I teach design thinking to high schoolers, startup founders, and seasoned CEOs. I use Dusker's emotion design pillar example all the time because it's so clear. I think there's something very compelling about designing everything around the emotions and values you want to evoke or resonate with. And it does give people a-ha moments, taking them away from feature-focused, solution-first thinking, which tends to produce muddy design. Thanks for the talk.
The feeling of indirect control helps create so much of the tension. The CLI, the drones, the physical distance from the play area, the hazardous space. That's tension. And that the drone controls are tweaked with a slight delay, with the revving sound effect adding to this feeling, feels so right for creating tension.
I absolutely love Duskers. He did such a good job with all of this that I can never sit down and play it for the same amounts of time that I play other video games. It is isolating, and terrifying, and real.
I think the lesson here is to know what to do with feedback. Contrast it to Sid Meyer who created nonsensical "probabilities" in Civ IV because he found people didn't understand probability and people didn't like when they lost 3 times in a row, but liked when they won 3 times in a row. Feedback was responsible for all the odd choices in that game. This guy hears "players want to use the mouse more" and he... takes away the mouse. It also reminds me of something I heard about Dark Souls. People were complaining about the difficulty of the game, so the designer responded by just making it more difficult and people just came to accept Dark Souls was a difficult game. But it's not that feedback is being disregarded; it seems like it was incredibly valuable. It's just that it was never taken at face value and something that was dissected until you learn something counterintuitive.
I am so glad this talk is now available to point at as an example because I've been wanting to try to apply this kind of philosophy in a real-world project for years. Unfortunately, I've found it a tough sell so far. It sounds scary and vague and "not how games are made" to many. Having started out as an interaction designer/concept designer this stuff is second nature, but I've never found a good way to introduce it into the field of game design. You often find teams either going the strict GDD/traditional route or going wild and doing whatever the game design equivalent of cowboy coding is. Formalizing these emotions as design pillars enables your team to discuss them, evaluate them and work towards them. When you think about it it makes perfect sense. You're trying to evoke emotions and experiences in your players. So why not set those emotions as the goals that you're striving towards, rather than picking a bunch of mechanics and features and *hoping* those emotions will be evoked? It's user-centered design applied to game design.
9:08 "You can play Tetris without imaging you are a block or something…" ❇️❇️◻️"I am the man, who arranges the blocks ◻️❇️❇️ that descend upon me, from up above." ua-cam.com/video/hWTFG3J1CP8/v-deo.html
Gotta Love GDC's free content...Thank you GDC :)
I teach design thinking to high schoolers, startup founders, and seasoned CEOs. I use Dusker's emotion design pillar example all the time because it's so clear. I think there's something very compelling about designing everything around the emotions and values you want to evoke or resonate with. And it does give people a-ha moments, taking them away from feature-focused, solution-first thinking, which tends to produce muddy design. Thanks for the talk.
The feeling of indirect control helps create so much of the tension. The CLI, the drones, the physical distance from the play area, the hazardous space. That's tension.
And that the drone controls are tweaked with a slight delay, with the revving sound effect adding to this feeling, feels so right for creating tension.
I absolutely love Duskers. He did such a good job with all of this that I can never sit down and play it for the same amounts of time that I play other video games. It is isolating, and terrifying, and real.
I always come back to duskers. Really glad he announced a possible spiritual succesor.
I think the lesson here is to know what to do with feedback. Contrast it to Sid Meyer who created nonsensical "probabilities" in Civ IV because he found people didn't understand probability and people didn't like when they lost 3 times in a row, but liked when they won 3 times in a row. Feedback was responsible for all the odd choices in that game. This guy hears "players want to use the mouse more" and he... takes away the mouse. It also reminds me of something I heard about Dark Souls. People were complaining about the difficulty of the game, so the designer responded by just making it more difficult and people just came to accept Dark Souls was a difficult game. But it's not that feedback is being disregarded; it seems like it was incredibly valuable. It's just that it was never taken at face value and something that was dissected until you learn something counterintuitive.
Relevant : twitter.com/twoscooters/status/874735790252863488
It says :
"12. Always listen to what playtesters think is broken.
13. Never listen to how playtesters think it should be fixed."
"All our planes are coming back from bombing runs with damage in these places. They need more armor there!"
You sit there with a cup of coffee, and that's YOU, working salvage on these derelicts. Lovely, lovely design.
The commandline idea is genius, I think I'm going to steal it some day ;)
I'll be waiting
Emotion-driven pillars. That's something I'd like to try.
I am so glad this talk is now available to point at as an example because I've been wanting to try to apply this kind of philosophy in a real-world project for years. Unfortunately, I've found it a tough sell so far. It sounds scary and vague and "not how games are made" to many.
Having started out as an interaction designer/concept designer this stuff is second nature, but I've never found a good way to introduce it into the field of game design. You often find teams either going the strict GDD/traditional route or going wild and doing whatever the game design equivalent of cowboy coding is. Formalizing these emotions as design pillars enables your team to discuss them, evaluate them and work towards them.
When you think about it it makes perfect sense. You're trying to evoke emotions and experiences in your players. So why not set those emotions as the goals that you're striving towards, rather than picking a bunch of mechanics and features and *hoping* those emotions will be evoked? It's user-centered design applied to game design.
9:08 "You can play Tetris without imaging you are a block or something…"
❇️❇️◻️"I am the man, who arranges the blocks
◻️❇️❇️ that descend upon me, from up above."
ua-cam.com/video/hWTFG3J1CP8/v-deo.html
My thoughts exactly lol
A lot of his description reminds me of the movie "Silent Running."
Love the game. Almost fits on a floppy disk also ;-D
bought the game after watching this.
Woah, this is pure genius.
Awesome, really awesome talk. Very inspiring, thanks !
Awesome!
I keep adding these videos to my special GDC list, but there's less and less time to actually watch them :(
This one is good, watch it.
It is all about committing