[ambyra]

It’s common beginner gamedev thinking that making things more realistic makes them better. It’s only fun if it’s fun. Realistic is usually != fun. Maximizing the core fun element, taking away everything else, is a good way to make a fun game.

Realistic skydiving game: Start! Drive your civic to the DZ. Oh no there’s traffic! Wait for plane. Get in plane. Take 20 minutes to fly to altitude. Fall for 1 minute. There are no obstacles, nothing around you so you don’t die. Land. Wait to get picked up, take 1 hr to repack your parachute. Talk to your friends about how cool it was.

Fun skydiving game: Start! Jump out of airplane immediately. Skydive for 15 minutes. Surf on the wing of a plane. Avoid obstacles. Fly around buildings. Try to land in a swimming pool on the side of a mountain. Land. Parachute repacks automatically. You’re back in the air automatically.

[duskwuff]

> It’s common beginner gamedev thinking that making things more realistic makes them better. It’s only fun if it’s fun. Realistic is usually != fun.

As another case in point: movement speeds in most first-person 3D games are unrealistically fast (like, walking at 10 mph, running at 20+ mph), because realistic movement speeds would make navigating around the game world painfully slow.

[dilznoofus]

*full packing physics for the parachute! Frayed lines, tangling, dodgy mechanisms! The risk of plummeting to your account's demise.

[matthews2]

We need a cops and robbers game where the robbers serve their prison sentence in real time, and the cops have to fill in mountains of paperwork for every shot fired :)