There's a bunch of discourse on my tl about respect and curiosity towards game design and I agree generally speaking but also I think for me there's an element of optimism to statements like these in that probably 70% of the games I've ever worked on were, to quote the excellent Karla Zimonja, "drunk-walking towards completion" and sometimes you really do end up with a design cobbled together from a bunch of goals you're not sure how to execute, a bunch of decisions that might have been good ideas separately or at the time and now you're stuck with them. Treating that as always intentional and artistic is well meaning but well and truly, sometimes game development is in fact a polite disaster that somehow turns out okay (or doesn't)
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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:
Game design can be viewed as 100% intentional
vs
Games come together at the last minute, if at all
Mhm, I think my ultimate wish for discussions like this is for individual aspects of a work to be considered as part of a larger system and under the goals they were trying to accomplish. I would find, eg, "rain stopping me from climbing was probably to force me to improvise or make certain areas feel more difficult to explore than others, but so often I couldn't find an alternate route or anywhere to make a fire to wait so I always that I felt like I had to give up on whatever I'd been doing and come back later through no fault of my own" a more compelling argument (even if my experience was very different) than "nobody likes not being able to climb something fun in a game about climbing, why did the developers make this Bad Decision to do a Bad Game Design? They should have figured out rain sucks the first time they played it".
I think it's interesting when you can feel the designers' conversation with those design problems (even when they're not problems per se), like tears of the kingdom affording different approaches to rain. It's also pretty explicit proof that Design is Happening, made really clear by having two games you can sort of lay on top of one another
I remember reading an interview with someone that worked on Zelda II for the NES, and he said the game was built exactly to the design doc without any changes…and that’s why he feels like it’s a lackluster game.
Like video games need a certain amount of “oh man, you know what would be cool?!? Let’s change direction a little!!”
I think you’re describing something way more than a little improvisation, but the pathological opposite—a totally clear path—apparently has flaws too.
i mean i get that. most games are made collaboratively, and every game has a certain amount of shit that just is the way it is because the game had to get finished. but i was mostly commenting on how a lot of people online will develop an adversarial relationship with devs where any inconvenience in a game is treated as a result of incompetence or malice. even if the truth is always more complicated, in art criticism (or at least certain flavors of art criticism) a general rule of thumb is to treat everything as a choice, and then think about how those choices impact the work as a whole. and i just wish more people would try to think about game design like that rather than jumping to "the stupid devs are trying to waste my time"
(also wow that rambling post i made on a whim sure did get an overwhelming amount of attention)
...I want to be clear, because I've seen multiple people assuming this -
- this post isn't any attack on anyone personal
- this post is not specifically a reply to any one person - I know cohost can feel very small because of how segmented its audience is but this is a topic I saw at least 3 different posts on, and that's why I was commenting on it, not because of something specific you did or said.
...beyond what I said in the other comment, like I said in this post itself, I generally agree with what's been said on the whole - I just think it's funny how often the games I've been on have been such messes of compromises. In my time as an artist I've always felt that demystifying art was important to me, and that includes discussing the ugly, boring, etc parts of it. I'm not really sure why most people seem to have taken what I said here as disagreement or an attack on critical analysis. I think critical analysis is important! I think discussing the messiness of gamedev can and should coexist with that.