Postmortem of IGF's Web GOTY

Posted by Zonk on Friday June 10, 2005 @11:21AM from the how-they-did-it dept.

Oasis was the winner of the Independent Game Festival's Game of the Year award in the Web/Downloadable Category. To give us some background on how an award winning indie title is put together, Gamasutra has a Postmortem from the folks at Mind Control Software. From the article: "'Life's not fair.' Oasis levels are not fair. They are created randomly, following a complex set of heuristics. It is not a foregone conclusion that a player will win a level militarily. If things look bad, a smart player starts to think more defensively."

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Life's not fair, but Games should be by LKM · 2005-06-11 00:55 · Score: 2, Insightful

"'Life's not fair.' Oasis levels are not fair."

To me, this about sums up the reasons why auto-generated levels are most often useless. Life's not fair, but I'm playing games to avoid the unfairness of life, not to experience even more of it.

Levels should be designed by humans who can anticipate how a game will play out. Otherwise, games become more luck than anything else, which ultimately is often bothersome, annyoing and discouraging.