Hello and welcome to another episode in the Godot basics tutorial series. In this episode we will be taking a look at randomness now as a game designer or someone who thinks about game designing. We can categorize randomness in games into two categories. The first category is called input randomness and the second category is called output randomness input randomness also referred to as pre look is basically the randomness or luck that happens before your player has a chance to make decisions in a game. For example input randomness could be the randomness on who starts their turn in a game. A more popular example would be the cards dealt to you as the player in poker before you as a player can make decisions in poker you must first be dealt a random set of cards spelunking is a great example before the player can control the main character a procedurally generated cave is created for you.

In this case the generation of the cave is the input randomness. It is only until after you are put into the randomly generated cave that you the player are able to control your main character output randomness also referred to as Post luck is basically the randomness or luck that happens after your player makes a decision. A great example is the Dungeons and Dragons game. When you encounter an enemy in dungeons and dragons you have many choices. You can choose to run. You can choose to talk to the creature and try to seduce it or you can attack the creature but no matter what decision you make after you make your decision. You need to grow a pair of dice in order to determine if what you want to do is successful. In this case if you were to choose to attack a creature you must first row a dice to see if your land hit.

In this case the example is considered output randomness. The rolling of the dice which is your random event happens after the player makes their decision. A great example of output randomness is the enemy encounter in x com. In this case your player is able to make any decision they want. However for the particular game functionality of attacking an enemy you are given a percentage. This is your output randomness you the player must first make the choice of attacking before the game can apply the random event in this case the randomness is whether your attack lends or miss what makes X come so interesting is that even though you have a 100 percent chance of hitting your enemy the game internally adds certain calculations to make sure that your 100 percent is never really 100 percent.

In this case the game design decision means that you the player are never safe from output randomness. When you decide to attack an enemy. Moving on now in game design. The reason we want to implement some sort of randomness whether input or output is three things. One is surprise two is unpredictable outcomes and the last reason is that both surprise and unpredictable outcomes do present your player a challenge. And players tend to like challenges. I won't go into too much detail about game design theory and how randomness helps but just keep in mind that randomness does add a benefit to your game design. Well that's all I have for you in this episode. Thank you so much for joining me on top of that I'm also gonna put down a link that I started working on. It's a Trello page and has different types of YouTube channels and videos sectioned off based on game genres. So please feel free to take a look at that if you're curious at watching other YouTube channels.

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