Reality Factory

Hi, I was just wondering how much research do you do for your games. If you're making WWII/WWI game do your search for info about acctual battles, guns and stuff or if you're making sci fi game do you make research for near-future texhnology? I'm just asking because for our game(with one other guy you don't know) we're making a HUGE research. Acctual schemes of underground tunnels, hide outs, we're trying to make weapons as real as possible(and believe me, if you got the right schemes Source SDK can do just perfectly), we're acctualy going to the forest to search for guerilla's underground tunnels from the soviet times. Do you think it makes the game more interesting or reality sometimes wrecks all the fun?

G'Night!

when i make a game i do some research.oh thanks for the comments on my sci fi game idea. research can make a game more real,because research is normally what actually happened or could happen in my opinion.

Do you think it makes the game more interesting or reality sometimes wrecks all the fun?

there is a fine line. i sorta do a mix, if you've played Sniper Elite on the PS2 your gonna understand why reality vs playability can make a great game or break it,

basically that game was good, but you'd have to be a real sniper to play it, calculating distances and wind + projectile distance...bah, i enjoyed the realism but got annoyed i wanted to kill, not calculate.

however this made it all the sweeter when pop that shot off and got someone between the eyes from 1/2 a mile away.

basically go as real as you can but don't sacrifice playability for realism

for the game project im working on with mallek,im going for real weapons,so im looking for real pics,not just using my imagination,but if i was doing a fictional game,i would go wild with the designs and stuff.

like Spyrewolf was saying you most certainly don't want to much realism. Effects for the most part should be realistic as possible. But some of the other things like how the player can move or what he can do you might want to stretch it a bit beyond realism.

As far as storyline. Some times what makes a game really interesting is if you research the battles, and then change them up some, or unleash other positions. Like a WWII game what would be really cool and I think this has been done before, is if you could fly the WWII style planes along with the ground fighting. But in all honesty with so many WWII games out, just to get people to play you almost have to have something extraordinary or different, that stands out.

I have been thinking about realism for my game project. There is really a big decision to be made about your games realism because it defines your gameplay. I watched the video for the Star Wars DDM technology and noticed that the forces reacting do not seem to be proportional even though its awesome.

Look at any game with guns and you'll see reality is very skewed. Shooting a crate a few times will not make it explode, the same with barrels. Destructibility of objects is also highly skewed and are destroyed too easily. But of course, the explosions and interactions make us get more into the game.

It's a strange balance of taking us out of reality to bring us deeper into the virtual world. Weird how it works when you think deeply into it.

I think realism for a game should be defined by the gameplay experience goal of the developer.