For me, emergent gameplay and emergent storytelling are new words for me, but I have experienced and enjoyed them for many times. And this kind of elements really bring a lot of fun to players which is actually some kinds of accidents.

Though the emergent event seems clear and simple, it is really for the designer to make an emergent storytelling. And in most situations, they are not designed on purpose. The designer should only design the basic structure of the game system, and then give up his power and leave an open and free world for players to explore. In that case, there are many potentials in the game world with which both designers and players are not familiar. And then something beyond players’ imagination would occur in a sudden to surprise them.

And in Slime Rancher, the designers do something to make the world more random and chaotic by adding explosions slime, phosphor slime and the vacpack. They all can move other objects so that no one knows what will happen next.

We’re planning to make a cyberpunk first-person shooter. Instead of a design game that takes place on the ground, we wanted to do a design game that takes place between buildings, above the sky. So we design the place to take place on the bridge connecting the buildings so that players could experience the cultural atmosphere of cyberpunk in the process of passing through. We also wanted to design tools for the characters to fly, so that they could move between buildings. 

I always feel the camera angles and the viewpoints in the games are interesting topics worth to explore and sort. And I have experienced many games with different camera angles, and the ways I connect with the protagonist seem much different. And I think such an article to explore deep inside this topic and compare them with the pros and cons from the perspective of players’ immersion is very valuable and helpful for me. 

The way he describes the players view the game world in a box from outside is both accurate and lucid, and his analysis of different angles is accurate. Like in the side scrolling, the immersion is really terrible, and for the first perspective, though it is very immersive, it is not very suitable for the game in which the characters interact with the world directly.  

And I really think over the shoulder angle is fantastic and can be improved to be method to use in all kinds of 3D games. Because it can allow the player to see the movement of the protagonist and face the scene in the game world at the same time.

But I don’t think the immersion is the only thing game developers pursue when they decide the angles of cameras. What we want from adjusting the cameras is to change the way of storytelling and what we want the player to see. We don’t always want the player to see what protagonist in the game sees. So I think the way we decide the camera can me more flexible but not only focus on the immersion or the sense of reality.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Since we want to create a cyberpunk industry scene in the game, and we think delivery man appears frequently in cyberpunk novels or games. In addition, we have a successful driving control system, we want let the player act as a deliveryman and engage in a small narrative scene. And the player should be able to explore the whole scene and get familiar with all the available operations and skills in the game during he/she experiences the story.

The core operation of the game is the typical driving system with delivery quests (go to the aim point). And the player can choose to sneak around the city with careful observation of the enemy or drive fast with excellent skill and use the special abilities at the right time to shake off the enemy, They can also combine two ways together, be discovered first and then find a good place to hide to return to sneak status. 

For the special abilities, we want them to be very cool and give the player a feeling of hi-tech futurism. The first ability is the invisibility, and the when as we all knows, the enemy can’t detect the player when the spaceship is invisible.

The second ability is called quantization, when the spaceship is at quantization status, it can pass through any rigid body. For example, the player can drive the spaceship through the buildings to make enemy can’t see himself/herself anymore.

The third ability is called space transition, the player can save spaceship’s current position, and he/she can do it for multiple times, bu only the latest one will be saved. And then the player can choose to go back to that position. 

The first two ability should consume a certain energy when they are activated. We will make an energy bar and a HP bar. And the third ability should have a long cool down. 

And until now, we have designed two kinds of enemy, the normal one is like a policer which will chase after the player once they detect him/her , and it can shoot bullets to hurt you. But it can’t see the player when they are invisible or behind the buildings. 

The second one is like a surveillance camera, it can’t move or attack, but it can see the players when they are invisible or behind the buildings. And once it discovers the players, it will report their positions to other enemies. 

Personally, I think that 2D gaming still has a bright future. From my perspective 2D gaming has its own advantages and it attracts me a lot. I especially agree that 2D gaming is a better way to create a world with strong artistic style. First, I think hand drawing and 2D is a comes first when we try to do something conceptual and creative. And 3D games tend to be kind of dull when it comes to modeling thus it can’t emphasize a world with many features. Instead, in 2D games (like some dungeon games), the combination of different culture and transition between two different scenes can be really natural and attractive. 

Also, 2D games is really easy to be familiar with, and because of this, it usually demands the user to be really skilled with the basic ability of the characters to pass the game. This gives player a very exiting challenge which I love a lot. And because of the limit of 2 dimensions, the moving of characters become limited. Game designers need to create many interesting interactions or ways to play to enrich the game. And it leads to some fantastic gameplay mode. Like the image based interaction in Rusty Lake series and the hardcore platform puzzle solving in Celeste or Hollow Knight.