Minecraft Viki (video wiki) ➜ https://minecraft.viki.gg
Let’s talk more design over on Discord: https://bit.ly/3wI5ovB
There’s no doubt that Minecraft is still one of the best building games, but there certainly is room for improvement… While on the quest to try and answer the question “What makes a good base building
game” through the perspective of Valheim, I’ll be taking a look at a few different building mechanics from games like Terraria, Rust, Sims 4, Subnautica and even Garry’s Mod.
Relevant Links
———————————-
Patreon: https://bit.ly/2SwPWDB
Twitter: https://bit.ly/3wGQ1TR
Video Contents
———————————-
0:00 Intro
0:49 Reasons
1:11 Granularity Scale
3:31 Structural Integrity
5:30 Motivating Aesthetics
7:31 Maintenance
8:41 Rewarding Creative Expression
Footage Used
———————————-
Pharaoh ► FINAL Mission 38 Hetepsenusret (Kahun) – [1080p Widescreen] – Let’s Play Game
[Rust] How To Make An Airlock in Rust
How to Build a Simple 2×2 Starter Base Design 2020 in RUST
Minecraft Longplay – Peaceful Survival, Gathering, Building a Simple Home (No Commentary)
Minecraft: All Living Room Decorations! [Fast Turorial]
Minecraft: Relaxing Gameplay Ep1 – Homesteading [No Commentary] [RTX] [60fps]
The Sims 4 Walkthrough Gameplay Let’s Play Playthrough Part 2 – No Commentary
The *FASTEST* Keyboard Editing with HANDCAM (CRAZY Satisfying)
source
people bellow fail to understand the minecraft style, its style is being an empty shell to be filled with mods, the game has slow updates, with no sence of progression outside 2 or 3 tiers of things at MAX, it is a building game but dont have integrity checks, its a crafting game without tiers of items crafted from rare resources and mob drops, its an adventure game without good mobs, its an combat game without any combat mechanics, without 200+mods its a tech demo 40 mins adventure, no combat mechanics, no furniture, no adventuring, no reason to have furniture, no crafting cooll shit, , its as adventurous as going to the local park walk ur dog on a leach
7:00 Another example from Terraria is how NPC Towns decrease the spawn rate of hostile mobs, further encouraging you to let them move in.
As well as that overcrowding NPCS into one big 'house' (like players used to do) is now discouraged as of 1.4. Doing so decreases NPC Happiness, which is required to be high for certain items (primarily Pylons, which are important for getting around quickly)
There's also the non-gameplay feedback that encourages NPC towns. Like how they have lanterns fly at night after defeating a boss for the first time in your world, the town music it contains which is even calmer at night, and npcs complaining less in their dialogue.
Man, its so pleasing and easy to listen to you. Great and informative video!
XD no one's mad at you for shitting on Subnautica's base building
…Minecraft however..
a whole video just gushing about a single aspect of valheim
Well, My biggest problem with Valheim (and I do like it as a game) is that it's too… Realistic? It adds just enough real world logic to start the trend but then makes some notable exclusions and exceptions for what I assume are game-play reasons. Like the surtling cores. Which are mandatory for a bunch of things, but the things they are mandatory for have obvious real world and pretty easy to acquire material like coal and other fuels. So why do I need this fantastical "core" or something to do stuff we do with normal material, but don't require or at last have the ability to ventilate my house with magic? Or the fact that the first pick axes were made of simple stone or wood possibly both, but the game makes you get special antlers for it? Which yeah they did use antlers for picks way back, but not excluively there was a range of materials used for them.
It's kinda one of the areas Minecraft excels in where Valheim sacrifices for other things is the linear logic of upgrades, hand>wood>coal and leather>iron and gold>diamonds>Diamonds with magic(enchanting)>diamonds reinforced with hell-metal> Diamonds reinforced hell-metal and with magic. There is also subtle stuff where you learn gold is weaker then iron but takes better then iron(in fact better then any other material) to magic, which makes sense if you know gold's history as a material and it's myth. It's real enough in most ways to make sense.
But Valheim is kinda pushing you to push your self to go and kill bosses and other things to get new stuff as quickly as possible and then restart the process on a new tier for it's definition of "success". Minecraft kinda refuses to define success, "what do I do?" what ever you want says minecraft."When do I win" when ever you've had enough fun with this world. "Where are the credits?" some where, explore to find them. "I googled it on the wiki" Looking to others for guidance is good, talking to people is good, keep going, the end isn't the end and neither is the credits, you can have more if you want.
Valheim is more "What do I do" see that? "yeah…" kill it and use it's bones to make killing the thing over yonder easier, and then kill that too. Repeat until blood lust and urge to dominate is sated and home is marginally safe.
Late to comment but another base building game to look into is 7 days to die.
It's unique from a gameplay design perspective because the game is a base defense from zombies so the devs had to take measures to patch against exploiting zombie ai to prevent the zombies from attacking the base or pathing correctly.
god damn, this is so well made
finds a game they like
“this is better than Minecraft!”
keeps playing
“Hmm. I could make a video about it.”
thinking for ways valheim is better
“Combat? Nah. Aesthetic? Who cares. Core Concept? It’s not like anyone would watch that. A part of the game most players hate? …”
picturing it in his head
“Absolutely!”
Commenting (and liking) for the algorithm.
I'd say the next step of that is the ignored factorio in which everything you build serves a function which informs the way it looks.
That is extremely important for base building games. More so that physics integrity whatevers or wood decaying in the rain.
The biggest part of minecraft building isn't the starter hole in a wall, it's the redstone autofarms you can make that save you all the farming work you'd have to do. Or the autosmelters. Automated doors. Monster farms. Entire transforming bases.
One game that does this extremely well is space engineers.
You build vehicles and buildings that help you gather materials to build bigger stuff to more effectively gather more resources so you can build bigger stuff.
That's basically it. That's the entire game. That's all it needed to be where it is now even though it is an opaque mess. You can sink hundreds of hours into it just with that.
The lack of this is also what holds starbound in which building is almost entirely cosmetic back even though the building blocks for something greater are there.
Why build a base if it doesn't do anything?
use the classic textures of minecraft
Pretty good video with good points. But the title really doesn't reflect anything about the video.
Scrap Mechanic has some a great building system. Similar to Minecraft, except it's subject to physics and the building grid isn't as strict (things only have to snap to the building grid if they are directly attached to a static object in the world, like the ground)
Will you talk about dwarf fortress basebuilding tho?
I actually prefer it when games don’t reward asthetics. I feel it makes the progression from surviving to thriving more natural. Humans are already intrinsically motivated to create and appreciate beautiful things, and games do a poor job of recognizing the difference between decor spam and actual asthetics. As far as your first Minecraft shelter being in the side of a hill, yeah that happens, but without any gameplay need, many players gravitate towards some kind of house, or turn the cave into something you enjoy sleeping in. While Minecraft doesn’t require you to add extensions to any crafting area to access its recipes, people still gravitate towards making crafting areas because its nice to have all that stuff in one place, even if you are mostly just using the crafting table. On top of that Minecraft has a very interesting farm creation system, in that there basically is none. What allows you to farm something is simply emergent from mechanics that apply everywhere else. You can choose between slave labor or machines and there are endless ways to farm most materials. Second the portal system simply and its connection to the nether creates a portal system that I enjoy. You have to travel through another dimension for extradimensional travel and it is through the combination of portals and high speed transit that you can gain quick access to other parts of the world. Minecraft’s whole point is to be a game that doesn’t force you into anything. What could it have to learn from games that do
I got recommended this video multiple times and I wouldve clicked earlier if the tiyle had not misled me into not clicking it.
One problem I find with mechanically rewarding players who place decor items in their bases is that folks will immediatly optimize that to the extreme and instead of ending up with a nice arrangement of diverse and visually cohesive elements they'll just dump as many of the most efficient decor item as possible until they max out the prettiness stat.
I guess I just adscribe to the idea of letting people decorate as much or as little as they feel like, without too much of a punishment or reward other than having a visually impressive home.
That being said I absolutely adore when games put constraints on how wack can structures be, constarints force creativity to come out and make the best out of it.
theres a reference to a gmod creepypasta at 2:24. I cant remember what the creepypasta is called, but I do remember gman saying "you need me" in the dark room. If you listen carefully, you can hear it when gman is spawned in.
The thing that makes me play Valheim instead of Minecraft is because Valheim has more activities to offer, it has more bosses, places to explore, and I also love that the building in Valheim requires actual structural integrity as suppose to adding pillars to make the illusion of structural integrity.
Mr. Checkpoint your point is as based as bed rock.
Interesting summary of what Valheim does mostly right, as a building game.
One topic you didn't really explore, is how the building interact with the rest of the game. How does it fit into the narrative, feeds from it and feeds it? And the same for other areas of gameplay…
It's one of the least properly addressed issue by games in that arena… WHY would the player build? And to go further, why would they build this way? Or that way? What are the challenges and gains of building? How the narrative and/or the rest of the gameplay are integrated in the building loop? And so on.
It's also something Valheim does a bit better than a lot of other building games (without that much depth, which says a lot about the genre unfortunately), but if a game is not designed to be purely "build for building sake", it's an extremely critical topic.
If you still read comments on older videos one of the best building systems in every game ever is from the cosmoteer that launched on steam this year! It's a sandbox-/starship-building game, it does so much stuff so well you could make a whole video just about it 😀