Flower's Dev Diary (Week of October 8th)

[FlowerChild]

In general, this forum is for discussion of BTW only. Please leave other mods out of it.

[barcode]

Ok, understood guys. Wasn't meant that way, simply was meant to be a reference to what I see as an interesting change in mob behavior. I did add a link so you can look at what I was talking about if you're interested at all and to avoid talking about it too much here. But - again - fine with me. :-)

Looking forward to finding out what the Endermen changes actually are tonight..

[LaserSushi]

Guys: I think many of you are misunderstanding my post. The changes that will require increased defenses are coming later...probably *much* later. The point I was trying to make is that I am postponing them until a later date when they fit the mod better.

The changes I am making to mob AI now and in the near future are of a much more subtle nature.

Huh. Sounds good to me. I will wait and see what they will be.
Perhaps could save me time in the future too.

[devak]

Not a whole lot of activity here.

I assume work is getting done, but we mere mortals can not know?

[Gormador]

Pestering for an update of that Dev Diary isn't going to make you any good...

And he stated somewhere on this forum that he was working on the internal mechanics of the mod for the time being, if I'm not mistaken oc.

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, I make no promises about dev diaries being absolutely every week. I'll try there, but again...no promises.

This last week I lost a few days to XCom addiction (well..."lost" isn't really the right word as that game was a real eye-opener in terms of masterful design, and such lessons inevitably find their way back into the mod), and now I'm deep in the guts of the next release and hesitant to stop work to detail what I'm doing, especially since a lot of what I'm working on was what was already detailed last week or elsewhere on the forums.

So yes, please don't update pester on the dev diaries. I will most certainly skip a week here and there.

[devak]

I wasn't intending to update pester. I was just curious whether it was silent cause nothing happened (IE, the Xcom thing) or because you were too busy coding (or too busy banning people in the Suggestions department)

EDIT: that question's obviously been answered now.

[FlowerChild]

I wasn't intending to update pester.

Uh huh. Enjoy your vacation.

[warmist]

<...>This last week I lost a few days to XCom addiction (well..."lost" isn't really the right word as that game was a real eye-opener in terms of masterful design, and such lessons inevitably find their way back into the mod), and now I'm deep in the guts of the next release and hesitant to stop work to detail what I'm doing, especially since a lot of what I'm working on was what was already detailed last week or elsewhere on the forums <...>

As a game designer myself (well currently mostly board game). And most games i play i see in different light. (e.g. bastion was a perfect example how to implement story telling into an action game (music and narator)). Also i love BTW because of that. All the choices are made for the game design. This is really easy to forget when developing a sandbox game (i.e. devs. think that sandbox = anything goes).
I kind of wish that you would read the DF dev goals... (kind of because there are many many of them, it's like wishing for a person to analyse all of the games of century X)

TL;DR new Xcom is very cool, BTW is cool too, FlowerChild keep up the good work (both in "game design research" and in BTW developing) :)

[FlowerChild]

I kind of wish that you would read the DF dev goals...

I do follow DF pretty closely and have been following it for about six months or so (I hardly knew about it before then). I generally stop by periodically to read through all of Toady's dev diary type stuff.

However, my interest has been waning as of late because I really don't agree with his focus on adventure mode. It just doesn't interest me in the slightest.

[warmist]

i meant the http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_single.html i liked that implementing all the "core" goals would give us version 1.0. But as I said it is very very long term and current version of DF does not look as good in game design perspective as current version of BTW. Some could argue that in ver 1.0 DF would beat any game it is not close to that, where in BTW it is a more gradual transfer from "just few features" to "FC point of view of a minecraft as a game", where all the version in between are fun to play and mostly no breaks in functionality. Also you are working in constrains that some of the features are from minecraft developers (I guess we (the dfhack devs) are working in similar enviroment) that limits some things as well as infuses some features into your "game".

[Sarudak]

Man XCom is so good! I think I might be out of minecraft for a while because of it. Given how little time I have to play there'll probably be DLC/expansion out by the time I get tired of it. I find it annoying all the people complaining about things like how you have to choose 1 of 3 abduction missions. Or how you can only choose one backpack item. Those are the decisions that I agonize over in the game. Do they not understand that hard decisions == good?

On the DF front I've kinda lost interest in his recent updates too. I understand his goal is a complete fantasy world simulator and all but I really wish he would focus more on the fortress mode. Sieges with tunneling enemies and more complex trap systems would get me back into that game in a heartbeat!

[FlowerChild]

i meant the http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/dev_single.html i liked that implementing all the "core" goals would give us version 1.0. But as I said it is very very long term and current version of DF does not look as good in game design perspective as current version of BTW. Some could argue that in ver 1.0 DF would beat any game it is not close to that, where in BTW it is a more gradual transfer from "just few features" to "FC point of view of a minecraft as a game".

Well, that's kinda the thing. At some point I did transfer from independent features to a more systematic approach to what I was doing. I went through a period of a couple of months where I reworked the entire tech-tree to tie it all together into a cohesive whole, and since then, I've been very reluctant to include anything that breaks that without first doing the underlying groundwork so that it properly fit into the whole.

Steam is a great example. It's no secret that I planned to implement steam more than a year ago, but then decided the mod just wasn't there yet in terms of the tech-tree. With my previous approach to the mod, I just would have put it in anyways, and then filled in the details later, but the problem with that (and you see this with other mods), is that in the time in between, which could easily last months, the mod is effectively broken in terms of providing a "complete" gameplay experience.

Instead, now I lay the groundwork first, so the mod is basically fully playable and consistent throughout THEN I implement the big-ticket features that I'm aiming for.

With Toady, he's really all over the frigging place, never really implementing anything to completion, so in playing DF at any point during it's ongoing development, you don't really have that complete experience that I'm talking about.

I think that for any ongoing development process like I'm engaged in with the mod, or like what Toady is doing with DF, incremental development in which you bring each feature to completion before moving onto the next becomes *very* important. It's a very different paradigm from what you generally experience in commercial development where you're basically aiming for a single release when the game is done, and where the order in which you develop things becomes far less important as a result. Because I was used to that kind of commercial dev, it took me awhile to adapt my approach to the mod to accommodate that, and I think in the case of most modders and indy developers, they never really do adjust to it.

Heck, you even see this problem with vanilla MC where we have a whack of dangling features that never seem to get completed, and it becomes increasingly uncertain whether they will ever be addressed. Meanwhile, players come and go, having their entire gameplay experience within MC defined partially by those loose ends.

I don't want to turn this into an RP debate, but I think that mod actually exemplifies this. Elo always seems to focus on the "big ticket" features like computers and frames, but the mod is beginning to look like someone fired buckshot at a game design document as a result. Will she ever have the patience to go back and do the massive amount of work that will be required to tie it all together? I sincerely doubt it, which means players of it will basically always be playing something in an incomplete state.

Meanwhile, I'm just chipping away at things one at a time slowly expanding the gameplay experience and trying to retain consistency throughout.

[Foxy Boxes]

Elo always seems to focus on the "big ticket" features like computers and frames, but the mod is beginning to look like someone fired buckshot at a game design document as a result.

I'd say more like it's written based upon a ink-blot test.

All joking aside, good to here that you're taking Minecraft apart, putting some logical stuff in it, then putting it back together good as new. So that's a complete reassembly. New vitals. Spit-shine on the old ones. Plus you're scooping out tumors. Frankly, Mojang oughtta be paying you.

Cave Johnson. I'm done here.

[MoRmEnGiL]

What I wanted to say here is, even though you think the fluff is not a priority to btw, it has a surprising amount of consistent lore behind each feature ;]

I sometimes get the feeling that you are a perfectionist at heart, I sympathise with a lot of things you have mulled over (remember the btb wrench recipe fiasco? :P) and I am sort of a perfectionist myself.

It's really reflected in how you implement things. Everything is always well thought out.

I also have some comments about xcom, but will take them to the appropriate thread. :P

[FlowerChild]

What I wanted to say here is, even though you think the fluff is not a priority to btw, it has a surprising amount of consistent lore behind each feature ;]

I sometimes get the feeling that you are a perfectionist at heart, I sympathise with a lot of things you have mulled over (remember the btb wrench recipe fiasco? :P) and I am sort of a perfectionist myself.

It's really reflected in how you implement things. Everything is always well thought out.

Thanks man. And yeah, I definitely remember the wrench thing, and am glad you do to. Those were strange days indeed :)

And yes, while I do tend to create lore to support everything, gameplay always comes first, lore second. I think many designers tailor gameplay to suit the story they want to tell, and that's not something I really ever do. In fact, I fairly routinely blow my own internal story right out of the water when I decide I want a new feature, then reassemble it into a new form.

The recent Enderman changes are an example. Remember how once I half-jokingly referred to end-stone as Enderdragon poop? Well, obviously that is no longer the case, because the gameplay I provided (and will be providing) due to those changes was far more significant to me than my preconceived notions of what the lore was.

[PizzaSHARK!]

Meanwhile, I'm just chipping away at things one at a time slowly expanding the gameplay experience and trying to retain consistency throughout.

It's this approach that, I feel, separates BTW the most from other mods of similar scope. I dabble with several other complex mods, but BTW is unique in that not only does its developer focus solely on ensuring the mod will always function regardless of other mods, but also that you seem to have an emphasis on doing everything you can to avoid breaking existing worlds/builds with each update that pretty much every other mod I've tried just says "oh well, deal with it," about.

And thinking about it, I can also see that systematic approach you were talking about in recent updates. Even if you're saying certain things aren't finished yet, what's in-game right now still feels fully thought-out and more or less complete, and in general it's clear you have a definite goal with each change added to the mod.

It's an interesting departure from the norm for other Minecraft mods.

[Panda]

What I wanted to say here is, even though you think the fluff is not a priority to btw, it has a surprising amount of consistent lore behind each feature ;]

I sometimes get the feeling that you are a perfectionist at heart, I sympathise with a lot of things you have mulled over (remember the btb wrench recipe fiasco? :P) and I am sort of a perfectionist myself.

It's really reflected in how you implement things. Everything is always well thought out.

Thanks man. And yeah, I definitely remember the wrench thing, and am glad you do to. Those were strange days indeed :)

And yes, while I do tend to create lore to support everything, gameplay always comes first, lore second. I think many designers tailor gameplay to suit the story they want to tell, and that's not something I really ever do. In fact, I fairly routinely blow my own internal story right out of the water when I decide I want a new feature, then reassemble it into a new form.

Whats the lore for BTB?

[FlowerChild]

Whats the lore for BTB?

Huh? That came rather out of left field given BTB doesn't even exist anymore.

I actually did have backstory planned for BTB before it went under, but you've got me scratching my head right now how this question is even vaguely related to anything being discussed here, or what your intention was with it.

[Nexus Trimean]

Well when a Spiky betentacaled Eldrich horror from another dimension, and an extra-terrestrial amphibian love each other very much, you get better then buildcraft.

Thanks for the continued updates flower, its always nice to see how you work, and whats in the works. Im especially curious about just what you will change for mobs, im all for them being less derpy and feeling more like they belong in the world. in the past they have felt much like Steve, that they don't quite belong.