BITFIGHTER'S PARADIGM SHIFT

[Quartz]

Man, I knew that intense title would get you to look.

OK so there's this strange attitude shift that has occurred over the years. Like, a lot of years. And it's starting to become annoying. I'm not really expecting this thread to change anything, but hopefully it will be interesting nonetheless. Human nature is an interesting thing in my opinion anyway, and this holds some insight, perhaps.

When we had Zap!, a game stuck in its beta, abandoned by its developer ... we, the players, seemed to be incredibly resourceful. We looked upon ourselves for innovation and change. And obviously, there wasn't all that much we could really change. So we innovated with our maps, A LOT.

It seems like now that we have a development team again, who are gracefully working on this game purely out of their interest and kindness, the players are becoming less and less resourceful all the time. I see thread after thread on these forums telling the developers about what gameplay aspect needs to be changed, and that's cool because game balance is important, but I rarely see any of us players making any innovative maps recently.

Now if you ask me, a real good way to show these developers our appreciation would be to continue to create and innovate in our own ways, instead of forcing them to do all the work.

I can't deny that some aspect of your post is right on - but to be fair, I don't think the matters are mutually exclusive. One can brainstorm cool ideas on the forums while still creating exciting and innovative maps.

I also don't think a rise in forum suggestions is directly tied to a decline in innovative mapmaking. But I do think that we may have become "lazier" - in the slightest sense of the word - with all the new tools we have. In Zap!, the lack of tools effectively required players to innovate in order to create enjoyable maps. Now, we can create fun maps that don't push boundaries. And that may have contributed to the current lack of groundbreaking new levels.

Another cause might be the introduction of levelgen. I can't be the only one who considers levelgen to be the future of Bitfighter, yet has no idea how to operate it (despite its supposed simplicity). That alone has kinda stumped me personally in coming up with new innovations.

Cool topic, thanks for posting.

Levelgens are the future

I am currently working on a Bitfighter levelgen IDE maker thing in javascript, so no download required. It would generate a levelgen with a simple interface. I would like to see how that turns out with the Bitfighter community...

[Quartz]

I can't deny that some aspect of your post is right on - but to be fair, I don't think the matters are mutually exclusive. One can brainstorm cool ideas on the forums while still creating exciting and innovative maps.

No, I do not think they are mutually exclusive either. Regardless, I have yet to see anyone doing both in good measure.

Another cause might be the introduction of levelgen. I can't be the only one who considers levelgen to be the future of Bitfighter, yet has no idea how to operate it (despite its supposed simplicity). That alone has kinda stumped me personally in coming up with new innovations.

I can't do crap with them either, but I still find ways to innovate beyond them.

There's no logical reason why levelgen should stop players from experimenting outside of scripts, but I think it does play into motivations. Like, why bother creating some elaborate setup to accomplish a simple task, when you can theoretically do the same thing with a few lines of code?

I think the optimal solution here is to not worry about what levelgen can or cannot do, while simultaneously trying to better understand and learn it.

[kaen]

Levelgens are cool, and we've worked really hard to try to make them accessible to people who have never programmed before in their lives. I think the biggest reason that there are so few levelgen writers is that there is a shortage of resources for learning about them. _k's tutorials (despite all of his great work on them) have become too old to be reliable, and are generally lacking in their teaching methodology. Plus, there's too much reading to sift through before you can make a useful levelgen.

I have an updated series of bite-sized tutorials in progress, but they are far from complete.

All that aside, I want to say that I am not convinced that levelgens are the future. The number of levelgens that legitimately leave you with better gameplay than vanilla bitfighter is very small. My favorite levels are still ones without levelgens. Levelgens are great for stupid levelgen tricks, extending the bitfighter engine to make it into some other game, and prototyping new ideas. As it stands, I prefer levels with that overwhelming feeling of craftsmanship in their design. Ones that look nice and play even better.

I'm not impressed by soft-body physics simulations, RPGs, or minefields. I am impressed when I dart around a level manically vying to accomplish an objective and it finally culminates in that brief moment of exhilarating, transcendent euphoria as I watch those goalzones finally blink gold or that last core explode into a flurry of tiny multicolored particles.

I think there's lots of room for "innovation" by reducing the amount of gimmicky abuses of the engine in favor of legitimately better level design from the ground up. Maybe some sort of renaissance where we finally work out a set of principles that make a solid map, and as a community create an impressive corpus of plain old good levels.

Great thread, by the way. I think this is a topic we seriously need to discuss.

Amazing kaen

[Quartz]

Amazing kaen

How sweet the sound~

[raptor]

From one developer to the players -

I'll work on code, if you make maps.... Thanks!