How would you make turn based battles more engaging? (Aside from the mechanics that the mario and luigi and paper mario series use?)

In my current opinion the key is to have a much wider separation between optimal decisions and suboptimal or terrible decisions and to have these change on a turn-by turn basis. To really make Turn Based Battles more engaging, you need to make it more about the player evaluating the circumstance and needing to judge what options are best for the situation. These need to change turn by turn so that the player rethinks on a continual basis, so they are engaged in the primary challenge.

How do you do this? First, options need to have tradeoffs versus other options. If you have a clear sorting order, like a bunch of JRPGs that have Bolt1 Bolt2 Bolt3 or something along those lines, you end up with people using the most powerful option most of the time. There need to be other variables and dimensions to options besides how much HP damage they output in order to make them worthwhile over your most damaging option. In SMT, attacks that hit opponent’s weaknesses also gain turns for you, turns are another dimension of advantage that can ultimately translate into more damage than simply your most damaging option at that moment. (though obviously the problem here is that hitting their weakness usually is your most damaging option, then you gain a turn on top of that, so not the best example).

Ultimately what determines who wins in a turn based RPG is who can output the most damage, so everything comes down to either doing the most damage every turn, or setting up a circumstance in the future where you can output even more damage than you are now, while also balancing these against your survival. So the most basic tradeoff is dealing damage versus healing it, then dealing a lot of damage now versus more later, versus healing. Most traditional stat buffs in JRPGs are basically things that allow you to deal more damage in one way or another. You get direct damage buffs, which increase your damage on later turns, speed buffs which mean you attack faster, dealing damage more frequently, ultimately dealing more damage, accuracy buffs, which mean missing less which is more damage, etc.

So the questions to ask are, how can I make an option tempting that isn’t one of these existing options without making that option the only one people want to pick? How can I make people want to pick a different option every turn? How can I make someone want to prioritize different targets every turn? What other resources besides enemy HP and own HP can we make the player compete with enemies over?

Some basic ways of doing this are decay cycles, having things drop off in effectiveness over time, like how buffs in SMT expire after 3 turns, so they need to not only have a turn spent on applying them, but also need to be reapplied periodically, which can eat out of damage output in the short term. The Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World games have enemy power grow by 10% every turn to stress efficiency, so if you can’t take out enemies fast enough, you will end up with enemies that can annihilate you, so long term setup strategies are not always as good as getting in that blast of damage to eliminate an enemy damage source this turn.

Other ideas are having things become good and bad on cycles, then making sure the options have orthagonal benefits to each of them so they’re tempting even during cycles where they’re bad over the options which are good that cycle. I’ve never seen this one done before.

Enemies can be spread out and attacks can have different hit areas so that you might be forced to hit certain enemies along with other enemies, and not get the optimal effect where you want it to. So like you might hit the weak to fire enemy with the brunt of your blast, but also the absorb fire enemy gets the second most intense part of the damage splash, healing it, so you might have done a really big net damage to the enemy group, but still healed that one pesky fire absorbing enemy. one ability might only affect every other member of a group, two enemies might be adjacent and needed to be killed on the same turn to die, so you can’t use that ability to kill them, but you can use it to hurt the one that’s ahead in life so they’re within range of each other.

It’s all about coming up with tradeoffs like that, and enemies that play off those tradeoffs.

I kind of like this question because it demonstrates a real predictive quality of game design theory in an area that is very abstract conceptually. I can talk about what the potential answers to this question would look like even without giving specific answers.

How should stats affect gameplay in rpgs? Having them make the character stronger just makes the game easier so, do you have any alternatives?

As opposed to affecting what else? Appearance?

I know I already largely covered this topic in a previous post: https://critpoints.wordpress.com/2015/05/29/do-you-think-the-souls-games-would-be-better-if-they-werent-rpgs/

On the other hand, grinding versus not grinding can be like a form of self imposed challenge, but that doesn’t really tend to work out.

The alternative is not having stats make the character strictly stronger, only different, but that makes it so stats are no longer a form of positive feedback. Continue reading →

What elements make a good horror game?

I swear I answered this a long time ago, or something like it. I was definitely involved in a podcast on it. My view is, you need to create an environment of high risk, selectively limited information about incoming threats, and rules consistent enough to get used to, but inconsistent enough to surprise you. Playing Penumbra, I wasn’t scared by the dogs, I was scared of when the dogs did something I didn’t expect. The dogs established tension, but it’s like a joke, not knowing where the punchline will come from is what creates fear and terror. I went through a wooden door early on, leaving a dog behind me, then I pushed a barrel in front of it so the dog couldn’t get through. What scared me was the dog pushing the door open along with the barrel, I never saw it coming.

So first, players need to be familiar with the threat, this is the setup. They need to know how dangerous the enemies are, they need to know how tight their chance is to escape, they need to have a sense of when they’re in trouble. A lot of horror games try to do this with dialogue, text, scenery, etc. Spray blood on the walls, it’ll be fine. I have no heart, so I don’t really care about any of this stuff. I played a horror game once that measured my heart rate, making the rooms do more and more spooky shit as my heart rate went up, and killing me if it went high enough. I never got to see any of the effects of a higher heart rate. http://store.steampowered.com/app/342260/ (here it is on steam if you care) I know nothing is really going to hurt me as long as I’m calm, even within the game world, so I’m unaffected. In-game cues of danger only work if you have an association between that thing and actual danger, so a spooky diary entry by itself doesn’t work unless the association has been built up.

I was a LOT more spooked by the Sa-X in Metroid Fusion as a kid, particularly this encounter. The Sa-X is set up in prior encounters really well, it will murder you if you step into sight, and it has a very distinct audio cue associated with it, as well as a spooky theme, so even though you haven’t dropped down to encounter it yet, you know it’s waiting for you down there.

You need to train the player to recognize cues that there is a threat, and associate those with an actual threat. Like Witches in Left4Dead. Then you need to make the cues less consistent with the presence of a threat, so that players can’t predict correctly anymore, and become scared of the cue in absence of the threat, which makes the threat itself scarier when it actually is present.

Good horror is using mechanics to make the player afraid, creating expectations and subverting them. Blindside them, and force them into threatening situations they don’t want to deal with. Use RNG to mix things up, especially when backtracking. Let them have weak tools that cannot completely halt the threat, like the ice missiles on the Sa-X. Also fuck Dead Space.

What mechanics do you think Platinum could use for their upcoming TMNT game?

I guess not weapon switching, since the turtles are pretty set in their weapon preferences. Maybe they could experiment with tag team stuff, a la sengoku basara or four swords adventure? Could take some inspiration from Ninja Gaiden perhaps, using projectiles to link juggle combos, guard breaking moves strategically sprinkled around each turtle’s moveset, and blocking + dodge out of block + counter attack out of blockstun? Also more command moves, less combo chains because I always ask for this and never quite get it.

I think they should avoid witch time, blade mode, wicked weave/vehicle finisher, and try something new. The main character/support character damage system from W101 would make sense here, only take real damage on the main character selected, other characters can get stunned and need to be picked up. All four characters could have separate health bars, maybe regen health akin to marvel or skullgirls when swapped out to keep people switching.

Maybe you can’t cancel, but you can switch in turtles at any time, while the previous one finishes their attack, which is effectively like a cancel. Allow some moves to be canceled late in their animations into shuriken to link combos together, have a lot of launchers be weak ones midcombo on some chains, so you gotta land some tight links to have it work.

We’ll see what they actually end up doing in like a year.

What makes a great mobility system in videogames?

Different mobility systems accomplish different things. Mirror’s edge has a great mobility system relative to the level design of the game, much like Mario 64 does for those levels, Tribes needs a large hilly landscape to really work out, where Quake/Half Life/unreal tournament has one that works for nearly anything.

Everything well designed in games is a microcosm of the trends that create depth. It’s about how many elements of the system remain relevant and non-redundant.

Also interesting to note is the way that movement mechanics can have synergy with other mechanics, like in the case of FPS games, shooting. Mirror’s Edge, Quake, and Half Life all have very poor synergy with shooting, because they all require you to aim your mouse precisely to move fast, either because mouse movement itself controls your speed, or because you need to look at environmental objects, like walls, or the cursor’s position is affected by the movements. If you want to move fast in these games, you need to make a choice between moving fast or shooting accurately, though you can switch very quickly and in half life/quake’s case, you can make occasional shots without losing speed. Unreal Tournament and Tribes by contrast have very strong synergy between advanced movement and shooting. Unreal Tournament allows you to dodge in 4 directions regardless of your mouse orientation, so you can usually dodge around in the middle of a fight without requiring you to stop aiming. In Tribes, you carry your momentum forwards, leaving you totally free to aim while moving fast. Gunz is another good example of this, with movement controls similar to UT, allowing players to focus their fire on their opponents most of the time, especially true given the weapon of choice is shotgun, which gives you a bit of time between shots to look away for advanced movement purposes. Imagine Quake bunnyhops with UT dodges. Fast elegant cross-map movement with viable dodging during firefights. Someone should make that combination, I’m amazed Toxikk didn’t see the opportunity.

Smash Bros Melee, and especially Project M, have an awesome system of interlocking relationships between their movement techniques. Everything has different levels of commitment, range, speed, utility, leaving a ton of tradeoffs. Project M has a few techniques like reverse aerial rush and B-reverse that fill in some gaps Melee left behind. Though crawling is just plain fucked up, especially on Sheik who has an even lower crouch than in Melee.

I’m hoping to make a video on Mirror’s Edge’s movement system in depth in the near future, that should illustrate a bit of what I’m talking about.

What’s with open world games and why don’t people make good ones?

Hmm, this is just a guess on my part, but I think it’s that when you make an open world game, the focus is on the open world, which maybe detracts from the focus on the other elements. Open world has some implicit assumptions in the development process that probably negatively impact the game’s design, because of a need to create a ton of content, even if a lot of that content is recycled. The implicit thought is probably, “What are we making, and how much value can we get from every piece of content we make?” How many times can it be reused? This is something that developers think of in regular games too of course, but in open world games it’s especially emphasized.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php
A lot of my thoughts on this matter are derived from this by the way.

In general I think that the value in a game lies in the core gameplay mechanics and level design more than the amount of content. Open world is a style of content presentation and level design that comes with expectations about the amount of content, so the main things tend to take a hit. In open world games, the assumption is that you can access most of the points of interest at any time without roadblocks. Progression becomes modeled based on whether certain events have been completed rather than whether you have physically accessed new areas, and left the old ones behind you.

Open world games, like Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, seem to demand you search for a billion trinkets scattered everywhere to get whoknowswhat. MGSV’s side ops and animal collection were lousy with this. This type of stuff tends to exist to inflate the gameplay time, and leads to the game overstaying its welcome as you need to play through the same content over and over again.

On the fun side, you get Just Cause 2, which I think is one of the best open world games I’ve ever played, barring some of the story missions. Hell, story missions in a lot of these are kind of a blight, they set up specific goals typically and don’t let you do other things until you exit the mission, typically returning you to an in-mission checkpoint if you die, fail, or stray. In the case of the Far Cry games, assaulting the various outposts is way more fun than the story missions, which practically seem unrelated. However in MGSV’s case, the story missions were usually more fun than wandering around the map, because they changed the patrol patterns for those and gave them more thought.

Meanwhile Bethesda games don’t really have the same mission or collectible structure at all, and I guess that’s pretty nice on their part actually, just the level design kinda sucks, as does combat with enemies.

This mod has way more care put into its one room than any other area in Skyrim.

Lemme collect my thoughts a little:

Good open world games: Far Cry Blood Dragon, JC2, MGSV, Zelda 1, Infamous 1
Bad open world games: anything by Bethesda, Asscreed
Inbetween: Far Cry 3, Minecraft, Witcher 3

Elements I like: being able to freeroam anywhere, multiple angles to attack objectives from, route planning across the world to hit hotspots,

Elements I dislike: Collectathon style padding, big flat open uninspired level design, sandboxed mission structure (as in, forcibly made separate from the rest of the game, whether by actual geometry constraints, or rules forcing you to follow the mission)

MGSV did something sort of clever in the way they built the world, the mountains serve to funnel the world into these lanes, so you kind of have to pass by most bases in a sort of linear fashion, giving the designer a bit more control, allowing them to funnel you into their level design challenges, so you can’t always go around everything.

Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon both have shitty story missions that are linear, but they both have really nice capturing of outposts.

It’s nice to have some element of collection driving you across the map, but if you split up the stuff to be collected too much it gets exhausting. It would be better to try to consolidate that aspect a bit so challenges could be a bit more loosely focused on locations instead of sweeping over and collecting literally everything possible. Set some limits on how many times you make someone return to the same place, maybe 1-3 times so they don’t get worn out on it. Try making the collectable elements more important. The places of power in Witcher 3 are pretty nice, a lot of the other collectable things on the map are trash. I enjoy going across the map collecting things, but I don’t enjoy finding out that all of it is just junk, that makes me personally get fatigued, because I’m out there collecting tons of junk.

Just Cause 2 had a cool way of doing it, you had to go around the map blowing stuff up, which caused the enemy to attack you and call in reinforcements. Awesome core dynamic. Then there’s a ton of little things to destroy that don’t net you much chaos (it’s like a currency that goes up and unlocks new stuff when you have enough, including missions), but they’re still sitting there. And it’s not like Katamari where small stuff in great quantities is awesome because you can roll it all up at once, it’s like picking up grains of rice with a pair of chopsticks, it’s time consuming for not nearly as much reward, but you feel obligated because it’s there. Take a hint from Katamari on that one and just totally stop having them once the player outscales them significantly.

The thing is, a lot of this collectible stuff is optional, it’s not designed to be important or necessary for progression, so no effort is put into creating it. Ostensibly, the game is designed so you can complete it without needing to engage with any of that collectible stuff. Why bar the player’s progression for them to collect things that aren’t part of the main story? So the rewards on a lot of them are really weak also, because they don’t want to upset the difficulty balance in the main story missions.

But on the other hand, a lot of these open world games just want to be big hamster wheel things, that’s why they have so many progression systems, they know that their main story missions aren’t enough to satisfy the player alone, because the level and encounter design isn’t very strong, so they add filler content and progression systems to keep the player busy.

So what should they do? Probably take a page from Metroidvanias, and Crysis Warhead, Far Cry Blood Dragon & FC3’s outposts. Keep the collectibles limited. Focus on the locations, the strongholds, make places in the world that are difficult to assault. Make level design across the world that is difficult to pass through unfettered. Metroidvanias are primarily about getting from checkpoint to checkpoint without dying, they set up things in your way that are difficult to get past without losing some health. In Metroid, save room to save room, same for Castlevania, La Mulana, Dark Souls. Exception is Ori and the Blind forest, but it has a really funky checkpoint system and really linear level structure overall to make it work.

The thing to get good at is probably controlling how players approach stronghold type structures, having enemies be better roadblocks in the wild, and a general study in good level design of terrain for moving around the map that allows free movement generally, but still restricts the player on an encounter level. The place to look for this is probably the original Zelda, which had limiting terrain all over the place. Figure out a suitable equivalent in 3 dimensions and you’re set, or start from 2d and work up to 3d.

The other big thing is, more elements in the open world should have more care put into them. A lot of stuff in open world games gets recycled, so the world starts feeling rather samey when you’ve seen that same art asset so much. Dark Souls is a fairly large game, and all of its areas are very deliberately crafted. Rather than aiming to make everything modular and reusable, aim for giving areas distinct touches. Plan how to make the most interesting areas possible. Probably work iteratively, building out from a central place. Quit trying to make a ton of filler content, focus on a smaller amount of more meaningful/challenging content in the open world format.

This was a bit rambley and probably not as straightforward as I could have written it.

Since you said you don’t believe in factoring age as part of judging the quality of a game. I’d like to ask how’d you design a game for kids? What properties do you think could make good game elements while primarily appealing to 5-12 age demographic?

lol what. Wait, I think I meant age like how old the game is, not how old the audience is.

Okay, the strongest properties in making games for young children is probably keeping the core mechanics simple and high affordance. Affordance seems to be my theme word of the week here. Don’t require a lot of reading unless the reading isn’t really that important.

NES games are great for this, the NES only has 2 buttons. Some NES games have weird hidden information though, but those don’t tend to be the most popular ones.

As they get older, like I think 8 or 10, they can probably afford to play something complicated, because they’re a kid, they have plenty of time to figure out how the whole system works. I learned how to read from playing Pokemon, because it was a big deal back then and I wanted to get into the game so much. The game lays out the type weakness chart in the instruction manual.

If you want to make a good game that appeals to someone that age, it’s a process of sort of building 2 games. Sure, any kid can play a pokemon game, but there’s a lot about Pokemon that goes beyond just beating the gym leaders. There’s the EV system, IV system, STAB, and other subtle factors. Any idiot can play smash bros melee, I did as a little kid too, but there’s a lot more there if you dig into it. The game needs to be layered where people can function on an effective level. Sakurai talks about this in his statements on smash 4 as a game, and he’s remarkably on point there.

“The Act of Balancing” Sakurai’s Famitsu Column vol. 480

“Furthermore, if I went with what is fair according to advanced players, the beginners wouldn’t be able to keep up. For example, Kirby’s Stone attack probably won’t hit a player above intermediate skill level, but if I made it more powerful, it would destroy beginners. At the end of the day, I’m aiming for intermediately-skilled players to be able to properly enjoy the game.”

At least, he’s on point in identifying that there are different skill levels, and based on the way you design moves, things will be more or less successful or effective based on your skill level. The thing he’s not on point about is failing to recognize that seriously, project M made kirby’s down B more effective and it still doesn’t destroy beginner players, and smash attacks come out fairly frequently in Melee because they’re safer and you can move faster to position them.

Traditional fighting games, probably not for kids, because the basic tools in them are low affordance, it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. On the other hand, kids have a lot of time to figure them out, and they have a tendency to get fixated on things, so it could work out in the right environment.

RTS, also probably not for kids, but MOBAs work fine, because it’s only movement and like 4 abilities at any one time.

Keep the options at any one time limited. Make them clear in primary function, add more subtle secondary functions.