/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2334831]

Hi /vr/. I'm an aspiring and still not successful game developer.

Please pick 10 retro games you wish every game developer would beat and therefore be able to reference when making new games. Whether it's the art style, music style, story, gameplay, or whatever. If you could recommend 10 games to inspire game developers, which would you pick?

I need some new games to play and want to play ones that will help me grow as a developer.

[Anonymous No.2334835]

>>2334831
Nope, Read some books, and get some separate hobbies from video games. I don't need another developer recycling things I am already familiar with.

[Anonymous No.2334841]

>>2334835
What this guy said.

[Anonymous No.2334847]

come up with a novel mechanic and build your game around it.

[Anonymous No.2334849]

>>2334831
Riven is the first that comes to mind. Ingeniously designed, detailed, unique, well thought-out. It's something that I think modern developers would struggle to recreate.

[Anonymous No.2334854]

You're going about this all wrong. Playing games can help you grow, but that isn't nearly enough. Take Mother for example: Itoi only played a couple games when he stepped in, he had many other jobs that came first and foremost and played a huge part in what the series had become.

And now you have a billion little indies trying to be Mother-like in charm but can't hack it, because they aren't Itoi.

[Anonymous No.2334856]

>>2334835
I agree with this, but studying the nascent history of games is important, too.

Nethack and Ultimas IV-VII are obvious choices, but nethack already shows a pretty broad influence.

I think digging into the diversity of computer games in the 8-bit era, and to a lesser extent on the Amiga moreso than other 16-bit machines, would be valuable. The C64 alone had a huge variety of novel game ideas that are ripe for further development. Paradroid is one of the games that comes to mind. Impossible Mission, too.

Exile, on the Amiga, of course, but that's pretty well known.

I feel like over the last ten years the "indie" movement has done a pretty good job of grabbing most of the low-hanging fruit in terms of past ideas to recycle, but there's still a lot out there to learn from if you stray from the well-beaten path.

[Anonymous No.2334859]

Listen dude the one thing you should do is ask yourself what things stand out the most to you in a game. Think about that one game you played that caught your attention or you wanted more of in that game. Don't be one of those designer that copy paste from 12 different games that makes an unfocused mess. Rule #1 make the game you want to play. Rule #2 K.I.S.S. Keep it simple stupid

[Anonymous No.2334863]

>>2334831
Do you want to make money or do you want to make a good game?

[Anonymous No.2334864]

>>2334856
Oh yeah, and Captain Blood.

[Anonymous No.2334867]

>>2334831
If you want to grow as a developer and grow in your understanding of the history of your craft, make sure to play a lot of games that weren't successful, that weren't critically acclaimed, that weren't well-executed, but which had important ideas or elements.

[Anonymous No.2334913]

Rogue, Metroid & Castlevania

[Anonymous No.2335025]

>>2334831
>10 retro games you wish every game developer

These are 10 games that if you aren't intimately familiar with then... Well, then you're probably a modern game dev.

Super Mario Bros. / Duck Hunt
Super Mario Bros. 3
Pac-Man
Tetris (Gameboy version)
Street Fighter II
Ultima VII
Master of Magic
Wolfenstein 3D
Pokémon
World of Warcraft

[Anonymous No.2335028]

>>2335025
>World of Warcraft
WoW is literally everything wrong with modern gaming in a single package

[Anonymous No.2335030]

>>2334831
Do you have any genres in mind, commander faggotron?

[Anonymous No.2335050]

>>2335028
Yes, but we're talking studying.

This is how you learn what not to do.

[Anonymous No.2335109]

>>2334835
>>2334841

There's a point where going back through old games can help, though, if you know how to look at it. Don't just go back and take a little from NiGHTS and a little from Tetris and mash them together or something; see what it is exactly that you liked about these and maybe figure out a way to implement them in your own way.

I don't mean like "I like the speed in Sonic!", but more "I like the level design in Sonic 3, because while it gives you sections where you can enjoy the speed, and once you know the level you can run around it quickly, it's arranged in a way where blindly running through it will trap you into death. It feels like it's using the character's power against him, like Robotnik tried to figure out ways to use Sonic's strength against him. Once I master it and can run around the level quickly, it feels like I've outsmarted him, and therefore the game/level designer themselves."

Now, agree or disagree with that (since that's my opinion either way), it would lead me to designing better levels for a game I was to make than if I didn't examine why I liked Sonic 3 so much.

tl;dr: Don't feel like you need to play certain games to get ideas, but look at games YOU loved in ways that give you insights as to WHY you love them and try to incorporate that design philosophy into your game.

[Anonymous No.2335154]

>>2335028
It's probably THE best single study on gamer behavior. VERY important if you're a dev. Can't understand gaming unless you understand gamers.

[Anonymous No.2335163]

>>2335025
I'll add that I'm 100% certain on the first six, but less certain on the last four. I could maybe switch out MoM with GTA: San Andreas and Wolf 3D with Doom. Come to think of it GTA is probably a better thing to study than MoM. With Wolfenstein it boils down to what you think is more important to understand: Influence or Innovation.

[Anonymous No.2335194]

>>2334831
>All those seams between screens that don't match.

So this is what it's like to be triggered.

[Anonymous No.2335195]

If you want to make a throwback to the NES, you're going to have to dredge through all the games that were released that weren't by the major players like Nintendo, Capcom, Konami, or Tecmo. Hell, go to this site and click the NES button 10 times to give you your games.

http://s3kr.it/gauntlet.html

The NES had a library of 800 or so games, moreso if you include the translated Famicom games. So you'll easily come across 10 games that were "the norm" for NES game design. For example, my 10 games are:

>Hudson Hawk
>Silkworm
>Ice Hockey
>Mario is Missing
>Maharaja
>Friday the 13th
>Harlem Globetrotters
>King's Quest V
>Pescatore
>Gotcha

This is the kind of tripe that clogged the arteries of the NES. These are the kind of games you should come to expect from said console, and what the quality of said games to be.

[Anonymous No.2335208]

>>2335194

[Anonymous No.2335216]

I'm not going to pick 10 games, but I will reference 2.

Star control 2: story, dialogue, sandbox, characters, number of possibilities, limited amount of time to complete, voice acting, atmosphere...

Warsong (langrisser 1): to me, this game is the ultimate strategy RPG that has NEVER been even close to being touched by any other game in the genre. Everything about it is near perfect.

[Anonymous No.2335248]

Way too broad a topic, OP. Just look at any top 100 retro game list and play anything on there. Look at what those games did right and try to make your game have the same things.

A few other anons said this, but make a game that you want to play. Cave Story is a great example, just a personal project from one guy to make a game that he wanted to play, and put it out for free, too. I'll add that I think it is fine to copy the shit out of games that did things well, as long as you do things equally well. >>2334835 says he doesn't want recycled concepts, but I still seek out any Metroidvania clones I can find as long as they do it well. That's my favorite kind of game, and I don't care that it copies its core gameplay off of something that I love. Just don't fuck it up and make it play like shit.

I'm not sure where you could start with this, but I would recommend seeking out some WoW balance blue posts from the 2008 - 2011 era (or later, I stopped playing in 2011). In there, players would post feedback on why X ability isn't fun while Y ability is, and the head balance guy Ghostcrawler would respond and try to get the players to describe why that was. The conversations would go back and forth, and often existentially boils down gaming to why pushing some buttons and counting to three and getting out of the red pixels under your feet and being rewarded with purple pixels that make bigger numbers appear on your screen is even considered any fun at all. A lot of it is intangible and driven by emotion and feeling ("this just feels fun"), but I think it is a really good resource for anyone interested in game development. Maybe look up a "blue tracker" site that just catalogs blue posts and start reading. It helps if you've played WoW, too.

Oh, also check out Game Sack. They have long videos where they showcase the gameplay of games way more than most Youtubers, and it might be the best way to survey a lot of games very quickly, and play the interesting ones.

[Anonymous No.2335262]

>>2335025
Another thought: Maybe one of the last four could be replaced with Super Metroid. Hands down the most thickly atmospheric game ever made.