/games/ - Games

the crafting/survival loop has to be in harmony otherwise it's boring and shitty

There aren't enough games about crafting where the primary game loop *is* the crafting. Usually crafting mechanics are just a sub-system that's something like a goal to complete, with the primary gameplay being something else (usually combat + exploration) that gates the resources you need to craft. Crafting systems themselves are generally just a disguised version of a shopkeeper who only takes very specific currencies for a given item. The real potential is where the main game is where you're doing the crafting, like city/colony sims where you are crafting the settlement or something like Mario Paint.

Crafting in video games is the boringest thing since my son.

>>46188
>Crafting systems themselves are generally just a disguised version of a shopkeeper who only takes very specific currencies for a given item.
yeah that's a really good point and one I don't see made often enough. Disguised AND portable shopkeeper really. So it saves you from having to find the shopkeeper and gather the "currency" but you're forced to perform the labor.

>>46189
it's done wrong. it has to be fun and not shoehorned into the game as part of a features checklist some executive made

I think the crafting table layout in minecraft, and it's gradual fall from favour since the game started being console-ified, introduces an interesting line of questioning. Why have these spatial recipes in the first place?

I still remember playing minecraft as a young teen and being captivated by the crafting table as a concept. Spatially laying out the items adds a visceral quality to it and at first i picked these up from let's plays and such, like arcane pieces of lore. This is obviously not how most people now or even back then interacted with the system. At their best the recipes are obvious and at their worst they are practically undiscoverable save for meta-knowledge or brute-forcing.

In a sense, minecraft since the adventure update really is two games haphazardly merged into one:

• On the right, the game about surviving in an angular world, that requires meta-knowledge to survive and bend reality to your will.
  
• On the left, a game of wonder, not only upon the idiosyncratic environments fashioned by worldgen, but also the (ideally) intriguing structures and hints of plot scattered throughout the world.
  
  

To conclude, i would argue there are three primary reasons for introducing a crafting system:

1. The ability to acquire items through resource management
   
2. The mechanical tedium as a point of friction
   
3. The mystery behind organically discovering new recipes
   

Minecraft only handles the first with any grace, yet i think its failures indicate the possibility of something greater, as has been tried by many mods that pair in-game recipe books with achievement-based progression. From playing starbound i also remember it locked some recipes behind blueprints, but the few that i found were… underwhelming. Needless to say, there remains a lot of mileage left within the crafting concept.

>>46192
>Why have these spatial recipes in the first place?
So you can have recipes that use the same amount of a resource but in different layouts, like pick and axe use the same resources but you just intuitively place them differently in the grid.

This raises the question why not just have some kind of sculpting mechanic built into the game to make whatever shapes you want out of the materials, but that requires some more computationally complicated things like inverse kinematics and physics simulation in order to make it functional. But in theory you could have your character do some flint knapping to make a stone tool and based on how they knapped the stone, it has different stats like angle of the edge which relates to effectiveness.

>>46193
>why not just have some kind of sculpting mechanic built into the game to make whatever shapes you want out of the materials
Sounds like a tarpit from a game design and usability perspective. Nodecraft makes it work, but i think something like a skyblock mod would be the complexity limit for a crafting system, that's not supposed to be its own entire gameplay loop.

>>46193
>So you can have recipes that use the same amount of a resource but in different layouts
how is that functionally different than having both recipes available at a click of a button if you have the resources, except for being more tedious?

>>46195
>available at a click of a button
That's the most boring shit ever. Boring is fine for a game like terraria, but in minecraft i always saw console crafting it as a mechanical downgrade.
>more tedious
Sandbox survival games are 90% friction and that's the point. It's not like 3x3 grids are particularly hard, while adding some much-needed flavor to something you would hardly notice otherwise.

>>46192
Betterthanwolves/Ytech crafting is my favorite because i can return to monke and craft shit by hitting it with rocks

>>46189
what did your son ever do to you?

>>46198
>Betterthanwolves/Ytech crafting
I'm not familiar with this. I'm assuming it's the minecraft mod in your screenshot?

>>46199

that's Ytech, it adds a new crafting mechanic which is workbench crafting in a 3x3x3 block

and a lot of other "primitive" tools recipes.

personally i like crafting minigames but they're rarely done right

which is usually that middle point between chore-ish and simple-ish

just so it doesn't become annoying.

maybe in the future i'll make/help make a mod like that for Hytale.

>>46195
>how is that functionally different than having both recipes available at a click of a button if you have the resources, except for being more tedious?

1. you make it part of the challenge
   
2. how you craft something affects how it works, so part of the progression curve is getting better at making the stuff
   
   

>>46194
>that's not supposed to be its own entire gameplay loop.
Why not? Why not have a blacksmith simulator where the entire game is you forging things? You have to judge how much hammering the metal needs, and go through a whole process from start to finish, and you can have a rhythm based mechanic for timing your hammer swings like a real smith does to minimize fatigue.

>>46192
>The mystery behind organically discovering new recipes
Impossible in our internet age, your game will be datamined in the first day and every recipe exposed for the world, this is also why puzzle games nowaday do not punish you at all, else the player just go see the solution in advance

>>46198
That's exactly why I pick the immersive crafting mods in vintage story, so that I don't have to use a menu and can just assemble things together in the world

>>46202
True but print playthroughs were big, first game I played was some domestic puzzle game… with a guide lol. Not to mention older psychotically trial-and-error text adventures. Must have been made so by publishers to sell guides.

>>46217
apples and oranges that came out 16 years apart

>>46183
The Median Mod of Diablo 2 had some cool crafting recipes in the horadric cube but it got out of control. I kinda assumed they were copying stuff from World of Warcraft or something I dunno never played it dunno how it compares to modern games either.