Does any of you actually have game design or development experience, or at least e.g. years of daydreaming and failed prototypes behind you? I’d like to point out that making a video game, particularly an MMO (which it looks like you’re thinking of), is very hard, and there are many problems that can ruin their success quite apart from the actual quality of the game.
You also haven’t said anything about the actual design itself yet; my prior, from lots and lots of personal experience, is to expect people who are making a Great Game That Will Help Change The World!!! to have tons of Cool Ideas and no discipline and to try to turn it into a kitchen sink and lose all momentum. (I’ve been those people. Over and over again.)
So: what are the actual game mechanics? What do players actually do in your game? And what makes that action fun?
looks at your website
Oh dear. You don’t even have a job listing for a game designer. And lots of talk about the AI you want to make, and as far as I can see, nothing about the game you want to make. Your goals are admirable; but my prediction as of right now is ~80% that you will be shocked at the difficulty of the undertaking and your own lack of readiness for it and give up within a year.
My suggestion is that you help other game studios that already exist build AI for their games in return for their agreement to allow you to use those contexts to explore the alignment-relevant questions, rather than attempting to make games yourself. I think that would be much, much more likely to succeed and require far less effort and struggle on your part.
Evidence that my opinion ought to matter to you: I’ve wanted to make games since I read Chris Crawford’s “On Game Design” when I was 11, and I have had a PERFECT EPIC GAME in my head for years that constantly changes form and never settles down, and I’ve never managed to actually build even a small prototype without giving up in frustration and self hate. I’ve also been part of several “small, passionate” teams of people who’d never made a game before and were trying to do so, two of which actually had a professional software developer at the head, and all of them failed miserably within a month or two with nothing to show for it.
Brandon has been a professional game developer since 1998, starting his career at Epic Games with engineering and design on Unreal Tournament and Unreal Engine 1.0. More recently, Brandon spent 12 years at Valve wearing (and inventing) hats. Many, many hats… Brandon has spent considerable amounts of time in development and leadership on Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 where he wrote mountains of code and pioneered modern approaches to game development. Also an advisor for the Makers Fund family of companies, Brandon offers his expertise to game startups at all stages of growth.
I’m not seeing any (sorry I missed a word) much game design here.
My experience as a designer, building out a genre of “peacewagers” (games that aren’t zero sum but also aren’t strictly cooperative, the set of games where honest negotiation is possible.), is that it actually is very likely that someone who’s mostly worked in established genres would drastically underestimate the amount of design thought that is required to make a completely new kind of game work, and they’re trying to make a new kind of game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they just fell over irrecoverably as soon as they strayed from the yellow brick road they have lived their whole lives within. When you’re building a new genre… you have to figure out so much about what can be done there, what the challenge is, and what the appeal is, and how to elegantly communicate all of that to players and make them want it.
So… I’ve been working on semi-cooperative games for a few years now, I might be able to help with that (I’m also familiar with rust, and have built a basic game engine of my own for some unreleased stuff (in C++)). But I don’t get the impression from the site that they appreciate the difficulty of design, that they’d appreciate me, so I haven’t applied.
I see that this is getting quite a lot of agreement points. I would also like to add my agreement, this is probably a true quote. I agree that it’s probably a true quote. Your claim that this was written somewhere is probably true.
Well, I still think my pessimism was warranted given the epistemic state I had when I made the comment. I still don’t have a clue what the game is about though, and I think that’s a legitimate question… or did I miss an explanation of that on the website too? :/
I think it’s generally right to have a prior of pessimism about projects in this reference class, although I think you went overboard in assuming your initial read was right. (Critch also has a several successful non-game projects under his belt which I think is relevant)
Does any of you actually have game design or development experience, or at least e.g. years of daydreaming and failed prototypes behind you? I’d like to point out that making a video game, particularly an MMO (which it looks like you’re thinking of), is very hard, and there are many problems that can ruin their success quite apart from the actual quality of the game.
You also haven’t said anything about the actual design itself yet; my prior, from lots and lots of personal experience, is to expect people who are making a Great Game That Will Help Change The World!!! to have tons of Cool Ideas and no discipline and to try to turn it into a kitchen sink and lose all momentum. (I’ve been those people. Over and over again.)
So: what are the actual game mechanics? What do players actually do in your game? And what makes that action fun?
looks at your website
Oh dear. You don’t even have a job listing for a game designer. And lots of talk about the AI you want to make, and as far as I can see, nothing about the game you want to make. Your goals are admirable; but my prediction as of right now is ~80% that you will be shocked at the difficulty of the undertaking and your own lack of readiness for it and give up within a year.
My suggestion is that you help other game studios that already exist build AI for their games in return for their agreement to allow you to use those contexts to explore the alignment-relevant questions, rather than attempting to make games yourself. I think that would be much, much more likely to succeed and require far less effort and struggle on your part.
Evidence that my opinion ought to matter to you: I’ve wanted to make games since I read Chris Crawford’s “On Game Design” when I was 11, and I have had a PERFECT EPIC GAME in my head for years that constantly changes form and never settles down, and I’ve never managed to actually build even a small prototype without giving up in frustration and self hate. I’ve also been part of several “small, passionate” teams of people who’d never made a game before and were trying to do so, two of which actually had a professional software developer at the head, and all of them failed miserably within a month or two with nothing to show for it.
I’m not seeing
any(sorry I missed a word) much game design here.My experience as a designer, building out a genre of “peacewagers” (games that aren’t zero sum but also aren’t strictly cooperative, the set of games where honest negotiation is possible.), is that it actually is very likely that someone who’s mostly worked in established genres would drastically underestimate the amount of design thought that is required to make a completely new kind of game work, and they’re trying to make a new kind of game, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they just fell over irrecoverably as soon as they strayed from the yellow brick road they have lived their whole lives within. When you’re building a new genre… you have to figure out so much about what can be done there, what the challenge is, and what the appeal is, and how to elegantly communicate all of that to players and make them want it.
So… I’ve been working on semi-cooperative games for a few years now, I might be able to help with that (I’m also familiar with rust, and have built a basic game engine of my own for some unreleased stuff (in C++)). But I don’t get the impression from the site that they appreciate the difficulty of design, that they’d appreciate me, so I haven’t applied.
I see that this is getting quite a lot of agreement points. I would also like to add my agreement, this is probably a true quote. I agree that it’s probably a true quote. Your claim that this was written somewhere is probably true.
I don’t think I remember seeing any of this information on the front page of the website. If it’s not there, it maybe ought to be?
It’s in the “team” section (you have to click on Brandon to get the info, but it does say Game Developer by default before doing any clicks)
Weird! How did I not notice that?
Well, I still think my pessimism was warranted given the epistemic state I had when I made the comment. I still don’t have a clue what the game is about though, and I think that’s a legitimate question… or did I miss an explanation of that on the website too? :/
I think it’s generally right to have a prior of pessimism about projects in this reference class, although I think you went overboard in assuming your initial read was right. (Critch also has a several successful non-game projects under his belt which I think is relevant)