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RimWorld: Contrarian, Ridiculous, and Impossible Game Design Methods

GDC Festival of Gaming · talk · Watch on YouTube

Game design

What it is

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 Hacker News recommends it

Recommended as an accessible talk on emergent narrative and on how RimWorld was designed, and cited in threads on simulation games.

  • 2 people recommended it
  • 2 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “Strong recommend, if only to understand how RimWorld was designed and built.”

    Accessible talk explaining how RimWorld was designed

    ecdavis, 2022-06 · Strong recommendation · in “Citybound – A city building game using actor-based distributed simulation”

  2. “great thoughts on this in the early part of his GDC talk on building a 'story generator' rather than a game”

    Building a story generator and using apophenia in game design

    jameshart, 2021-09 · Recommendation · in “Games that emphasize emergent narrative”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: rimworld, emergent narrative, story generator, gdc, simulation games

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