reth

n.s.

@reth

the display name is my initials

experimenting and all that.
chief executive dysfunction officer. few of my posts are high-effort, but at least they're funny.
current avatar is an old art by fireflufferz because i'm bored with having michiru pfps.
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reth
@reth
MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct
MxSelfDestruct
@MxSelfDestruct

lotta discourse about Game Design going around today so I'm throwing in my unsolicited 2¢

  • there are no "best practices".
  • 90% of popular opinions about game design are moronic.
  • "fun" does not necessarily mean "good," and vice versa1.
  • more is usually worse.
  • "competitive first" design almost invariably sucks all the joy out of a game.
  • art direction is vastly more important than graphical fidelity2.
  • runtime optimization isn't the most important thing in the world but it's a lot more important than most developers seem to think it is. if your game looks like a PSX game, it should happily run on an eight year old PC with integrated graphics.
  • RELEASE YOUR SHIT AS OPEN SOURCE WHEN YOU'RE DONE WITH IT.

  1. my favourite example of this is Spec Ops: The Line. Spec Ops is not fun to play. if it was fun, it wouldn't be nearly as effective.

  2. this one is probably pretty uncontroversial, especially here.

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in reply to @MxSelfDestruct's post:

giwake
@giwake

"competitive first" design almost invariably sucks all the joy out of a game.

YES. fucking yes. i genuinely hate competitive first design. i wanna enjoy an experience and sometimes that requires overpowered things, it requires underpowered things, it needs things that just absolutely fuck it up. i enjoyed the time i spent playing jabroni brawl (which is a half life 2 mod that's like gmod deathmatch, complete with weird shit like levels dedicated entirely to driving) for a handful of hours a lot more than the 500 hours i wasted playing counter strike trying to "get good"

and also the majority of games that want to be The Next Big ESport just fucking suck. a cycle of "we made counter strike again" "we made overwatch again" "we made another battle royale" is hell.

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