Now, the gameplay here is a bit better, and this kind of experience could even be fun. You jump up and catch sight of an archer on a knoll nearby. As you kneel next to him and try taking his gold, an arrow slams into the ground less than an inch from your knee. That last swing connects with the bandit’s throat and he falls to the ground. You raise your sword and charge the bandit. There’s a solitary bandit waiting for you, axe in hand and ready to fight. We still use Skyrim’s world simulation, but only on the highest level - the map, distances between objects and places, the location of actors, NPCs, where to spawn monsters, etc. One way to solve this is by increasing the level of abstraction. And no matter how you tweak the output, the input, or the length of each frame represented in text, it would still suck. Īs you can imagine, the gameplay and story experience here would absolutely suck. The most naive way of porting Skyrim to a text adventure would be to take the world simulation as it exists in the 3D game and play it one frame at a time, describing what’s going on and asking the player for low level input. To me, every videogame that has a steady update loop is a simulation of some sort - even if it’s a 2D simulation of an Italian plumber’s journey to save a princess. That is to say, I’m not using the word “simulation” to suggest that Skyrim tries to “ imitate real-world processes” as closely as possible. The goal of the simulation is to entertain the player. In Skyrim, the world is rendered in 3D, and the player gives low-level commands such as “move forward” or “use weapon in left hand”. This world is inhabited by actors (monsters, NPCs) and entities (swords, doors, chests, etc.) that the player can interact with. The important thing is that we simulate a world that the player can explore.
Videogame because I put emphasis on the play/flow aspect more than on the interactive story (again, more on that later).Open-world because these types of games are a great form of escapism, and therefore a good fit for our needs (more on that later).Fantasy because the combat style in fantasy games is especially well-suited for our needs (more on that later).Sufficiently well-known because I want people to immediately have an image in mind.Skyrim, for me, is just a sufficiently well-known fantasy open-world videogame that we can use as an example. In this article, I’ll walk you through the process of building that game and talk about what I learned from watching people play it (on Twitch).ĭon’t get too hung up on the fact that I’m referring to Skyrim here. The idea has already brought a short game into the world, Insignificant Little Vermin, which I submitted to this year’s IFCOMP.
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