How "Good Design" Ruins Games

Hello yes I would like one egg please, extra egg and with a side order of egg. Oh! - and if it's not too much trouble can you sprinkle a bit of egg over the top of it? Great, cheers thanks!: www.patreon.com/ArchitectofGames Look I'm all for being experimental and trying new things but this social media thing has been nothing but trouble let's call it quits (unless you follow me): twitter.com/Thefearalcarrot

Just the other day the author of Caves of Qud tweeted: “Some people will say Caves of Qud is a bad game, to which I will say, yes but if you only make good things you're missing out on a lot of things that could be made.”

1:52 "games about cooking...are at least positive and fulfilling experiences" He says whilst showing the most intense, stress inducing, family destroying gaming experience of my life in Overcooked

As the saying goes, you need to know the rules before you can break them— but often understated is the emphases on asking “why” rather than blindly following them~

I think the important thing to realize about Arctic Eggs is that the reason it can break all these rules of cooking games is that at its core, it isn't a cooking game. It's a game about mastering a single skill, but that skill has enough variety in expression that it can fill out a whole game. This isn't a game about cooking eggs; it's about mastering your control of the mouse through increasingly awkward situations.

For me, this game was Sekiro. It was my first Fromsoft game and went in assuming it was an action adventure hack and slash type game. Got my butt kicked and quit for a while. Then i played Dark Souls and learned to be afraid of everything, cautious, extremely methodical and to take no risks. When i went back to Sekiro i progressed a little more, but (as with most players), Genichiro put me in my place and forced me to learn to play the game right. I had to unlearn my Souls approach of extreme caution, reactionary boss fights, and letting enemies control the flow of combat. This coincided with me finally learning the Mikiri Counter after hours of playing the game. The symbolism of having to dodge directly into the oncoming attack finally clicked in my head and i realized i needed to be the one controlling the flow of combat. I learned just the right amount of aggression and control needed to play the game right and its since become my favorite combat system ever. Still havent beaten Isshin or the Demon of Hatred, but i adore that game for all it taught me

I will say, the first boss of another crab's treasure sends a lot of mixed messages. They teach you the block system and try to get you in the habit of blocking more often as they should. But in the same breath they introduce blocks, they introduce unblockable attacks. Putting people back into their existing muscle memory.

I know this is the litteral antithesis of your video, but my tenuous grasp of chemistry, phase changes, and gastronomy allows me to suggest an answer to your hook's question. TLDR: you would be able to "cook" an egg, but it would take a bit more energy or time and the final result would be a weird dehydrated egg-cookie of unevenly cooked fat and proteins. In the normal case, eggs are cooked by denaturing the proteins with heat. This value ranges from 65 - 75 °C. Since proteins are large, complex molecules suspended in aqueous solutions, i would not expect cooked-temperature to decrease significantly as we lower ambient air pressure (top of Everest being about 1/3 the air pressure at sea level, or ~0.3 bar for this napkin math). That is to say, if you can bring an egg to 70 °C at 0.3 bar, that egg will be cooked. However, water happens to evaporate at around ~70°C at 0.3 bars. This is important because eggs are 90% water. When eggs are cooked at 1 bar, water doesnt get hot enough to evaporate, but it gets trapped in a soup of denatured proteins, essentially giving well done eggs that fun squishyness. At 0.3 bar, a significant amount of water would leave the egg through vapor (exactly how much is a bit beyond my drunk capacities and shoddy math right now). Additionally, the water vapor "steals" heat from the egg as it leaves, further increasing cooking time and/or energy required. Also, liquid water is a great heat conductor and storer of heat. This is why we can cook an egg over easy at 1 bar. Even if the top part of the egg never touches the hot part of a pan, the water conducts heat through the egg. At 0.3 bar, this phenomenon would be less likely, further increasing cooking time AND resulting in a significantly uneven cooking. I would expect a sort of very dry and crumbly hunk of unevenly cooked fat encased in a carmelized or charred shell. Shaitains scrambled scam

Kojima's presentation on how (mostly technological) limitations stimulated Evolution of Metal Gear's game design is a great companion piece for this vid. Really what should be kept in mind are these heuristics: 1) understand your tools and the context of design conventions, how developer's vision or technology at the time led to it. Mechanics and decisions should NEVER be analyzed in isolation from the game around it. That's cause it will have different effect based on what design decisions you already made. Metal Gear exists because the MSX computer had very strict sprite count for the action game, so Kojima reversed the Dynamic of engaging in encounters to avoiding them. 2) keep in mind the vision: understand the Dynamics and/or Aesthetics (MDA framework) the game is going for. Ueda wanted to create a game where you create emotional bond with your companion (Aesthetic part), and that fueled the design decision of removing the healthbar but tie success/failure to safety of Princess Yorda (changing the Dynamic). Imo, the concepts of Dynamics and Aesthetics are quite underdiscussed, but are great tools to help with understanding what's good for your game.

Wow!! It is an honor to be featured, thank you so much, and fabulous video! Arctic Eggs is such a bizzaro delight, and now I understand a bit more why I loved it so much.

Wasn't the crazy taxi arrow locked behind a patent or something like that?

Sometimes I wish I could look into other timelines and see what games they make there, like what if genre definers, like Mario, Quake, X-com, Rouge, Warcraft, etc., were never made or made poorly and instead, other games took off. Would games of these genres look notably different, or would they start down a different path to come to a similar location?

Reminds me of those stories that have the main character be someone secondary to the grander events. I find it fun when you're being another cog in the machine, rather than always staying in the spearhead - gives the setting an actual sense of scale, and not some Call of Duty "four angry dudes save the world" vibes

I took a desktop design class once, and one thing that stuck in my mind is the professor said we were learning the rules - so we can break them. When it comes to art, something that is mostly consistent but in one area breaks that consistency - that will stick out and have a lot of impact.

Honestly I wish there were more open world games with no death or combat. I was refreshing to realize I can actually jump all the way down in paradise killer (unless it's water then I'll be respawned). It also has a stellar story where literaly everyone is guilty of something.

As I've played more games over the years, I discovered how important it is to know "how to play" a game. This isn't always about going against the grain and doing things differently, its about setting up perception and expectations. It's part of why we have genres in the first place. Playing a Horror game like a Shooter not only won't work... It just doesn't make sense. Ideally, "how to play" a game is something that should be taught in a Tutorial, but sometimes that's difficult to do or developers forget. As a result you get issues like you had with Crab's Treasure. Although, one could argue the 1st boss is part of the tutorial, in which case forcing you to adopt a defensive playstyle to win is actually a great way to set expectations for the game. Personally, I recently bought and played Signalis but I didn't realize it was a Horror Survival Game, I just knew it was about Human Sentient Androids. Unfortunately, I've never been good at understanding "how to play" Survival Horror games, especially Retro ones like Signalis is modeled after. I tried to play Signalis, but I was constantly upset while playing because I didn't know if I was playing it correct, using the right weapons / bullets, solving the puzzles correctly, progressing correctly, etc. I got to the last Act of the game but then stopped because the game became too frustrating and the feeling of "What am I supposed to be doing" or "How am I supposed to play this game" got too much. I also had that experience when first playing Noita, I was unsure how to play it, like an RPG? A Survival? A Roguelike? A Roguelite? Does anything roll over between play throughs? Should I be working towards anything or just trying to preogress as far down? Should I be trying to collect gold? The game doesn't actually tell you how to play it or what to expect, I had to resort to Youtube Tutorials for help.

The most important motion you should use when flipping anything in a pan is keeping the pan mostly level and doing sudden horizontal movement. So arctic eggs is not only ruining game design, but also cooking technique :v

my favorite example of "bad design done right" is always gonna be nuclear throne at the very end of the game, after you've beaten every single level and killed every enemy you previously had died to once the final boss starts its battle the first thing it does is shoot a giant laser beam across the center of the hall it's in chances are you'll be caught in the beam and given pretty much no time at all to react and you'll die and go back to the main menu the best part about this is that one of the developers for the game, rami ismail, said that he and the other lead developer recieved emails saying stuff like "why did you put that there fuck you for adding this" and some days later he'd get another email saying something like "i beat it, fuck you again."

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses."

I think this is what Yahtzee called “post-punk games” where after the previous rules and assumptions have been overthrown, new ones are established to always push the medium forward