Is that a human leather jacket (good) Tynan is wearing?

Tynan: Rimworld is a story generator. Every else: Rimworld is a WAR CRIME GENERATOR

11:38 "You can even flee your base in a caravan and go somewhere else entirely. This creates that Western story trope where the protagonist flees their village thats burning behind them with their family dead or enslaved, looking to get revenge or start a new life or whatever goal you choose". Fuck. I always just start a new colony entirely when my base gets raided and taken over. It never once crossed my mind to pick up and start somewhere new with the same people (that survived). But it makes so much sense. That's still the "game" part of my brain taking control. I obviously need to let the "story" part take over more.

This statement that: "Rimworld is not a story, it's a story generator." Reminds me of a statement by Tarn Adams about Dwarf Fortress: " We didn't want to create another generic fantasy world, we wanted to create a generic fantasy world generator."

I've played the game for more than a thousand hours now, but I'll never forget one of my very first colonies. I took in a young girl, I think her name was Vera, who was great at shooting. During one specially hard raid she saved our lives by taking the attention of most of the enemies while some guys with knives got close enough to take them down, but at the end she received a bullet that destroyed her spine. She survived, bur couldn't walk anymore, and since everyone would bring her meals and visit her to chat eventually everyone was at +100 relationship with her. One day some pirates tried to take us down, I managed to kill them, but in the process all my guys also died, and then I had to watch, unable to do anything, as Vera starved. Memorable stuff.

This guy is telling me why procrastinating is good. Its not procrastinating, it's "Future decision making"

I liked Rimworld already but I would get angry at what I thought were random and cruel events in the game. This has changed my perspective.

I think the social system of Rimworld is a lot like... The Sims series without player input. Characters babble abstract things at each other, which you're free to interpret however, and that results in them having a better or worse relationship. And it honestly is a lot like playing with dolls, but these dolls have their own simple agency to be interpreted. And that's wonderful, I love it a lot.

Rimworld is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, it is a time-vampire like none other.

This startingly similar to the priorities one has when running a TTRPG (e.g. DnD) story. It's that weird middle point between running a game and generating a story

A great game, a great designer, and a great talk. I use his Designing Games book with my students, and think it's absolutely fantastic. Mr Sylvester may be hesitant to call RimWorld a game, but I cant think of any other experience engine across any media outside of real social interactions that I've invested as much time in (1000+ hours) or reaped as much enjoyment from. I hope he continues to see success.

This is why I love games that have a healthy modding community. The devs can say no more often for new features knowing that, if players really want it, they can mod it in themselves.

I really like this idea that "story generator" is a separate medium from video game, regardless of how serious he is about it. As an artform we haven't seen anything close to its true potential yet.

That last point, it's hard to imagine agreeing with something more. I've spent hundreds of hours on Rimworld. And the only goals have been ones I have set for myself... And I want to spend hundreds more. But so many games these days turn into a grind. Do this until the numbers tick up and the sound plays. Find all the feathers, gain experience to unlock the next mission, etc etc. Its ruins some games that without achievements and without the padding of random collectibles would be really much more fun. But then, in general, this whole talk showed how drastically different from the mainstream gaming industry Rimworld's development has been.

"Contrarian, Ridiculous and Impossible Game Design Methods" aka what your boss fires you for because it's unconventional and doesn't include payment systems.

THIS is why I'm subbed to GDC!! Tynan is a legend!! Industrious, Iron-willed, hates bumb labor, yet is a fast learner optimist!!

Tynan, I'm playing your game on a lower difficulty level than I'm capable of handling and with helpful mods because I hate failure, I hate losing. My whole life I've been losing things. Losing friends, family, money... I come into the game to relax. And before Royalty DLC I severely lacked content in my experience, because before then there's been just your loss story generator and not much else. And I thank you for expanding game in a way that makes winning also as interesting as losing

Tynan, if you read this please make another game. Your mind is a beautiful thing

I still remember my first time playing RimWorld. It was a hard time for my group as they landed in a terrible location that made growing crops quite difficult. They barely survived through trading and building relations with a nearby faction. One day the faction we were trading with sent a bulk goods trader on a especially hot day which made my melee fighter tôko go into a berserk rage attacking everything in sight, I had my whole group try their best to stop him from attacking the traders so they fell to him one by one. By the end of the day all but two people were dead on my side and tôko just sat there burying his dead friends as the traders left our now desolate base. The other survivor lost every single limb and ended being the only one to make it from the original group.

Watching this gave me a +8 happiness bonus for 2 months.

53:00 Tynan, Where is my Slug Alien that we can milk? We want it

The bit halfway through about the ideas higherarchy and not forcing a status quo just because the idea's old and already in the thing? Brilliant.

Love the game. My girlfriend and me play it on a daily basis. Hard to hear tho that everything we wished that would come to the game just won't.. Storytelling is nice, but having more depths in some game mechanics would be really cool. The relationshipa between colonists felt pretty much impactless and actually useless. Would be cool to know more and have more options when suddenly your "husband" from an advanced technology tribe visits you, while you actually started as a prehistoric tribe. Kinda weird sometimes. Still love it.

About your comment that something like a more realistic system of building using materials. The process itself does not invoke story or emotional response - no one would say something like "oh man remember that time I made steel ingots?" But, it does lend itself to emotion. A good example of this is Minecraft. Many people who build in creative mode will build extravagant things, but they don't tend to care about them. On the other hand, someone who had to mine, refine (once twice or more), then prepare and build with those things, they tend to be much more attached to the things they build. If someone blows up your house in creative, no problem. You fix it for free or you don't care enough about that one to even bother. In survival, you might have to go to the ends of the world again to get the things you need to re-construct what you built before. It's frustrating, because you lost something you invested time and effort into. Honestly I would say Space Engineers is a better example of this, because in Minecraft you get many/all of the blocks back and in Space Engineers you mostly just get scrap, which needs to be refined again, most of the valuable resources are gone, and you won't get much from your recovery efforts. But Minecraft is a more well understood example. Either way, my point is that investing time is a very important aspect of emotional investment and emotional response; if it took twice as much effort to build a base, losing it would have that much more emotional impact. There are obviously limits to the level of how much you want to negatively impact the emotions of players; if it took you 10 hours to build your base and it's completely annihilated, you will feel defeated. If it took 20 minutes, rebuilding it is not really a problem.

I never knew Tynan had a book (excellent), might have to pick it up just for the novelty since I don't do game design but love his work.

I was looking forwards to something like this; thank you so much for sharing!

One of the best games ever made! Over 2000 hours still haven't made a spaceship and escaped. Brilliant man. Sold me on a game and book. Solid community for his games too.

It is really interesting for me to see what was the goal of the creator of the game and how differently I approached it. With over 400 h and a dozen of different colonies, I never cared about my colonists, barely new their name, just assigned them to the task they were good at. My only goal always was to escape the planet as soon as possible. I find it very hard to get attached to colonists since they mostly do stupid things when not directed and have mental breakdown every 2 weeks XD

One of the best GDC process talks

24:30 Speaking as a horticulturist and game designer/project manager ... Seeding plants can be emotional asf my dude 😂 that's why horticultural therapy is a thing, or people enjoy farming simulators (which harks back to the same emotional context he grounded his story generator philosophy in: the universal tribal-magical environment shared by people for hundreds of thousands of years of anatomically modern human history). 31:50 my 'project scope creep.txt' is at ~230 pages tho :')

29:30 HOLY SHIT, I have never found the words to explain how I feel when I'm in a store haha

For a story generator the only thing Rimworld really lacks is ... Character development. Yes my dude ... the 'narrative' in rimworld sorely lacks character development. Traits are static and don't evolve, character backstories create static pawns, the characters don't evolve or change over time, they don't grow organically like living beings, they are and will always be the exact same nitwit that crashlands at the Rim except with slightly higher skill levels or missing/replaced a few body parts on the way. That loner or banished pawn that has disabled/terrible social skills will always have disabled social skills. That factory worker even if he has fast learner trait still will be incapable of performing intellectual, artistic or even simple cooking tasks ... because he is and will always have been a factory worker. None of that makes sense and none of that creates interesting stories. Perhaps that factory worker never got to develop his skills and as it turns out, as a fast learner he can actually turns his life background from a factory worker to an inventive scientist. That loner we talked about earlier, perhaps he had a bad past but now on the Rim forcedto interact with people who depend on him, he has opened up and learned to socialize and it turns out, he's an excellent leader. These are stories ... but in Rimworld you have to make sure your loner will never ever get any kind of social interaction because you'll just be wasting your time on it. In fact he's entirely incapable of socializing ... now it's your job to imagine how he'll always be like that and how to 'game' around this quirk.

I had an issue where a mechhive appeared that I could not defeat. Each time I went to a prior save, the mechhive would re-appear (it was attached to a quest). It never occurred to me that I could pack up my dudes and leave. I quit the game instead. Maybe adding a hint that re-establishing your base elsewhere is an option (in the quest language) could have helped. I should also add that I had 800 hours playing Rimworld when this happened, so I’m no rookie. Thanks for a great game.

Really like this way of designing on the fly. Gonna integrate it into my work flow.

One thing I'm starting to contemplate is the balancing act of an open ended game is between developing a story in game and managing the mechanics. To this end at least for what I had in mind I personally preferred more skill systems thus reducing the developing story a bit but the idea was to introduce randomness in other systems but reduce player frustration, specifically around that randomness, (making it clear and visible, well explained and communicated, and straightforward to manage) so they are willing to deal with a defect in their despite failure, for example don't introduce annoying game over states and don't just kill off the primary player character(s), instead try to defer as much of primary player character harm to be emotionally investing or to grow the character or player themselves. I've wondered as some solutions and I've been curious to try out my ideas to see if they are worth attempting and to see how effective they are at mitigating frustration and such things as save scumming. (which I think need to be solved design-wise, not mechanics-wise, what War Horse decided for example was a terrible manner of trying to solve save scumming without making the game actually better)

I hope that he inspires other creators to make great games. He has demonstrated without a doubt that this is possible even with a tiny team of developers. I bought the game on Kickstarter and I still play it today, I'm pretty bad at it, but even failure makes for a good story.

Very thoughtful, will happily watch.

Rimworld is one of my favorite games of all time. Stoked to watch this!

Hell yeah! been waiting for this! Tynan is a F****ing monster!

Problem: you want players to be emotionally engaged in characters but you want characters to die all the time for ridiculous reasons Solution: make players hate all characters

One of the more interesting GDC talks out there.

I didn't know that Gabe went into game design after Dunder Mifflin.

Also, really good call on the bubble sort. I think managing creeping or shifting bias while applying numbers. The numbers seem 'true', but they were written by past you. One reason I break up complexity estimation into relatively short time periods. Future me will know more. Value estimation is even harder to get write, even in non-gaming, pure data things. Ergo, it's probably much more reliable to do a constant buble sort on the list. Compare with what you know know.

The Story Generator concept is super interesting, I feel like the future of really great games, design wise will try to incorporate this concept as a its core mechanic. I've observed many huge titles try to implement something like this or have it as a core concept but bow out to their other lackluster conflicting mechanics that bog down the game as a whole instead of sticking to one design philosophy. For example most BGS titles like Skyrim or Fallout 4 focus on exploration as their emergent gameplay mechanic, "the player can go wherever they desire in this gigantic map and do whatever they wish." The structure of each playthrough is fairly unique, regardless if the content is exactly the same. Simultaneously creating a world that(due to their "player can go everywhere anytime" design structure) can't really be designed with a tangible progression of difficulty or structured engaging narrative. 9/10 times I play these games I completely ignore the main quest because the game is designed to allow me to or better put, the game with its set of rules hasn't given be a reason to care enough. And with stakes like the dragons are returning to destroy the world or your one and only son has been kidnapped before your very eyes, it just comes across as silly, illogical and completely unbelievable.

Honestly such an incredible presentation

I can't tell if this motivated me to work on my game or play rimworld more -__-

Bubblesorting good or bad ideas is a pretty good idea.

oh my oh my oh my! this makes me so happy!!!

This man is really intelligent, I understand so much of what is wrong with gaming today now

Remember that time the janitor with the bad back was throwing a tantrum and breaking shit from chronic pain? yeah, one of our corpse disposal guys responded with a Molotov to the face, which horrifically and irreparably scarred his face, and making the chronic pain worse. Not only that, the corpse disposal later got into art, and made a statue about the time he burned the janitors face off. We put it in the cantina.

I just ate without a table (-3) :(

I'm very hype for this video

It's interesting how some things changed in Rimworld from some of the attitudes he had in this talk. For instance, players ended up having a good amount of control over characters, or at least were able to override what characters were doing to have them do what the player wants on the fly. I'm not sure if difficulty levels were in the game at the time of this conference, but they were in the game after this for sure and some of the settings were meant for relaxed gameplay that wasn't intended for the player to lose. I have to wonder if his methodologies evolved and changed some since this talk, because it seem that way.

Damn. Rimworld is one of my favorite 'games' of all time. Close to 3k hours. Only now do I realize why. Tynan is genius. I hadn't realized the degree of conscious thought put into how the game does what it does, and what it doesn't do on purpose.

Wow, that was a really good talk, maybe one of the best I've seen.

so thats him...the mad lad. the legend. the gift that keeps giving. thanks you so much for this great game.

Amazing talk !

I love Rimworld! So cool to see this talk. I love making games as a hobby~

The only thing on Rimworld that was a let down on my exception is when I read of the "story teller" (coming from DF) I didn't think of it as a fancy name of the RNG, I thought similar to inscriptions in DF some (simple) AI that actually writes down a novel type story text of your colony... Right now the "story generator" actually doesn't create stories, it still needs the human to write a story about what they experienced in game.

When he was talking about developers putting enormous amounts of time into things that are really difficult and dont amount to much, all I could think about was Project Zomboid (still) spending years of dev time on animations. Glad devs have learned from that painful example.

Thanks for uploading that. It is nice to hear a creator letting us to get an idea of what and how it happened behind.

I loved this talk. Great insight into the developer's mind. This is what i'm subscribed to this channel for. If anyone else liked this check out Zach's (from Zachtronics and Spacechem) talk.

I see Tynan Sylvester, I like the talk

i remember my first game on rimworld, stray cats join my settlement, they mass breed, all of a sudden my mass food has gone... colonists start going a lil coocoo. cats go crazy eat my colonist. left with 20 evil cats around colony nobody alive but those evil cats... moral of the story cats are dicks.....get a dog

After Royalty and Ideology I can say Rimworld is one the best games I've ever played and that is along side gems like Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 7, Castlevania SotN and others

Its funny how they made a whole convention just to tell you why its better to stop save scumming

I went this entire speech without a table!

I’m glad I found this video it makes me happy and I love rimworld!

On my 279th 500% threat commitment run

I played 16 hours when I first picked up rimworld. I was confused, frusturated, annoyed, but was ok with the money I spent because I though the game deserved it, even if I didnt have that much fun. then Ideology came out and reminded me it existed... I put in 100 more hours since then... they have been very fun. Also shoutout to the hygiene mod and vanilla expanded, very nice.

amazing talk and gamedesign

Man, his overview/pitch of Rimworld was....not great lol. Game is a million times better than how he described it in the intro.

1:18 1st off this talk is surprisingly great. 2nd, this point makes me think of Starcraft which I'm playing/replaying right now. you are often fighting uphill battles just to survive a bit longer or race to an objective before you are overrun during the gameplay, and because you get to take turns playing as the 'bad guy' or good guy, you get to take turns being the underdog or oppressor :D

"Optimizing things that aren't slow" That hit me right in my noggin

11:55 ok old star wars nerds who else was like "YOU MEAN HIS ANT AND UNCLE" lol

I wish I never played this game, my life is entirely encapsulated by Rimworld and my colony’s struggle.

7:54 Neo is getting a hard pushback in the Matrix, but he is not starving to death, having a deadly desease while the doctor is having a tantrum spree and has to fight an incoming man hunter pack (at the same time)! That would be not a dispropriate pushback, but a bad Ending before the story has a chance to begin!

Yet if people were interested in story generators then everyone would be playing text adventures on NovelAI or ChatGPT. I think Tynan definitely had a goal in mind but the gamification of the story generator is definitely something in the core design of the game. Royalty, Biotech, and the very mechanics of the game (hoarding resources and skill progression and advanced weapons and armaments) all support encourage the player to climb the power ladder for the sake of continuity. The war crimes are definitely also quite gamey as people are doing it primarily for cash and not for roleplaying necessities... IDK. I play Rimworld because I like basebuilding and perfecting utopia like in Stellaris. The story generation is a side for me but idk about others.

Actually the game mechanics, numbers and gameplay is what i like the most. The 'emotions' and relationships are the worst and more annoying part of the game.

Rimworld is the best game in the past 10 years by far ! Pure epicness !

40:22 Is it possible to ship without it? *AAA industry* "YES"

i'm in love with this game

Only 7 minutes in and this has already sort of changed my perspective on the game. (I only just installed it a few days ago, but admittedly during that time I have obtained quite a lot of hours.) I have a really bad habit of ending up turning on developer mode and 'cleaning up' some mistakes or things I justified should not have happened or were unfair to me. I was aware of how Rimworld advertises itself as a 'story generator', but I wrote it down as mostly something used as an advertisiong gimmick, and didn't really thinki about how it affected the game. I'll try and have some runs where I disable dev mode near the start of the game and do a large run sometime soon. I always loved watching thigns from the sidelines, and some forms of micromanaging things can be interesting, like how I enjoy Prison Architect and logistics games (haven't played Factorio just yet), so I should try and just observe. Anyways this sounds cheesy and stupid and I just wrote my thoughts down or whatever, time to resume the video.

Came for game dev, leaving to play more Rimworld.

According to Stephen king, notebooks are the best way to keep a log of all your worst ideas. Little ideas come and go from your mind, but the good ones; the ideas that are worth using, those stick in your mind forever.

Omfg I just realized that the base in the thumbnail background is the one I built long ago 😮😍

That satisficing shopping way I have started doing that a while back now. Never truly understood why I changed. I thought I was just getting lazy in my old age. But your right it is less stress.

I now know this isn't the case, but I initially thought when he was commentating over the trailer at 0:25 the audio we were hearing was from the trailer, which makes it absolutely hilarious.

This dude a game designer and a philosopher!!

I love you Tynan!

Super helpful for us novice gamers! Thanks

when humility meets intelligence in game design

My current colony has an architect lady that is super pretty and an absolute goddess at anything art and construction but absolutely REFUSES to do any menial work, including simply transporting materials. She's also really antisocial. One of my other survivors, Chumbo, is a big, burly miner who's dumb as rocks and absolutely smitten with her. In any other game, the permanent mood drop Chumbo gets from getting romantically rejected on a near daily basis would be infuriating. In Rimworld, this is hilarious. Tynan managed to make a game/story generator where losing is fun and problems something to look forward to. Mad respect.

when people start asking the questions at the end, feels like tynan is standing in the republic senate

Underrated masterpiece

ya I kind of experienced that random failure on my first game where I had to defend against a raid thrice my colony size with only rifle drops from pirates and they did leave afterwards but all of my colonist died from bleeding cause none of them could walk or tend to themselves Xd

In rimworld a freaking skirrell can kill all you colony because you are afk but a 80 years old human can lift A FREAKING TRUMBHO

man this is underrated...

Its so legendary how hes using internet explorer

Love you Ty!