aash29: переводы

→Above all, evolve.

→This is admittedly the harder path. You need to analyze your design preconceptions. You need to understand the psychological functionality of what you are building something instead of merely mimicking patterns of the last generation. Break your game down into loops and arcs. Understand what is filler. Understand what core elements form a endless engine for generating value (be it 'fun' or your outcome of choice.)

→Create a fortified island nation with an ongoing stream of revenue.

→Build a hobby

→Invent dynamic loops

→If you are making a more modern evergreen game, consider how loops may result in delivering long term value to the players. Question the forms of a traditional game and ask yourself if they are still valid in today's market.

→Reduce portfolio risk in order to survive long droughts between mega hits

→Build sequels

→Author evocative arcs

→This isn't a black and white situation and I respectfully ask you to avoid couching this in any tired us vs them terminology. There is not one market. You may find that the traditional arc-heavy recipes are exactly what you need. If you are selling to a community whose norms for buying games were set during the retail era, creating a great beatable payload of entertainment may make you a lot of money. Many of the popular indie sales channels remain conservative recreations of markets past. It is a well trodden path.

→Games of improv or bluffing or charades are all loop-based activities with nearly zero traction in the markets today. These are games that can be played for life.

→No one is even talking about the loops inherent in religion, a system that has driven the behavior of humanity for thousands of years.

→Star Craft thrives because it taps into the mastery loops at the competitive heart of sports.

→Eve forges forth into new territory with every update by exploring the loops of economics and politics.

→Both Will Wright and Notch made millions by exploring the loops of player expression.

→However, this is admittedly a rather reductive exercise. What I'm far more interested in is what happens when we, as designers and developers, invest our full energy in exploring the potential of loops. The language here is far less developed and it is an extremely fertile field for a young developer to make their mark. Consider the following sparely settled frontiers:

→Can you make a wonderful game out of the remaining bones? The vast majority of the time you can. Even deeply arc-heavy graphical adventure games yield procedural hidden object games at their root. Now, you can never get rid of arcs completely, nor would you want to. Loops and arcs are ingredients and the goal is to create a new recipe with different mix rather than unquestioningly recreated the same meal again and again.

→To take this one step further, remove any elements of a computer game that you can 'beat' or that render the game boring or meaningless upon repeated play.

→Narrative sequences that are not specifically functional feedback that powers the completion of a loop.

→So how do we evolve our designs with the market environment? One exercise I've been performing on various games is identifying loop and arcs in a popular genre and then removing the arcs to see if what is left stands on its own. What I've discovered is that arcs are almost never critical game elements. You can remove them and still have a playable game.