Great article, Tom, and very solid advice It was terrific working with you on MechWarrior 4: Vengeance back in the day -- you really saved that project.
Yes -- That 's exactly what I did to help the game balancing for City Conquest, as I described in my GDC AI Summit talk. I used a genetic algorithm running about a million games overnight to help identify dominant strategies and ensure that the design goals for the game ...
Also, this: r n r n What makes a game fun for you No, you 're not hiring a game r n designer BUT the programmer 's job is to make the designer 's r n vision work. r n r nseems a bit off the mark to me. r ...
@Kellam: Past a point, Effort was put into this so don 't criticize it is a weak argument r n r nThat 's not even my argument, Kellam. You 're mischaracterizing my comment. Criticism is always acceptable it 's things like Picard double facepalm pics and imaginary conversations between the ...
In any event, I 'd urge readers to decide for themselves. Discovery-driven planning has proven extraordinarily useful in other fields, so it 's very surprising to me that no one in the game industry seems to know about it. r n r nHere are some links that might be useful: ...
The game industry never ceases to amaze me. r n r nWe have the world 's most skilled developers, with a staggering amount of engineering, design, and artistic talent at our disposal ... but we seem to be completely incapable of pairing all of that with even the slightest bit ...
I'm reminded of the wake for Ultima IX, where they took a 6-foot-high stack of design docs, drove a stake through them, and lit a huge bonfire under them. http://www.ultima-ascension.de/ix/artikel wakeheld01.php
