Bulky Drive!!!Originally Posted by grayejectbutton
--Zero
Bulky Drive!!!
--Zero
The principles of good level design are hardly simple; game developers are forever discussing them, and yet only a handful of videogames released each year really get them right.
A console-based level editor would necessarily have to be simplified -- although a 2D-platform editor would be far simpler in theory than, say, Agetec's Fighter Maker 2 and RPG Maker 2.What IS arcane, however, is the crappiness of the level-editors that most game companies write for their products.
That's the genius of Miyamoto; he's equally adept at both level AND game design. He has wonderful ideas, and he knows how to implement those ideas within levels.A lot of level-designers may be good at technically using the programs but they have no creative drive (something that I believe to be true about the level-designers for Unreal 2 - they can't even begin to approach Cliffy B's level of ingenuity and imagination, and to be frank Cliffy B is a good level designer but not a good game designer).
Miyamoto was also brilliant at teaching you various gameplay mechanics as the game unfolded, as opposed to the lazy-ass method of including a tutorial level or mode in which all the mechanics are thrown at you at once.
Okay, then -- in your opinion, which designers produced 2D platformers and/or action/adventures that were equal to or better than the 2D Marios and Zeldas? (I presume 2D games remain the focus of this thread; 3D is an entirely different realm, and Miyamoto has notably struggled to adjust.)There are other designers out there who have done things that are just as good, IMO - and maybe even better.
Miyamoto had no shortage of resources during the production of Mario 3, and yet he spent "exhausting months" on its creation. Game development, ironically, is anything BUT leisure.Besides, Miyamoto is also in a position where he is virtually unconstrained by either a budget or a time-table. With that kind of leisure, I'd imagine it would be hard for anybody with a modicum of designing talent NOT to turn out an A+ title every time.
A+ games are not produced by a "modicum of talent," they're produced by the best of the best: Miyamoto, Meier, Cerny, Wright, Molyneux.
Admittedly, it takes a tremendous amount of money to create a technically sound and visually appealing game for the current generation of consoles, but there still has to be a great game design upon which to build a sparkly 3D engine.
(I still can't quite believe I'm defending the 2D design talents of Shigeru Miyamoto....)
-- Z.
Allow me to quote from "Chris Crawford on Game Design":
"Games are for kids, right? They're simple, easygoing fun, right? Ergo, anybody should be able to design them, right? WRONG! It takes lots of training and years of practice to become a good game designer. Surprise, surprise. Game design, like any other serious activity, requires expertise. Yet this simple lesson is lost on just about everybody."
No, it's not rocket science, but it's hardly easy.
I wouldn't anticipate thousands of submissions. In fact, Agetec's roll-your-own games (Fighter Maker, RPG Maker) have proven that most console gamers, when they discover how much work is involved (and this, with enormously simplified design tools), quickly lose interest.out of the thousands of people who would probably submit levels, I'm sure at least 5-10% of them would be quite fun.
Of those people who did submit, MAYBE one or two levels would be good enough to compare to a real Mario game. But the vast majority of the submissions would be slight (and inferior) modifications of existing Miyamoto levels, or stupidly difficult "mega-hardcore" levels, or just plain awful levels with no balance or form.
I've yet to play a dungeon-hack with a randomly generated dungeon even one-tenth as interesting as the most basic human-crafted Zelda dungeon. Random 2D-platform levels would be much the same.Although it would take an fairly sophisticated program, it would also be entirely possible to make some kind of random level generator to make quick levels... although I'd be concerned that it would become akin to random encounters in RPG games... just pointless busy work that was never as good as the REAL levels.
-- Z.
Not even those of the game Dungeon Hack (SSI/Forgotten Worlds, '94)? True that it's a Dragon Warrior-esque game, but the level generator was very good.
My knowledge of PC gaming is very limited, so I know nothing of Dungeon Hack. Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll try to track down a copy. Does it include randomly generated Zelda-ish puzzles, or is it just combat?
-- Z.
First off, I don't want to be mistaken as saying random dungeons are anything as complex as what you'd need in a sidescroller.My knowledge of PC gaming is very limited, so I know nothing of Dungeon Hack. Thanks for the heads-up -- I'll try to track down a copy. Does it include randomly generated Zelda-ish puzzles, or is it just combat?
-- Z.
Dungeon Hack is essentially Eye of the Beholder, but with prettier graphics (that repeat a good deal) and unfortunately *no* meaningful storyline outside of a (rather pretty but generic) "go to the dungeon and find me whatever" type story. The one time I played it through it ended with me meeting a Lich, whom I dispatched with great haste. In short, it's one of those ridiculous AD&D crawlers that lets you run through map squares as fast as you can hit the arrow key; combat essentially becomes a matter of running up, whacking once, and then running away as you wait for your attack option to return. It's on 3.5 inch disks, 5 of them or so. You can find it on the AD&D Silver Anniversary compilation, or you can buy a new copy of the original on eBay for not much at all (I know this for a fact--I just checked). Not the best game ever, but rather interesting as it's one of the last of that genre.
I remember Dungeon Hack being more Eye of the Beholder-esqe (might have even used the same engine) than Dragon Warrior-esque.Not even those of the game Dungeon Hack (SSI/Forgotten Worlds, '94)? True that it's a Dragon Warrior-esque game, but the level generator was very good.
The level generator was definitely better than I was expected, or good enough that I played through to the end of a randomly generated game, but not good enough for a replay.
As others have said, it's a Dungeon Master or Eye of the Beholder style game... unfortunately, the puzzles that it creates are rather simple "find the right key" style puzzles. It's actually smart enough to generate puzzles that span several levels (ie, you'll find keys that you needed two levels previously). You can actually alter some of the settings that it uses, but you'll never get levels out of it that are as good as the original Dungeon Master levels.
The same is completely true for a 2D platform games... you'd never get random levels that were anywhere near as good as legitimate levels (and making random Zelda dungeons would probably be even worse). But, a limitless source of levels (even ones that were only moderately good) would be interesting for at least a while. It would only work as a secondary feature of the game though (like, there would be a secret level somewhere that was a new random level each time you played it).
--Zero
Sorry, I had cleared that up in my post six minutes before yours, but yes, you're absolutely right.
Yes, that's essentially what I did: played it through once. Hologram walls upped the difficulty of navigating a bit, but it was still essentially "find the key." It's still amazing that the game could set up those walls and have you peering through a grating at a room you knew you should get into but couldn't. I remember that the game had a setting to create multi-level puzzles as well. I set options to make hunger virtually a non-issue, if it's not possible to disable hunger altogether. There are some really neat options in that generator; it's a shame they didn't use them all in a new story-driven game. Oh well. Dungeon Hack was a pretty game at the time, but the core engine to it was obsolete. It handled pretty much everything a previous AD&D game had, though...The level generator was definitely better than I was expected, or good enough that I played through to the end of a randomly generated game, but not good enough for a replay.
I had the impression that Dungeon Hack was an inferior graphical remake of Hack/NetHack. NetHack seems to be amazingly popular with its users.
(You can get that collection here.)
No, Dungeon Hack has nothing at all to do with NetHack except for the fact that both use randomly generated dungeons.
--Zero
More on Miyamoto
OK, I'll get to this in a second, but first I want to tackle one of your responses to someone else (and I am not in the habit of creating five different posts just so that I can quote all your stuff, so...)
So, you who think you can quote Chris Crawford and defend Miyamoto - let's tackle this Chris Crawford quote:
"If I go into the forest and eat an orange mushroom,and it makes me so woozy that I actually enjoy Super Mario Brothers, I can come back and tell you, 'Don't eat those orange mushrooms, they'll make you do crazy things!'"
This is from his (in)famous "Dragon Speech" where he lambasts the gaming community for creating twitch games that do almost nothing to engage either the human mind or the human heart. I hardly think that Chris Crawford, when asked his thoughts on Miyamoto, would answer in favor of your position. He's been a regular critic of Nintendo and their "twitch-gameplay-without-any-deeper-meaning" philosophy of game design.
He doesn't like Super Mario, or Zelda, or any of those games - he wants to see games that are about "a boy and his dog, the prostitute with the heart of gold," etc. - games that make you think and feel in deep and meaningful ways. Let's face it - while Miyamoto's games are entertaining run-arounds, his ability to move the heart and mind are limited at best. It's not that he doesn't have any story, but that his story has never really progressed beyond the trite "save the princess!" paradigm and the "oh no but our princess is in another castle! er, I mean, you have to collect eight pieces of triforce! no, wait - you have to collect the medallions of the sages!" model of story-telling.
I never said that the principles of game design were "simple" or that it didn't take talent - but I admire talent like Sid Meier's and Warren Spector's and Peter Molyneux's over Miyamoto's any day of the week. Why? Because, in general, when you play one of their games, you have some sort of exploration of a philosophical issue and / or you have a choice about how you accomplish your goals. Black & White - will you be a good god or an evil, god? Why? Deus Ex: kill people or go in guns blazing? Alpha Centauri: which "civilization" (or "political / philosophical ideology" in this case) will I choose, and how will I live with the practical side-effects of this philosophy?
Granted, games like Deus Ex didn't offer you a complete choice and eventually you had to kill people. I'm guessing that if Spector had had a budget as big as Miyamoto's and all the time in the world like Miyamoto has he could have made Deus Ex a lot better game in that regard (as he's said in interviews that he wanted to). But at least, for most of the game, you had a choice about how you take down the opponent - as opposed to Miyamoto, whose only method of creating a challenging enemy is to make it vulnerable to exactly one weapon and then to have you have to figure out which one it is (and that's not usually too hard because it's almost always the weapon you just obtained).
Furthermore, I never said that game design was "leisure," but that Miyamoto "had the leisure" of an almost inexhaustible budget and schedule. You're good at twisting words, aren't you? I suppose if you do it to Chris Crawford, though, I should feel honored that you'd feel the need to do it to me, too
In short: Miyamoto might be able to make good "jump-through-these-hoops" games, and I'm not arguing that when it comes to hiding heart-pieces and making some little block puzzles that he isn't very talented. What I am saying is that this ability doesn't make him Shakespeare - in fact far from it.
Shakespeare's genius was not just putting together a bunch of words to make it sound pretty, but making it sound pretty AND injecting some hefty and meaningful statements about the human condition into the work as well. Miyamoto's work is entertaining, but any deeper meaning drawn out of his games would be really scraped together - it's not like the games are rife with it. As such, no matter how talented he may be with what he does, there are other game designers out there who are better than he is, because they can hide their heart pieces (or Augmentation canisters) and make their block puzzles (or their creature islands) just as compelling while also managing to insert meaningful choices and / or dialogue on the human condition into the bargain.
You are startled by a grim snarl. Before you, you see 1 Red dragon. Will your stalwart band choose to (F)ight or (R)un?
Re: More on Miyamoto
My "position" is that game design is a bitch, but far too many people think it isn't. I don't think Crawford would disagree with that position.
I'm well aware of Crawford's distaste for the current state of game design, and discussed those views with him in a lengthy interview shortly after the release of "Game Design." While I certainly don't agree with everything he has to say -- in particular, his writing off GTA3 as "sleaze" -- I have the utmost respect for him, and I certainly had no intention of twisting his words.
Absolutely true. I was referring strictly to his unrivaled skill at the art of 2D action/platform and action/adventure level design.Let's face it - while Miyamoto's games are entertaining run-arounds, his ability to move the heart and mind are limited at best.
I don't have a problem expressing equal admiration for Miyamoto and Spector, because I appreciate Miyamoto's light-hearted romps as much as I appreciate Spector's thought-provoking efforts. They have vastly different approaches to game design, but they're both masters of their craft.I never said that the principles of game design were "simple" or that it didn't take talent - but I admire talent like Sid Meier's and Warren Spector's and Peter Molyneux's over Miyamoto's any day of the week.
While I don't feel that I "twisted" Crawford's words in any way, I apologize for misinterpreting yours.Furthermore, I never said that game design was "leisure," but that Miyamoto "had the leisure" of an almost inexhaustible budget and schedule. You're good at twisting words, aren't you? I suppose if you do it to Chris Crawford, though, I should feel honored that you'd feel the need to do it to me, too :)
What I didn't clearly state was that an inexhaustible budget and schedule don't guarantee an A+ game. Daikatana and Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness cost millions of dollars and untold man-hours to produce, but they were atrocious. It comes down to design talent, as always.
As before, I welcome anyone to cite examples of 2D action/platformers and 2D action/adventures which they feel are equal or superior to Mario and Zelda.As such, no matter how talented he may be with what he does, there are other game designers out there who are better than he is, because they can hide their heart pieces (or Augmentation canisters) and make their block puzzles (or their creature islands) just as compelling while also managing to insert meaningful choices and / or dialogue on the human condition into the bargain.
My quoting Crawford obviously struck a nerve with you, and I apologize for doing so. I should've simply stated that game design is a bitch, instead of inadvertently introducing PC designers into the discussion.
-- Z.
Re: More on Miyamoto
Well, Nintendo has already announced that they plan on focusing on making "simpler" games that are easier to learn, and play, so I hope this guy wasn't holding his breath.
Personally, I don't really care much what the story is... as long as the gameplay is fun (which is the case in just about all Mario and Zelda games), I'll enjoy it. If I want deeper meaning, I'll go read a book.
--Zero
Re: More on Miyamoto
Crawford is hardly just "this guy." Check out http://www.erasmatazz.com and read up on his career and accomplishments. His most recently posted articles, "The Education of a Game Designer" and "The Tyranny of the Visual," are typically brilliant observations. He's also kind of an asshole, which appeals to me.
-- Z.
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