!" Why shouldn't she be kick ass and looking cool? Why shouldn't she be the most expensive unit in the faction? It's speaking to a narrative for which we have to guess the other side.

I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some gamers do have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem that some people feel that gamers must be like that.

In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that the audience has been hungering for.

I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really demeaning.

Guy is hired by videogame studio, makes a kickass warrior and is proud of it. Tells it to interviewer. Is accused of pushing an egalitarist agenda by internet strangers. Come on guys.

I think she was just proud of adding more "representation" of her gender in a game that didn't have it and not having a ceiling on how powerful those units could be. It's an important cultural message of equality of our genders. I don't think she was implying that male gamers can't enjoy strong female characters but maybe the developers didn't consider it more. Maybe female gamers would appreciate the representation.

I do think Don is being a bit harsh in his criticism of you. I don't find any malevolence in your comment.

The fact that you think so doesn't change the fact that she is proud of it – and that's what matters here, that's the whole point of the article.

But the thing goes deeper: if you chose the attributes of the characters by flipping coin, the distribution would look very different than what it did, according to the article – judging from the earlier stuff, the developers were in "rut" and didn't think outside of the box, at least in this aspect. Male characters are very much the norm in many genres. She's proud that she made a difference against that "normal", and improved the result doing so.

Jacques Servin programmed an unauthorized easter egg into SimCopter that had an unintentional bug in the coin flipping code, which resulted in a very different looking distribution of hundreds of shirtless Speedo-clad "himbos".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Servin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCopter#Easter_egg

>Easter egg: The game gained controversy when it was discovered that designer Jacques Servin inserted an easter egg that generated shirtless men in Speedo trunks who hugged and kissed each other and appear in great numbers on certain dates, such as Friday the 13th. The egg was caught shortly after release and removed from future copies of the game. Servin was fired for adding unauthorized content (which delayed the release of the game, and caused Maxis to miss Christmas season). He cited his actions as a response to the intolerable working conditions he allegedly suffered at Maxis. This caused a member of AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), a gay AIDS organization, to call for a boycott of all of Maxis' products, a measure which Servin rejected. Some months later, a group named RTMark announced its existence and claimed responsibility for the himbos being inserted into the game along with 16 other acts of "creative subversion." Servin stated that he had received a money order of $5,000 from RTMark for the prank. It was revealed later on that Servin was a cofounder of RTMark.

LGR - SimCopter - PC Game Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mh7Pc5MSI&t=8m15s

SimCopter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozL3LtSsYd8

Here's an actual authorized easter egg in SimCopter that Paul Pedriana put in:

SimCopter: Aliens Easter Egg (including developer comments)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2S5-QUKmhU

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