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Games Entertainment

Substance and Style in Game Design 24

Posted by Zonk from the more-than-just-a-pretty-face dept.
Gamasutra has a piece on the elements of substance and style within videogames, and what should be considered when designing with these elements in mind. From the article: "An easy way to understand the difference between style and substance is by example. Many shooter games have traditionally calculated world collision and bullet impacts by modeling bullets as instantaneous line traces and characters as moving collision cylinders. In this case, the line-projecting cylinder is the fundamental nature of the character - the character's substance. The image of a fighter, the sounds he makes and the way he animates is the character's style."
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Substance and Style in Game Design More

Substance and Style in Game Design

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  • Strange game physics (Score:4, Informative)

    by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @06:52PM (#13725840)
    Many shooter games have traditionally calculated world collision and bullet impacts by modeling bullets as instantaneous line traces and characters as moving collision cylinders.

    That always irked me in FPS games. In the real world, bullets aren't instantaneous and travel in an arc. Red Orchestra [clanservers.com] (a UT2k4 mod) does a pretty good job of simulating bullet drop and real life physics.
    • This is where the question of "how realistic is too far?" comes in. I mean, there are plenty of people who would love no more than to have bullets take a bit of time and arc a bit, to be sniping and have to adjust for distance and wind.

      On the other hand, this will just serve to confuse a lot of people, or make it difficult. In an effort to find a happy medium between the super-realistic people and the just-make-it-easy-to-pick-up crowds, I think modern FPSs aren't too horrible.

      (Though, I would love a

      • Well said. Except for the happy medium thing I couldn't agree more. For me, I'd say keep those ultra realistic features out of my game. I want fast paced action and not a bunch of people learning how to aim and a whole lot of wasted ammo. But that's me. And I fully appreciate that some people want hyper realistic. So it's pretty easy really. Some game makers focus on gameplay, others create super realistic games (Rainbow 6 maybe? i dunno). And to me, I am happy to have the choice. What makes me unhap
      • Presumably it would be less confusing if you could give the player some realtime feedback as to what was going on, eg. with 'tracer' lines which showed a bullet's arc and speed. Make them only visible to the shooter, if you feel that negatively disrupts stealth attacks.
    • That always irked me in FPS games. In the real world, bullets aren't instantaneous and travel in an arc. Red Orchestra [clanservers.com] (a UT2k4 mod) does a pretty good job of simulating bullet drop and real life physics.

      FPS games are that way on purpose. It reduces the server load by quite a bit and reduces network traffic. Also, it's hard enough to deal with internet latency & client-side prediction of the action without throwing in craploads of flying bullets. (Most FPS games are now built on
    • I remember Digital Image Design (an old game developer) made a big fuzz about how realistic their new flight simulator TFX [mobygames.com] was; one of the points they touched was that rounds shot by planes had realistic physics - it was either that game or EF2000 [mobygames.com], kind of a sequel to TFX. Both were great games and those details added a lot to the experience. If they could do it the DOS days, they can surely do it now.

      But, in a fast paced FPS (a-la-UT2k4, f.ex.), i really don't think it matters much - after
      • Re your midair flip thing, the problem there is that no FPS takes account of recoil. Oh yes, they make your sights move a bit, but that's it. No loss of balance or anything like that, not even firing a SAW from the hip. They don't even reduce aiming accuracy whilst moving. When they get all that right, look for all those ex-leet people jumping around to die in swarms to the one guy who stays stationary with his feet on the ground whilst firing.

        Grab.
        • Try Day of Defeat for recoil.

          As far as accuracy reduced while moving, just about every semi-realistic FPS does that.
          • All the ones I've seen move your sighting in a predictable side-to-side way. This simulates running very well. What it *doesn't* simulate well is the behaviour of arms whilst running - I've yet to see a FPS which does anything except fire at whatever's in the centre of the screen. If it comes through the dot in the middle of the screen, bam, it's dead, regardless of how fast you're running. Except that IRL, where your eyes point != where your gun points. No game I've seen makes any allowance for this.

            T
            • - I've yet to see a FPS which does anything except fire at whatever's in the centre of the screen.

              Meaning, you've never seen a PC FPS set on the modern planet Earth. Battlefield2, Counterstrike, Deus Ex, Rainbow Six, Americas Army... they all slash gunfire precision while in motion. Even the fantastically whimsical Castle Wolfenstein is careful to make an MG42 uselessly inaccurate if fired while standing.
        • Try Delta Force: Black Hawk Down. Reduced accuracy while running (they give you a sort of circular area created by the crosshairs, and the diameter grows when you're moving). Running with a sniper rifle requires a lot of luck to hit anything unless you're standing right next to it. This same effect is used in the "recoil" system... when you use a machine gun, your accuracy goes down with each bullet that leaves the barrel. They also don't allow use of the scope while running... you fire from the hip unl
  • A grouping of game elements into substance and style is somewhat useful, but really couldn't anyone with a decent knowledge of game development have figured it out?
    • A grouping of game elements into substance and style is somewhat useful, but really couldn't anyone with a decent knowledge of game development have figured it out?

      Well, apparently not, because I don't think Gamasutra quite got it.

      A game's substance has nothing to do with how a bullet travels through the air. That kind of thinking is why we're all stuck with cookie-cutter FPS's, sports and racing games these days. People (including most developers) mistake genre conventions for substance. That's still pa
      • Actually, the way the bullet flies in the air can mean a CRAPLOAD about substance and style.

        Multiplayer games and online competitions. I forgive you for thinking entirely in the context of a single player game, though. :)

  • I'm rather disappointed. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SharpFang ( 651121 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @07:07PM (#13725940) Homepage Journal
    The article tries to draw a clear line between substance (mechanics/rules) and style (look/feel/story) of a game - but the story itself has very little of either.
    In terms of style it sounds a bit like a lecture for a school of game developers. Readable but boring. The examples are dull or oversimplified. FPS gamers concentrating on Substance, The Sims concentrating on Style? I wouldn't be so sure players of Half-Life 2 are all about substance...
    In terms of substance... actually I'm not really sure what the article tries to achieve at all, because it first defines a sharp border between the two and then methodically expresses that the border isn't really important at all, because both are just as important, and by emphacising one or the other you change the style of the game, not whether it's good or if it sells well. I don't think I've learned a thing from the article, because all the info it presents seems pretty much as completely useless analysis. Like analysing structure of a sentence in a poem won't help you writing better poetry, analising whether your game has enough substance or better style won't make better games. And the article doesn't write neither how to improve the style nor how to create better substance...
    • I agree, I don't really see any point in this article other taking up a bit of server space. It seems to me that whoever wrote this is obviously a pompous windbag who wanted to try and boast about how much they know about games. This is underserving of being /.ed.

    • Re:I'm rather disappointed. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Idealius ( 688975 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @07:33PM (#13726096) Journal
      Methodical analysis is all well and good but some things beyond human analysis are better handled organically.

      His conclusion is organic. Despite /.'s dreamworld, one doesn't have to react analytically to every stimuli.

      In true /. form I wrote the above before reading TFA. It's sad because the FIRST paragraph is this:

      "Nobody can completely understand the entire field of game design. There are too many interacting elements, too much information, for the human mind to perceive and consider simultaneously. Thus nobody can hope to think about all of game design at once. The only solution available to the designer is to conceptually split the field up into manageable chunks, each of which can then be considered separately." ..which basically drives my point home. Don't blame the author for a confusing dyanmic that exists in video games. He's not making it up, he's describing it. So what if the subject is boring, say that, don't say the article is style-less and devoid of mechanics. You're disappointed because this wasn't the article you expected, critique the article based on it's merits please!!
      • "There are too many interacting elements, too much information, for the human mind to perceive and consider simultaneously. Thus nobody can hope to think about all of game design at once"

        This is wrong.
        Nobody can analytically examine all of the game design at once.
        All the rest is possible. Not as business, science, engineering. But as art, pretty pure at that. And like any art, game design has some prerequisites that are hard to put in words, impossible to purchase, difficult to understand. Things like talen
        • "Nobody can analytically examine all of the game design at once."

          That's the primary difference between organic and methodical analysis.

          Organic analysis is used for subjects too complex for human's to completely understand methodically.
          • Yes. Then why teach failed methods of methodical analysis? Maybe one day we will be advanced enough to analytically examine the process of game development, but for now it's of no use, purely academic problem completely useless for game developers. I wonder who's the target audience of the article - I suppose there are maybe 2-3 people in the world genuinely interested in pushing this kind of analysis ahead, who might profit from it...
  • suck.
    some that could be fixed rather easily, too.
    like models that keep guns at hip, and then bullets fly out of their eyes. pretty annoying when you see someone peek out and shoot you, while their gun is still behind an obstacle.

  • Myth's and Facts (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Daysaway ( 916732 )
    From the perspective of a Game Developer, there are quite a few myths that buzz about the game industry, and the majority of the complaints about the quality of games these days fall on deaf ears. My favorite is "This game would be so much better if X was done instead of Y". X = a pretty damn good idea which chances are was already thought of, and more times than not, in the original design doc to begin with but had to be cut. Y = what the developers settled for due to time constraints / engine shortcoming
    • [pwned by the html selection, new and improved comment, now with more carriage returns]

      From the perspective of a Game Developer, there are quite a few myths that buzz about the game industry, and the majority of the complaints about the quality of games these days fall on deaf ears.

      My favorite is "This game would be so much better if X was done instead of Y".
      X = a pretty damn good idea which chances are was already thought of, and more times than not, in the original design doc to begin with but had to be c

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