dijonketchup

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eniko
@eniko

something i dont think people really get is that when development of a game is say, 80% finished you don't have 80% of a game, you have 0% of a game and 80% of the disparate parts that would make up a game if they were actually 100% done and put together


eniko
@eniko

so i need to elaborate on this since it seems to be confusing some people. when i say 0% of a game, what i mean is experientially, as games are experienced by people who play them, you have 0% of a game. before a game is finished you don't have a game at all. it's like having the parts of an ikea flat pack sprawled across your living room floor. like, you have 100% of the parts that make up a shelf, but i don't think, experientially, you can call the mess of disparate parts a shelf

i know there are exceptions. some games, as they're developed, remain more or less playable throughout the development process. but this is the exception and not the rule, because it's hard, time consuming, and kind of inefficient. this is why you mostly see big companies with lots of money banked doing this. they have that luxury (and it is a luxury)

if you're not doing that then, yeah. you have mechanics. and you have levels. and you have side activities. and you have world maps. and you have minigames. and you can, with some effort, fire up an executable for the game that lets you access some of these. but that's still not a game. you're not experiencing most of everything that makes up the game at the same time, in its proper context. you can set up a way to do this, and then you have more than 0% of a game, but doing that is a task in and of itself which is often left for very near the end of the project

so the subjective experience of developing games is that you're treading water working on a whole bunch of parts for a very, very long time. and then suddenly, one day it all comes together and then you have a game. and then you're probably going to ship not long after that

EDIT: put another way, if i say 90% of Kitsune Tails is done, that doesn't mean that i can send you a build that you can fire up and experience that 90%. in general, the percentage that you'll be able to (seamlessly) access is going to be orders of magnitude lower


dijonketchup
@dijonketchup

I have 100% of the thread I need for a cross stitch pattern. I have some percentage of the thread stitched into the aida. But I still have 0% of a cross stitch project, because I can't display what I've done so far and have people be like, yes, this is x% of a pattern. Folks who see it would be like, this is not a pattern, what the hell am I even looking at? I couldn't try to donate it as a prize for something, cause what organization would advertise x% of a cross stitch as a prize you could win for donating?

Like, realistically, yes, I've done x% of the work, but that doesn't count towards the finished product because it's not finished. I can't do anything with it until I've done 100% of the work. This is essentially my understanding of what the OP is saying, but in different wording.


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in reply to @eniko's post:

in reply to @eniko's post:

I mean, yes, but philisophically that's the case with many things? you mentioned the flatpack, right? I guess you could argue that a book with the last fifty pages missing is technically 90% or whatever of a story, but without an ending it doesn't fit the concept of a story (having a beginning, middle and end?)

Like, if I'm building a car, and I have everything there except the sparkplugs or the timing belt then yes 99% of the mass and compoonents are there but you can't hop in and drive the thing right?

like I think I understand what you're saying! but im not really sure what the take home message is

if you have a book with the last 50 pages missing you can still absolutely experience it as a normal book. you can take it, start reading it, and consume all the story up to the point where the pages are missing. it's more like if someone handed you all the pages to a book in random order. that's not a book. it can't be experienced as a book. not until you put in a whole lot of additional work to put all the pages in order

If we're getting truly pedantic: the "lacking an ending" criteria would mean The Tale of Genji probably wouldn't qualify as a story, since most scholars believe the ending is lost; the "everything needs to be in a well-defined order" criteria would mean Woyzeck isn't a story, since we have all the material, but not the order for the scenes to go in (in fact, people have staged the play by drawing the scene order out of a hat because you somehow get a coherent story no matter the order).

I definitely have experienced that feeling of like, cresting a hill and suddenly it "feels like a game". It's like there is a special metaphysical property that just sorta flips to "on" or makes extremely coarse steps at various milestones during development where all of a sudden it has "gamefeel". I think part of this is because a game is comprised of different elements that have to work together to produce "gamefeel", and in isolation none of them really can independently. That "gamefeel" is the sensation of the interplay between those elements, and anything significant missing will be noticed immediately, because it'll cause friction that reduces the gamefeel and immersion.