Forum Overview :: Gamerasutra :: This is why I want to identify the one or two things a game will occasionally

[quote name="get right and enumerate the flaws."]Look, maybe I just need a compass heading out of here. Maybe you can help me out. I am a chimerical little shit, I look at a game and see all the things it could be if the designers were less lazy about bugs or more genre-conscious or as pretentious as I sound right now, but also ambitious. But for fucking sure I'd like somewhere to go with a merciless approach not unlike that of caltrops to tear into these games and consider what they do right or wrong. Modding isn't something this site seems to focus on a whole lot because most mods are superficial or overwrought, but it's getting easier and easier to do as independent developers and small studios release 4x games. Some of them even give their community carte blanche to fuck with the executables, for christ's sake - probably an awful idea for safety but whatever, if you download the mod you're already at risk. Art and rendering software is something a guy with even a cheaper home machine can get off the ground. There's voicework available for free that isn't total shit if you spend the time to find decent sources of it. If someone had the information together in one place, collated the thousand pitfalls these games seem to run afoul of in terms of not being an annoying piece of shit, and then strung together the useful advice people could give them about design decisions, there'd be no time like the present for making something that the market would probably never make and having it turn out like Caves of Qud instead of Dwarf Fortress with its shitty leech of a creator. Seems like Caltrops would be the place to find that kind of thought, but as far as I know all of one of you make games and ICJ isn't coding up OpenCiv or whatever that freeware 4x was called. So if that place isn't here, give me a link and I'll take the conversation over there to spare you the burden of talking about StarDrive.[/quote]