I don’t understand the appreciation for that animation (or the one I linked a while back that you said you’d use as inspiration for magic in a tabletop). I guess the technique is praise-worthy, but they just seem like showpieces (like the animation equivalent of a tech demo), rather than ‘proper’ art. I mean, when I see people praising these things and talking about how amazing they are, it’s always so vague and nebulous, and I don’t understand what it is I’m not seeing. I might sound dumb for saying this, but it comes the same as those peepz who stare in awe at paint splatters.

I like seeing things fluidly move. It doesn’t need to have a purpose or a meaning, though I can certainly appreciate those things.

And I’m going to attach some cool looking vaguely abstract pictures to this.

Depends what paint splatters. Sometimes paint splatters look really nice. Abstract imagery can frequently be aesthetically pleasing as a result of composition, color theory, and some natural part of the way the shapes are made. It’s like typography. Everyone hates comic sans and papyrus, even though letters themselves are completely abstract and based in no way on the natural world.

I think there are less vague and nebulous ways to describe abstract imagery that is successful, but I don’t know if I have the words. That’s something really deep and fundamental about human psychology, the sense of aesthetic itself, which I don’t think I have enough background knowledge to tackle.

Like, there are certain types of lines that we find appealing, textures, patterns, etc. I don’t really know what defines the whole trend, only parts of it in relation to rules of composition or color theory, golden ratio type of stuff, and so on. These abstract things that appeal to our sense of aesthetics are themselves found in representational works of art. In the process of drawing, frequently people abstract on what they see to create something more visually appealing in line with a higher ideal that is connected to an evolutionarily formed sense of aesthetic. That’s what makes a particular drawing of a subject more beautiful than another of the same subject, not simply a more close depiction of what’s observed, but appealing to that sense of aesthetic.

This talk taps into some of that:

I mean, can technique alone make it worthy or great praise? There isn’t any story or any obvious meaning. I mean, it’s abstract enough that you can derive meaning, but that can be done for anything. I feel like I’m missing something, so would you recommend any pieces I should watch/read to help understand this concept?

I think so. It doesn’t need a meaning if you ask me. Technique in of itself is something we can appreciate. Not all games have a meaning, not all animations have a meaning. In a way, the highly technical representation of moving objects is a meaning, it’s information. It’s like, “Oh, so that’s how he did that?” or “Holy shit, that’s so smooth! Such a great and complex motion!”

Watch The Thief and the Cobbler. It has a wreck of a story due to a lot of meddling, so you might want to watch the recobbled cut, which is the next best thing.

re: meaning/stories in art. Yeah, what you said makes a lot of sense. I guess I just get confused by people who think, for example, that those abstract animation shorts are masterpieces, but something like Ponyo can get points docked because parts of the story don’t make sense. I guess I was approaching these views without context though. Maybe you can criticize Ponyo in that manner because it’s a feature film? Maybe it’s in the intent of the work and everything should be judged relatively? I still think Ponyo’s one of the best Ghibli films.

I believe people (including me) criticize Ponyo for that, because it’s not an excuse plot. It had some type of actual ambition with the plot, much like Spirited Away did, but it ended up being kind of immature. It’s not just a simple or absent plot, it’s a plot that is actively unappealing. It lacks conflict in a lot of ways, and has the existing conflicts kind of just get swept aside like they don’t matter instead of truly resolving them or coming to catharsis, which is unsatisfying.

I’ve seen well animated films that have no plots and honestly it gets boring around the 9 minute mark if not sooner (like a lot of Bill Plympton films, though they more have nice drawings than nice animation per se). Even a simple plot at that point is better. Something purely visually interesting isn’t enough to keep people engaged for extended periods of time, which is why Ghost in the Shell 2 falls out for me. That and there’s less actual animation and more gawking over pretty scenery.

It’s like, yeah, I want a gif of all the best parts of that, but I don’t want to sit down and watch the whole thing.

What games are recommended for those who want to get into speedrunning?

The usual recommendation I see people give is, pick a game you’re into. People speedrun nearly every game under the sun, there’s almost bound to be a community for whatever game you pick.

What I can say beyond that is, it’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

Unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Good games to recommend depend on what you’re into, even though speedruns are collectively a community, it’s filled with subcommunities that can be rather divided. If you want an easy run, then Dark Souls 2 current patch and Deus Ex are both really simple and easy to learn. If you want something with more complex movement, try Mirror’s Edge, Half-Life 1 or 2, Megaman X2, or Mario 64. If you want something really focused on improvisation, try Minecraft, Binding of Isaac, Hotline Miami, or Animal Crossing. Lots of glitches, go 3d Zelda, castlevania sotn, dark souls 2 broken%, portal, megaman 1 and 2, or morrowind. Combat focus, go Dark Souls, DMC4, or Bloodborne. If you want pay2win, go Warframe. http://www.twitch.tv/celestics/c/6769673 If you want something technical, go for Dishonored, yoshi’s island, super metroid, metroid prime, F-zero GX, Shadow of the Colossus. If you want something somewhat straightforward and less glitchy, go for Super Monkey Ball, Portal 2, a Kirby game, Dark Souls 2 or Bloodborne current patch, Super Puzzle Strike, Super Mario Bros, Smash Bros Melee’s event and adventure modes. For stealth go for Deus Ex Human Revolution, and Metal Gear Solid 3 European Extreme. For something classic, try Contra, Gimmick!, Metal Slug, Ninja Gaiden NES, Castlevania 3.

Check some of them out, pick something for yourself.

To repost something older I wrote on this:

Picking a game isn’t just a matter of picking a game you like I think. It’s a matter of finding a game you want to learn more about and get better at. It’s good to pick a game that has good documentation on it because then you’ll have other people to ask about how the game works and you have readily available information on what you should be doing to try to get faster, like tutorials on how to perform various tricks.

That and unless you want to become leaderboard style competitive it doesn’t matter if you’ll stick it out for 1000 hours or only 100 or 30. Speedrunning is just another way of having fun with a game. Speedrunning is a way of testing yourself, finding out new things about a game and working to do better. It’s a way of turning single player games into something you can do with friends in a comparable and measurable way, even competitive.

Here’s how you get into speedrunning: Pick a game, grab a timer, work out the shortest route you can manage on the tricks you can currently do, have a playthrough. Don’t worry so much about getting the best times, just try to do better than you did previously. Check out the latest tricks, talk to other people working on the same game as you, make some friends who can help you out and who eventually you might help out. Try the route again, see if you can integrate some new tricks. Give the stuff you’re close to being able to do an attempt or two every run. Maybe even stick it out for an hour on the same trick if you really want to get it. Try thinking of it like a risk/reward type of thing. You got a good run going, and you could do this trick that saves 5 minutes or you could take the safe route instead of spending 10 minutes repeating a trick that doesn’t work.

Then do another run, maybe take this one slow. Go through the route at your own pace, try out the tricks you can’t do yet. Maybe this time you’ll get a few. Try working out how you did it on your correct attempt. Look at the other stuff around you that isn’t in the route you’re following. Since you’re probably not following the official route yet, there’s probably stuff that doesn’t make sense in a world record run that would still help you shave off some seconds.

For the timer, it’s there to both tell you your score as well as tell you how well you’re doing on each segment, help inform where your problem areas are and where you could save more time. Make up some splits based on what you think the major segments are or borrow some from the better players. As you do more runs it’ll be able to tell you how well you could be doing from your best split times.

Back on game choice I’m gonna relate a personal experience that lead me into speedrunning. I previously had an interest in it because I have an interest in glitches in all games, however I didn’t like the idea of resetting a billion times to replay what was essentially the same string of inputs until you matched the perfect string of inputs. It seemed to me like speedrunning was an efficiency race without a lot of the dynamics of the games when played more normally. So I enjoyed watching speedruns and learning about the glitches and tricks in the game and just seeing how cool the run was, but I thought I’d never do it personally since I loath repetition. (I’m not even the type to practice combos for fighting games, the few games I do have thousands of hours in)

What ended up happening for me was a friend challenged me to speedrun something, and we both happened to have mirror’s edge. He had beaten the game like 4 times and I had only beaten it once like a few years prior. Mirror’s edge is short and I figured it would be worth a go. I ended up getting lost a lot, and wasn’t even close to winning the race. We ended up also running crysis warhead and sonic generations, both of which I also lost because the guy knew the games better than I did, and then we returned to Mirror’s Edge. I looked up some strategies so I could win the race that time. I figured out I could go a bit faster with things like the fall break kick and the side dodge boost, as well as a simple short skip in chapter 1 I was able to pull off. I lost that race too, but my time was way ahead of where it was previously.

So I continued trying to play Mirror’s Edge and learn new strategies to beat my friend, and eventually I started really picking stuff up. In my older routes I used to use the kick glitch exactly once in this one spot where it was safe even if I messed it up and I seemingly always got it for some reason. I started watching more mirror’s edge streams and what I noticed was that every runner had their own strategies. Every time I’d watch someone play through I’d learn some new thing about the game. I watched OvenDonkey’s old videos, done on PS3, with advice for chapter runs, and those used ridiculously outdated strategies that were optimized for a controller. However in those old strategies, I found easier tricks I could use that would help me go a bit faster in the places where I couldn’t do the skip. I did slow runs of the game where I’d just look around for faster ways to do things and try out tricks until I could do them consistently and was sure I could use them in my route.

In the process I was frankly addicted, I loved every new thing I found out about the game, how the geometry worked in this one place to enable this thing, the proper way to get the most speed off this trick, how speedvaults weren’t random or based on geometry but something players specifically controlled. It was cool. I was never really into mirror’s edge. I thought it was a screwed up game from my first time playing it that didn’t really live up to its speedrunning promise with incredibly linear levels that limited all but really dumb and obvious shortcuts. As I learned the game and speedran it, I came to understand it in a way I completely hadn’t before. I thought the controls were kinda clunky, I thought the levels didn’t have much to use for alternate routes, and as I learned the whole game, as I saw all the little bits and bobs people used to get to new places, I realized that Mirror’s Edge was like, the perfect speedrun game. There was a beauty to the controls that I just hadn’t seen being unacclimated to them, and I loved how the advanced techniques expanded how everything worked.

So hey, for me speedrunning Mirror’s Edge changed it from a game I didn’t have all that positive an opinion on to being one of my favorite games. In large part because it was so well documented, because I think I took the right approach to it, and because it’s a game with such huge growth potential for a player.

So hey, don’t be nervous, think it over. Play your favorite games a lot, be open to trying something you see potential in, have fun.

Any companies that you wish to see improve in terms of quality games and business models?

All of them. I’d like to see people across the board step it up. A bit more specifically than that, I’d like to see Nintendo, Valve, Platinum Games, Capcom, and From Soft step it up.

Nintendo has a ton of great IPs under their belt, but they’ve basically fucked up in managing them. On all fronts they seem to be mismanaging their assets and not playing to their strengths. If they can’t make games that leverage the Wii U’s controller and are actually fun/profitable then they’re fucked.

Valve has fallen short on the gamedev side and they generally seem to be growing more evil by the day as a publisher/distributor. I hope they put the consumer’s interests first soon or we’ll be in trouble and the market might fall out from under them.

Platinum need to stop being losers. Sure, we love them but they never sell well in part because they always have these ridiculous setbacks, like the chain combo systems that nobody wants to deal with, QTEs, Shop systems that encourage grinding, a reputation for making hardcore games, just to throw out some guesses. I think their games could be better and better connect with audiences at large, but I’m no marketing guy.

Capcom are idiots who need to stop milking their customers. They’re generating a lot of ill will for their DLC bullshit, they need to show people that they care and provide value for their customers or they will die. it’s especially dangerous to focus on japan only and mobile like they have, they don’t have IPs that can leverage mobile very well and they have a ton of games that would succeed outside japan.

From are cool, but Dark Souls 2 was a failure from a marketing perspective. They need to keep their shit together and stick to the plan, weed out the big mistakes they keep making each game and stick to improving on Dark Souls’ formula, because it was their best selling game and in my opinion best overall.

Were you ever like the top pleb depicited in this image complaining about games you don’t understand?

I used to think a very long time ago that fighting games didn’t involve a significant amount of skill because mid to low level players could be beaten with button mashing. I thought that Smash bros was more legitimate because I felt more in control of all the things I was doing in that game and it felt more natural to operate for me. I felt like in smash bros that I was actually intelligently making choices and couldn’t tell why there were so many different normal attacks in street fighter and what they were even good for or how they were meaningfully differentiated from one another. That and the control scheme was awkward to me, having no jump button and holding back to block, and the way that you couldn’t move during most of your attacks, no IASA frames either. That was some weird shit to my perception.

Eventually I got a PS3 and at a loss for games to pick out for it, got SF4. One day a friend came over and asked me to play in it, so we tried out some characters, and had no real idea what we were doing. He picked like dhalsim one time, and I couldn’t beat the stretchy limbs. He also picked bison and I couldn’t beat the sweep attack. I was like, man, why do you keep picking characters that have these long range attacks? I just didn’t get the game.

So I sat down and tried to figure it out. I knew there were huge tournaments for the game, I knew Daigo was blowing people up as Yun at the time, and I had seen evo moment #37 in my first year of high school, understanding instantly how incredible it was. I knew there had to be a higher level game there, I just couldn’t see it yet. I went into online play and got mercilessly destroyed by all manner of people and looked up beginner tutorials and strategies and other things to try to figure out how the hell the game worked. I tried the combo trial mode and got completely confused about how combos worked at all, or how people even figured out what combo’d into what. It seemed really arbitrary to me what would even combo.

At the time I was connected to this site that is now called Learn to Counter, and I played a bunch of games on supercade with them, which helped me get an idea how to play at all and let me in on a ton of classic fighting games.

This background in fighting games allowed me to see games in general in a new way. It’s like how learning to draw will teach you how to actually see the world around you. I’ve said for a long time, if you want to really deeply understand games on a fundamental level, you need to play fighting games. I know it sounds imperialistic from me, who is practically still a beginner at fighting games, yet people talk of me like I’m some aficionado. Like I’m trying to force my favorite or preferred genre down other people’s throats, but it’s a simple truth. It’s the way of the world.

Have you read or watched Berserk? Is so, what genre of game would fit best for it?

I’ve done both of course. It’s one of my favorite manga series. I think that it would fit best as a 3d beat em up game, somewhere between the souls games and say devil may cry. In terms of game structure you could very easily adapt a lot of manga chapters to fit.

Following from the souls games I think that combat should be about finding the right time between enemy attacks to land massive heavy weighty hits. I played through Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls 2 for the first time each using the zweihander type weapon. First the dragon bone smasher, the zweihander, then the greatsword. I think that missed hits should probably be cancelable into roll dodges, and blocks should either be done two handed, letting some damage through, or no blocking at all, just dodge everything. The hard part will probably be capturing the agility of Guts in combination with massive heavy sword wielding, which is why I propose the roll cancel on whiffed attacks (inspired by monster hunter).

In line with Dark Souls, having faster lighter attacks as contextual actions after rolls would be a cool touch too. Following from DMC, having a bunch of command inputs, like forward + slash, back + slash would be helpful. If there are two attack inputs, one should be for horizontal slashes, the other for vertical slashes, the latter being more powerful, and probably slamming enemies to the ground (because I loved that about the zweihander). I think using a stamina system would make a lot of sense (it’s what prevents you from repeatedly slamming enemies to the ground over and over in an infinite) even though that’s clearly more of a souls influence. I think that if command inputs are used, that lock-on should be toggled based on the R1 button, meaning that the attack buttons would be among the face buttons instead of triggers. Some ranged attacks can hang out on the triggers still though.

The game could follow directly the story and battles as they are in the manga, or during the golden age arc and later during the black swordsman arc, open you up for a mission-type structure or open world structure respectively. I think that leveling up and so on should be left out of the game ideally, with new abilities and weapons presented at the appropriate point in the story arc. Maybe a light resource management aspect with throwing knives, arrows, and cannonballs. If there is an open structure then people tend to respond poorly to side quests or optional missions unless there’s a reward at the end of it I feel. Maybe a healing item could be introduced in the open world half of the game and side missions unlock dispensaries. Side missions could maybe also unlock warp points or shortcuts through the world. In the golden age campaign, you could have it so there are many paths to victory and different missions push the enemy back across the map or something, closing off some missions so it’s essentially branched progression forwards, pick your favorite percentage of missions to advance

Reboots exist in comics and film franchises because eventually a storyline completely arcs and there is nothing left that can be done with it. Stories and characters eventually as a part of how storytelling works, generally need to reach some type of catharsis in everything but an episodic format without significant character or plot development. Eventually Spiderman gets married to Mary Jane, and everything is working out fine, and you can’t really do much else with the character, so either you retcon something or you reboot. Or have the devil undo it. Alternatively, sometimes there are just so many restrictive elements in the canon of a story that it’s just plain difficult to write anything new without contradicting something that’s already happened and the franchise needs a reboot so that new ground can be tread at all.

Lately we’ve been seeing a lot of reboots of video games in a similar fashion to all the recent reboots of film franchises and the question that nobody has really considered is do video games need to be rebooted? Unlike film franchises, video games aren’t based on stories. Sure, video games have stories in them, much in the same way films have soundtracks in them, but it’s rare that films are made to be about soundtracks. Stories, by their nature, need to come to a type of catharsis eventually. They need to reach a resolution where the dramas of the story are set to rest and sometimes you have room to make a sequel, but frequently it’s just odd to drag characters that have reached fulfillment, or are dead, out of retirement like that. Games don’t really have that limitation because that need to come to a resolution isn’t a part of game mechanics. So do we really need reboots of games? Can the mechanics of a game ever reach a type of complete that prevents new iterations on them without tearing down the previous formula completely and starting from scratch?

One example of a series that never seems to die is Mario, specifically, 2D Mario. Mario has been trotted out with roughly the same mechanics in 2D for over 25 years. It’s received some revisions over the years, such as the ability to carry shells or other objects around and some changes in powerups, but for the most part, the Mario we have today is the same Mario we met in 1985. The closest thing to a reboot Mario ever received was Mario 64 in 1996, and again in 2006 with New Super Mario Bros. This is a long stretch of time, but 2D Mario was still being kept alive on the handheld systems with updated rereleases of previous titles, such asSuper Mario Bros Deluxe andSuper Mario Advance. For the closest thing that could beinterpretedas a reboot, New Super Mario Bros didn’t try to get away from the foundations of the series much at all, rather bringing them back just how they always were with a few new features, like the mega and mini mushrooms, wall jumping, and triple jumping.Despite the New in front of New Super Mario Bros, it’s hard to say that much had changed in it from previous Mario titles apart from the visual style.

Street Fighter is a series with upwards of 20 games in it and several subseries, with every numbered release (and whatever you’d call Alpha, EX, and some of their Versus games) being closer to a completely new take on the series rather than an update on what came before. Since Street Fighter II: The World Warrior Capcom has released about 6 titles all sporting the Street Fighter II name, depending on whether you’d include some of the updated rereleases and collections or not. By about Super Turbo, it’s arguable that Capcom really had nothing left they could do with SFII. New characters just wouldn’t fit the cast they had developed, with combinations of rushdown, keepout, grapplers, and a good mix inbetween. New mechanics probably wouldn’t be supported by the architecture they had programmed and wouldn’t mesh with the system they had already established. In 1996 Capcom rebooted with Street Fighter Alpha in a style similar to their more cartoon-like and cel shaded Darkstalkers games. Street Fighter Alpha introduced air blocking, multiple supers, tiered levels of supers, each with more power, carry over of meter from round to round, chain combos of moves from weaker to stronger in strength, alpha counters, and a few new characters (a lot of these new characters being carryovers from previous Capcom franchises and the original street fighter). The Alpha series went on to develop completely differently from Street Fighter II in style. Alpha 2 introduced custom combos, and set a very different pace for the game from other street fighter titles with its fast normals. Alpha 3 then introduced -isms, and the guard gauge and had maybe the most robust air combo system of any Street Fighter to date. Street Fighter 3 set out to redefine street fighter with beautifully animated characters, a new parry system that allowed hits to be completely blocked with good timing, attacks that all contrasted in timing to cut down on button mashing, a new dash system, EX attacks, very few normals that linked or chained, 3 different supers, and a whole new cast of characters unlike any seen before, or after, in the series. Street Fighter 4 then set out to try to try to distill the roots of the series and iterate on it with its own take. Street Fighter 4 featured focus attacks, which worked like parries from SF3, except with regenerating white health, and the ability to cancel special attacks with them. It also brought back dashes and EX attacks from SF3, but instead of selectable supers, it now has 2 ultra attacks, powered by the revenge meter. The current iteration of Street Fighter 4 has the largest selection of characters from across the franchise ever, and adds a couple new characters of its own. On top of that, SF4 is the definitively most balanced game in the franchise. To say the least, Street Fighter across its various subseries, has handled rebooting itself really well. Every version reaches a point where it’s eventually really distinct from all that follow it, and pretty much feature complete, then they start it over again with a new series. I’ve left out some of the weirder Street Fighter versions, like EX and the versus games, which are odd compared to the main series in their own right.

The Penny Arcade RPG, On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness, is a title I figure few have actually tried, but was actually really enjoyable in its own way. The first game set up a simple combat system which was rather dull until I discovered action queuing, which made the whole thing explode with vibrancy. During animations for damn near anything, you still had complete control over the menus, and any action queued up would execute after the current one completed, without allowing the enemies a chance to act even if they were ready to. This mechanic ended up creating a tremendously cool system of trying to judge timings for attacks, waste time with actions that had long animations to build up meter for stronger attacks, factoring in what the enemies were weak and resistant against, and tons of fun realtime evaluations of circumstances and frantically hitting buttons all over the menu, trying to completely choke the enemy out of all attacks. After a few trips around youtube, I don’t think anyone other than me discovered this rather basic trick. In any case, after 2 episodes worth of this, it seemed a lot like they had pushed the system they made to its limits and tried basically every possible combination on the theme in terms of enemy and attack variations, so naturally they switched over to a completely different format by teaming up with the Cthulhu Saves the World developers. I kinda regret that there wasn’t another one in the original style, but there just wasn’t any room to expand I believe.

A recent reboot on everyone’s minds is the new Devil May Cry game, DmC. It’s here where it is hard to hard to argue that a reboot was really necessary, or that the series needed it. Every iteration of Devil May Cry continually set up larger and larger expectations, with a greater feature set than the previous games. The original game had basic attacks and jump canceling, DMC2 had aerial raves and gun switching, DMC3 had a way more developed combat system, styles, tons of weapons, and DMC4 had style switching, a whole new character, new enemies and new weapons. DmC removed lockon, had way less technical combat, and a ton of other bad business that I’m sure you’re already aware of. Was this reboot really necessary? Devil May Cry 4 was the best selling game in the franchise, despite the killer deadlines that required them to reuse tons and tons of content. They were on the track to make a better DMC game after it, but instead they decided to reboot something that still had room to grow. They could have integrated the aspects lost of DMC3’s combat system. They could have expanded on Nero’s. They could have implemented more weapons and styles. There were a lot of things they could have expanded on.

CASTLEVANIA

METROID

The big conclusion here is, sometimes reboots do make sense for games. Sometimes games reach a level of finished where there isn’t much left to explore with them and your only choice is to define something new from scratch. However, sometimes a series is perfectly in its stride. Sometimes it just needs to grow a bit more and still try new things, even if it’s just new level designs like from Super Mario Bros to The Lost Levels. If this is the case, then a reboot can risk seriously alienating the fans, especially if it’s aimed at a broader audience and doesn’t respect the soul of the series, like so many modern reboots seem to do.

Here’s an open letter to all competitive game developers, stop trying to make your game an esport, support the competitive scene for your game

Hearing that a game is “designed to be esports-worthy” or “designed for high level competitive play” almost always means the opposite thing to me. None of the best competitive games were designed to be competitive in any sense other than “some players win, some players lose”, none of them were designed for the

Design for fun, create accessibility where it is absolutely necessary. Any time accessibility is brought up as a reasoning for removing a feature, it’s always a bad thing. Leave hard things in the game, some people are drawn to things like that. Consider whether any given thing in question is too easy, too hard, or not hard enough, basically whether that thing should be as hard as it is relative to how useful it is.

Move for a design that creates balance across options, but don’t consider balance a be all and end all. A balanced game isn’t necessarily a fun one.

Try to design the game to have a lot of options open, the idea is predictable uncertainty. Players have to be uncertain about whether they will succeed or not, but everything they attempt should have predictable results. what they see on the screen should make sense on the basis of what they did, so that even if they fail, they know why. Consider how options counter other options, and what sort of unorthodox tools you can provide to your players. Try to make options that have a variety of outcomes and interact with other options to create more permutations of outcomes.

Don’t crush or shackle the fans with your attempts to market the game. Don’t just see esports as a huge viral marketing/astroturf campaign, leave it up to the players to make your game a success or not, and allow them

Try making it so there is an easy way to get people into the game without compromising it, meaning good tutorials, a simpler beginner character that focuses on the fundamentals and does well with just fundamental play, or generally designing so the way the system works is evident and players can derive conclusions about how everything looks from just seeing it so people can feel like they have a grasp on the game without much investment, but give people skills to master so the dedicated players can move up. If the base game happens to be complicated, don’t strip it down for the sake of accessibility, just make sure you have good teaching methods for players and a simple base point for them to get into the game and expand on from there.

Don’t design the game so that it is centralized on your continued operation as a company.

Note: This essay is less than half baked, I’d like to expand on everything in here if possible.

Easily. Most multiplayer games can easily be dominated by AIs through simple routines. The classic example is SF alpha 2 akuma, who would walk up to you and if you did anything that wasn’t invincible, he’d throw you, if you tried to throw, he would dragon punch, and if you dragon punched, he would block. This an unbeatable option select that is completely unbeatable, but no human could ever do it because you’d need intensely fast reaction time. The computer is already capable of processing everything going on on every frame, having the AI decide based on that is a light load.

In Starcraft there are a ton of build orders that are incredibly hard to counter, requiring specific timing pushes, but they’re so hard to execute that human players can’t even bother with them. Brood War AI tournaments are dominated by these. It’s so much more effective to program for that, that the designers of those AIs don’t bother to have the AI scout or react to anything their opponent does, they simply program a routine where it sweeps every corner of the map until the opponent is destroyed.

In Chess or Checkers or other turn based games of perfect information, the usual routine is simply to simulate every single possibility as far into the future as is reasonable, and weight the possible moves this turn that lead into scenarios that take more pieces in more possible futures more highly than those that lose pieces or take none.

The real question is, in what field can a human opponent compete with an AI? What are AIs still poor at?

An obvious one is object recognition. So they’d probably do bad at pictionary. They’re also pretty shit at Go, mostly because simulating possibilities for go or scoring different outcomes as more/less advantageous is incredibly difficult. They’re also pretty terrible at predicting human behavior (Yomi), which lead to me beating one pretty hard in rock paper scissors. They don’t really know how to write jokes or things that we’d find aesthetically appealing. Still pretty terrible at translations. Pathfinding algorithms are still too rigid to really produce effective use of movement in combat situations. They have a tendency to be indecisive or switch routes up frequently or to be too committed to a route that becomes blocked. AI are good at finding the shortest path between two points, better than humans, provided they have all the data, but it becomes harder as movement mechanics for a game become more complex and link together more physical spaces, not to mention that computation time becomes prohibitively expensive for searches like that, where humans can parse wider fields of possibilities more easily using heuristics (a good enough solution). Computers can have algorithms modeled like heuristics but don’t have the same self awareness of when an operation would take up too much time to take an estimated result. All estimations made by computers are the designers realizing in advance the scope of the estimations to be made.