Hi, I just have a simple question. When I release a new game, let’s say a text-based game. When I invest nothing in graphics (ofc not needed since its text based) does it affect the game in a negative way? Or does the game know that it is text-based and therefore doesn’t need good graphics and sounds?
The same counts for gameboy games. When I create an engine that supports gamepads and joysticks it doesn’t make sense to me to use the gamepad or joystick when I develop a game in a gameboy. Does the game also notice that this is senseless or do I have to add every feature of the engine to get better games?
Every engine feature, despite their unique names, is just a representation of a bonus. The game doesn’t check the type of feature against what kind of game you are creating. (So the Steering wheel will benefit a racing simulation game just as much as a Fantasy RPG, for example).
The way features work is this: When you are working on a part of a game that has a special engine feature enabled, the number of bubbles produced during that step are increased. So if, for example, I include the “Better AI” feature, when my team gets to the AI part of the game, they’ll be spitting out more bubbles than they would had I not had the “Better AI” feature.
As you research more and more features, you can add more and more to each aspect to gain a bigger and bigger bonus…up to a point. How many bonus features you can include and still get benefit from depends on how much time you spend focusing on that aspect. If you try to add more features than you can handle, you’ll notice a little % number appear. This is telling you that some of the benefit of your features is being wasted…and that adding more features in that category will not give you any further benefit. The only way to cram in more features would be to devote a higher slider % to that category.
That being said, you need to be mindful of your slider balance based on the genre of game you are making. You might have a BUNCH of dialogue features that need a really high slider % to enable all of them…but if you are making an action game… you don’t want to do that. Action games don’t care about dialogue and setting your slider too high actually hurts your score. Better to keep dialogue to a minimum and only turn on 1 small feature. Where as with an RPG, you want the dialogue slider nice and high.
When you go up in game sizes (medium to large, and large to AAA) you’ll be able to fit more raw features in.
Every engine feature, despite their unique names, is just a representation of a bonus. The game doesn’t check the type of feature against what kind of game you are creating
This actually surprised and disappointed me. Until reading this post, I’d been tailoring games by using only features that seemed relevant, thinking that the game would reward me for applying logic. Hearing you say the game actually rewards illogic, makes me not like it as much :/…