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Postmortem of IGF's Web GOTY
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."
Somewhat interesting to read about the design concepts... but still, just one big advertisement... the guy who designed it writing about the "problems" (not real problems, fake, hey our game is great problems)... oh well. *shrug*
http://www.pterrys.com
if you're so inclined, you can download the demo from their site.
I've played the demo, and IMHO it's allowable time is too short to attract players to buy it. It give you one hour of free trial total, and the website itself is really lack of information.. I know this is a low budget game, but.. at least provide enough information for possible buyers to decide whether you want to spend $20 to play it or not. by the time I went through tutorial, the time is up already. (yes, maybe it's intended, but it should allow enough time for players to finish a few rounds of easy games.. ).
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.