Game Design Megathread

[Bushido]

[Ad Bot]

[DestroyerOfBlocks]

youre gonna need more blood than that

[McJob]

The Week One Showcase is up!

Included is:

• Swimming
• Respawns
• Changing the power of your gooey-balls by holding the mouse down
• Ladders
• Explosive Boxes
• Very basic code for the mission objective of blowing up generators
• Simple AI Pathfinding and their Chase Behaviour (they currently have a tiny field of vision, and can't yet respond to sound)
• Grappling (not its finished name)

Melee was going to make it in, but I forgeted it at the last minute. The interactive audio system is missing the condition setting code (it checks and fades everything correctly). Remote detonation is still not ready. A swath of bug fixes aren't stable yet.

This is going to be a good week, methinks.

[Demian]

The Week One Showcase is up!

Dude. Turn down that chromatic aberration. By like a lot.

[McJob]

Dude. Turn down that chromatic aberration. By like a lot.

Alright, but it's not my responsibility; the level designer is responsible for all post-processing effects. I'm working on a settings menu so players can adjust it themselves.

[beachbum111111]

-snip-

Reminds me of the magnet gun from Red Faction: Armageddon.

[otto-san]

welcome to my series of run-on sentences show it is very nice to see you today

i dove head-first into game design by making a cute lil platformer in like five hours for my mom on mother's day finally so now that's a thing i'm going to just do cus w/e man it's no big deal just gona make video games how hard could it be not doin nothin just sittin here thinkin about video games let's make some video games

i'm dealing with game maker right now mostly because i got it on sale a while back and should get as much use out of it as possible until i'm sick of working with it

gona try and make a nise lil turn based combat thing kinda which will be a significant leap from a dumb platformer but hey i like a challenge and i'm unconvinced that i'll have much trouble considering things i don't feel like typing because INTERNET!!!

coincidentally what is the best way to store persistent data about types of objects eg enemies and guys in game maker THANKS

[Glass Joe]

haven't touched game maker in a while (i moved on to c++) but you can store persistent information about an object in it's create event. from there you can store variables, it can work something like this:
///Initialization

hp = 50;
defense = 20;
attack = 50;
special = 100;
mana = 5;

then just integrate those variables in your game and you're golden

edit: actually misunderstood what you meant, you're going to have to make a base parent object, for example, par_enemy, and give it some things in a create event
then link all of those other enemies to that parent

[otto-san]

yeah that's what i figured

some good ol polymorphism kinda and whatnot

[McJob]

As a warning, no Week Two showcase this week. We had to go back and fix a lot of the design problems, so not a lot of code got implemented.

[IkeTheGeneric]

got into a fight with some1 on steam

he doesn't believe that one of the biggest parts of making a good horror game is sound design

what do you guys think?

[plad101]

got into a fight with some1 on steam

he doesn't believe that one of the biggest parts of making a good horror game is sound design

what do you guys think?

Sound design and subtly

[Flamecannon]

got into a fight with some1 on steam

he doesn't believe that one of the biggest parts of making a good horror game is sound design

what do you guys think?

my question is what did he think the biggest thing is

i agree with you because, iunno imagine a happy little game like animal crossing just having echoes of drops, no music, echoed footsteps and like white noise coming in and out would make you feel HOR ROAR, i mean of course creepy noises have to also be placed subtly and perfectly to work but yeah

[otto-san]

got into a fight with some1 on steam

he doesn't believe that one of the biggest parts of making a good horror game is sound design

what do you guys think?

sound design is important regardless of what genre your game is in. even the choice to have no sound is a sound design choice. it's a powerful tool to help deliver whatever it is you're trying to deliver to the player. i don't think it's necessarily useful to look at it so starkly as "sound design is one of the biggest parts," it's kinda just a matter of bringing every element of the game together to be engaging in whatever manner you're attempting.

more directly answering your question: sound design is always important and horror games are no exception. whether or not it's "one of the biggest parts" is probably a poor way to look at the fundamental question, rather, the question should be, "what is this game trying to deliver and how can its design deliver that central element?"

sorry that's probably all a bunch of fluff and nonsense i've been watching extra credits a lot today. which is a great time to say that if anyone in this thread has not seen extra credits jesus christ go do it for the love of god they are amazing and wonderful and give an awesome perspective on so many elements of game design. they've done a lot of videos about horror games in particular as well

[BluetoothBoy]

Sound design is most certainly one of the most important things in a horror game. Imagine Slender without sounds - it would be laughable.

A logical explanation of it: Our main sense (both IRL and in games) is sight. In horror games, you're usually not always surrounded by fear-inducing visual stimuli. That would ruin the point of the game. So when you don't always have visual cues, a game designer has to implement audio cues instead, hearing being our second line of defense in sensing our world.

From a psychological perspective, there's also the fact that we can interpret the same visual situation completely different in different sceneries based on the context clues. In other words, if a horror game had happy music, we'd feel far less scared, and would be much more prone to actually being happy. If there was the sound of a tropical rainforest instead of dark ambience, we'd feel more peaceful than suspenseful.