The game has an excellent concept, but it has to have the worst scoring system possible for reviewing your games. The game reviews based on your record? How does that make a lick of sense? As the game stands, the game rewards gaming the system by increasing your quality very gradually.
The entire concept of the sliders is something I don’t get as well. Why would, for instance, better AI in an RPG be considered negative? I think focusing on “non-essential” areas in games should be penalized by cost and developmental time, not by arbitrary penalties. That way, players in most stages of the game will make that trade off on their own.
Totally agree, the compare to your best game thing +12-20% is the biggest flaw. But the whole game balance relies on this, so it would not be an easy fix.
The slider thing is ok I think, but I also agree it would be better to just reward focusing on the other 2 areas instead of penalising AI above 20%.
We will work on balancing the rating system for different play styles better. An announcement about this will be made in the next couple of days. The core principles of the sliders will still largely remain but the actual score calculation will be tweaked.
Wait what! you get penalized for more then 20% AI ?! wtf well that explains why my games have been trash I love Good AI and so I have been cranking that so yha ok… WTF!
you are not just penalized for doing too much AI in any game. it depends on your topic/genre combo. Please don’t take such statements at face value. the game is a bit more complex than that. Even if you happen to focus too much on an area, the game doesn’t just penalize you brutally on that one factor. there’s lots of other factors that come into play.
Only in games that do not require much AI, like Adventures and Casual. And there are indeed lots of other factors,so I suppose it could be possible to make a very good adventure with superb AI, if you do the other factors right.
Frankly, I think the sliders should be overhauled. Each slider should indicate how much time you’re spending on that specific aspect of the game, rather than being a percentage of predetermined time. In other words…if the slider is at, say, 10% you only spend a month or two on that one aspect of the game. As well, if it’s at 100%, you may spend 6-9 months, or even a year, on that single aspect. It will make time management more important, allow for each specific aspect of a game to shine in reviews, and make the process a bit more in-depth.
Obviously, the more time spent on specific aspects should effect the scoring/rating, as well…based on which genre you’re making.
I don’t agree with the simplicity of your slider model. If I, for instance, produce a small game with 5 people why can I not have all sliders on full and just spent more time with development? Also, why are all small games rated average or below just because I am able to produce AAA ? It’s also uncool to only be able to assign one person for each topic in each step. And: the system stops to work completely when I do a AAA MMO.
[quote=“Resistanc3, post:10, topic:4142, full:true”]
I don’t agree with the simplicity of your slider model. If I, for instance, produce a small game with 5 people why can I not have all sliders on full and just spent more time with development? (…)[/quote]
THIS, so much this!
At first playthrough, I assumed increasing sliders meant spending more time on each, and that the preview was just a weird fun thrown-in thing. When I realized that the amount of time spend per phase was fixed and that you were allocating fractions of it, that was quite a bummer.
Forgive me, but suppose you have a 2 mediocre coders on on two sliders and an uber tech guy on AI and you’re making an RPG and your sliders are optimal, won’t the excessive tech generated by the AI guy throw off your balance and cause crap reviews?
@Resistanc3@dafranker
We discussed this early on as well. The problem is that if we tie slider values to actual time spent the first thing everyone would do is drag them all to maximum, thinking that this will result in the best possible game. Then we would need to explain somehow that it still matters on what areas you focus on. Having the development time fixed (and based on game size) while the sliders just set the relative focus just makes much more sense.
I’m strongly against any system where you can just create a perfect game by spending money and time. This isn’t how game development works. You could have millions and a great team, if you try to be perfect you will not achieve this goal.
to everyone:
Please keep conversations about this constructive. If this devolves into just saying ‘this is bad’ and throwing around arguments based on wiki-knowledge or flat-out wrong assumptions as if they are hard facts then there isn’t much value added.
@PatrickKlug
Ah, of course. I see what you mean about the problem with the ability to just spend more time to linearly get better games. The kind of design for this I had in mind by default would not suffer this problem (i.e. a good diminishing returns thing based on project bloat and bugs and such), but on second thought doesn’t seem to fit with (what I perceive to be) your general design goal.
As in, I was envisioning the ability to just increment the number of weeks spent on something arbitrarily, i.e. +/- buttons or number-entry, with no sliders, and leave it to the player to determine “good” amounts - and have the amount of points currently put into some aspect of the game act as a slowdown/bloating effect on putting more points into it, modified by developer skill. So yeah, doesn’t seem to fit in that well with the rest of the game.
And from what I’ve seen (*whistles innocently*) this thing would require quite a major rewrite of… well, one of the core elements of this game! Why, that’d be just like a new, different game! (which I should go make right now, if I’m as good as I make myself seem - sheesh, I should shut up now).
@Fruit_Platter
Real life’s current rating system is pretty bad too. You can never get a perfect 10 on it, even if you’ve got the best game in history. There’s always some bummer somewhere who’s going to give you an 8.
Not that I’m arguing in defense of the rating system. I dislike it greatly too, but unfortunately don’t have any genius ideas that would make it better without, as implied above, major rewrites of key game elements.
Why don’t you just put benchmark ranges of points that equal different game scores. This benchmark could go up every year to reflect the advancement of the industry as a whole.
example
year 1 benchmark 9-12 design 9-12 technology= avg 5-7 [7 if the direction is perfect 5 if its not good]
13-15 13-15 =avg 8-10
year 30 benchmark 600-800 design 600-800 technology= avg 5-7
800+ 800+ =avg 8-10
In this way both things would matter and it would be more realistic. This is just a rough idea you could make higher top ends more prone to getting better averages as well.
we have experimented with this before. it doesn’t work. play-styles are very different and this would make it either too hard or too easy for some. anyway, we have already plans on how to adjust the current system. we just need to try it out first.
Yeah I agree, this system definitely needs a overhaul. And go more indepth, with at least a paragraph of reviews and actual reviews…its hard to explain but in depth, etc.