Elfideo
August 8, 2019, 10:59pm
3
Maybe_Great:
Novelty is a powerful, but a short-lived beast.
As you write, Façade came out in PS2 era -the teenager years of videogames. Everything was about shooting, being cool and rebelious. God of War wasn’t a thoughtful daddy, but a revengeful nothing, but angry "dude-bro. "Being on-par with contemporary art was a glistering star to where videogames can travel. Conceptual art pieces though don’t sell well as a product to mainstream. One of the major reasons why these simulators are not as popular.
From technical perspective, any branching you add to your game grows production scope immensely. This argument is somewhat auto-solved by utilizing Neural network and Deep Learning (your Alexa reference), but the results would be unexpected (hard to design around). If an experience is to be cohesive and coherent all paths and options must be thought of. The last bit could give a life to some wonderful random non-designed moments (aka Emergent game design). At the same time all of this is a big lottery that costs a lot of money, time and effort to put together, with very risky returns.
Still some try. Mike Bithell’s studio released Subsurface Circular. Few months old Heaven’s Vault also comes to mind. Both do very smart and new stuff with language. There’s plenty of ‘horny’ games up on Steam where you might find this experience to be similar to Façade. Obviously you can also look into the past of classic text adventures, or later Ultima, Albion and such, all of which heavily utilized text parsers.
All of that is just language. Add to it another variable layer of simulation, such as ‘social hierarchy’ and you might finally get an answer to your question. It’s a tough, risky, and technically challenging endeveour. It might work out, thanks to the novelty, which also means you need to be first.
Thank you for taking the time to response I really appreciate it, I agreed with all you said, especially the making a branching story line grows production I experience that myself. I can’t help but feel that games now a days are really uninspired or at least that’s the feeling I get myself from playing them, I really want to give this a try, thanks for all the suggestions I’m going to check them out
oh and btw I made this game, it’s the first game where I did all the coding myself, so it’s nothing amazing but you can see what I’m trying to do, if I were to implement the social system.
hope you like it.
