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How I Saved the Gaming Industry
Jamie found a nifty blog entry where indie game designer Jeff Vogel writes about game engine and art re-use. He is criticized for not rewriting his core engine for a decade. It's an amusing little rant with thoughts that actually might apply to anyone working in engineering.
This guy has it exactly right. I don't need a new engine, just new levels or a new story. I would LOVE to pay for new high quality episodes for the original Doom engine. Game after game comes out on the Adventure Game Studio engine, and I love it. I never heard of this guy before, but the Avernum series seems to be supported by Wine (platinum!) so I'm going to give it a shot. When your formula is good, "more of the same" is a great thing.
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Sorry, I actually read it. It got me thinking of the classic Infocom text games. Yes, there was an "engine" of sorts. It was, AFAIK, some kind of scripting language designed for text games. I bet they tweaked and reused it in every game too.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Is it just me or are "good" graphics overrated? No matter what they do, in the end the overall looks are still not real and only the textures are prettier.
Remember that people played (and still actively play) MUDs - they are not played for the nice looks (ASCII maps is all you have to look at!!!), it's the story that catchy.
I think that the players who are there for the graphics play the games for the shortest time. The more valuable customers that are there for the story and would buy a sequel, updates whatever actually don't care about the looks after first 2 days.
This is good advice for practically every field. If you've done a good job of defining and documenting clean interfaces, it is almost always better to reuse a wheel than to reinvent it (usually badly). The only time a rewrite is in order is when it would actually take more effort to accommodate an existing subsystem.
(This applies mainly in a business context; for free software that is unconstrained by the need to turn a profit, the main question should be which choice will better serve the users, not which choice is quicker and easier for the developer.)
As far as games go, many of the games I've enjoyed most have had relatively primitive graphics but superb gameplay, while I've seen plenty of games that were visually stunning, but not all that much fun to play. For game developers, I'd recommend developing the game first with minimal placeholder graphics and then play it. Is it fun? If yes, then upgrade the graphics. If not, then no amount of eye-candy will save it.
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How many times did Duke Nukem Forever switch engines and start all over?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I happen to be in the middle of playing one of his games (Geneforge 5) and I'm really impressed. The crappy graphics took an hour or so to get used to, but the complexity of the world and faction system makes the game worth playing. You really feel torn between the ideals of the different factions, and get to know the personalities of the major players. I think it compares quite favorably to modern big-budget games in that regard. Also the fighting mechanics were solid and didn't get in the way of gameplay.