[MUD-Dev] size

[Ling Lo]

Amanda Walker wrote:
> On Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 10:20 AM, Ling Lo wrote:
 
>> A useful method of thinking about production, paraphrased very
>> badly: amount of work with assets required to please the average
>> customer (a key point about this discussion) increases by bleh
>> percent each year, the amount of work an artist can do is fairly
>> constant, tools increase productivity by blah percent each year.
>> I would bet bleh is higher than blah hence money, and lots of it,
>> is required.
 
> Is that true, though?  I think that assets may be a red herring.
> Examples: Tetris and Counter-Strike didn't succeed because of
> their content assets.  They succeeded because they both hit sweet
> spots of game mechanics.  People would play Counterstrike, I
> suspect, even if were flat-shaded polygons with cheesy little
> noises for explosions.

Appealing assets get the casual player to look in the first place.
Counter-Strike appealed to that demographics we're all familiar
with.  Once they're hooked, reel them in.  As for Tetris.  Well,
asides from being bundled with the GameBoy, the music didn't annoy
after 50 hours of playing (unless you were not playing) and I swear
that's a feat in itself.

Anyway, it depends what is desirable.  From a hobby perspective,
there is always a place for graphical muds no matter the quality.
The fact that there are things moving around on the screen and the
mud is free will attract players. ;) The main thing is to get the
assets consistent and stay there, even if that's consistently bad.

I would go as far as to say that the difference between the mod
scene and developers is the content.  There are good open source
engines out there so why aren't there many good games built on these
engines with open source assets?

> Hmm.  Remember Mazewar? :-)

No. :)

Cheers,
Ling
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