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Sometimes you have to show how the trick is done

One of the first years we were lucky enough to go to GDC (a yearly game developer conference), we had breakfast with a guy who worked at Bullfrog during their heyday. He told us a story about one of their games that’s been echoing in my head for years since.

This image constitutes a spoiler for the contents of this blog post.

Warning: this image constitutes a spoiler for the contents of this blog post.

During development of the title (which we will call “Cheese Wrangler” to protect the innocent) they created a sophisticated simulation of the environment to determine which challenges to present to the player. Months of painstaking work went into cheese wrangling challenge* simulation in an attempt to create a model that would feel intuitive to players, but the system was taking way too long to finish. Eventually they decided to test players against a purely random event driver, and they found that after all that work players couldn’t tell the difference between simulation and chance. So they threw out the simulation.

(*Not actually cheese wrangling challenges, but we’re sticking with that theme.)

Simulation just doesn’t matter if the player doesn’t care about it.

{ read this article }

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