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Introducing GMTK Workshop - Help with upcoming episodes
🕑 Added 2020-01-02 11:03:07 +0000 UTCHello!
So, something I've wanted to do for a while now is create a space on Patreon where willing participants (on $5+ tier) can help me out with upcoming episodes of the show. Especially in the densely packed, example-filled, educational videos.
The idea is that on certain videos I will show you stuff that I've been working on and ask for feedback, more examples and ideas, and so on.
I have to admit that I find this quite difficult. To put unfinished work out there, and specifically ask you to tell me everything that is wrong with it... well, it's not super fun. But it's with the intention of making better videos with fewer mistakes or oversights. So, I'll suck up my pride and give it a go!
Also, you're obviously under no obligation to take part in this. If you'd rather wait until the episode is finished and just watch the final thing - I'll see you in a week or two!
Okay, here's GMTK Workshop Number 1
I've been working on a video about randomness over Christmas (I know. I was supposed to be on a break. But I couldn't help do a little research). I wanted to look at how randomness is used in game design, and why some instances of it are positive, and others are negative.
So the video is called The Two Types of Random. I'll start with the script, and then go from there. Remember this is a first draft, please!
Video games are full of randomness.
There are roguelikes with procedurally-generated level layouts. Role-playing games with random encounters. Strategy games with unlucky misses. And games that play with cards, dice, roulette wheels, and random number generators, or RNG.
It’s all the same stuff, really: situations and systems where the outcome is not fully determined by the developer or the player, but driven by the unpredictable whims of lady luck.
But while randomness is responsible for some truly wonderful moments in gaming, it can also be a cruel mistress that leads to unfair outcomes and frustrating failures. RNGesus - who is the personification of luck in the gaming community - is cursed just as often as he’s worshiped.
So, what gives? Why does this single game design tool lead to such radically different reactions? Do we just like luck when it lands in our favour, and hate it when we lose? No, I don’t think so. The truth is, some game designers actually split randomness into two distinctly different concepts - and recognising their differences can be the secret to wrangling RNG, and making luck more fun than frustrating.
I’m Mark Brown, you’re watching Game Maker’s Toolkit, and this is the two types of random.
Before we get to that, though, I think we need to talk about why randomness is used in game design, at all. From the obvious, to the not-so obvious.
For starters, randomness is used to provide variety. Well-made algorithms can pump out infinite set-ups, levels, characters, and problems. It’s a cornerstone of the roguelike genre, and you couldn’t make a game like Shadow of Mordor, with its unique cast of Orc captains, or No Man’s Sky, with its 18 quintillion planets, without a big dollop of randomness.
Of course, a randomly generated level is almost never as good as a completely hand-crafted one - but the clear advantage is diversity, quantity, and a feeling that your experience is unlike anyone else’s.
Plus, there’s the fact that by removing the ability to endlessly replay the same level and memorise every aspect of the stage, players are forced to master the underlying mechanics of the game itself - so they’re ready for absolutely anything the algorithm might throw at them.
Randomness is also a popular way to balance a multiplayer game, though that’s usually only desirable when it’s expected that players of vastly different skill levels will be playing together. Party games and board games for families, then, not esport-level stuff.
Basically, lucky rolls and unlucky draws can limit the importance of pure skill, and give newer players a chance to get ahead. That’s especially true when the randomness is weighted in favour of new players, such as in Mario Kart where the random item boxes are way more generous to the players at the back of the pack, than those in first place.
Randomness can also be used to make rewards in games more exciting. Grabbing an awesome new weapon from a dead body in a looter shooter like Borderlands is way more exciting when you know there was only a small chance for that gun to drop. This can, of course, be taken to the extreme, creating a Skinner box trick that’s designed to sap your time or, more perniciously, your wallet.
And finally, randomness can play a role in the player’s formation of plans - which are any strategies that take a number of steps to achieve.
Making plans requires information - which is essentially the current state of the game’s variables like the enemy’s location, health, and perhaps even their intention for what they’ll do on the next turn. The more information we have, the better our plans can be. But too much information can actually be quite troublesome.
For one, complete transparency can lead to players being able to calculate many possible moves into the future to figure out the optimum choice - a paralysis of analysis which can be super tedious... but you already know how players can optimise the fun out of a game. This can already happen on a single turn of Into the Breach, which is a tactics game that shows you the entire board and every enemy’s plan for their upcoming turn. You can spend 10, 20 minutes just staring at a static screen, figuring out the ramifications of every choice you might make.
Plus, we can create airtight plans which rarely fail - like in Plants vs Zombies where we get to see the exact cast of upcoming monsters and can quite easily create the perfect defence. This can create flat and uneventful gameplay, as it’s often much better when plans get disrupted with surprising new information - forcing us to react, regroup, and replan. There’s never been a good movie where the heroes come up with a scheme and it just perfectly works as intended. Drama is driven by the unexpected.
So we generally want to cap the amount of information the player has access to. The game designer Keith Burgun calls this the information horizon, defined as “the distance between the current turn, and the point at which information becomes known to a player”. And there are three main ways to do this - exponential complexity, like the ever-expanding matrix of game states in chess. Hidden information, like the fog-of-war that hides the enemy’s plans in Starcraft. And, the one we’re talking about today - randomness. You can’t make perfect plans if certain factors are, by design, completely unpredictable.
So, randomness certainly has a role in game design. It’s used for variety, balance, rewards, the information horizon, and probably more things I’ve forgotten about.
But like I said before, randomness actually comes in two distinctly different flavours - which game designers frequently refer to as input randomness, and output randomness.
Input randomness is when a random event occurs before the player gets to make a decision. The most obvious take on this is the procedurally generated levels in a game, because they’re cobbled together and then you get to play in them. Other examples are drawing a hand of cards before taking your turn in a deckbuilder, or rolling dice and then choosing where to spend them in Dicey Dungeons.
Output randomness, though, is when you make a decision and then luck takes over and the game tells you what happened. The most infamous example of this is hit chances in XCOM, where you tell your soldier to shoot an alien - but it’s down to chance whether your bullet will actually hit its target. Other examples are walking onto a tile and then the game tells you if there was a monster there. Or, not knowing what the enemy will do until after you press “End Turn”.
Or, I guess, paying for a lootbox and only afterwards being told what was in it.
I’ve also heard the same concepts be called pre-luck and post-luck, by Civilzation 4 designer Soren Johnson. But let’s stick to input and output for this video. These two terms were first introduced, as far as I can tell, on the podcast Ludology - “But in general, I find this distinction between input and output randomness to be very valuable. I think this is the fundamental difference between randomness that supports strategy, and randomness that undercuts strategy”.
The host, Geoff Engelstein, makes a good point there. Output randomness is certainly more responsible for anger and resentment than input randomness. And indie developers are becoming privy to this - after FTL, which was stuffed to bursting with swingy output randomness, Subset made Into the Breach which almost exclusively features input randomness - leading to a much fairer and more strategic game.
And while early builds of Slay the Spire hid what the enemies were thinking until you finished your turn, the devs found the game was way more fun when that random choice happened at the start of your turn - allowing you to strategise around your foes.
But I don’t think it’s a case of input randomness good, output randomness bad. They’re both tools that must be used wisely, and poorly designed input randomness can wreck a game, just like carefully tuned output randomness can improve it.
With input randomness, these unpredictable starting conditions can sometimes massively dictate the likelihood of success. So in Spelunky, these crates have random items in them. You’re much more likely to get something mediocre like a climbing glove or spike shoes than something amazing like a shotgun or jetpack - but if you are so lucky as to get one of these items at the start of the game, you’re going to have a much easier time of things. Were you super skilful, or was it just good luck?
This can also make runs where you don’t get the goodies feel slightly pointless. Some speedrunners will just restart the game over and over again until luck is in their favour.
There’s a couple ways to solve this. In Slay the Spire, the devs didn’t want you to just hit restart until you got some really powerful cards or a relic at the beginning of your run. So they introduced a system where you start the game with additional bonuses - but only if you made it to the first boss on your previous go. This encourages players to at least try to play with the stuff they’re given, and who knows - maybe they’ll still find a strategy that can see them be victorious.
Another way is to mess with the randomness in some way, to increase the reduce the chaos that randomness can bring.
In the tabletop game Pandemic, you set the game up by removing all of the epidemic cards from the play deck. You then split the deck into four, and shuffle epidemic cards into these piles. Finally, you stack the four piles together to create a deck. It’s a bit of a faff, but it’s a clever way of ensuring that you always have a pretty even game without three epidemics at the very start, or no epidemics until long after you’ve cured all the diseases. There’s still a chance of getting two epidemics in a row, or having an epidemic on the very first turn - but they odds are slim enough for those to be exciting, surprising one-off events.
Lots of games do this, in reality. In Tetris, the game doesn’t just pick a block at random for every drop. Instead, the game generates a random sequence of all seven blocks and then delivers them in that order before making a new sequence. This ensures that you’ll always get a diverse selection of blocks, and there’s an absolute maximum of twelve blocks between two I-blocks, sometimes called line pieces, or Derek.
Another thing to consider is how often are new input randomness events occurring? If these occur at the start of every single turn, it can have the effect of drawing the information horizon in claustrophobically close - and stopping you from making plans that last any time at all.
Designers should consider their game’s information flow - a term invented by Ethan Hoeppner in the article Plan Disruption. He points to XCOM, where we can make strategic plans about how we want to approach each mission and for a good few turns our plan will be pretty viable - not perfect, thanks to all the output randomness. But close enough. But every now and again, you’ll stumble onto a new pod of enemies, or a fresh bunch of foes will descend onto the battlefield. This unexpected spike in new information disrupts your plans and forces you to stop, regroup and rethink.
He says “a good pattern to follow is the spiky information flow, in which high-impact information is collected into discrete spikes that happen at regular intervals, with a slow, regular flow of information between the spikes”.
Now, output randomness can take away control, and break your plans not out of strategic incompetence but sheer bad luck. And on the whole, some of the stuff we like the least in games is down to output randomness - such as random encounters and loot boxes.
But it’s not all bad. For starters, this sort of randomness can be a good way of simulating mistakes and inaccuracies in a game with abstract combat system - which is games where you tell characters to perform an action rather than doing the action yourself. If your units never missed, then that wouldn’t be particularly realistic.
Also, output output randomness forces players to play with risk management, and to create contingency plans if things go wrong - which I think are totally viable skills to test. There’s this idea that output randomness essentially becomes input randomness for the next turn, because you’ll be dealing with the consequences of whatever just happened. Essentially: the best XCOM players are those who have a backup plan if their shots miss.
But there are ways to improve output randomness. The first is to show the player the odds, which allows them to make way more informed decisions about which risks they’re willing to take, or how their actions can impact their chances of success.
Some games also choose to use dice or cards instead of numerical odds. The game Armello even includes a physics system to drive the digital dice, to make them seem more realistic. This is because most of us are better at grasping the odds of rolling a six or drawing a heart card than we are at understanding what a 90% chance to hit really means.
In fact, humans are really bad at understanding odds, thanks to countless cognitive biases that make it hard to deal with random numbers. So game developers frequently lie about the actual chances of things happening - the numbers in Fire Emblem are massaged to make a 90% chance more like a 99% chance. If you lose two 33% chance battles in Civilization, the third will always succeed because that’s how we think numbers work. And there’s allegedly a pity timer in Hearthstone, to ensure you’ll always get a legendary card after a certain number of packs.
It can also be good to have output randomness in places that will only ever be in the player’s favour. The only real example of output randomness in Into the Breach is the game’s building grid system where there’s a small chance that the enemy’s attack will actually miss and save you from surefire defeat at the last moment.
“We found that if there’s randomness where you’re expecting something bad and then you get something good, no one ever ever complains. So that’s the only kind of randomness, output randomness, that we left in the game”.
Randomness is something in games that must be dealt with very carefully. It impacts fairness, balance, player psychology, the formation of plans, and the likeliness of success. But it’s a tool, like any other, and can be used with clear intention or weilded carelessly.
Understanding the difference between input and output randomness is perhaps the most important thing to learn. Neither is a silver bullet or a dastardly trap and both can endanger or improve a game’s design. But when used correctly, these concepts can create surprises, force the constant reevaluation of strategies, and turn players into risk-calculating tacticians.
So that's what I'm kinda going for. Introduce the role of randomness. Talk about input and output randomness. And then talk about the ways to work around their strengths and weaknesses.
It was really important to not simply say Input Randomness is Good and Output Randomness is Bad. That's too simplistic, and not true at all. I wanted to talk about how these things are tools, and it's how you use them that dictates their quality.
I also knew I wanted to talk about things like how RNG actually works in games like Tetris. How games like Fire Emblem lie about the real numbers. How the "perfect information" in Into the Breach works. And how Spelunky can turn into a bit of a re-roll fest. I'm pleased I found a way to squeeze them all in!
Now, onto you. Here's what I want to know:
- Did this all make sense? Is there anything you're left confused about?
- Do you disagree with any of the statements?
- Are there obvious things I missed?
- Are there any other important uses of randomness? (I mention variety, balance, rewards, and information horizon).
- Have you played a game that does something particularly interesting with randomness?
- Have you seen any articles, interviews, videos, GDC talks etc that bring up interesting ideas about randomness?
- Anything else I should mention?
Answer any, all, or none of the questions in the comments below, please! If you just want to go off on a peel about randomness, or talk about the thumbnail, or make any other helpful comment, I'm all ears!
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this. If it goes well, I'll do it more throughout the year!
Mark
Comments
Eduardo Gallardo
So after seeing the final video and both of my suggestions made it into the video I’m biased to say this is your best idea ever, I just helped one of my favorite creators make a video!
Jeff Lamb
"Have you played a game that does something particularly interesting with randomness?" I don't know if I'd call this *particularly* interesting, but I think it's neat: In Supergiant's Roguelite Hades, the primary method by which your character gains abilities is through boons from Olympian Gods. Which gods show up on the door exits (representing the reward for completing the next chamber) are randomly generated after completing a room. Often you'll have a choice between two or even (somewhat rarely) three different exits, leading to multiple different gods. (EDIT: Oops, submitted before I got to the interesting part. The rest follows:) Here's the first interesting bit: simply having boons from a certain god makes that god more likely to show up in future rooms. (also, there are some "duo" boons; if you have, e.g., a Poseidon boon and a Dionysus boon, there's a high chance of either of them showing up and offering you a choice to take that duo boon, or just select from two of that god's normal boons) The second, and more interesting thing: A fairly expensive permanent upgrade in the game lets you "reroll" some number of doors every run. So you're given the option to, in a sense, turn Input Randomness --a randomly generated choice between, say, Aphrodite and Zeus--into output randomness--change that door to any other god, randomly. (there's quite a lot more with how randomness in that game works, but I've gone on for quite a bit now. :P)
Krit Petty
I think 2 aspects of randomness that are over looked significantly here are how Speedrunning communities feel about it and loot based games like Diablo or Destiny in which randomness is essential to the core game design to keep people coming back over and over again.
Robert Vionny
Hi Mark, I'm sorry I'm a bit late to the party :-) Even though you won't use it, I wanted to mention Dota 2 in which they have a way of mitigating "bad luck". Basically the more you don't crit, the higher the chance will be to crit. I'm not sure but I think they even lower the crit chance just after a crit to avoid chaining too many of them. I always thought it was a good way to approach the RNG issue with multiplayer games like so that nodoby feels the lost because they lack luck or because the enemy had too much of it. Cheers!
Game Maker's Toolkit
Just a note that I've now started on the recording so won't be taking any more notes at this stage (you'll get another look when the video is done!). Thanks so much for your help!
Chris K
Just came across another way randomness is used...some games with puzzles (I'm thinking of adventure games in particular) will have some degree of randomness to them, so that the puzzles are slightly different on each playthrough. There were a bunch of kid-friendly games by Humongous a while back (Putt-Putt, Spy Fox, Pajama Sam, etc.) that took it a step further, and the overall path through the game was randomized each time, so which puzzles you came across were different.
Guilherme Anselmo
The one point I disagree is when you consider the algorithm for No Man's Sky random, based on everything I've read about it (some reading, but not a lot) it's deterministic. There's no chance involved in it, go to a given coordinate and you'll find always the same thing. There may possibly have some randomness regarding creatures, enemies, flora spawning, but not to their existence itself. Also this may be a good oportunity to improve viewers game literacy about the diference of procedually generated and randomness. This article about it on XCOM and XCOM2 is really good to understand it. https://www.ign.com/articles/2015/06/04/xcom-2s-procedurally-generated-maps-ign-first
Katja Petrovic
Great script Mark! As usual I was hooked from start to finish and now my brain is excitedly racing! My only outstanding question is: are there games that use BOTH input and output randomness, how do they do so, and what’s your opinion on them? I can’t think of many (maybe Darkest Dungeon?) but it would be super interesting to hear about games that integrate both, and to hear your opinion about how that affects gameplay and whether it makes for an awesome game. Well done!
Chris Lopo
A good example of bad usage of randomness is Sundered. All levels are procedural generated, and some of them have infinite enemies. This makes the game extremely repetitive and boring. I enjoyed at first, but then I got tired of killing waves of countless enemies at random. Like the developer said in Steam Community Forums, "Those sections were meant more as optional platforming challenges, to make you run through the environment while dodging enemies. You are not really supposed to fight there, but rather run for the finish line. Perhaps we could have communicated this better. I am sorry you didn't enjoy them." ( Source: https://steamcommunity.com/app/535480/discussions/0/1471966894877909820/#c1471966894878132629 ) But I am the kind of player that likes to kill all the enemies, and this "feature" just makes me feel like "I'm not the player I think I am" by running constantly from those infinite hordes.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Thanks for the movie rec - I was initially thinking of putting a more traditional planning movie there like Inception or Ocean's Eleven, but that Deadpool gag might work really well! And will look into the smart loot - might be able to squeeze that in!
Chris K
Bit of a random suggestion here, but when you mentioned "There’s never been a good movie where the heroes come up with a scheme and it just perfectly works as intended.", the first thing that came to mind was the planning scene in Deadpool 2, where he says something like "If we succeed, we get to go home early" and circles "No need for Act 3!" on a whiteboard. Even just the visual might work as a background clip for that part. The only other thought I had was something like Diablo 3's "Smart Loot" that weights the RNG towards items and even the stats on those items towards the class you are currently playing, but I'm not sure if that's significant enough to add in somewhere.
Heli
I’m really thrilled with this idea, got a couple of points off the top of my head after a quick read through of the script and comments: - Keeping track of all this feedback in the comments section could be tricky, have you thought about online doc sharing? Something where we can drop comments at a specific point in your script seems more manageable. - on examples of output randomness, one that comes to mind is Pokemon battles. You choose your attack, but randomness decides whether your attack lands and whether you get critical hits. It’s interesting seeing this in terms of working for or against the player: critical hits are definitely for, but accuracy misses are decidedly against, and battles account for that by not having accuracy affect the battle unless someone actively uses that in their strategy - talking about variance might work better as its own essay topic. This video focuses on what situations randomness works with, while variance is one of the control levers used to define randomness, along with expected value. I’d be interested in learning how those mathematical definitions translate to game feel, but that might be too much for this video
Yücel Cil
Paragraph 1-5: Very good introduction, because you begin with a problem and tries to solve it. The affairs of the game designer should always be the intellectual basis of your content, because only then it has a practical value for them and it makes sure they make progress. Paragraph 7-19: The difference between randomness and not ramdomness and the description of randomness in reality is very good, because you give the game designer and experienced consumer an understanding of this conception. But whether it was necessary to explain it or not, is questionable, because they know this conception already. However, i must say, some of this information could be new for them… So far as you sad, this was the obvious stuff, but why have you mentioned it? Personally, i have removed it or at least shortened. Paragraph 20-23: From here on you explained the conception about input and output randomness, which is i think new for most of the experienced consumer (not so obvious). The difference and description of this conception is very good. Paragraph 24-26: From here on you adress the problem and the solution, which you have already mentioned in the introduction, very good. Paragraph 27-etc.: From here on you discuss the good and bad design (or as you sad wisely designed) of input and output randomness in games. What good or bad is, determined your criteria. So what is your general criteria for good and bad game design? I think this is not clear for your audience. Keep in mind that not everyone will agree with your criteria and this is okay, but it must be comprehensible and this is the most important thing. Finally, you have mentioned games which most of your audience is familiar with to understand and to enjoy what you mean, very good examples. That‘s all. Sorry for my bad english.
Adam Kirby
This is really good and really thorough. I'm not sure if it's worth including, but I saw a video about Super Smash Bros, and the three types of randomness that affect the game in a competitive way. Even though the community turns off as much randomness as possible (limiting stages, turning off items, etc), there are still a few that nobody can really do anything about. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ji59AoIRc8M . They might provide a few examples of degrees of "output randomness". tl:dw, it has got "Reactable", "Unreactable", and "Unfair". For the first kind "Reactable", you've got the princess who can pull turnips (and other things) out of the ground to throw at people. The opponent can see what was pulled and can react accordingly. But what she pulls is up to RNG. It's sort of output randomness in what was spawned, but that becomes the input for what the player decides to do next. For "Unreactable", you got Game-And-Watch who hits them with Judge (a hammer and number), with bigger numbers doing stronger damage. The G&W player chooses when this comes out, but neither player has control over the outcome if it hits. Alternately, he discusses Luigi randomly having his Launch-Sideways move (Green Missile) suddenly be super fast and powerful (Misfire). Same situation - the Luigi player decides when to use the move, but whether it's the "Good Version" is random and not something that the defender can do anything against (besides ceding their advantage to the opponent just in case they get lucky). It feels entirely like output randomness, but people are generally okay with it because it's another small part of the game. Though in the latest game, the Dragon Quest Hero's spell "Hocus Pocus" also has a spell that does random things, including making the caster temporarily huge (which gives them a massive advantage and may as well be a free stock). He can also randomly score a Critical Hit, giving him all the benefits of Luigi's misfire, with none of the extra risk. He caused a lot of controversy when he first was released. And "Unfair" randomness is the stuff that you can't do anything about. Like when you die off the top of the screen, you'll either get a fast death or one of two slower deaths. There have been cases where both players died close together, but the player who died second still won because they rolled the quick death and the other player rolled the slow death. This is the version where people can get upset, especially when it gives away a win to the "losing" opponent. Many of the hazards and items and stuff that the players turn off also fall into this category (like whether an item appears close to one player or the other). It might be worth giving a two-second nod into how people feel about the "fairness" of the different levels of randomness, with Peach being seen as mostly positive, and Hero being mostly negative on account of how hugely RNG can swing things. Anyway I hope some of this was interesting or helps in some way. The script is looking great regardless!
Game Maker's Toolkit
Interesting - the idea of being able to override output randomness with a cost is clever. I wonder if there are any video game examples of that. And thanks for the clarification on the information horizon things, I'll be sure to address that
Game Maker's Toolkit
I'll dig into variance! I didn't want to go too deep into multiplayer stuff, but looks like I might need to include a tad more detail (or remove it entirely and address it later)
Game Maker's Toolkit
Would love to! Eduardo earlier mentioned Phoenix Point, so I'm going to try that out - any other examples would be welcome :)
Mikhail Aristov
Hi Mark. To be honest, this script looks almost perfect to me already, but there are a few points I'd like to address. :-) You say that "there are three main ways to [introduce an information horizon]", but there are actually four: Greg Kostikyan has listed them in his book "Uncertainty in Games" as three you've already mentioned (hidden information, exponential complexity, and randomizers) plus the skill/performance-based challenges. The latter is simply any form of twitch gameplay where the uncertainty of outcome comes from not knowing whether your reflexes (or some other physical attribute, which is primarily relevant in sports games) will be fast enough when needed. Burgun, whom you cite, actually also refers to this kind of uncertainty in his book, but he uses the term "execution" instead. Two more notes on Kostikyan's classification: Instead of saying "randomness", which is a bit of a loaded term (as in the cries of "this game is too random!"), he uses the term "randomizers" -- i.e. game subsystems that use some form of a random number generator to artificially add probabilistic noise to the overall game system. Also, the thing that Dallon mentioned about other players being a source of output randomness is lumped by Kostikyan into what you call "exponential complexity", and he instead dubbed "opponent uncertainty". I think a convincing case can be made that exponential complexity comes not from a multitude of reachable game states, but from the fact that each opponent has a large number of possible strategies whose combinations you cannot predict because you cannot read their minds. For example, chess, for all its combinatorial complexity, would make a pretty boring solitaire. If you want to get more mathematical, you can look up the GDC talk "The Flavors of Tabletop Game Randomness", which discusses different kinds of random noise and how they can be used. Another thing that may or may not be worth mentioning is that between input and output randomness, there is the possibility of "cost randomness", where the noise is injected in the middle of a game loop, so the player has a chance to counteract it. The only major application of this I know of, however, is in the fiction-first pen-and-paper RPGs, where the player rolls dice to resolve their character's action, but if the roll doesn't go the way they wanted, can spend a limited resource to get an outcome they wanted, anyway. E.g. in Monster of the Week if you roll really poorly in an important situation you can spend a "luck point" to still succeed through sheer luck in-fiction -- but a character only has 7 luck points in the entire campaign and usually has to be retired once they run out. In other words, this kind of randomizer is invoked after the player invokes a mechanic (like output randomness), but determines not so much the outcome but the cost of the player's desired outcome (not unlike input randomness would). If you're interested, this approach is described in-depth under "Fortune in the Middle with Teeth" section here: http://socratesrpg.blogspot.com/2011/02/how-do-fortune-resolution-mehcanics.html
Steven Stadnicki
This is an excellent topic that I admit to being immensely biased about. :-) It will take some digesting and thought, but there's one thing that comes to mind immediately. You say: "Randomness is also a popular way to balance a multiplayer game, though that’s usually only desirable when it’s expected that players of vastly different skill levels will be playing together." I don't think it takes vastly different skill levels for this to be desirable or important. One of the most essential concepts in (mathematical) randomness, and a term I'm a little surprised not to see anywhere in this discussion, is the notion of _variance_: roughly, 'how widely is the spread of outcomes distributed?' Rolling a single die has a mean (or expectation) of 3.5, and rolling 10 dice has a mean of 35 — but for the former, all of the possible results are equally probable whereas in the latter case the results are clustered closely around that mean value. You talk about the consequences of this in the single-player case, but I would argue that they're even more relevant in the multiplayer case; in a matchup between two people of roughly comparable but slightly different skill levels, whether the better player wins 55% of the time, or 65%, or 95%, is one of the key questions about the game, and there's a _very_ big sliding scale here from Chess to 'party game'. Games like Magic succeed to a great extent because they hit the sweet spot on that curve for their purposes, and I think you could make a case for that being a tangible part of the appeal of professional sports as well ('any given Sunday'). **ETA:** In fact, there are tools that sports and game organizations use to adjust the variance in their 'metagames'; while I can't think of any common tools for increasing variance in one-on-one matches, single-elimination tournaments like March Madness serve to increase the variance in ultimate outcome across a field, whereas best-of-n series like the World Series seek to decrease the variance of a one-on-one matchup from what a single game provides.
DSMikeNW
I believe adding a few more examples of the output type randomness used correctly would be good, even though you are going out of your way to point out that both feasible tools if used correctly, the lack of examples for the output type leaves me with a 'I'm not sure if I believe you' kind of feel.
Game Maker's Toolkit
Thanks Dallon. Lots to chew on and will definitely put some of that in the final video. Will need to Google Independent / Dependent. Didn't come across those terms in my research.
Dallon Feldner
I think this is gonna be an awesome video! - Love the return of "I’m Mark Brown, you’re watching Game Maker’s Toolkit" after the cold open :) Feels like a good balance between the old style and new - I thought Into the Breach's design is actually a good example (rather than a negative example as used here) of how to use randomness to limit the role of planning; you have perfect information within a single turn which is really fun, but are discouraged from planning much further past that due to the randomness after the turn ends, so the things you have to worry about are limited to the things right in front of you - Not sure if this is worth talking about here, but some designers consider other players (!) to be a source of input randomness, since you can't predict them perfectly. This was a bit of a galaxy brain moment the first time I heard it. - Aside from that, computers actually physically can't generate (truly) random numbers, so there's a lot of different ways of generating "pseudo-random" numbers which is the RNG we usually see. Some of those differences in approach can be the difference between a game that encourages save-scumming by coming up with different results every time you load, and a game where fate seems fixed. - Similarly, you kind of touch on this, but independent (ex. dice rolls, XCOM) vs. dependent (ex. card draws, Tetris) probabilities are really interesting to me, especially how much better humans are at intuitively dealing with the latter. Makes me wonder a little bit what the benefit of independent is, aside from simplicity of implementation. - Love the mention of Pandemic. Might be worth mentioning that "epidemic" cards are very bad things that throw the whole board into chaos. It also might be worth pointing out that even if you get one of those rare occurances where you get one right off the bat or two right next to each other, the structure of the deck guarantees it'll be quite some time before you get the next one (that is, because there was an epidemic card at the top of the pile, you won't get another one until you at least work your way through that entire pile). - It might be good to introduce the idea of "they're both useful tools" earlier - for a little while it felt like you were going for an "output random bad, input random good" conclusion and I was relieved that you didn't
Erikmitk
I guess my point is that output randomness as a tool is completely valid but to be used well the developers have to put in more effort to pull this off. It's not the player who throws the dice but the game itself. It's outside of the player's control although throwing physical dice is just as random. The player is tested for risk-management skills but the developer has to invest in frustration avoidance techniques. And I think the draft does not make this clear as it could be? Does this make sense?
Erikmitk
I just read it one time. I get input randomness with its possibilities and flaws. I couldn't grasp why output randomness can be a good tool though? Throwing dice like in a board game makes sense, but as it's completely digital it feels like that kind of randomness seems always bad and developers as well as players know this. With this knowledge developers start massaging the outcomes so that in certain "bad luck" cases it offsets the frustration (like the third time always works after two 33% misses).
Game Maker's Toolkit
Excellent, thanks for both! It pays to be picky - the comments section on YouTube certainly is, so pays to get these things caught early :P And cheers, will grab Phoenix Point now
Eduardo Gallardo
I love this idea,two things: In Tetris, the game doesn’t just pick a block at random for every drop. This is not true for original Tetris, so adding “modern” Tetris will make the statement more correct( big fan of competitive NES Tetris so I have to be picky in this ones) There is a new xcom like game, Phoenix point, that has a chance base hit like xcom but simulated each bullet, so a machine gun can hit some bullets and no others, that is interesting as you use xcom as an example of “feel bad” randomness and this is an interesting take on the same core concept, letting you know if you want to take a look
Game Maker's Toolkit
That's actually really important to note. That has a big impact. Thanks Tom!
Tom Stuart
Perhaps tangentially: No Man’s Sky is an interesting case, because it’s _deterministically_ random (https://www.rambus.com/blogs/the-algorithms-of-no-mans-sky-2/), i.e. the whole idea is that all of the procedurally-generated planets are always the same for everyone, every time they play the game. So while of course no human has individually designed all 18 quintillion planets, it’s a different sort of randomness because the dice have essentially been rolled only once, at the beginning of time, and then everything is fixed forever.
Tom Stuart
This is fantastic! I’m really excited to see the finished video.
