Mr. Hands

Two weeks ago, I stepped into the very fancy office of one of the world's best-known gaming companies. At their invitation, I had an interview with them. What happened was that I circumvented the typical recruiting process by poking the Tech Director's inbox directly. He was very excited to meet with me. I had an hour-long interview with two of their programmers, then had lunch with the team, and finally discussed contract details with HR. "Oh, this should be easy," smiled the HR representative. "Contracts under €1 million require a lot less paperwork." Four days later, I had an offer in my inbox. Chat, I suspect I might finally be what we in the biz refer to as "hot shit."

I'm bad at replying to comments, and I want to thank everyone for their kind words. ❤

I've been in development hell on my client's stupid live service project for the past two and a half years, and it made me feel like I was going insane. This was a short-term six-month contract extended four times. They are still nowhere close to shipping this monstrosity, and they are still finding new and innovative ways to fuck everything up. Suffice it to say that I'm ready for my next challenge!

The "puzzle" is the worst gameplay you've ever experienced, and there are 357 levels before you see a boob.

I should have guessed that a forum for an old genre would have a lot of stodgy guys on it but it's so weird seeing shmup players complaining about indie games with "weird" art styles and just wanting everything to look exactly like the games they played in the 90s. If all you like is games that are exactly like what you played 30 years ago why are you on a forum, what do you even have to talk about. "Played Garegga again lads"

you couldn't make Galaga today, everything's gotta be PC now

Some digital games (assume I'm talking only about those for the rest of this post) with "board game / pen & paper" aesthetics represent die rolls by actually making rigid body physics objects and simulating them tumbling around from an initial (possibly player input determined, possibly not) transform + impulse, and then reading the result for "which face of this object is facing directly up?" to get the outcome. Other games more conventionally pre-calculate the result of the roll in code, and then play a canned animation of the die coming up with that value.

For the latter - at Irrational we called this "emulated" in contrast to the former "simulated", which I assume came from the Looking Glass lexicon - it's very easy to transparently apply any of the usual PnP / board game bonuses and penalties that your mechanics might feature to the result - eg a stat boost turning a straight D6 roll(1, 6) into a roll(1+bonus, 6) or roll() + 1, etc. The result is calculated instantly in code, and the appropriate canned visual is displayed to the player to give them the feeling of having just made the roll. Standard stuff.

What I'm wondering about is how you do this for the former case - for simulated die rolls where the result really is an emergent outcome of the physics sim. If you want to add a +1 bonus of any kind, does that put you back into predetermining the result territory, and faking that it was a real simulated roll for the player? Or do you actually add extra weight to the sides of the die that will produce the intended outcomes? Or do you run a bunch of simulations invisibly behind the scenes in a single frame / spread over a few frames until you get the result you want, and then play that for the player? Or do you somehow calculate what starting transforms and impulses for the die will or won't produce the intended result? And how do you handle any of those if player input is affecting the dice as the roll starts?

This isn't for an actual game I'm working on or anything, it's just a question that stuck in my brain because it didn't seem to have an obvious answer. Would love to hear about it if anyone has tackled this particular problem before!

So, this would be stupidly complicated, but you could definitely simulate a weighted dice in the physics engine that rolls how you want it. Unfortunately, with physics simulations being unpredictable and all that, there's still a non-zero chance that some other number could come out on top.

If I were somehow put into a situation where a game director insisted on simulated dice rolls that were still 100% predictable, I would uhh... paint the tape, to use a bit of stock market parlance. Let the player roll a blank die, then paint the number you want on the face pointing up. You could leave it at that, depending on the narrative context. For example, you could show the final roll as LEDs in a sci-fi game or as magic in a fantasy one. But per your suggestion, you could also simulate the entire roll with physics, then paint the numbers, and finally show the outcome as an animation for a truly spectacular piece of stagecraft that no player would ever appreciate.