THE VIDEO SHELF · game design
RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods
RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester explains at GDC 2017 how Ludeon framed the game as a story generator rather than a game. He covers the design methods that came out of that frame.
Why HN readers recommended it
Recommended as an accessible talk on emergent narrative and on how RimWorld was designed, and cited in threads on simulation games.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- GDC Festival of Gaming
- Topic
- game design
- Format
- talk
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 9
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2020–2026
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
It's very accessible. If you can grok the first 30 minutes of this talk you can grok the book: [VIDEO] Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.
ecdavis on Hacker News · 2022-06
In Citybound – A city building game using actor-based distributed simulationTynan Sylvester (creator of Rimworld, and author of "Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences") has some great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game. He talks about 'apophenia' - the propensity …
jameshart on Hacker News · 2021-09
In Games that emphasize emergent narrative
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.
