/digipen/ - DigiPenitentiary

>>2191

It's funny you say that because that's exactly how I felt. Fucking poetic games… No wonder gamers today are such pussies and whine like little bitches. Story wasn't good? Graphics weren't AAA. Guess what, go watch a movie or go read a book. I just want to play a game that's fun.

League of Legends is pretty fun and I didn't even know it had a story.

>>2191

Its funny because in my experience story is the hardest thing to base a game on. Probably 90% of games that focus on story as anything more than a supportive function do not do well in GAM and GAT. Good games are mechanics first, story as an enhancement.

>>2200

Jolly good point.

Red Dead Redemption for example had, from what i've been told, a great story. The mechanics were built exceptionally well, but there wasn't a lot of them compared to the vast majority of games.

It sort of did what DP teaches once and a while, build some mechanics and polish the fuck out of them. Tell a story AFTER you get that part down.

I'm also not one who needs to know WHY I'm doing something, as long as what I'm doing is fun I don't really need some narrative to say anything to get me to play it. The game play should speak for itself

BSGD dropout here, 100% agree. I mean, I like bullshit art games too, and even enjoy making them too… but that should not be what DigiPen's "game design" program should be about. Sometimes you just want to make a game where you shoot triangles or jump on enemies' heads. Games don't always have to be About Something.

Jesus Christ, the amount of unwarranted venom from your post is intense. There's a market for poetic games, just as there are other games. If you actually made something that was fun I assure you, you wouldn't be sounding so resentful to the Digipen instructors.

There's nothing noble about being a gamer who only cares about the gameplay. You aren't a dying breed, in fact, the opposite is true with the amount of mindless mobile games flooding the market (some of which, to be fair, are fun). Games that try to deliver storytelling experiences are harder to make, and that's probably why a lot of them tend to come off as pretentious, because nothing you learn in game design REALLY tells you how to be a storyteller, aside from some bare fundamentals, so there's a lot of awkward exploration and trial and error involved, but it really comes down to the player. A more story heavy game appeals to a certain type of player, which isn't what you are, and that's fine.

If you don't like poetic experiences, then don't make them, because you don't have to. Plenty of games that weren't poetic have been honored at DigiPen. (Chronomancers and Shadow Tag being the best most recent examples), so I can only assume your verbal assault, or…"confession", comes from a lack of self whatever, because you don't have a justified external reason for it. Take this opportunity to look for the real cause.

>>2209

Ignore this boner.

If you want poems go read poems.

>>2209

Games that are honored are one or more of the following:

a.) poetic experience bullshit

b.) amazing tech

c.) interesting gimmick

Subray is b. Chronomancers and Shadow Tag are b and c.

DigiPen doesn't praise gameplay, it praises visuals, gimmicks, and feels. Tech only matters if it helps create visuals; having an amazing underlying game engine won't help your game be praised at all. If your game has feels and emotions and is like About Things That Are Important, even more points for you. And finally, heaps of praise are given to games that have interesting gimmicks to them, regardless of the quality of the game. Examples are: Tag, Chronomancers, Shadow Tag, hell, even Narbacular Drop… games are just given top praise because someone thought of an interesting gimmick, regardless of whether or not the implementation is actually any good.

At DigiPen, your game can have the best, most interesting gameplay of all time. It can have audio-visual feedback that conveys the state of the game to the players in an interesting, natural, well-designed way, and so on… but if your game doesn't look pretty or have a shiny gimmick like time travel or projecting a 3D environment into a 2D platformer… nobody will give a fuck about your game.

The joke of DigiPen teaching game design is that they don't give a shit about how well your game actually plays, as long as it looks good as a screenshot on their website or a video clip on the TVs in the hallways.

>>2209

>Gameplay is mindless

Please remove yourself.

>>2212

>mahnigga.jpg

Every morning on my walk to school I wondered what would happen if I jumped into traffic. I have no family out here and if I die, no indication of how to contact them. Then I started driving to school and haven't had those thoughts anymore.

>>2223

I often think the same thing as well, to be honest, but I never got around to owning a car.

>>2212

The thing is that the people who complain about this are always people with games that play like shit.

The few games that come through that actually have good gameplay get praised for it. Your game is just way worse than you think it is.

>>2240

Well maybe if the school would fucking teach how to make gameplay enjoyable instead of forcing students to do independent research, it would be possible, but oh wait, GAT never teaches how to make video game gameplay satisfying, nvm.

If you want to learn how to make video games fun to play, just smoke a bowl and play a bunch of games all the time and think about them. Way more useful than anything ever taught in GAT.

>>2240

It's funny to hear kids like you talk big because for every 1 student that passes GAT with a stick up his ass there's 10+ students who fail who all agree that GAT has a problem.

Typically that means there is something wrong with the class if countless students share the same complaint.

>>2241

Dis nigga gets it.

last summer i literally needed to be pulled away from jumping off that bridge on redmond way and now i need to be medicated. i'm so glad we go to a school that's so high-stress that i'm not the only one that's considered suicide

>>2242

Passed GAT. Can confirm it was pretty dumb, and mostly a "make games, then learn from your mistakes with very little direction" class.

>>2243

I've always wondered what the depression/suicidal-tendencies rate of DP students was, especially each degree.

>>2191

OP is funny because the only team who made an actual "poetic experience" game that I'm aware of this year didn't have any BAGD's on the team.

>>2297

The only one you noticed, maybe? There were like 5 at the showcase alone.

>>2311

The only one that could be defined as solely a "poetic experience". The game that won "best poetic experience" was actually a platformer with interactive story.

The only game that rode off the fact (and got 2nd place I believe) that it was a poetic experience was Yarbus's game, which had no BAGD's on the team.

Or are we defining "poetic experience" as anything with a story and atmosphere? Because if so…you're right…how dare anybody make anything other than the 50 arena based combat games the school puts out every year?!?

>>2312

You had to nominate yourself for the poetic experience, so those games, though they had other aspects to them, claimed to be poetic experience games.

Oh, some confessions? I could put some up since I dropped out last year.

>I camped in a parking space for a month to save $600 on rent.

>I stole at least 3 reams of paper from that box by the Edison printer and God knows how much from paper trays in the less-used classrooms.

>I ordered one of those glitter bombs care of Melvin Gonsalvez for running a college campus's security like a military installation.

>I lied to my teammates about my finances and overspent on dinners out because I didn't want them to think I wasn't a team player.

>I'd never dealt with autism spectrum or ADD people before DigiPen, so I avoided anyone who seemed kinda fishy after 2 or 3 conversations.

>I let a friend fail GAT so that I'd at least know someone in the class(I'd failed a prereq and was set back a year).

>I lied to my friends about my grades out of shame - I'd gotten a 4.2 GPA(weighted) in high school and couldn't bring myself to explain that I'd failed stuff that came naturally to me like Calc.

>>2329

>I let a friend fail GAT

I don't know how you managed this but fuck you, that is incredibly shitty.

>>2330

To be fair, he was playing fucking games in the cafeteria instead of going to class. When I say I let him fail, I mean I didn't bother to warn him that he was skipping classes.

I don't listen to any of the Gat lectures and just build the projects to the rubric. I get scores in the high 90s by shitting out uninspired projects, and do the same for my Gam projects.

They say to 'kill your baby' at DigiPen and build your dream games there but that's to keep as much eye candy as possible in the school pamphlets and ads.

>>2209

there's a really small, unsupportive market for "poetic" "games".

I hit someone with my car because he was being a retard and running around in the parking lot in all black during outbreak.

I personally send a request to Melvin every year to shut down outbreak or have them move it to a public park instead

>>2385

I've come pretty close several times. Assholes watch me get in my car, and then come running out behind it as soon as I get in.

DP is surrounded by forests, a golf course, and a giant empty parking lot for the church right across the street, but they still decide that having their events at night in the only place that gets traffic at night is a good idea.

Hows this for a confession:

I always feel like I'm really terrible at my job. I'm horrible, and people will figure that out any day now. Imposter Syndrome to the 100th degree.

Then I see the shit that other Designers (both BAGD and BSGD, and especially RTIS that think they're designers) are outputting, and I feel a lot better about myself.

Former kitchen employee here. I stopped serving sunflower seeds in the salad bar mostly because one dude was a massive dick to the kitchen staff, and he fucking loved the sunflower seeds. Nothing made me happier than lying to his face about the availability of sunflower seeds.

>>2396

>Imposter Syndrome to the 100th degree.

right there with you bro

as for confessions:

- I'm not in a design degree but feel like I am a better game designer than most GD's I know

- I analyze people and learn what sentence I could say to them that would ruin their life

- I flip flop between genuinely/obsessively caring about myself/people/life/"like, The World, man" and complete apathy

- when I'm apathetic I contemplate suicide, not from depression or like as an out, but because I'm bored and curious

>>2429

>- I'm not in a design degree but feel like I am a better game designer than most GD's I know

You are, I guarantee it. Rant time!

Most BAGDs are completely garbage at everything they do, but make up for it with hard work. Because guess what? A ton of GAT (at least through semester 5 or so) is just doing work and following instructions. They draw upon video games that they like to play for immediate inspiration when they make their games, instead of coming up with something creative and new. They get by by following exactly what the professor says to do to, which usually involves hours upon hours of work.

Some of the more creative design students become bored with this crap very quickly, realize that DigiPen truly has very little in the design department to offer, and drop out immediately.

If you want to tell how good a BAGD is, just go to Ellinger's website and skim it for terminology. Don't read it too hard or it'll hurt your brain with its stupid. Memorize these dumb terms (but just the terms, not the definitions, again, your brain will hurt), and listen to see if designers you know use them casually in earnest in order to sound like they know things about game design that you don't. If they use "engaging" instead of "fun", or ever talk about "the intensity curve", or about how a game has "the aesthetic of discovery/expression/competition/etc."… you're probably talking to someone who knows fuck-all about game design but is a likely a very hard worker.

Also, incoming students: if you meet someone in one of the design degree programs who mentions that they really want to write stories for video games more than actually design them, they will definitely fall into that category.

Knowing how to design is not something that you can learn from books right now. Game design is not a very well-researched field yet, and it's largely bullshit at the moment. When you're designing a video game, you barely need to know any of the crap the GD program teaches you; you just need to be creative, and to have played a lot of video games and really, truly thought about what makes them fun. That will get you way further than DigiPen's GD program's teachings at the time of writing.

Here's a fun fact: many programmers, including RTIS students, are exactly this way. (Not all, but many.) They played video games as a kid, and were fascinated not by just how fun they are to play, but how much of a technical marvel it was that they worked the way they do. They then explored how to make video games (or mods, etc.), which is how they probably started programming and learned their first scripting or programming language.

>>2430

Whoops, got cut off there. Anyways:

There's a good chance that those kinds of people have also thought about what makes the video games that they play actually fun. Again, not everyone thinks this way, but many do. They started noticing things like, what it is about Call of Duty's shooting that feels really, really good. They then realized that the fact that CoD runs at 60FPS on consoles and looks as good as it does is a massive technical marvel. They'll notice how when Mario jumps, you can hold the button down to jump higher. They'll also look into exactly how many sprites the NES could render at once, and how different developers got around this limit. They'll notice when a multiplayer-focused video game with a single-player campaign has the single-player campaign selected by default instead of the multiplayer mode. (That's bad design, see.) They'll also be looking up the documentation to create menu items on the user's screen in the mod tools for their favorite game.

And so on and so forth. So yeah, if you're a programmer who wants to program video games for a living, there is a good chance you're also probably good at doing design stuff for video games.

(Of course, there's also the chance that you're a John Carmack and just find enjoyment in pushing the technical boundaries of the technically-demanding nature of video games. I have so much respect for those people, they're crazy mad geniuses. Those of you at DigiPen: I want to hang out with you.)

>>2431

(Also, this isn't just a programmer thing; students of other degree programs can do this, too. Sometimes people just think about why they're having fun when they're having fun. We're weird, but that's just how it is.)