RNG

At the heart of every game is a dice roll. It's easy to see the influence of the dice in RPGs, whose roots in Dungeons & Dragons can't even be concealed by massive anime hairdos and inconceivably large swords. Other genres aren't quite so obvious: racing games and other simulations seem to hinge on perfectly realised physics, where every action is met with an equal, opposite and predictable reaction. But it's there. No matter what you play, at some level you're at the mercy of the RNG.

Random number generation is something I've had to use for work occasionally; you'd be surprised just how much animation and graphic motion can be compelled from the sheer force of numbers. Some animations can impose a beautiful order to the chaos of RNG, while some wiggle and wobble, revelling in the unpredictability. In games there's a fine balance between using RNG well or letting it ruin the careful balance of gameplay.

Unsurprisingly, Dreams has been the spark for this line of thinking. I've banged on about Dreams a lot over the past few months, but only because I've found my mind starting to wonder at the possibilities of what it can create.

Every idea I have though has some sort of random aspect to it, because I feel a little bit of chaos goes a long way to making a game more interesting. I want to make something satisfyingly predictable but also unpredictability fun. Easy, right?

Well, it can so very easily go wrong. Castlevania Dawn of Sorrow counts as one of my favourite games in the series, but I fell victim to two curses while playing it: the curse of RNG and the dreaded curse of the Completionist Gamer. You know that one. It's the curse that compels you to tick off every box in the list of doable, obtainable things in a game no matter the cost. In Dawn of Sorrow's case I needed to harvest a soul from a baddie to forge a big sword. God I wanted that sword. But the drop rate for this one soul was about 1% - a deadly RNG curse itself.

But the enemy also had such high defence that even my strongest weapon barely scratched 1HP from its health.

A more sensible person would have just made do without, but I was not that person. For hours, days even I entered and re-entered the lair of the baddie, killing it to no avail then making it regenerate before attempting again. Finally, the mighty RNG god decided his soul could be mine, and I swiftly upgraded my sword, getting an endorphin hit that lasted about 5 seconds before I realised I wastes valuable actual time in my actual life.

I still love Dawn of Sorrow, of course, but I won't be doing that again anytime soon.

Game design is a tricky business, and I have nothing but admiration for the skill and talent required to carefully balance a game's dependence on RNG to give it the secret sauce that makes it tick.