RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

[Music] hello everybody and thank you very much for coming I am Tynan Sylvester and today I'm gonna be going over rimworld contrarian ridiculous and impossible game design methods but for those of you who might not be as familiar with it I just want to run the trailer and tell you a little bit about it so rim world is a space colony simulator in which you land on a distant planet and it's sort of a space Western and you construct your base you farm stuff and your characters interact you'll trade they develop relationships they fund love they fall out of love they have X break up fights and go to each other's weddings and get drunk and do things they probably shouldn't do and over time you develop a base and continue in that direction so with the design of rumor world I tried really hard to approach the problem in a different way than what I saw is the usual so today I'm going to talk about some of those contrarian approaches and the beliefs that make them possible the core idea here is not about what to do specifically but rather how to change the mental framing of design problems to try to find new solutions because if you frame a problem in the same way as is automatic and common and typical then often you will get the same answers as everyone else but if you frame a problem a new way valuable new answers can arise so mantra rim world one of world's greatest inspirations is obviously Dwarf Fortress so hats off to turn Adams for that one but I wasn't actually inspired by playing Dwarf Fortress as much as I was inspired because I can barely play door fortress as much as I was inspired by the stories people created from Dwarf Fortress players have used door fortress as a storytelling tool by playing long games and writing down what goes on and recording the events taking screenshots and embellishing it all if poems and stories and art so some of you might have heard of stories like boat murdered or gem clawed and these are epic tales of creation and destruction and humor and victory and ambition and tragedy and interpersonal tension and alcoholism and this fascinated me because the emotions are so varied I've long believed that games attract us because the yield emotional experiences that people find fulfilling and I think classically games deliver what I call the arcade emotions which are basically suspense triumphs and defeat and the emotional sphere surrounding those but in Dwarf Fortress stories the emotions were much broader they were the emotions of story and character and empathy like the feeling of discovering a character is jovial or evil or prideful there's an emotion to discovering who someone is or pride in seeing an evil character reverse themselves and become good or disappointment when a good character does the opposite laughter add absurdities anger at injustice --is and worry over wounded friends and these kinds of feelings speak to deeply ingrained human needs that go beyond skill and competition and so why did so few games seem to be yielding these experiences in a systematic way I think part of it is social momentum I mean back in the 80s you had arcade game designers they want to get people to put quarters in and so a great way to do that is to make an infinite difficulty game that anyone can start out playing but no one can ever finish they absorb any level of skill and they've taken money by selling you lives and continues and a lot has changed since then but I think we're still living in a design culture that echoes that founder effect those founding ideas even the name of what we're doing here games it's the game developers conference even that has assumptions embedded into it typically if you talk to people about games games mean competition victory triumphs defeat the gourd game does not refer to the emotions of picking strawberries with your child or going to the beach or laughing at some comical misfortune or the pride of creating a story so when some says I'm going to make a game before deciding anything else they've already said a mental frame on the problem and if not careful they've potentially subscribed it to a set of assumptions that could limit them and of course I'm not the first to notice this so we do hear a lot about doing narrative and games and this is a really good impulse often though this means importing other assumptions from books or movies and sort of ramming them together with games and kind of doing the two side by side so and even then saying I'm going to make a story is just as much of a cognitive prison as saying I'm going to make a game but what I saw with Dwarf Fortress and the stories that it's created is a glimpse outside these constraints so from very early on I said specifically and explicitly that rimworld is not a game it's not a game rimworld is not a game and I have to keep repeating it and I have for years like a mantra because it reframed everything and it's so easy to slip back into the game framing Nora's room roll the story I'm not here to tell a story the game is not there to tell a story rimworld is a story generator the player interacts with it and stories emerge from that interaction so let's look at examples of how this reframes some design decisions first one one common complaint among rimworld players who are really skilled is that they play really well but they still get their face beaten by the game and they feel this is unfair because they think that their skills should be rewarded with commensurate success and since this comes up so often I've actually made it the skill test assumption it's the assumption that skill should be rewarded proportionally and this seems kind of obvious right like the player is more skilled so they have more success but hold on it's not a game it's not about winning and losing success isn't assumed it's not even important stories can end in success or failure and still be great stories every tragedy from Romeo and Juliet to ex machina ends in horrifying failure and loss for the protagonist but those tragedies are rich and moving emotional experiences I mean imagine applying a skill test assumption to stories - like a movie imagine a movie where the protagonist gets exactly their rewards proportional to his skill level I don't think it would be a great movie I think this is the opposite of a good story but it's exactly what a classical game is supposed to be in writing they'll teach you that one basic principle of good stories is that the protagonist pushes against some challenge and gets an unexpected disproportionate pushback so you look at examples the movie The Matrix neo is exploring the mystery of the matrix he doesn't even know what it is and suddenly he wakes up in a tube of goo with wires down his throat that's a disproportionate pushback in Star Wars Luke is basically just bored and he doesn't like the Empire and he wants to help out against it and he ends up holding a laser sword fighting a Dark Lord an alien rip Ernie's crew looking to make a few extra bucks from some distress signal and they're hunted by a xenomorph bioweapon perfect organism that's going to kill them and this is the opposite of the skill test assumption so I think we have to choose if we're gonna make an accurate skill testing game we cannot generate a good story at least not in the mechanics game's a split story and gameplay can do this because the scripted story presents the unexpected push back against the characters well the individual game mechanics challenges reward the player skill it's like a back and forth structure but with the game generating the whole story top to bottom characters and all the initialization and conclusion it doesn't work anymore so that's why while rim world does acknowledge player skill and we do try to reward it waise the game is very deliberately willing to harm players who are even playing well because if it couldn't I think it would be badly hobbled as a story generator another aspect of rimworld that makes it work without matching player rewards to skill is how it handles failure to have tension I think a game has to threaten the player with some sort of consequence that's what's in the balance in classic games this is the game is over or you failed two skill test and this makes sense because these games are all about testing skill once you've failed the skill test the question is answered that the test is done there's nothing else to find out stories are different and if story attention is maintained by threatening things that the characters care about not by threatening to end the story so in rim role when things go wrong they're designed to go wrong such that the player loses some story element that they care about like a pet or a loved one but the game is intended we just keep going we play it out and this works because the player is invested in these things and Starcraft you don't really care about any one of your Marines right there's nothing to make you care about them except insofar as they can help you win all you really want is victory but in room world you care about your characters because you've gotten to know them and losing even a character who might be kind of useless in terms of victory can still be a little bit heart-wrenching and losing things is good story losing things is emotional it's powerful it sets up the stakes for later on you you remember psycho the movie it starts out with the woman she she goes out to the hotel she was looking for for something and she gets stabbed to death I like a third of the way through the movie and you all think that she's the protagonist but the story doesn't end it just goes on with with other characters and the fact that she got stabbed and killed raises the stakes later on and that's how rumor Andals failure so here are some examples specifically like of game mechanics when the Raiders win a battle they don't just keep going relentlessly and Massacre everyone in the base after they've broke your defenses they used to do this but in later versions we discovered that if the Raiders become satisfied with kidnapping somebody or stealing some of your stuff and leaving they leave you to recover you can rebuild and you know the stakes next time they're coming after you even if your whole base burns down you can rebuild a new one right next to the ruins or in the ruins if your colony is in a poor state your characters get low expectations mood bonuses so they can continue to function at a lower wealth level without the creature comforts of a rich base and that lets you have some space to recover without everyone just falling apart and when things go really bad the player can even flee their base in a caravan and go somewhere else entirely and we've just emergently created that old Western story trope where the protagonist flees their village that's burning behind them with their family dead or enslaved looking to get revenge or start a new life for whatever goal they might choose it's the same as when Luke's parents got roasted at the start of a new hope I call this elastic failure because instead of failure being a brick wall that you run into and shatter on it's something that stretches the failure state you enter a deeper and deeper failure state and those failure states tend to be very dramatic and very Storyful because it's in the process of failure and the process of perhaps recovering from that that if we can extract that out that produces those dramatic situations another example of applying the story generator concept is Rimmer olds approach to game visuals so typically I think when we evaluate game graphics the most obvious way to do it is to say how good do they look how clearly did they communicate gameplay and these are generally pretty good criteria but if you're making a story generator the frame is different what purpose did the visuals serve to communicate the story they don't have to look detailed to do that or beautiful or realistic in fact it might be better if they were less detailed less beautiful and less realistic because the story is not a sequence of images it's a sequence of events images are just one means of communicating those events but there are others when you read a novel or you listen to a friend tell you a story verbally your mind fills that the situations and the characters in the emotion and you feel the story and those situations and characters and emotions are what the story generator is trying to create and none of them are visual so all that stuff in the screen it's not the end product the end product is the understanding and emotions an internal experience of creating and enjoying that story so rim rails graphics don't actually attempt to look maximally beautiful or realistic or detailed I think of rim road graphics as a system of symbols like Asian characters a little bit or icons on your phone and they represent abstracted objects to me room old graphics are as important as the typeface on a novel it can be better or worse but in the end I don't care except in terms of how effectively it transmits the story into the players mind so how do we do that specifically in rim world this is what I tried to hit number one not ugly if it's painful to look at or it looks awful on video you're not gonna sell that many games because it's just ugly it's actually unpleasant to look at so we try to definitely at least reach the threshold of beauty where you can look at it without psychic suffering easily identifiable the visual characteristics have to be very easily to identify for what they represent and this is in conflict with conflict with abstraction a little bit it makes it easier for new players to to play or for people to watch a video our trailer and understand what's going on which is important minimal noise making the graphics really simple reduces the noise in the image and that reduces the cognitive load to read the image an image with a lot of detail everywhere might be beautiful but when you're talking about a game like rim world with potentially hundreds and hundreds of objects on the screen scanning through that with your eyes and finding what matters to you becomes harder and harder the more details in their intensity hierarchy this is one way of helping people determine visually what is important and what is not so it's it essentially a hierarchy of what you'd call visual intensity to draw the eye more strongly towards things that are story relevant and let the slide over things that matter less as a simple example characters and buildings in the game have solid black outlines but plants have dark green outlines or no outlines at all and this means that plants tend to blend into the background slightly you can still see them it's not difficult but the characters really pop out so if there's a big field of trees and one character on it the character is looks like he's in the foreground and the plants are all sort of smeared together and it draws your eye there and the same is true of items gold food all have black outlines plants no second to last fast implementation for a reelin I really just made graphics really really quickly skipping over the need to worry about animation and complex graphics made it possible to inject more story content into the game more mechanics a lot of this stuff would be almost impossible to do if we tried to do it anywhere near the standard that a lot of games go for with their graphics because if the only goal is to enrich the story you cut whatever details you need to to make the story as rich as possible it's all about focusing on that one target of being a story generator that works well and finally is leave room for interpretation I'm going to go into this later but the basic notion is that you don't show everything and that lets the player imagine things better but I have a more a later discussion on that which is right here usually one would assume that in order to play or in order to enjoy some aspect of a game the developer has to implement that aspect of the game but it's not necessarily true so if you consider this table and the top left in the bottom right are what you would expect you put something in the game and people enjoy it if people read it you don't put something in the game and nobody perceives it because it's not there the top right is a classic design failure wherein a designer might put some complex beautiful number system in but it player just reads it as noise because they don't know what's going on or they don't see it but the bottom left is what I'm really interested in this is what I mean when I'm talking about impossible game design something that's not present in the game but the players are perceiving it anyways and think of how powerful this is because you don't even have to do the work but the players are enjoying things that you never had to actually implement and it works because the human mind is really an overactive system for matching patterns this is why you know ancient people they would look at the constellations in the sky and they would see beasts or chariots or people or they saw messages from the gods in chicken guts and tea leaves and people pattern match in a very specific way it's not random people interpret everything that's possible as tribal interpersonal politics so this is why religious traditions or mythologies would interpret unknowable phenomena in the old days like weather or quakes with the intentions of unseen deities it's the weather has an intention it's not just an object or political discussion tends to revolve around pretending countries or people or corporations or people it's like France did this or Germany did that Germany is a lot of different people and it doesn't have a single intention but we anthropomorphize it that way and I think it's because the part of our mind that models social interactions is super over developed because it's important to us but it's so over developed that we thoughtlessly applied to everything effortlessly without even realizing we're doing it when we impart rocks or we impart emotions and intentions on things like rocks and rivers and rain and stuffed animals and this happens of course even though these things don't have feelings so we can use this since the goal of rim world is to create a story of emotions and intentions and people are massively over interpreting these things we can let the players pattern-matching mind automatically and unconsciously ascribe emotion and intention in places where it doesn't actually exist and that's useful because stories are made of emotions and intentions so here are some ways to do it or some things that feed into this phenomena which I call apathy no one is abstracted feedback this is what I mentioned before the player can only invent interpretations if you don't force an interpretation upon them this is why the graphics are kept so simple in rimworld so for example here's the situation the doctor is treating his wife's bullet wound but it doesn't show the characters faces or their body language this isn't a Miss this is deliberate it means that the player is free to imagine these faces in this body language based on the situation if we put a visual image of that body language in the play would not be able to imagine it so you know if the doctor and the wife like each other the player might imagine a heartfelt moment of tension as he tries to save her and if they dislike each other they player might imagine that they have this like get it over with attitude or I'll let you touch me barely and if one character likes the other but not the reverse there's all sorts of other permutations that you could come up with the second thing is long-term relevance you want to keep things relevant for a long time to maximize the connections between circumstances and events interesting story events and interpretation spring from the overlapping of different circumstances so if you can retain over time the reasons why a character might want to do things something why might they they want to have that intention or why they might feel a certain way you can give people food to generate their own interpretations so for example this is why in rem Road I specifically designed the random incidents to take a long time to play out wherever possible so diseases they last a long time so does the toxic Fallot it floats down for months half a year maybe volcanic winter prowling Manhunter packs of wild boars they wait outside the doors for a week hoping you'll come out sieges and so on and so forth colonists remember events like family deaths or marriages or divorces they know their relationship they know what this person did to them failed surgeries they remember these things for a long time so there's many ways for these situations to overlap and connect together and knit into a story of intentions so for example if the doctor previously failed a surgery on his wife she will have a memory record of that which the game will express it says botched my surgery and makes her express dislike for him in the game systems but that's pretty thin in terms of how we do it numerically with the game but in terms of how this player can interpret a this it can be quite rich terms of how she might feel about this situation if the wife needs surgery because of a wound from an animal who's still prowling outside and food is short and the two are divorced recently but they had a cathartic fight that they feel better about you could just pile in the context and imagine what all these different permutations next I want to talk about game developers so game developers as a group I think we tend towards obviously a fascination with mechanics and logic and systems and numbers and especially this is in computer game development because this is how computers work so game developers will often chase their own emotional signals and tend to work towards mechanical numerical interactions that are interesting which can work really well don't get me wrong but if we're making a story generator this is a trap because stories are not made of numbers they're really made of emotions a story generator game has to relentlessly focus on the emotional journeys of the characters depicted and this is really different from a game game where the numbers and the mechanics provide the puzzle that the player can test themselves against so as before we have a conflict between the game is a skill test and the game is a story generator and a skill test game the player spends their time engaging with a logical system that they can master and a story generating game the player spends their time engaging with the imaginary motions of the characters and so many times I've gotten suggestions from players for mechanics that would be interesting to add interesting more internet in intricate economic production chains like right now you can just dig steel out of the ground and build something with it which is ridiculous because in real life you have to dig or out and then get some coal and smelt them together and refine them and people want that modeled some of them weapon customization with grips and stat changes and scopes propagating fluid dynamics or gas or deeper simulation of plants eating or animal breeding or these sorts of things these don't go into the game automatically because even they're interesting none of them are fulcrums four characters emotional journeys or at least not as strong as they could be you're not going to get an emotional character moment from somebody smelting or or seating plants and that's the sort of decision razor that I try to apply to cut things out of a design is it relevant to the character's emotional journey if it's not it doesn't go in the game so I focus always on things that characters will feel about saying is like changes in relationship status between people arrival and departure of family health problems created and solved food being good or bad or scarce are plentiful I mean these are you speak to deep human needs evolutionary time needs social competition and wealth and status quirks and traits of individuals I mean getting to know people is it's a very feeling intense process and this can be hard to do because I have the same impulses as everyone else who loves to write computer code which is I'm really interested in numbers so it's easy to fall into the trap of self indulging that and saying I'm going to code this really interesting thing that's going to make this this system that's going to have all these crazy properties but I try to suppress that because it could drive the game away from what it's really supposed to be which is Story generation so I always asked over and over does this enrich the emotional journeys of the characters so that's prim role does a story generator next I want to move on to some of the specific methodology that I used during development so game design I think as a discipline is really all about task selection it's answering the question what do I do next do i optimize the graphic system draw art for a new character do I write some new dialogue do I clear our whiteboard and just start brainstorming or start implementing a new bathroom mechanic or do I go to lunch and this is a hard problem and it's an important one because task selection is staggeringly impactful it shouldn't be done casually because that one moment where you choose to do the right task or the wrong one can equal months of labor trying to fix a problem on a poorly chosen task or spending time implementing features that don't really have much impact optimizing things that aren't slow or perfecting graphics that nobody notices unfortunately there's a lot of great games out there that are or games out there that are really well implemented but the developers worked on the wrong tasks and so they don't see the success that they should so I spent a long time thinking about how to do task selection and I'll start by criticizing that some of the typical approaches a little bit now I'll tell you what I've done on rimworld so how are we choose very consistently I think they're really the first naive approach that a random person at the street wall will come with is to the game design is they'll ask the question here's an idea would this idea be cool in the game and if so they think I should go in the game and I get suggestions of this form all the time this idea would be cool so you should put it in but this is absolutely the wrong question to be asking as part of a design process in fact it's almost a useless question because lots of ideas would be cool in the game in fact isn't that an idea would be cool does not mean you should do it the real question is of every possible idea for the game which one has the best coolness to cost ratio and this is the difference between satisficing and optimizing and these are two decision-making methods the satisficing is you set your criteria which is the ideas cool and you consider options one after the other and as soon as you find one that satisfies the criteria you choose it done optimizing is different it's optimizing you would essentially enumerate as many options as possible sort them according to some criteria and then choose the best one from that that process so each of these has its place if you want to buy a t-shirt off the internet you're going to satisfice because you can't enumerate all the people who will sell your t-shirts off the internet and t-shirts are pretty darn similar anyways so you probably just go and maybe look at a couple sites and choose the first one that you like and that's rational that's the good thing to do but if you're choosing dinner off a menu with five items you can afford to consider all the options before choosing the best one if you were satisficing you would just read from the top of the menu and literally just choose the first thing that was not awful but with optimizing maybe there's something even better down and you're gonna check there too you're gonna do the extra work so we can see some clear differences between these two optimizing is way more effortful and satisfies some criteria can be simpler because it's just a pass/fail but optimizing criteria need to be a comparison operator between two options that let you know which is better than the other satisficing saves time because you can consider just a tiny proportion of the options but optimizing needs to look at as many as possible and even though it's just thinking this is real cognitive effort the type that people try to avoid doing and really instinctively recoil from so I have to push myself into it as an aside when I understood this I I read about this concept I I realized why I hate shopping so much because when I shop I tend to try to optimize so I'm looking at something in the store and I'm like okay is it is it better than all the other ones here is it better than every other option of this type in the universe is it the best thing I could spend this $20 on with the total integrated feature value of this being superior to the total integrated feature value of every other option that it could possibly spend is $20 on which is a really kind of stressful problem to be facing all the time and in the shopping mall so I've learned to start satisficing a little bit there because it's a lot more relaxing but optimizing does get better results in terms of decision quality and as we saw because task selection can be so impactful this is important in games so with room rolled I tried very much to not satisfy but I also tried not to plan at least not planned in a traditional way you know the classical approach to a problem is you decide what you're going to do and then you do it so it's a blueprint for a house or a script for a movie that's your plan but think of everything you discard by creating a plan like this you discard the inspiration that you might have during development like new ideas shower thoughts you discard feedback you might receive from players you discard things you learned from testing your own game because you're a slave to decisions you've made when you put them in the plan and some developers move against this in a partial way which I've definitely done and works in certain circumstances by iterating so essentially create a plan execute it maybe in some a simplified form and then iterate on that result but I decided to try to go a little further in this and remove the concept of the fixed plan from the design process entirely so here's what I did on rim rolled day-to-day first I kept one immediate to-do list this is a Google Doc for each developer this is what you're working on at that moment usually it's like a page two pages maybe a little longer sometimes they're short they generally don't include more than a week or two of stuff to do and I have one each of us have one second the giant ideas reservoir that's another Google Doc and this one I record every inspiration and every idea and and everything that comes up that seems like it could possibly ever be worthwhile and this is where I'm trying to enumerate all the options because even that's its own task and this document soon includes hundreds even thousands of items room world's currently is about 60 pages 25,000 words or so I think it might be a little more now since I wrote this and probably it should be longer because I don't I'm a little too lazy to write down every idea but I really should third regularly put effort into sorting the ideas reservoir to put the best ideas on top and this is something you do week after week month after month revisiting the same stuff over and over and over again or the new stuff as it gets added in it's a living document to me I just basically do a bubble sort I compare pairs of ideas and if they seem out of order like this this one's on top but this one seems stronger I just put the lower one on top and often because I'm doing it repeatedly a reverse the decision that I made the week before the month before because I've learned something new or I feel different or something else has come up and been added to the document I think while sorting one tip here is it's important to never ever consider anything to be locked in because when you feel like locking something in what I tell myself is it's my mind not wanting to do the work because when something is locked in you don't have to think about it anymore and that's delicious that's what you're after right that's cognitive comfort but that would make the system not work as well so I really try to force myself to never consider anything locked in reevaluate reevaluate reevaluate every time you got to ask if this idea wasn't already in this position would I move it here and if not move it to wherever it should be and I've said which idea is better by that I basically mean benefit / cost-benefit means having more positive impact on player experience or better market positioning cost is a combination of implementation difficulty or negative impacts on players like if they have to learn something new or do a new tutorial item or something like that then that's a negative impact on players these are big topics in themselves so I won't go into them I just wanted to clarify that a little bit fourth when the to-do list gets under about a week of tasks or any to-do list I go to the ideas or reservoir I sort it maybe a little more if needed and then I just take some ideas off the top and move them over and so it's just copying pasting between Google Docs and that's it and these are the results that I think make it advantageous one is you retain inspiration have you ever written something in a notebook and then open it up two years later like you forget about it entirely you open up your notebook you look at your ideas from three or four years ago and you just don't recognize any of them it's like another person giving you ideas that's inspiration retention you've forgotten the ideas I've had this happen to me so many times so what's good about having an ideas reservoir that you're always putting things in is you capture every idea every valuable thought from every day all the time you don't just capture from your brainstorming sessions you capture from the shower from the car you capture from stuff you you read or movie you saw some of these ideas can we use years after the fact and some of them are layered you put an idea in it inspires another one and then you compare it to a third and they combine together into something new that goes into the game two and a half years later that's happened I think a few months of random note-taking beats a three-hour brainstorm session every single time next is long-term decision-making it really reduces bias essentially the goal of all this is to get better quality design choices so if you can reduce bias that's obviously what you're after since you're not deciding at once this one specific moment what you're going to do you're not subject to the biases of that moment instead you make decisions over time and reconfirm them in different states and this is good because it delimits those short-term biases your emotional state one day might lead to a bad decision or maybe you're just obsessed with some new idea but later on you'll realize you know I was actually kind of crap next is future knowledge advantage since you only decide things when you need to by which I mean you only move things to the to do queue at the latest possible time when you really need something to do you always know as much as possible when making that decision the principle is the future version of you always knows more than the present version of you the future version of you pretty much more or less is a universally entirely better decision making the maker than you are now because they know everything you know and they also know whatever you're gonna learn between now and then and so if you can hand a decision to someone who's smarter than you and more knowledgeable than you in every conceivable way then you probably should and that's future you so that's the future knowledge advantage no status quo bias status quo bias is the cognitive bias where people prefer the status quo and they look at change with suspicion and this is this is measurable this is just part of human nature and there's a reason for it but it's a major problem that comes from planning because you you put something in a plan and the bias kicks in you don't want to change the status quo and it gets worse than a group because everyone gets invested in the status quo in this system you've got a big ideas of reservoir but none of its planned none of it's locked in there is no status quo because you don't have a status quo plan to change your decisions aren't affected by the bias next is asynchronous working you don't need to work synchronously I work remotely with currently two other people in lieu down we we raillery we don't even talk to each other it off and sometimes we'll go to several days about talking directly because communication is actually pretty costly and a lot of communication is wasted time that could be done better in other ways especially when you need to schedule meetups or worry about when you're actually going to synchronize and get together and have those discussions and if you miss something it's brutal is you got to go back and get it later this methodology it doesn't require brainstorming sessions or design meetings or anything because you're always brainstorming and even even when you're sleeping if you have an idea you don't have to evaluate it you just drop it in a reservoir and the designer will later bubble sort it in and you don't get emails with your tasks they're just there in your to-do document and it works remarkably well at least for our context I'm convinced personally that I think the intensely social synchronous methodologies that get used a lot people are biased towards them because people like hanging out with other people which is totally a legitimate thing to want to do but it's at least we're stuck knowledge insane if you can do this in a different way it might be more optimal for decision-making and saving people time I don't necessarily recommend this for extroverts though it finally is ideas fight their way to the top by the time you're working on it every idea that anybody works on explicitly or Felicity implicitly has been compared with every single other idea that's ever been had about the game so they have to fight their way to the top of that ideas reservoir over time and to get there they have to be good if there's a lot of ideas they have to be really good for rimworld we had so many great ideas that never made it into the game because other ideas were even better I had like I would think this idea was amazing and it just it just gets out competed completely in a year later it sits in the middle of the document because the fight their way to the top of that competition it each idea has to be a champion and if you make a game with champion ideas only it's going to come out real strong and this is this is really honestly that lesson I think is the most important outcome champion ideas some things that are things that are stupidly simple but emotionally rich elegant and meaningful and mechanics and story gettable and familiar for new players but also new and exciting you never spend your time doing work to fix up downsides or breakage cases or of some idea because once you recognize that the idea has those downsides or breakage cases which ideally you would during the analysis phases maybe not this month but maybe next month you'll find it out or realize it you'll bubble it down there's one other useful decision raiser here is it possible to ship without it this is critical before you've actually shipped something that people are playing it's remarkable how often the answer is yes actually so here are some of the things that I shipped early versions without some of this has been added later but the first version of rimworld which did people did play and enjoy and pay money for back in 2013 didn't have these things character animations I've already discussed how nobody animates and why and it doesn't bother anybody a stockpile system traditionally in the Dwarf Fortress like calling me a simile a simulator genre a core part of the gameplay is placing down these stockpiles and putting things in at managing where they are but in the first version of rim world I wasn't that great of an AI programmer and I couldn't figure out how to make them do that so I just had them pick up resources and touch a building and then just disappear into this magical place in the sky from which you could spend them and nobody minded the game still worked fine traders who physically visit the player I wanted trading in the first version of the game but the AI for having a trader come in and deal with getting attacked and hang around and interact with you and leave and carry all this stuff all those systems were just really brutal and complicated to do so I just didn't do them instead I just put a a communications console where ships fly over and you can trade with them magically and stuff just teleports up and down and if it fills the same design purpose as the trader without all those nasty details contagious crop blight you think a crop blight would have to like move between plants and spread and things like that but no mind just kills a whole bunch of plants randomly it fills the purpose although I might replace that one soon and the contagious diseases so players are I have found remarkably accepting of not having things that might seem to be necessary upfront very very few people complain about the things that I've talked about but they have lots of complaints about other things so the things that seem important up front the things like yeah we got to have character animations and the trader has to come and trade with you obviously right the players probably don't really care necessarily about those things and they probably really care about other things entirely so I've described a bunch of somewhat contrarian design strategies one can just try to follow the steps but I think to really be able to try to do something different you have to go deeper and I have this intention on a level of personal flaw philosophy and belief for a couple of reasons first obviously contrarian ISM means doing things differently so everyone can't do different things the same way I'm not saying this talk isn't telling you guys to make a story generator necessarily it's to find your frame secondly it's you won't get social reinforcement as much as if you're doing something more typical you might see some non comprehension or disagreement or pushback from a social environment around you when you discuss something like that and you need to have the belief foundations to hold on to those convictions even without external positive feedback and this is doubling doubly challenging because it's human nature to synchronize our beliefs with the people around us it happens automatically it's unconscious almost involuntarily I'm sure some of you have heard of these research studies well they'll put a subject in a room surrounded by actors pretending to be other subjects and they put some lines on the wall and they ask which line is shorter than the other ones and all of the actors pretending to be other subjects they all give the wrong answer and something like thirty percent of the time the research subject will agree with the social milieu instead of the line which is right on the wall right in front of them they will agree with essentially hallucinating or trying to go along with the people around them and so if that happens 32 percent of time for something so simple imagine how much harder it is to believe the correct or a contrarian logic on a deeper question speaking of questions it's often hard to even ask the question much less get the correct answer so consider questions like should we make a game should our product tell a story should more skillful players get greater rewards should we plan our work ahead of time should we try to maximize communication between developers should we try to make our game as beautiful as possible your characters have deaf faces should we implement this idea that seems really cool I think noticing these questions exists can be an intellectual challenge and giving unusual answers to them is really just a matter of mental effort finally I think the thing that convinced me at the quarter pursue a strategy like this or at least trying on some level to do something different is that indie game development is really a tournament market it tends to be set up such that to a small number of winners all the rewards go that means that in tip in such an environment a typical result the 50th percentile is actually either failure or a struggle it's not a success to be typical and if you use typical strategies you should expect typical results so from this logic the only option is to use an atypical high variance strategy when these will be strategies by definition thus most people are not using or likely won't agree with because if a lot of people are using them then you're back to the typical results but take heart one rule of history is that the social media is always making mistakes it's true in every society and all time everywhere so just because nobody's thinking you're a certain way or asking certain questions doesn't mean that they're dumb in a tournament market where the average results equal failure I don't think you should be frightened of following individual logic to a different conclusion or frightened of taking a strange frame I think it should be more frightening to follow the group thank you very much as always please fill out your evaluations I did write a game design book a few years ago that's it and you can check that out and yeah if you guys have some questions I would love to take you if you just come up to the mics here and I would overhear you man okay you spent the beginning of the talk drawing the distinction between a game and the story simulator you're trying to make yeah and talking about how people generally want to feel skillful and want the game to be fair and that's something you're not I want to say not interested in no that's not the priority yeah and then you're talking a lot about how you actually bringing story tropes or movies and books you know disproportionate pushback and so on to this game I would argue that when you are watching a game of watching a movie or reading a book the one thing that the audience can do is abdicate responsibility for what's happening on screen okay right we feel empathy but that's probably the only way we can actually survive watching Game of Thrones because well at least that wasn't our fault versus when you're doing something in a game people feel implicated in the success of what's happening on screen I'm wondering how you're drawing the line on the one end where people actually form this emotional connection but also feel they're responsible for it's going on screen but you're telling them yeah but it's not a fair game right like the fact that you can be competent is not really important I think there's a balance of influence that at least this is the strategy that remote took the player can influence the game but they don't control every single thing that their characters do they lay out priorities or set a schedule but the colonists that you're controlling won't always follow what you want them to do they might do something else entirely they might go crazy or they might just fall asleep err so on and so forth so I think in a game where you control people directly or control a protagonist at every moment every action a lot of this would have to be reinterpreted because you wouldn't be able abdicate anything it wouldn't be the feeling of watching something but in bryn role that you're far enough away from what's going on and the moment-to-moment interactions that even though you influence the context of the situation and set the overall priorities of some of the characters you are not exactly in control and so you can get into the mental frame of watching it saying this thing happened not I did this thing necessarily does that make sense yeah of course Thanks all right please I thank you very much for your talk I was very intrigued by your methodology pieces and you know where they borrow from other methodologies but kind of have their own unique spin on them and I was curious if you've given much thought to how those would scale up as you start adding much larger team sizes because it seemed like some of the things you were talking about make a lot of sense with a pretty small team and I could see how that could work with compartmentalized small teams and a larger team but say for example if you have a team of 130 devs and everyone's contributing to the idea of aren't actively organically it's almost like multiple full-time jobs just to sort that list yeah much less try to turn that into collaborative work assignments between different disparate groups of people so I'll just curious do you seem to be very well-thought how you how that maps to scale I I got to be honest I've generally focused on my own problems and I am in this sort of the three person range so I think it would be a really interesting discussion to talk about that but I can't claim expertise on it at this point I think you could probably come up with ideas just as good as mine right so you know I don't want to pretend out to have some more knowledge than I have here so it's a good question thank you very much I should have mentioned earlier that I only have three people and that this is really a system that was designed for that and that's scaling it up would be something that you guys would have to figure out in your own context okay thank you okay with just those three people with your ideas list is it just one person sorting the list every time or means so you just unilaterally decide what ideas are the best ones pretty much I mean I'm rimworld I am the I do the design work and I do some programming and the other guys help out with tech we do discuss things of course I know I asked some questions you know what do you think of this or that but I am making those executive decisions I think you so to speak please so storytelling or telling stories about my game would require having a nice record of the game at least memory prompted to try stuff off do you have any thoughts in what direction you're gonna go with the game recording what's happened second tell stories I think this is an interesting question because it touches on the difference between generating story events and recording and telling them because those are different processes right like you know you can watch something that goes on on the street or in a video and the story comes into your mind in some format and then if you're gonna repeat that back or synthesize that or say what was important about it and what was the connections that's a layer of interpretation which is and I think a different task entirely and my approach to that on rimworld is just to not do it because I think that the player mind player can unconsciously do that better than the game the game is fine at generating you know these numerical interactions and all this stuff but the interpretation and seeing what's important and what's meaningful I very much leave that to the player apophenia sorry in a very simple format just so people people can correlate something on the graph with an event yeah yes yes yes but it's not trying to tell the story and I'm like a accurate way sorry please hey I just had a question about the test selection stuff like so once you got like individual developer is sort of lists of things to do do you often find like ideas from the pool sort of bubbling up to be even higher priority within what people are working on and then have to kind of change you know direction or even if something was already like half implemented the game do you ever find it like it's priority dropping below new ideas at least for women rolled it doesn't tend to happen I mean I don't think we've cut anything significant for a couple years so no I mean I mean a big part of the point of the whole process is to try to avoid finding out that something is broken after you put it in so you know in practice it doesn't tend to happen at least for RIM role not that much although if it does you know we're always watching out for that and we will definitely redesign something I'm sure it happened I just can't think of examples of that specifically Thanks all right okay so I'm wondering if you've thought about basically a hybrid will he take something like an MMORPG and put some of these Story generation elements into it or going the other way and make a game that starts out as a story generator but has selected game mechanics added in from the MMO point of view I mean to me that's like an entire other layer of complexity so I'm trying to solve like the basic problem to start with which is to do it with one person I have you know people suggest ideas about putting multiple rimworld colonies in one world or having a whole bunch of people on one planet so they can interact over a distance and that would just sort of start to seem like an MMO if it was long enough I do think that that introduces a lot of difficulties that I have not thought through how to solve exactly right now thank you okay you gave us a bunch of examples of stuff players didn't miss when you locked your game but what examples of stuff that players did actually complain about or miss they complain about see now I'm trying to think back to years in the past to to some of the stuff that happened during that time period when those things weren't weren't in there a lot of the times people wanted more content they'd say things were unbalanced or they would you know something would be unclear so they wouldn't know how to interact with something like really prosaic design problems a lot of the time or oftentimes yeah people want different content instead of wanting say you know I want the traitor to come on foot instead of by the sky they want you know slug aliens to come and give you a lien milk that's like super powerful or something like that so people are usually asking for totally new things or fixes to things that are bothering them actively not to more complex versions of things that already work pretty well that make sense alright thank you okay yes so I'm assuming you're entirely self-funded but in a situation like this where you're so flexible and you have no commitments how do you see working with business partners or people who might want say milestones or some kind of idea or commitment of where you're going yes you're correct that I was self-funded I just used personal savings to start the company and did it do it myself and got some roommates for for the first first while in terms of integrating under people I think there would have to be a very high degree of trust from those partners in you I think that someone could contribute things with the understand like ideas or concepts or suggestions with the understanding that they're going into the process and the same places everywhere else so essentially I think it demands trust but I haven't personally faced this problem and it's something that I would generally I personally preferred this model of self funding just because it gives that freedom but yeah if you had good friends and business partners who could trust you that much and that could that could work out as well thank you hi there so Rimbaud's been early access for several years now right it was Kickstarter 2013 late 2013 then I sold it on my own website for several years and then it hit steam early access in July 2016 okay would you say that your decisions on cutting what features would be in the launch version we're a little bit easier because you weren't doing like a 1.0 final release of the game it was deaf it's definitely been essential to have a lot of players banging on the game over time for the first period before the Kickstarter I was just by myself but even even then I I got of a play at where possible and I even like send it to people and demanded that they make a youtube video of themselves playing it the first time because I wanted that first time experience and I need to be able to watch people just playing the game to solve those problems before I send it to the initial batch of like YouTube video airs or journalists so that feedback is really an essential part of the process and it's a huge fountain of information does that does that address the question or put something more specific and as a follow up do you know when you're going to come out of early access on Steam and call it 1.0 or I couldn't speculate about the future well I mean the game has long legs and there's a lot of places to add things but my general strategy on this is I don't promise the future because they don't actually know thank you okay hey you're talking about your sorting system yeah and is that a lot of different just trying can I get an idea of how that sorting system is is that just a whole bunch of different numbers that you've oh no it's just put I it's a bubble sort which doesn't require it only requires comparison one to one like the way I just approach it personally I thought about making make making a giant spreadsheet and putting numbers or the cost-benefit score or something like that and trying to do some mathematical thing but I find it so hard to put numbers on these things because they're so asymmetrical it's like you're comparing one task which is like you know let's stabilize the the data loading XML reading systems so the modders are can use it more easily versus like let's add some butterfly men who will fly you to the you know the moon or something like that like there it's just so completely different I don't know how to compare those things except for directly and I mean sort of a very nice sort of subconscious evaluation type way so it's basically just bubble sort one to one comparison okay thanks Hey do you find that you have to do a lot of work to manage expectations of your players if they don't really understand that the idea here is that it's a story generator and not a classic game design definitely this is a really good question thank you for asking I try to ok players have this this notion where they'll get really pissed off at a challenge if it seems illegitimate and especially if they're losing to it but if it seems like somehow legitimate they'll totally accept it so in room rolled we always have the problem where people get angry when their characters go crazy on a drinking binge or something or set this place on fire because they're pyromaniacs but even if they don't lose that much but if an enemy raid comes and just crushes them that seems more legitimate because it's from the outside and they have this notion that my people should be mine and that's an expectations problem I think it's not something you necessarily fix on the actions it's something you fix in terms of setting the players expectations so I tried as much as possible in the marketing in the name of storytellers for example the rim road has the the AI storyteller that you choose and this is very explicitly done that way and just all the messaging around the game to try to get people into the frame of you know you can enjoy when things are going bad it's here to see this crazy wacky stuff that goes on even things like there's no you know I'm not adding points I won't add steam achievements for this reason because as soon as I added that suddenly it would be about getting those and that would displace the motivation and just shatter the story frame I think people can set their goals but that's really up to them so it's a lot of different stuff basically it's a lot of different stuff and yeah setting those expectations is critical great thank you thank you all right well thank you everyone for coming and don't forget those evaluations you

Channel: GDC

Views: 200,368

Rating: 4.9090772 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, game design, rimworld, steam

Id: VdqhHKjepiE

Length: 60min 52sec (3652 seconds)

Published: Thu May 16 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/HP_Craftwerk]

I've been looking at Rimworld for a while and was always on the fence with it, thinking I would not "get it"

But his explanation of how a story can end with success or failure and how it can work just sold me, picking it up tonight.

[u/sal101]

My favourite thing about rimworld is it's pure brutality and duality. When you play it, you never imagine that things wouldn't/couldn't carry on without you. It is an incredibly immersive game even with its basic graphics because every story it tells is incredibly compelling. It also helps that it has a mod scene comparable to the elder scrolls in quality, there is literally something for everyone.

The ability to play as a paragon of justice and virtue, saving everyone and helping everyone, releasing prisoners and just living a nice peaceful colony, or to play as a complete amoral psychopath who makes human leather furniture and makes prisoners eat their own comrades while missing their arms and legs and a few organs which you then sold for more weapons it incredible. The fact there are no arbitrary "good/evil" sliders other than the mental health of your own colonists and yet the game still manages to make you feel like there are consequences for your options is underrated, and incredible

In my (admittedly biased) opinion it's one of 2 pc game releases in the past 10 years that genuinely deserve a 10/10 rating. The other being Factorio.

[u/gabal]

Haven't watched the video yet but Rimworld is amazing. You get really nice stories with your colonists and you can get really attached to them. Once my best melee fighter died on a raid and I was really upset not just because he was amazing fighter but because he was the only one who could cook without giving everybody food poisoning. Also, his fiancee was devastated and suffered mental breaks for months after his death.

Another thing that adds to the experience is that you aren't playing against AI, you are playing against story-teller. So when just as your last food runs out and like a miracle a pod of dog meat drops from the sky you aren't really that happy. Because you can just imagine that story-teller saying "starvation? Oh that won't do, I have something much more entertaining planed for you."

Also, you can name colonists after you and your family so your wife can aim at boar but critically hit a pawn you named after yourself in a head killing you instantly. And then your best friend makes you a crappy sarcophagus depicting you throwing up and on a wake seduces your "wife" and starts an affair with her.

Great fun, I reccomend it.

[u/KashIsTheLandShark]

Your average game :

Your super optimised colony is running at peak performance with everyone doing their jobs except Todd. Despite cleaning being high priority, Toddy is busy doing literally anything else but cleaning. Whatever.

Suddenly bug infestation but don't worry you prepared for this. Ridges in your hallway so your colonists can shoot down hallways, turrets to retreat to, and decent weapons to fight the tide. Great.

But wait. There is a spec of dust where the infestation came and a lone colonist is squeezing through an army of insects with a broom to get to it. Also your animals are pouring through the doors to collect the jelly.

Todd takes a bullet to the skull and is eaten by the insects, your animals get slaughtered, your best shooter and two others go berserk from eating without a table/colonist death and murder your sandwiched colonists.

Rimworld boiz

[u/mprey_]

I like this game but after about 100 hours or so, I feel it's a lot shallower and simpler than people make it out to be.

[u/bbqburner]

I stopped playing Rimworld after 100+ hours since I truly hated how items are managed in the game after a while. It's like a universe without the concept of a storage box. In fact, a buffalo or even a human is an even better storage box than a single game tile.

The idea that you have to plop down a zone to make sure the item dropped there belong to your colony when you already have the Claim ownership function which only works on structures is a mind numbing exercise.

The simulation is great. But the item mechanics at times, can be ass backwards and quite infuriating.