"You can't defeat your rude neighbor by repeatedly slapping him in the shin until he explodes" Thanks, I'll keep that in mind

I find it amazing that there have been people who have lived through a sign pole being shoved through their head, but some people die from having a tiny blood vessel being pinched.

P.S Rimworld is a fantastic game, this has a real feeling of "meatyness" they can lose an eye and as a result they lose shooting accuracy, they can bleed out, they can die from infection, it's quite brutal.

I love how a lot of these speakers are just as bad at speaking to a public as me. like 50% has some sort of stage fright and feels/speaks really awkward. but the talks are great none the less :)

Favourite line from this presentation: "...and your horse is like really sad cause he's like "I'm sorry guy, I didn't mean to kick you"."

Amazing talk. The speaker is genuinely interested and passionate about the subject at hand, and it really inspires you to think about alternative health systems. Tyriq, you have a new fan.

This person obviously didn't play Kenshi. I think the amount of joy he would get from the fact that you loose limbs and that healing takes time would be overwhelming...

Him: "Before anything, we are physical beings" Me: stops astral projecting - "ah right, almost forgot!"

These GDC talks are great. I'm surprised they aren't getting more views. It's kind of hard to get this kind of insight into game design in such a digestible way.

"We have one thing in common which is what we're made of" A fixed sized pool of hitpoints which are of little consequence until they hit zero?

In Banjo-Tooie there's a snow level where you can be transformed into a living snowball and your size actually does grow or shrink proportional to your health bar. In this form you restore health by rolling around in snow-covered ground, growing bigger in the process. So this has literally been played straight!

The first Fable kind of gave me that feeling, I didn't want to get scars on my character, but I was a kid and the simple mechanic took over my mind way easier.

"When was thelast time you felt breakable"? Baldur's Gate. The segment where you fight an assassin at an inn before going to the mines and then come back to find another, again at the inn. They attacked you when you were likely to be weakened and vulnerable- outside the inn when you were likely looking to rest your party. They were noteably stronger than enemies usually were at that stage of the game (offset by the city guards that would jump in to help you as long as you weren't a villain). But you were still very fragile and the fight was likely to knock out a party member (again, this was offset somewhat by a temple nearby to revive them). It was the first time I felt... Hunted...in a game.

Oregon Trail has an abstract system that defines the difficultly curve of the game. Games about endurance and will are too rare, but exist in literature: the hobbits in Mordor. I would love to see a game based around building morale and morale buffs: inns, crews, good food, sleep, warm nights, etc. Where finding a good place to sleep matters.

good talk but for the love of Christ why did noone get him a glass of freaking water.

This entire talk I was just thinking about Bushido Blade. They really need to remake that game. In that game you didn't have an HP bar, if your leg got injured you could no longer stand or run, and one blow from the enemy could kill you.

Now I can explain better what made me feel an play unusual health systems, like in Hybrid Heaven, MGS3 Snake Eater or Fallout series. And how they worked... or not. Thanks, Tyriq!

I think Uncharted did a really cool version of health that i've always kind of assumed for fps games which was that you died in essentially one shot, but the more you get "shot" is just a representation of your luck running out. Like it doesn't make sense that you can take and heal from an endless amount of bullets, but if you aren't getting hit and it just plays like the enemies are missing until you die kinda seems more legit.

Fantastic talk. The transition to Dwarf Fortress was perfect.

good old *operation flashpoint* had the best meat simulation i have ever played. getting shot in the legs... crawling to the mission end zone for like 45 minutes! xD

It would be cool to see more of these ideas applied to games, especially in VR. Lose an arm? The other hand controller stops working. Lose an eye? Depth-vision disappears. Lose sight entirely? Screen goes black, but you can still navigate by touch and sound. With the help of some more recent inventions, it's even possible to create sensations of temperature and weight. These could be turned into interesting and challenging game mechanics that would work especially well in the horror genre.

MEAT! I like the diminishing return question. Because It comes to a point that the mechanics overwhelm the players ability to have fun.

OH MY GOD ive always loved catacomb kids, i never bothered to look up the person that made it and he's awesome! great talk!

All the people giving him crap for the noises and whatnot should realize something: YOU are here typing away on his channel and mocking him or drawing attention to something you perceive is a failing. HE was on that stage at GDC giving a professional talk to other professionals in the industry. Not only is he succeeding at what he is aiming to do, but he is overcoming the nerve-wracking anxiety that comes with the weight of what he is actively doing. If he makes mistakes he is remembered for them. But he still manages to get his point across and his industry respects and values his opinions.

Dwarf Fortress models physiology and bodily injury amazingly well.

Somebody should play Arma / DayZ... One day I got sick from the rain and went through hospitals, schools, convenience stores, etc. trying to find cold medicine until I decided to lay down on a hill in the middle of the forest and fall to sleep (log out), and 9 hours later I woke up (logged in)...and my cold was gone. Or another time a friend of mine got injured and was bleeding out (DayZ Standalone), we couldn't find bandages or any of the stuff from the DayZ mod, so I thought "look I can't find a bandage, but I found an extra shirt... I wonder if" so I put it into my hands.. and I had the option to rip it, and so I did... and with several strips of cloth now in my inventory I applied one to my friend for a makeshift bandage on his arm. Once spent a week with a broken leg, can you imagine going through a zombie infested city like that? I don't have to, I did. Never found so many uses for useless items before in my life as noise makers and lures to lure them away from me before they find me. Accidentally swallowed disinfectant once when trying to use it to disinfect my wounds. Nausea, blurred vision, vomiting, my friend tried desperately to help but I couldn't hold still and at one point I couldn't tell him apart from the plant next to him. I fell unconscious and he was attacked during this. I remained unconscious, presumably assumed dead, some of my stuff raided. When I wake up I call out quietly, but there's no answer. My buddy is nearby murdered. Due to carry limitations, he still has some of his stuff so I collect it and in the next room I find the guy sorting what he found apparently trying to decide what was worth keeping and what he might come back for. Both of our backpacks are on the ground in front of him. I've got a shovel and a slight problem, my vision is black and white, blurred with trails, and the only reason I can tell the difference between him and our two backpacks is he's moving and I can hear zippers. Undetected, I took a swing...and hit a backpack. Thankfully in another couple of blind swings I managed to somehow kill him. Except... I killed my friend. In the scuffle I heard earlier, my friend was actually victorious. But his mic was muted by accident, so when I called out for him he replied but I couldn't hear it. He didn't "detect" me because why wouldn't he trust me, he knew I was there. Just not what I thought or was about to do. And I got him because he wasn't in a position to fight back and didn't want to hurt me. Meat... hard to find a better representation.

It's not often that a GDC talk leaves you to philosophize the nature of your physicality in an enlightening yet terrifying way. What a truly insightful bag of meat this man is. And his game is truly awesome too. This channel never ceases to present new and informative talks

Planetside 2 was a game with an interesting example of a time-cost for injury. Okay, technically, it was a time-cost for death. But in my few months of wandering around the game world as a ronin, squadless, I always found the really high time-cost to run from respawn to the active battlefields really interesting. I know squads have ways around that long run to the front lines, but just taking the hit was so much more interesting to me as a player. Having to learn the geography like that. Having to physically return to the heartland of your country when you got seriously injured, then transit back. It was a really unique take.

This makes me think about the Rimworld damage/health system. It is pretty detailed, including pain and disease among other things. Also you need hospital bed to heal people, and a recovery time that depends on the injury, the skill of the person performing the doctor role, and the quality of medicine available.

Was hoping for a mention of dwarf fortress!

My favorite system, that I've never seen in another genre/type, is the body map seen in pro wrestling games. Would love to see that in an action brawler or shooter, where an injured arm weakens your punches, or injured legs means reduced mobility. You could have injured abs or pecs cause a character wince or freeze.

Nice talk! He should play overgrowth. Seeing as health is one of the most fundamental mechanics of games, it would be nice to see more games experiment with the idea, though right now it would probably take a few small games whose focuses would be on exploring their own health mechanics before other games could take inspiration from them. I can see more rouge-lites in the future perhaps taking inspiration from the binding of issac, who came up with the interesting idea of turning your health into a commodity that can be traded in. I would also believe it if it turned out that the new doom game took inspiration from bloodborne's health mechanics showing that killing enemies to restore one's health leads players to play more aggressively. I know these are more abstract than what the talker is calling for, but along with a call for realism, I think there should be a more general call for greater experimentation with health, as it has to be one of the most play style defining mechanics out there and too often games just rely on either health bars or regenerative health to signify harm.

Man, really wish he brought up the game NEO Scavenger. Has a nice balance between simplification and simulation, imo. The combat and enemy health system is also just brutal and merciless.

There's something unpleasant about lip smacking, particularly when the focus is on people being meat. Every smack is a reminder of his meatiness. Of his wet, moist meat audibly slapping together and sticking to itself. It's like his meaty meat is meeting meatily right next to my ears, which coincidentally are also made of meat. It's a cavalcade of unsettling horrors all the way down, I tell you I do appreciate the discussion though, I think health system are important and they don't get enough focus! Most people have just switched to regen systems and called it good.

I'm glad this guy mentioned Dwarf Fortress. It tackles these issues like no other game I have ever seen. You can end up with everything from missing teeth or an infected finger nail to permanent motor nerve damage in your left hand after a dog bites it and latches on. You could be blinded. You could get legs or arms lopped off or you could suffer less deep tissue injury due to the fact you were fat or buff and the extra tissue absorbed the force from the blow.

I like the dwarf fortress representation. I think many RPGs could benefit of having multiple thresholds to represent human condition like pain, consciousness, physical trauma and loss of blood. These can be impacted by various ways and can interact as systems. Too much pain will take away consciousness for example

One of the best GDC talks I've ever watched. Good effort!

Where is the "this is not a roguelike, its a roguelite" comment?

Sweet talk. I never considered rethinking the whole health bar system.

Not strictly a health system (although a long term consequence for failing at challenges, so technically, maybe it is?) but Sid Meier's Pirates from 2004 played with time in these ways! The game runs on a clock, in part to simulate the Caribbean sandbox, but mostly to keep track of the character's age, as he becomes more sluggish and difficult to play as he grows old, and is forced to retire from sailing at a certain age. So the challenge for the player is to get as much done as quickly as possible before the end game becomes literally too difficult to complete. There are three instances that I can remember where time is spent to recover from failure. One thing is that crew morale can drop based on time spent at sea and gold earned, and the only real way to fix it is to dock and divide plunder, which not only splits your money up and forces you to hire new crew, but your peeps decide to spend six months on land to have some fun. A penalty that you really start to feel if you have to do it frequently. Second, if you lose a battle at sea, you become marooned, and your character has to waste a number of months (randomized I think?) on a tiny island until a passing ship finds him. This penalty can be directly affected by having purchased a signaling mirror or flare beforehand that will increase the chance of being found faster. And lastly, attempting to sneak around in a hostile city and being found by the guards gets you thrown in prison for a few months. There's a chance to affect this time spent, also, as sometimes a guard will accept a bribe after a certain time, or if you've acquired a lockpick ahead of time you can attempt to sneak back out. With the chance of being caught once more, of course, so maybe it's smarter to wait!

Kingdom Come Deliverance does this really well. Even at higher levels, you can get overwhelmed by several "weaker" NPCs if you are not careful. You cant just tank the damage as a meat shield, you need to position and keep moving.

This was an amazing talk. One of my favorite GDC talks that I have seen.

Rimworld IMO has a lot of the simulation approach to health and it is really well done.

Ive been thinking of Kenshi through the whole talk, its entire health system is based on this simulated and simplified meatyness that makes each wound different and the recovery crucial

Favorite health system in games: Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress

This is one of the most interesting, genuinely funny talks I've seen on this channel. Well done 👏🏻 Also, I ate a cheeseburger while I watched this lol

Thank you! This was great. I think it runs beyond games into movies and popular culture. What holds real people back from extreme violence is our understanding of fragility. When games remove that fear, what are we left with?

One problem I would say from a gameplay standpoint is: chronic seriously debilitating injury isn't fun. Having a character that has to play around their injuries is fun. Having a player that *can't* play around their injuries isn't. If your character will never leave the hospital again you probably aren't gonna play them. If you anticipate that non-speedrunner players will reset if they get a certain debuff, it is a bit questionable if that should even be a debuff at all rather than an instant kill unless there is some way to heal it or work around it.

What an exceptional talk. I could listen to this person discuss game ideation/theory more.

I immediately thought of ARMA, specifically the injury and healing systems as employed by ShackTac in dslyecxi's videos, where the impacts of injuries to specific extremities are modeled, including fatigue and pain, and the degrees to which things can and can't be healed.

This GDC talk has always left an ich in the back of my mind for what could be possible in a shooter. After three years of mulling this over and over I've started a dive into a shooter that makes you scared to get shot.

Great speech & presentation. I really appreciate your thoughts on the subject! Very inspiring.

Very cool talk! It occurs to me that games don't have to have a fixed position in the abstraction/simulation/simplification triangle. These can be varied for artistic effect or game play. One example for artistic effect is in Dark Souls when Sif starts to limp if you get his health low enough. It's an impactful moment for many Souls fans and builds a unique sympathy for the boss.

I remember Vagrant Story had an interesting status mechanic. Enemies can target your limbs and you the same. If your limb is indicated red(after taking damage), it would yield different effects per limb. Head: cannot cast magic(silence) Right arm: attacks do 1/2 damage Left arm: blocks & evasion is halved Body: received damage is 200% Legs: movement speed is reduced by 1/2. It was an “interesting” system, although it quickly negated by a healing item.

The guy who asked the last question left me thinking that the concept of the Grumbles' lore of twins is a form of "meatness" unrelated to health systems. I wonder if he meant to ask if Tyriq also thought of meatness as a concept outside of health systems and if that was an example of it. Excellent talk Tyriq!

Thanks for mentioning Dwarf Fortress. It is key in this discussion.

At the beginning, I thought the speaker was quite eloquent. Then he reveals the "game he's working on", Catacomb Kids, which is one of my favorite games ever! Time to sit up and listen :D

Health system where every-time you smack your lips you lose a hit-point

Maybe I'm old, but the game that immediately comes to mind regarding simulating "meatiness" is Robinson's Requiem from the mid-90s.

It should always be mentioned in cases like this that Space STation 13 works a lot like Dwarf Fortress in this way, and is considerably easier to play.

one of the most enjoyable talks i saw on GDC =) i like this guy, i see real passion for games in what he think and talk about ) PS: doing rouglike too atm ) browser, flash )))

One option might be brutally simplistic simulation. That is, have a few key systems simulated as simple numbers. You've got things like sleep, stress, circulation, digestive system, respiration, immune system, muscle, liver, CNS, Skeleton and skin. A handful of floating point numbers each all interacting with each other and you've got an incredibly dynamic system. A multidimensional possibility space with many different possible equilibria. Whatever they are, the important thing isn't what they are, nor even how they work, but how they interact. Even if you are literally simulating the four humors, losing a lot of blood could have meaningful, if rather alien, consequences, with meaningful, if rather alien, forms of recovery.

Nice talk! Deus ex did exactly the same thing of localised damage really well

There's this one simple game called "payblood" where you have a TON of individual body parts with their own health. Between fights you can sell the parts to buy weapons, and each loss effects you very noticeably. If you lose a foot or leg your speed goes down, you lose both arms and you can't attack

This was a great talk! I loved it! Very well structured, almost poetic!

I don't know if it was my biology professor, but someone said, we're electrified meat. It's true, we're meat. But what makes us interesting is the electricity. Without that, we're what's called dead.

Amazing talk and great insights! Love your passion and will be checking out Catacomb Kids soon. All the best!!!

Fantastic talk, great conceptualisation. Lots of food for thought. I can see this affecting some of my future design choices, thank you.

Health in games is usually just a type of score tally - like a point score in many real world sport matches. Not an actual representation of body function. Makes sense from a gameplay perspective.

I've been thinking about this recently and it's cool to see I'm not the only one ;P

This talk reminded me how much I like the health system in wurm. individual body part damage, minor wounds heal, severe wounds get worse, treatment and healing can take hours, location of damage effects stats, and type of wound (cut/bruise) affects what treatments can be done. you can have minor damage all over your body that almost killed you but will heal by itself or have a single hole in your foot that will fester can kill you if you don't get expert care.

Random youtubeness got me here - and laziness left me watching. I'm glad it did. Well presented and actually a subject I never considered. Aspects clearly and remarkably well presented. A "good think" piece. Thumbs up.

Makes me think of Rimworld and how much I love (and occasionally hate) its health system

very well done presentation, perfectly simple to understand whats going on

Such a great talk, I need this now

Klicked expecting DF to be mentioned and was really relieved when it was.

Great talk! BTW, I only noticed he smacked all of the time after ending the presentation, wow.

He should try the Romance of the three kingdoms games. Birth, Age, and Death all are involved in that series.

Asking in the local pharmacy for a healing potion will get you weird looks.

If you want a good human body / wound/defect/aging/healing simluation in an interesting setting, play Rimworld. It's probably the best recent game out there that uses this extensively and in a way, that makes it matter. Enjoyed that talk very much, btw.

did this guy do another talk at gdc about the level generation in catacomb kids? I kinda remember that, also a great talk.

I would say there is one layer of abstraction beyond health, and that is the one hitpoint wonder, i.e. boolean health. You are either dead, or alive. Everything either kills you, doesn't, or has a finite probably of killing you, but you store no additional health state information besides being dead or alive. It might be that a sword hit from above has a 50% chance to instagib vs one from below which has a 20% chance, but, fundamentally, either way, there are only two outcomes. Dead or fine.

this is exactly what i'm missing in games. one thing though, is that i think there should also be not just the physical but also the mental, where your character has wants and needs... if we do this we can bring role-playing back. punishments for meeting your mental wants and needs would be depression, which makes it harder to do other stuff...

Been thinking about this for years. Primal Rage was an early example of representing health as literal blood. When your character runs out of health the heart then explodes and your character collapses.

I really want to hear an update or response to this subject from someone who plays RPGs. I feel like there is a lot of ground not covered. Bandages have definitely been used in games to stop bleeding before. Its more common now but it was not unseen before.

YOOOOO Imagine a game where weakening the player is what causes the difficulty curve Like imagine a metroidvania power-set at the start of the game, and slowly taking it away for harder and harder levels

Regenerating health is a game mechanic that was popularised because larger companies wanted to cater to a younger audience in action games. Because the noticed that kids had trouble solving the "find medkits" issue. That was pretty much a big driving force behind it. Activision and EA for example wanted gamers under the recommended age to play their games. :(

Great presentation and the title was spot on

Great talk, but there’s one point that could have been dwelt on more: how to make this work more from a practical, business point of view. He certainly talked about it, but if you pay attention to the questions at the end almost every one of them related to this. I like what he was saying about the two survival games! Building a game from the ground-up like this would be very powerful, but a system like this is pretty intense. Like procedural generation it can be a bear to properly do but if it’s the goal from the beginning it can work. Also: many games are far too enemy-centric so this could be a problem. In life our struggles are far more complex than just combat (and that side almost never even emerges for a lot of people) so that’s why the damage of stress, financial failures, social difficulties, and so on have such interesting, varying effects. Death is so instant yet so fleeting in games; I think that’s the biggest problem with health trying “meatiness”, but a problem that can be overcome nonetheless. I will say that his statement about this sort of system never really becoming widespread is about as short-sighted as saying we could never get a machine to fly. Not to be antagonistic or anything: I’m just saying that this talk could be way more ahead of his time than he thinks!!

Made Out of Meat: Water Systems in Mouths

I'd say most Space Station 13 codebases fit into the "simulation" aspect of this presentation. It IS vastly simplified, with damage being mainly divided into four categories (brute, burn, toxin, suffocation), but considering it still manages to simulate blood levels, amputation and replacement of limbs, etcetera.

Fallout (1, 2), 1997 they didn't track individual body parts HP but your character could've get injured Evil Islands: Curse of the Lost Soul, 2001 had HP system that tracked your body part damage, and this affected your character's ableness Dwarf Fortress, I can't tell exactly since when, but for a very long time they have a very complex health system that makes you feel really fragile in an adventurer mode So sad the speaker never heard of those.

I was expecting a discussion about the many different existing health systems in video games and how to design them, something similar to Mark Brown's Doom video, but it was more of a introduction of the "meaty health systems" idea.

Great talk, great point, would love to see a bit more discussion on how to balance this need to make "meaty" player bodies (which is quite essential in inspiring empathy and generating suspense) and keeping the gameplay fun and difficulty-balanced (that is, how to make sure your sustained damage don't lead to difficulty spikes that are uncrossable cus most games are not roguelikes and if you place an uncrossable difficulty spike before the player they get mad). Also, dude you talk great but it feels like you're constantly snacking on your tongue or something...

I like how Bushido Blade handled health and limbs failing

Got me thinking about other ways we should make fighting more meaningful in games. Dopeu

that last "question" though

The answer to the first question: Everyone wants a more visceral experience. As games become easier to make and simulations get easier due to hardware increases I feel like we'll see more realistic characters that react more truly to the world around them. Part of which will be a meatier experience.

Make the hospital phase the main point of the game, or a special half of it. Great way to relax between missions, and as you go along, you get more and more gifts from allies, friends, and family to fill your hospital room. During downtime you can buy things like boardgames, flowers, paintings, or radios in town with ingame currency, and those would go in your hospital room and then home between combat missions. so the flow would be: combat mission report to employer hospital stay, (if injured more severely, it lasts longer, and will overlap with the report, as your employer cares about you too and visits you in the hospital) free time, you get to walk around town, go to restaraunts and shops, and spend time relaxing at home phone call from employer combat mission

Long live Headshot mechanics!