BlueCupTools Podcats! Grundislav & ThreeOhFour! Episode 82!

[Armageddon]

It's coming up to the second week, new podcast?

[Grundislav]

Unfortunately, we're both having a social binge, so we won't be able to record this week either.  Should be back next week, though!

[Grundislav]

Episode 37

[selmiak]

cool podcast. But in conclusion I have to say this podcast is too linear. There are branching pathes everywhere, which is good, but in the end there is some thread you follow. Please work on this and make a nonlinear podcast sometime in the future

[mitlark]

Maybe make it in a way that choices really matter, and add some real interaction. Also I don't like the Sound system, where all I can do is listen. No choices or ways to influence there, not really a system, just a nice demonstration.

(?).

Nice podcast. I had a lot of laughs, and made my day a better one. Good for listening while you're doing AGS things.

[Armageddon]

Good podcast. I still don't think any game is actually non-linear. The closest is The Witcher and even then it's just multiple paths. I guess Fallout 3 is pretty non-linear.

[Stupot]

I don't get what the big fuss is about non-linearity, like it's some Holy Grail of game design.  It's a nice touch if you have the resources, but it's not really that important to me. What are important to me are interactivity and exploration, both of which can create the illusion of non-linearity, which is fine by me.  Even a sprawling sand-box game like GTA has certain story check-points along the way making for an overall fairly linear story, well disguised in exploration and open-worldiness.

If you want to provide me, as a player, with some degree of choice along the way, then great.  If you can create the illusion that I am having some impact over how the story is playing out, then even better, but you don't have to create multiple branches and personalised endings in order to make me happy.  Tell me a story. Just one story will be fine. I'm probably only likely to play the game once anyway.  And if I play it again it's because I enjoyed it the first time around. So if I want a different story I can play a different game.

[mitlark]

Dark Souls. Has anyone here played that bastard? It's a non-linear game. When you start the game, you can go to pretty much anywhere, except for some places that need some kind of key, heh (plot). You can kill any NPC. You can customize your character to your liking and equip anything (this of course resulting in experienced people sticking to the "best method", like when in an RPG you have like 30 magics and you select the best one over and over -Meteor!-). And they try to hold your hand as LITTLE as possible, ending in you inevitably dying over and over.

Thing with non-linearity is that it doesn't has anything to do with the impact and extra endings. It's about breaking the "A to B" paradigm, making it instead A to either B, C, D, E, F... then at some point Z. Or finally end up with W, X, Y as possible endings.
Then the games that just throw a different cinematic depending on your variable values. Bools and integers determining what ending sequence plays (?).

Now let's think about linear vs. non-linear. Which is easier to develop? Which pleases most audiences without that much hazzle? Linear games. A lot of people are just caring for a story and blah. I'm not in that boat because I like a little more of non-linearity, but if I can please people with the easiest path, then it's a good thing to consider. Nowadays is pretty hard to achieve a good replay value if your game's main aspect is story.

If you go for a non-linear approach, there is this thing that involves branching. Let's say you make a branching, you have two results. Each of these branches then break again in two separate branches each. Now we have 4 paths. Let's say this happens over and over. With 7 levels of branching, you have 2^7=128 different paths. So you pretty much have to make 128 games in one.
Of course, I'm not taking into account that some branches start at mid of game, neither am I considering that some branches can join at some point, which is the key for branching stories, because neither you or your players will follow up with that gigantic schema where they are.

[Grundislav]

Episode 38

Work environment!

[Armageddon]

Neither of you have played Thirty Flights of Loving? I don't think I can listen to your podcasts anymore...

[Vince Twelve]

Well, that was chock full of good advice for single men with no children. (I have no personal space, help me!)

And phew, I thought you were going to go that whole podcast without mentioning me.  Thank god I slipped in at the end.  My ego!  MY EGO!

[ThreeOhFour]

Neither of you have played Thirty Flights of Loving? I don't think I can listen to your podcasts anymore...

Have you played Planescape: Torment? Well!? Have you!?

[Stupot]

And phew, I thought you were going to go that whole podcast without mentioning me.  Thank god I slipped in at the end.  My ego!  MY EGO!

You got mentioned within 4 minutes

[Ponch]

Catching up on the backlog of episodes. Was very disappointed that Vince didn't provide another DeliveRants. It should be a prerequisite for any episode he appears in.

[Daniel Thomas]

Great episode! I agree with everything Ben mentioned really, it does make life much easier.
I had the same opinion about Open Office being slow, but I had not been looking for an alternative - Installed Libra office now and seems to work great so far

[selmiak]

really? I tested them all and OOo opened around 3-4 seconds faster than Libre office. And they both have almost the same installsize. And the new MS Office has some nice features too and opens really fast on win7 (but is probably cluttering up RAM for this right from the booting).

[Daniel Thomas]

Yea, I would say about the opposite for me (I didn't keep open office loaded in the systray/background though). Opening a document in Libre takes around 1-2 secs. And it doesn't stay loaded stand by - so just feels clean, simple and fast
Realize it's getting off topic.

[ThreeOhFour]

Yeah, OpenOffice has never loaded fast for me. I switched to LibreOffice solely because I was frustrated at the OO load times. Interesting to hear that you experience the opposite, Selmiak, but I can only speak from personal experience in saying I find LibreOffice much faster and "lighter" to use.

[Grundislav]

Episode 39!

[Grundislav]

Episode 40

GDC recap!