High level game design

When people speak of luck, they mean that there are things outside of one’s control and/or knowledge structures that affects some outcome. Let’s call this the unknown. A game’s success is both composed of the known and the unknown. For instance, consider the image below:

Here max_oats is saying that despite Eric being really good at the known, Stardew Valley only got as big as it did because of the unknown. This is likely true, and if you were to ask Eric if luck played a role in his game’s huge success, he would say yes.

Game quality is all that matters

Recently I got into a small discussion with a few other devs over how much your reputation as a developer matters. The automatic position most devs have on this is that it matters quite a lot: if you have a good reputation further releases will be more likely to succeed, whereas if you have a bad one further releases will be more likely to flop.

I disagree with this very strongly. I believe that the only thing that matters for a game's success is its quality, and amassing an audience as a developer has extremely limited effects on the performance of any of your subsequent games. I also believe that people vastly overestimate how much publishers, streamers, youtubers, and marketing in general contributes to a game's success. And in this post I'll make the argument for why I believe this to be the case.

Self-expression vs. vesselization

I was watching this talk by Edmund earlier and it's a very good one. I think I agree with pretty much everything he says in it, except the very first point:

I think honesty is what art is and, you know, business makes it dishonest. It's a difficult field as an artist to be in, because, to some degree, the dishonesty of selling something or being a salesperson can easily taint your work and you can attempt to manipulate people into feeling a certain way, playing more, putting more money into the machine, and it's a dangerous thing.

Like if you're an artist, you're a voice and you've got to find your voice. And in order to do that, you have to know who you are and be honest about who you are in order to translate who you are into what you're doing. That's the only thing an independent designer has over a large company.

But you can't be brutally honest about this vision that you have for a game, if you're in a company of 100 people, like your honesty matters not, you know, it doesn't matter at all. But when you're independent, and you know, you're in a handful of people team, or even just two people or one, being honest is what being an artist is about, and it's not only very respectable to see overall, but it's also, I think it's just not done enough in our industry, and I understand that's because of business.

But not being manipulative and condescending with your work is important. Knowing who you are is important. And allowing your flaws and eccentricities, if you will, to show in your work is honest, and that's what makes art special.

Skill death spirals

Recently I've been playing Rumbleverse a lot after watching NL play it and also because I need to somehow fight my Super People withdrawal, and it's a very fun game. However, playing it has made me think more and more about a problem I've mentioned in my past two Super People posts, which is the problem of the "skill death spiral".

This is a problem every competitive multiplayer game has to manage somehow, but it's especially problematic with BRs because they uniquely need a very high population of players so matches can start in a timely manner, which means that they're more sensitive to the problem and thus are the best games to use for its analysis.

Description

Deep instinctive changes

This post is a response to this discussion on twitter.

When I first played PUBG for hundreds of hours I could visibly notice myself becoming better at making and sticking to plans. The game is so open and you’re constantly threatened, so if you want to get good it forces you to come up with your own structures to deal with all the inherent uncertainty and randomness.

Unity and Godot, artists and their hatred of money

A week ago John Riccitiello, CEO of Unity, said this:

More specifically:

Authorship isn’t real

Information wants to be free, culture follows evolutionary flows — viral memetics — and accreditation, provenance, patents, copyright are all burdens that strangle the free flow of the work and ruin its memetic fitness.

Recognize memetic culture cedes no authorship, no credit; art is produced in a lucid state playing handmaiden to collective unconsciousness — and accelerated by the web — Art comes from beyond the self, comes from the network, or God. Claiming it is hubris. Plagiarism is thus praxis, freeing work from hindrance.

— Unpacking Post-Authorship (2022)

In 202X, indiedev X releases his game. It’s a smash hit. In a matter of weeks it has 100k reviews and millions of copies sold on Steam. X also did the unthinkable: he made his game open.

The code was MIT licensed and made to be modded from day one, and more importantly, the IP was also open. This meant anyone could use the game’s assets, characters, story, etc, to make derivative products and build upon X’s work without having to pay him back any royalties.

Competition isn’t real

There is no competition among indie developers. The more successful indie games there are on Steam the higher your future chances of success as an indiedev.

Outsized success creates demand for more games similar to it, and as more of those games are created and each further outsized success happens, a new genre starts to establish itself.

As the audience for this new genre increases, more developers are enticed to make games for it, creating a positive feedback loop that only ends when no more outsized successes for it happen.

Luck isn't real

Your body and your mind are you and you are them. Your body speaks to you through instinct, your mind speaks to you through reason. You feel in control of your mind because reason is weak, you don't feel in control of your body because instinct is strong.

Body to mind coercion is the default state. Strong ancient instinct is a natural winner, which is why you eat and play more than you should, and exercise and work less than you should.

Mind to body coercion is slow and painful. Convincing your body to do something it doesn't want to takes time and effort - new habits have to be built from scratch, old habits have to be resisted and then forgotten.

Why indiedev creativity is stagnant and how to fix it

April Fool’s Day is a great example of how agreeableness acts as a blocker on creativity. Only on the day where wild and silly things are socially accepted do companies try aggressive changes to their products that might make them a lot better, as the social cost of change becomes lower.

For instance, Path of Exile’s battle royale mode started out as an April Fool’s joke. People liked it so much they constantly asked for it to be brought back over 3 years. Eventually the devs gave in and implemented a full version… that no one ended up liking.

Super People design review

I’ve played Super People’s closed beta for about 300 hours for the past month or so. I have a pretty good understanding of the game by now and I managed to reach a good rank (~#40 global, although if the game was properly populated I’d barely be able to reach top 500 at most, since I’m not that good). The point being that everything I’ll say comes from a place of good and fair experience.

The main reason for writing this post is that Super People has a few interesting design problems that tie in with issues I’ve been thinking about recently relating to openness, conscientiousness and game design so I thought it’d be worth writing it down.

The cons of compassion

Agreeableness is one of the traits in the big five personality index. This is a statistically derived survey-based personality assessment tool devised by psychologists over the past few decades.

It can be divided into two subtraits: compassion and politeness. The compassionate are more likely to empathize with people, to care about their feelings, to be concerned for them, to want to be connected with them and affiliate with them emotionally. Politeness refers to the tendency to avoid aggression, to not exploit people, to not take advantage of them, and to respect things like social rules and norms, as well as authority more generally.

You would think that more compassion and more politeness is always good, but that’s wrong! As a general rule, for all personality traits, the extremes always have pros and cons.

Status Addicts

Recently I got in trouble over saying the n-word. Yes, that's right. More specifically, I said that I had a generally positive view on them... Gamers currently don't take kindly to folks with these newfangled fancy ideas 'round these parts, so this kind of pushback isn't unexpected. What was surprising was that, like in 'em good ol' days, I even got called an "n-word lover" by this here boy what calls himself 'DANDEE L'OREO':

It's very sad to see how much the gaming community has regressed lately, it's almost 2022 for crying out loud! Alas, I can brush off these kinds of comments easily, but I thought it'd be good to use this curious event as an opportunity to talk about the broader idea of status yet again. I have already talked about this extensively in previous posts, but having yet another post talking about it in even more detail is going to be good for future reference.

2022

In this post I'll go over my gamedev plans for 2022.

SNKRX

Updated stats:

NFTs, status and creativity

I've been following crypto since 2012 and I first got interested in it mostly for academic reasons. It was an interesting development in computer science and I followed it somewhat closely for a couple of years. I feel like I have a fairly good understanding of it, but I've been really on and off about paying attention to further developments since like 2014-2015, so if anything I say here is wrong, please feel free to correct me and I'll update the post.

Essentially there are two ways to keep track of money, or of who owes who what: tokens and ledgers. Tokens directly represent the state of reality. If you have a gold coin, you have the coin. If you give it to someone else, you don't have it anymore. Ledgers indirectly represent the state of reality. Transactions are written down and the balance of each account can be derived from the transactions and their order.

In the digital world, because everything is information, we can only have ledgers. This is because if you give someone a token in the digital world, you're actually giving them a perfect copy of that token, but they can't know for sure that you'll delete your copy, since copies are easy and cost nothing to make. So tokens, as they exist in reality, are useless as record keeping devices in the digital realm.

This e-mail was sent to you because you subscribed to my newsletter at a327ex.com.

Marketing vs. skills

Recently someone sent me an e-mail asking me, roughly, that given my recent posts it seems like I don't value marketing that much. And given that marketing is such an important part of being an indie developer, what gives?

Why do I place such a low amount of value in activities like building wishlists, sending keys to influencers, building a community with a Discord server, and all the other tried and true activities that every indiedev should do if they want to have a chance at success? Is it because I'm now financially secure and so I don't have to worry about any of this anymore, or is it something else?