Sandbox Games Narratives

It's interesting, because I was always a bit confused and annoyed by the Giant's Drink/Mind Game that Ender plays in Ender's Game. It just always felt so different to how games I knew played, it felt odd that he would "discover" things that the developers hadn't intended, because I always just thought "wait, someone had to build that into the game just in case he happened to do that one specific thing?" Or if it was implied that they didn't do th

Easier said than done. I assume you have no prior experience on professional game development? Many game designers tried to tame chaos as a game mechanic in the name of "emergent gameplay" and only a few of them survived through numerous iterations in an extremely limited format. I would recommend you to do your own research before making such a bold statement. It is not that people cannot come up with the same idea; many cases they tried it and there's a good reason not to do tha

The mechanics lend themselves to a sandbox with no primary narrative

The trailer implies that these games offer worlds of boundless possibility, what it really is, is worlds with a bunch of generated primitives and sliders to change some numerical parameter. It's not that the trailers for these games lie, it's just we subconsciously expected more.To achieve what we expect, the programmer needs to implement features that allow emergent gameplay and unpredictable situations to arise alongside procedurally generated settings. There are few single player

this sounds really cool. some of my favorite games are essentially sandboxes (mount & blade, pirates), and I like the idea of taking the sandbox and building in non-trivial, non-artificial non-deterministic stories.

It really depends on the type of game you play. There are a TON of open ended 'sand box' type games that don't do any of those things (City Builders, MineCraft, Factorio, etc).

I think that's a common problem for most games - at least it is for me.The cool thing about Dyson Sphere Program is there is so much to do in it, you can create your own end game scenarios.Also just because the blueprints are there, you don't have to use them. It does feel like cheating sometimes!

Say goodbye to originality in games

Yes, you can use your imagination to do whatever you want in the game, that's the point. It's like a sandbox. It will generate new characters and adapt to you. Yet, if you want to win it, you have to try to achieve its goal.

Not so much that he (he's made several games like that) is oblivious to it, but more that it's the most easy thing to simulate in games, and also what people expect. You can do better, as games like Untertale or KSP demonstrate. But it takes a special kind of person.