Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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Fascinating, isn't it? There is something about storytelling in games that thrives on having a small group with creative control and seems to require a huge amount of effort.

But it is weird that we don't see better open source games, because good storytellers have no problems giving their work away for free. There is an overabundance of great writing on the internet. But taking a solid plot and turning it into a game engine just doesn't take.

I'll point at Return of the Obra Dinn as a nice example I played through recently. Very simple story (ship suffered a terrible fate), very simple mechanic (figure out who all the passengers were from visual clues). Individually all the ideas are so trivial it barely makes sense to talk about charging for them, and the engine isn't so amazing. But I've simply never seen an OSS game with that level of quality and storytelling. Which is actually highly weird given that I've seen both better quality storytelling and engines of similar or higher complexity made available as open source/free as a labour of love. There is something much more interesting than meets the eye going on in game development to do with the intersection of GUI complexity/difficulty of asset creation/stories.

I often find storytelling in games to be a time-wasting distraction. For example, Slay the Spire would be significantly improved if the narrative elements were removed and I could just focus on the duels. I play games to play. If I want a story, I’ll watch TV or a movie.

Same. Sadly, I feel we’re in the minority. I don’t want cutscenes, a narrative, or anything that drags me out of the flow of gameplay.

For my money, Quake III Arena was pretty much the pinnacle of gaming: play a match quickly, go to the next one or stop. Perfect.

The Tony Hawk games (mostly) nail this flow as well!

> But it is weird that we don't see better open source games, because good storytellers have no problems giving their work away for free. There is an overabundance of great writing on the internet. But taking a solid plot and turning it into a game engine just doesn't take.

Mh, I'm not a professional gamedev or such, but from 1-2 personal projects, some ludum dare interactions and also looking at the OpenRA project: Content is grind, and it's both easy to underestimate how much content is in games, and how much of a grind that content creation can be.

Like, if we stick with the Red Alert / Dune2+ universe. Initially after some design phase, you need to implement your mechanics, set the basics for your systems, implement the architecture how systems interact. This is very much what folk would call "interesting software development".

However, once you have that: You need to implement 30 units, paint them, add the units to your engine, create their behavior. There is some creativity involved here, but these are 30 very similar paint-by-number tasks. And then there are 2-3 * 20 maps to design, playtest and balance. Or 100 pushover levels to make, or 100 lost vikings levels. For example, the last time I was looking at it, OpenRA was still looking for mappers to setup some of the last maps from the different games - and not all of those levels were engine blocked.

Even look at the Return of the Obra Dinn. Look at the number of scenes you explore, the number of people you need to figure out. Even very optimistic estimations quickly run into weeks and months of similar kinded work.

I would suspect being in a group of a few people all excited about this project and/or needing the money it should make would make handling this easier.

I think you're right. Re-implementing the Red Alert engine is fun... at least for the sort of person who's doing OS work in the first place!

But playtesting the game isn't so fun. ("Have they fixed that collision bug yet? Let me try systematically driving the harvester through every other kind of unit to check.")

And another problem is that commercial game development moves very quickly, relative to OS. Like, 0 AD had its initial release in 2010, and it's currently still in alpha. Age of Empires 4, a similar commercial game, went through the full [concept, implementation, release] cycle in, what, 2-3 years?

> And another problem is that commercial game development moves very quickly, relative to OS. Like, 0 AD had its initial release in 2010, and it's currently still in alpha. Age of Empires 4, a similar commercial game, went through the full [concept, implementation, release] cycle in, what, 2-3 years?

This is something to keep in mind when comparing yourself to any professional, yeah. On a good workday, I can put an hour or two into the guitar or my game project. This however means: A professional musician or game developer can fit what I do in the working parts of the week into half a day to a day.

And then add in the reuse of existing ideas, assets, code, engines and such on top.

There aren't many commercial games either like Return of the Obra Dinn

Agreed. Obra Dinn is a weird example here as there's nothing else like it.

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