Low-level vs. high-level
Entry posted by Josh ·
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The Leadwerks community tends to be a pretty mature, technically astute one. This is great because it's easy to get good feedback and help, but we do tend to suffer from a tendency to focus on low-level details. This can cause problems with it delays projects, sometimes infinitely. If all we do is keep reinventing the wheel we'll never get to the automobile.
Preparing the FPS weapons pack is giving me a chance to work on some high-level game behavior I don't get to do much. Sometimes we tend to ignore that stuff as trivial or secondary, but I am discovering the high-level behavior can be just as tricky as low-level features. Just because you have a 3D model doesn't mean that item is game-ready. You still have to add sounds, scripted behavior, and sometimes physics geometry. When you get to scripting, there's quite a lot of issues to deal with:
- Does my gun look and feel like it's really firing?
- How does the player acquire weapons?
- How can weapons be easily placed in a map?
- Does my sound match the model animation, so it feels like they are really reloading the gun?
These issues will also make or break your player's experience, more so than all the low-level goodies you can add. The player won't care about indirect global caustic transparency if your gun handling sucks. The high-level gameplay issues that effect the player immediately are going to be much more relevant to them than intricate graphical details you have to squint to see, or a neural-net AI system, or a procedural dust-settling algorithm. I exaggerate, but you get the idea.
I've talked about these ideas a bit before, and I am trying to move us in a direction more focused on gameplay. My metric for success is the number of games published in the Workshop, or elsewhere. Right now, I think ready-made game content is the most effective way to increase this. The game tournaments are also great (thanks Aggror!) because they force you to release something in a fixed amount of time.
So my thought for the day are "be practical and make fun playable games. Good gameplay is not as easy as you think."
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