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Games With Crates Get No Twinkie

Posted by Zonk on from the items-can-come-from-other-containers dept.

Gamasutra's reoccuring feature "Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie" covers the subject of crates and barrels in games, (ala Old Man Murray) courtesy of designer Ernest Adams. From the article: "If there are crates in a place, there had better be pallets under them and at least one forklift as well. In fact, somebody wrote to me (unfortunately I lost his name in an E-mail crash) and pointed out that wooden crates are completely passé now anyway. Modern shipping is done in piles of cardboard boxes all held together with industrial-strength plastic wrap. Wood is heavy and expensive, cardboard is light, cheap, and recyclable. But our FPSes are still displaying 40-year-old shipping technology, even in futuristic science fiction games." He also touches on Rumble implimentation, Easy Mode, Split Screen, and Camera Angles.

4 of 93 comments (clear)

  1. Re:News at 11? by roseblood · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well, this detail probably isn't even in error. I've yet to recieve an engine (think V-8, automotive) that didn't come in a WOODEN enclosure that looked an awful lot like a crate. Sure, thigs like brake pads, calipers, and other smaller and lighter items come in cardboard boxes, but for the BIG HEAVY stuff, crates still rule the shipping world.

    --
    There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
  2. Why stick with warehouses anyway? by mnmn · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It makes me wonder why shoot and kill in one location at all? Think of de_dust, which makes more sense... hunting down terrorists in a small village. Although de_dust has practically no houses or even shops or vehicles, and too many crates.

    Look around you. There are apartments (great setting for a game, have never seen a complete apartment map, or a good one, there are villages, mountains, and certain places like airports, hospitals, downtown, offices, railway yard etc. The 747 map in CS was original too, but they overused airplanes in other maps.

    I wouldnt mind seeing an underground parking lot map. Think of the parking lot scene in terminator2... I always thought that was a great setting for a game lots of glass to break and places to duck.

    I was gonna say a school is good too, but I suppose its not.

    And if youre gonna make a warehouse, add computer desks, trucks, weighing and wrapping machinery, forklifts and lifttrucks, piles of crates arranged properly to maximize space...

    A library would be great if pieces of paper will fly if you shoot the books...

    --
    "Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
    1. Re:Why stick with warehouses anyway? by christopherfinke · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The reason you've probably never seen a good/complete apartment map is because of the limitations of the rendering engine. I've just about finished what I think is a great (and greatly detailed) map of my apartment building, but I can't get it to compile because there's too much detail/too many polygons (MAX_MAP_MODELS and MAX_MAP_CLIPNODES, for anyone else who does HL/CS mapping). I've gone as far as deleting all of the furniture/irregularly shaped objects in the map, but just having 3 floors of 30 empty 2-room apartments is too much for the compiler. Oh, and there aren't any crates in my map.

      (Off-topic: If anyone has some hints on how to easily fix these errors, I'd love to hear it.)

  3. Great quote... by cluke · · Score: 4, Interesting

    from the article:

    "..[developers have] still got that outmoded notion that the player is your adversary. He isn't. He's your audience, the person you're trying to entertain and provide enjoyment to."

    Amen! I hope the next time a designer considers putting a jumping puzzle or a maze into a game, he stops and thinks of that.