
Game developers share what they're most proud of making - danso
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/04/13/developers-of-your-favourite-games-share-what-small-thing-theyre-most-proud-of-making/
======
hnick
I had no idea Getting Over It had an ending like that. I'll never play it so
don't consider myself spoiled but getting there entirely unaware must have
been a great experience.

I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)

When you're done with the article, I found a link in the comments by Bennett
Foddy about naming things (related to his role in naming the rooms in VVVVVV)
which is also worth a read: [https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-
under/](https://distractionware.com/blog/2010/01/down-under/)

~~~
ecdavis
> I wonder how many people swore at him for what they got put through ;)

I heard him mention in an interview that he received a lot of abuse
(cathartic, not mean, from the way he described it). I think the mobile
version actually used text messages, which must've been fun for him after the
game took off.

EDIT: It's here, in a GDC presentation:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4UFC0y1tY0#t=39m20s)
\-- the whole presentation is worth watching.

------
rl3
> _“Trigger Happy is a two-player deathmatch game I made when I was 12 years
> old, using the Klik & Play game-making tool._

Ha, I played that game when I was around that age myself. It's one of those
things that you don't remember until you see it again and the memories come
back.

The article conveniently has a download link included.

~~~
paulryanrogers
Klik and Play was great. I made a multi-minigame project with it for months
... until shutting down Windows 3.1 cut off the save process. No backups :(. I
was experimenting with making an RTS by that point.

EDIT: typos

------
thedirt0115
One of the featured games is Kine, a cool looking 3D puzzle game. The creator,
Gwen Frey, just did a great GDC talk, "The Kine Postmortem":
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDG_EvHCIxQ)

~~~
cableshaft
Kine looks awesome. Thanks for the heads up on it.

------
A4ET8a8uTh0
I could not help, but smile at Divinity part. I absolutely despised Red
Prince, but it only shows the writers did a good job creating non-bland
character. Also now I know where the inspiration came from. Neat.

------
Agentlien
I love articles like this. And I can definitely relate. Game development
allows for a lot of joy, frustration and eventually pride once you look back
at it.

Also reminds me of the old twitter thread where game developers shared their
various tricks:
[https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640](https://twitter.com/Gaohmee/status/903510060197744640)
Summarized in this article:
[https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112](https://www.polygon.com/2017/9/2/16247112)

------
DonHopkins
I was going to give a talk at QGCon about what I was most proud of making in
The Sims, but the conference was canceled due to Coronavirus of course.

[https://qgcon.com/](https://qgcon.com/)

I plan on publishing a paper about what I would have talked about, and I'll
post that to HN when it's ready, but for now, here's the abstract I wrote, and
a few notes and references.

\----

How Inclusivity Saved The Sims. By Don Hopkins, Ground Up Software.

Abstract:

The Sims has evolved with society over two decades towards a more inclusive,
tolerant world celebrating diversity and creativity. Its procedural rhetoric
promotes inclusivity, diversity, personalization, and tolerance, and supports
self-expression, creativity, storytelling, and sharing. Players impress their
own identities, families, homes, communities, and stories into the game, and
share their own personal emergent narratives with tools like The Sims Family
Album and The Sims Exchange.

The Sims presumes to model human minds and relationships, but necessarily
makes brazen simplifications due to technological constraints. It optimizes
for playability instead of realism, while making concessions to marketability,
corporate interests, societal norms, and taboos. But somehow it works, and
this paper attempts to explain some of the magic.

Will Wright defined the “Simulator Effect” as how players imagine the
simulation is vastly more detailed, deep, rich, and complex than it actually
is: a magical misunderstanding that you shouldn’t talk them out of. He designs
games to run on two computers at once: the electronic one on the player’s
desk, running his shallow tame simulation, and the biological one in the
player’s head, running their deep wild imagination.

The “AI” of The Sims is scripted in a noodly visual programming language
called “SimAntics”, and is distributed throughout the objects and characters
of the Sims microworld. But it magically offloads most of the heavy lifting
into the player’s own imagination, incorporating and enriching their
intertwingled tapestry of common-sense knowledge and stories about people,
families, and communities.

The graphical design of The Sims was inspired by Scott McCloud’s
“Understanding Comics”, in which he illustrated how the “Masking” visual style
draws abstract characters against realistic backgrounds, which increases
empathy and projective identification, empowers emotional connections, and
permits players to easily and deeply identify with characters.

The educational philosophy of The Sims and SimCity was inspired by Seymour
Papert’s “Constructionism” learning theory, with which learners construct
mental models to understand the real world by building tangible personally
meaningful shareable microworlds, and learn by discovery and exploration, by
leveraging information they already know to learn more, and architecting their
own educations.

This paper reviews the history of inclusivity in The Sims franchise over two
decades, and explains some techniques for imagination, persuasion,
identification, empathy, storytelling, and education, which can also make
other games more inclusive, expressive, and enlightening.

\----

~~~
DonHopkins
The Sims Design Documents

[https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/](https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/)

The Sims Design Document Draft 3 (1998-08-07)

[https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDra...](https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/TheSimsDesignDocumentDraft3-1998-08-07-DonsReview.pdf)

On page 5, Don Hopkins wrote the following comments about same sex
relationships in the game:

The whole relationship design and implementation (I’ve looked at the tree
code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better
than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically
gave in response about not being anti-gay. The code tests to see if the sex of
the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result
is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are
definitely going to get flack for that. It would be much more realistic to
model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the
likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each
sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have
now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual
(mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of
the world’s population). It would make for a much more interesting and
realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by
that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in
that quest. Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of
other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but
doesn’t realize it since they’re projecting their homophobia onto other
people.

\----

The Kiss that Changed Video Games

[https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-
kiss...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-
changed-video-games)

The 1999 Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, a video-game conference held in
Los Angeles, California, was a typically lavish, if bawdy, affair. Here, for
three days, the world’s video-game publishers gathered to show off their
forthcoming titles to press and to purchasers in an overstimulating marketing
circus. David Bowie performed at one of the conference’s orbiting parties that
week, and Bill Goldberg and some other glistening-skinned wrestlers grappled
one another in a custom-built ring on the publisher E.A.’s gargantuan booth.
Away from the action of its main stage, E.A. had stationed a humble area
advertising The Sims, an ambitious social-simulation project that almost
nobody outside of its development team believed in.

For E.A., The Sims, the latest from Will Wright, the celebrated designer of
1989’s city-planning game SimCity, was a legacy project, inherited when the
company purchased its development studio, Maxis. The game had been in
stammering development since 1993, when Wright first had the idea for a
simulation that would model human behavior, not from the bird’s-eye viewpoint
of his earlier game but from the ground zero of domesticity. But replicating
the mundane dramas of the living room in game form had proven to be a tall
challenge: The Sims was almost abandoned numerous times. “We all knew that if
we couldn’t generate any interest at E3 that year, then the game would be
cancelled for good,” Patrick J. Barrett III, one of the game’s programmers,
told me. “E.A. did nothing to help us. They hid us away. The game wasn’t even
displayed on the large screen with the other title’s trailers.” But, within
hours, an unplanned, illicit kiss between two of the game’s background
characters made The Sims the talk of the show.

\----

Player Created Content

How to make the leap from smut to art, while continuing to support smut in a
plausibly deniable way that you can sell through WalMart? Don’t do smut
explicitly, but put the tools to create their own “artistic” content into the
hands of the users.

"Time to Penis" -A phenomenon that online game developers had been aware of
for years, which didn't have a name until someone came up with TTP. It's
traditionally measured in nanoseconds.

Spore Penis Monsters.

\----

[https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881](https://twitter.com/itstheshadsy/status/1151868012707962881)

Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims,
including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance:

[https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/](https://donhopkins.com/home/TheSims/)

It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims
written out so strongly like this

For more background: Will Wright's notebooks from the making of The Sims
(viewable at @museumofplay !) mention "same sex move-in romance" as a
potential feature, but it sounds like there wasn't a plan about how or whether
to implement that until Don Hopkins stood up for it here

Here's an article with additional context from Barrett's perspective about
when/how same-sex relationships were added. The article mentions "going back
and forth for several months" before he joined, which likely refers to what
these documents are saying

[https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-
kiss...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/the-kiss-that-
changed-video-games)

[https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736](https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1152266586025332736)

Here's the offending "tree code" from "The Sims Steering Committee" internal
release of June 4, 1998.

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_2sWbsXUAA5UtO?format=png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_2sWbsXUAA5UtO?format=png)

[https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218416393367554](https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218416393367554)

The Sims turns 20 today! Here's an early pre-release version of The Sims for
The Sim Steering Committee, from June 4 1998. #TheSims

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zC52jE60KjY)

[https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218212353060871](https://twitter.com/xardox/status/1223218212353060871)

The about dialog had a "No Shit!" button, and referred to it as "Project X":

[https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPm-
ekxXUAAqi2a?format=png](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EPm-
ekxXUAAqi2a?format=png)

    
    
        About Edith
        Edith Version 666 (motb) [No Shit!]
        Copyright (C) 1997, Maxis.
    
        Project X was designed by Will Wright, and programmed by
        Jamie Doornbos, Eric Bowman, Jim Mackraz, and Don Hopkins.
    

\----

Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.

Procedural rhetoric.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_rhetoric)

Procedural rhetoric or simulation rhetoric[1] is a rhetorical concept that
explains how people learn through the authorship of rules and processes. The
theory argues that games can make strong claims about how the world works—not
simply through words or visuals but through the processes they embody and
models they construct. The term was first coined by Ian Bogost in his 2007
book Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames.[2]

Procedural rhetoric analyzes the art of persuasion by rule based
representations and interactions rather than spoken or written word.
Procedural rhetoric focuses on how game makers craft laws and rules within a
game to convey a particular ideology.

[1] Frasca, Gonzalo (2003). “Simulation versus Narrative: Introduction to
Ludology.” In The Video Game Theory Reader. Ed. by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard
Perron. New York: Routledge. 221–37 ISBN 9780415965798

[2] Bogost, Ian (2008). "The Rhetoric of Video Games." The Ecology of Games:
Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning. Ed. by Katie Salen. The John D. and
Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 117–40. ISBN 9780262693646

\----

SimCopter Himbo Easter Egg was a SimAntics Programming Bug

[https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamesp...](https://web.archive.org/web/19991109030656/http://www.gamespot.com/features/maxis/page6.html)

Indeed, SimCopter was shipped too soon, and as a result, it launched with one
of the most controversial bugs in gaming history. A homosexual programmer at
Maxis objected to the use of female characters as objects of affection in
SimCopter. So, he decided to protest by putting what he termed "muscle boys in
swim trunks" into the game. During the game, these characters would
mysteriously appear and kiss each other, but only on very rare occasions. At
least, that was the idea. Unfortunately, as the programmer told Wired magazine
in 1996, "My random-number generator didn't work as I'd planned," and the
characters appeared with startling regularity. Upon discovery of the errant
code, the programmer was immediately fired, but the transgression spoke
volumes about the frenetic and fragmented state of affairs at Maxis.

\----

Scott McCloud

Reinventing Comics:

[https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9780060953508](https://www.nextchapterbooksellers.com/book/9780060953508)

“Anyone involved in interactive entertainment (games, web, etc.) should read
this book. Scott McCloud has once again transcended the world of comics and
tapped into much deeper issues of creativity entertainment and economics. This
time he’s looking into the future rather than the past.” — Will Wright

Understanding Comics

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics)

Masking, abstraction, concrete background, abstract ground, projecting the
reader or player into the scene.

Show vs. Tell

Transition and Gutters

Abstract vs. Realistic

Masking.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_(illustration)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masking_\(illustration\))

The masking effect or masking is a visual style, dramatic convention, and
literary technique described by cartoonist Scott McCloud in his book
Understanding Comics in the chapter on realism. It is the use of simplistic,
archetypal, narrative characters, even if juxtaposed with detailed,
photographic, verisimilar, spectacular backgrounds. This may function, McCloud
infers, as a mask, a form of projective identification. His explanation is
that a familiar and minimally detailed character allows for a stronger
emotional connection and for viewers to identify more easily.

It is used in animation, comics, illustration, video games (especially visual
novels) and other media. It is common in Western graphic novels and Japanese
comics and animation. The psychology behind the masking effect has been
extended to rendering antagonists in a realistic manner in order to show their
otherness from the reader.

\----

Tension Between Realistic Models and Fun Game Play

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-
to-...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-user-interfaces-to-
simulation-games-bd7a9d81e62d)

Some muckety-muck architecture magazine was interviewing Will Wright about
SimCity, and they asked him a question something like “which ontological urban
paradigm most influenced your design of the simulator, the Exo-Hamiltonian
Pattern Language Movement, or the Intra-Urban Deconstructionist Sub-Culture
Hypothesis?” He replied, “I just kind of optimized for game play.”

Discussion of all the third parties who wanted a version of SimCity that ham-
fistedly taught whatever they had on their agenda. Misunderstanding the
potentials of Constructionist Education. Ham-fisted attempts at patronizingly
didactic pedagogy.

\----

Nurture -vs- Nature Debate

Can you decide to change your sexual preference? Should you be able to? What
makes a game more fun? Does a game need to be realistic? What are the
technological limits of the model (complexity, privacy, AI, machine learning)?
Do we even know what the correct model is?

\----

Columbine

The Sims made its debut days before the shooting at Columbine, which triggered
a moral panic over video games.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_School_massacre#Video_games)

How did the Columbine shooting and subsequent backlash against violent video
games affect the coverage and popularity of The Sims, as a counterpoint to
Doom-type games?

Is The Sims a video violent game? There are numerous cruel and sadistic ways
to painfully and violently kill people. Does that mean that The Sims is a
violent video game?

\----

The Sims 4 Patch 34

[https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims_4/Patch_34](https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sims_4/Patch_34)

The 34th patch for The Sims 4 was released on June 2, 2016. It updated the
game to version 1.19.28.1010 for PC and 1.19.28.1210 for Mac. The patch allows
players to customize a Sim's gender in greater depth and allows previously
gender-specific assets to be used by any Sims regardless of gender.

\----

------
benibela
I wrote games when I was around 10 years old.

I was very proud when I figured out how to calculate if two axis-aligned
rectangles intersect. The most complex equation I knew then, and I did not
have internet to look it up.

------
DiabloD3
There is no mention of Talos. This makes me sad.

------
xwdv
I would like to present – my son.

------
lopmotr
The Pirate Queen example doesn't really seem like something to be proud of -
choosing the gender of a character and making it powerful aren't challenges
are they? Couldn't you do that by flipping a coin? Surely the thing to be
proud of there is getting to a position where you have the authority to make
those choices?

~~~
valesco
It's a decision she made that proved to be great, so she's proud of it.
Strange how you targeted the only vaguely feminist achievement in the whole
list.

~~~
mikekchar
Just to play devil's advocate, it's not really clear from the article what the
designer is proud about. "The strongest and most expensive unit in our Pirate
Faction is the Pirate Queen. She is kick ass, looks cool, and is even voiced
by myself!" Why _shouldn 't_ she be kick ass and looking cool? Why _shouldn
't_ she be the most expensive unit in the faction? It's speaking to a
narrative for which we have to guess the other side.

I think the implication is that players of the game are not predisposed to
enjoy female units in the game. I don't know anything about the game, so maybe
I'm missing something, but I actually find that insulting. Why is it a given
that there will be such a misogynistic view? While we have to accept that some
gamers _do_ have this awful point of view, I think it's part of the problem
that some people feel that gamers _must_ be like that.

In some ways it is potentially a bit of a sad thing to be proud of. I mean it
can be taken in a few ways. One might be proud to have pushed this strong
female unit into the midst of an audience that normally wouldn't accept it. Or
one might be proud to have been able to deliver the strong female unit that
the audience has been hungering for.

I can see some people feeling a bit put out if they assume that the designer's
intent was the former rather than the latter. It's potentially really
demeaning.

~~~
valesco
Guy is hired by videogame studio, makes a kickass warrior and is proud of it.
Tells it to interviewer. Is accused of pushing an egalitarist agenda by
internet strangers. Come on guys.

