VideoGame Construction Kit: Striving for a lego architecture

[Neuromancer]

There are some amazing subgames that are being created all the time for Minetest. And while they are incredibly polished, and very fun, the enchantment soon wears off and soon becomes frustration. Subgame designers have the best of intentions, they have a vision for a a subgame, and they work tirelessly to turn their vision into a reality. But at the end of the day one of two things happens. Either their grand vision was bigger than their time and ability to complete and so the community winds up with nothing at all, or they wind up creating a subgame that can't be broken down into its parts and reused. Consider the difference between getting a toy truck instead of a set of legos. Sure the toy truck is great at first, but soon you will tire of it. Instead if you had gotten legos, you could build a truck, but when you got bored with it you could build an airplane, a spacestation, or anything you want. And this is the strength of Minetest, as a community we can create for users a set of building blocks that they can combine in any way they dream of. Instead of giving players a fish, we should be giving them fishing gear. Instead of forcing our vision on them, we should enable their wildest dreams.

The way to do this is through modular design.

Mods: When designing subgames the first thought should be what Mods are we going to need, and how can I create them so that they will integrate perfectly with any other mods? The answer is configuration files. Make your Mods flexible by allowing the player to tweak settings so they will work well with a wide array of visions the player wants to create. Take for example a Mob spawner mod. This mob spawner mod should have a configuration file that lets it work with any mob Mod. That means it needs a configuration file that contains things like "Mob mod name", "Mob name", "Mob difficulty level", "Mob Rarity". Then the mob should contain spawners for different difficulty levels, and spawn mobs based on their rarity. There should also be an overall configuration that has something like "Difficulty Level", "Frequency" which will allow the player to customize how often mobs of a certain difficulty are spawned. Now you have a Mod that allows users to spawn any Mob, any where, in any way they dream up. A pretty good building block for any gameplay scenario that a player might dream up. I'd argue that at the end of the day, giving a user a mod like this is better than giving them a fully polished subgame that they can't combine with other mods, no matter how epic or polished that subgame is.

Modpacks: Suppose you have this compelling vision for gameplay, you think you have the be-all end all subgame. I'm going to argue that you should first consider making this subgame as a modpack instead of a subgame. I'm going to use the DungeonTest subgame as an example because it is the best subgame that has ever been and possibly ever will be developed for Minetest. And while I absolutely love it, I also absolutely hate it because it is so magnificent that I want to combine it with other Mods to create a rich fun gaming experience and I can't. Not yet anyway. That's because it was written as a subgame, and you can't break a modpack out of it to combine with other Mods well. Ideally what would have happened was that DungeonTest would have been developed as a Modpack with configuration settings that let it combine well with other Mods. It creates these incredibly fun dungeons to explore, but they fill the entire underground area, so there is no room for caves, goblins, mining of ores, exploration, underground realms, or a million other things you could do underground. It isn't a set of legos, it is a toy truck. Ferk is working on creating a Rarity configuration that may solve this problem. But there are a few other problems that need to be resolved as well.

Subgames: At the end of the day who should be creating subgames? Everyone. From the most sophisticated developer to the complete noob. Creating an incredible subgame should be as simple as snapping together lego blocks. Throw some mods and modpacks together, tweak a few config files, and you should have an infinite number of compelling subgames. If you have an idea of a compelling subgame that requires you to write code, instead think of how you can create configurable mods that could allow users to build your subgame simply by combining a few mods and tweaking a few configurations. Then after you have written the Mods, do the same yourself. Build your adaptable legos, snap them together like a noob and have an epic subgame. Why, because implementing your vision should be an afterthought. Enabling all players to implement their endless visions should always be the goal.

[Neuromancer]

As long as I am complaining about DungeonTest and how I both love and hate it, I should point out some of the things it got absolutely right and it got a lot right. First is fun and compelling gameplay the likes of which Minetest has never seen. The second is community developed content. Yes, the developer (Ferk) enabled the player to create and share the content for the Mod (dungeon rooms) with zero technical skills required. This is something that should be heavily encouraged as part of the lego architecture.

[rubenwardy]

Capture the flag is composed of a modpack called CTF_PvP_Engine. The modpack is massively configurable via settings. It also has a shell file to optimise settings by replacing setting calls with constants. And then around CTF_PvP_Engine are more mods to add blocks, stats, and match resets.

It's pretty modular. I could easily take CTF_PvP_Engine and use it in a city vs city game.

Sorry for self promotion.