General question; I have my own thoughts on this, but what do you think of the viability of “NES hard” modern games? Few games really kill you, or demand much attention anymore. I think overcoming adversity makes the player feel good, but it’s “medicine” the player doesn’t always know they like.
I think most of the modern games pretending to be “NES Hard” are pale imitations. You get stuff like I wanna be the guy, Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, etc, where you die in practically one hit and have really short checkpoint/reload times. I’ll give Hotline Miami an exemption here because it does have some actual depth to it, preventing its levels from being repeating the same string of inputs ad infinitum. A lot of these games tend not to feature lives, or care about checkpoints beyond the last one you passed.
Others like Shovel Knight take a different study of NES games, building every single one of its levels with introducing that level’s unique design feature in a safe environment, then slowly building in complexity on it. It’s less like a level intended to challenge you and more like a tutorial. If you read a lot of level design literature, you’ll notice that the majority of it is devoted to teaching the player silently through level designs, almost none of it is on how to actually challenge the player in different clever ways.
Raph Koster has a definition of fun that I think is appropriate, from his book, Theory of Fun. More or less, people respond to achieving something inconsistently. Achieving something inconsistently is more or less what we define as difficulty. We evolved in such a way as to receive a mental reward for achieving difficult things. We’re capable of creating goals for ourselves without reinforcing stimuli such as food, unlike most other animals, whose intrinsic motivation to complete a task quickly fades in the absence of a tangible biological reward. This is what enables us to pursue things like money or psychological stimulation to the detriment of our physical wellbeing.
When we achieve something inconsistently, we have fun. The more rare the success, the more fun we have, the more engrossing it is. If no effort of ours is expended in the process, if the process is randomized, the enjoyment is typically more in the form of desire, than an actual enjoyment of the thing itself. People don’t like it, but they want to continue to do it. Wanting and Liking have been verified to have separate neurological pathways. When you expend your own effort, and occasionally succeed and fail, you tend to come to like the act of doing the thing.
In this way, good games tend to have a lot of big and little things to succeed and fail at. You might not beat the level, you might not get as far through it as last time, but this time you bypassed that tricky part without taking damage, and your consistency at getting criticals or headshots was 40% higher. There are associated skills to master, and they balance against each other synergistically in the overall challenge of beating the level before you.
Games can meet a lot of other psychological pleasures, but of course this is a unique one. I don’t know if it’s medicine players don’t know they want, I think it’s an unmet want in an environment that doesn’t totally know what it’s making.
The point of difficulty is to bring out the depth of the game. The point of depth in the game is to make the difficulty interesting. The two work together. You want to limit the player’s options while also giving them ways forward. Kill the easy strategies, force them to be proactive. Give them lots of tools, lots of ways to use them. Almost never completely eliminate the usefulness of a tool. Just because you want to punish the use of a tool in some way doesn’t mean it should be perfectly countered. If the player wants to do only one thing, give them a reason to want to do multiple possible things. Give the tools themselves drawbacks. Go study Castlevania 3 if you want to go for the retro difficulty thing, that game is a master class in it.
As for commercial viability, I believe people are definitely looking for this sort of thing, however I don’t think you will reach much success piggybacking off those that have made success in this area already. Create an identity for yourself, probably skip trying to cash in on nostalgia. By all means make the individual game challenges difficult, though go ahead and include multiple lives and an actual health bar if you feel those things are appropriate. Most of the actual NES games had those. Demon’s Souls was literally found and saved by the western community by importing a chinese copy of the game because they recognized its difficulty. Beyond that, it’s a lot of guesswork and it depends on your individual implementation.
In a way, the success of NES games is that despite their simplicity, they used the elements available to them in order to give the player interesting choices in how they proceeded through the level, challenging them in the precise ways they executed those larger scale choices. Like in the above video, there was a skeleton below, the guy tried to throw axes, expending resources, but missed. Instead of finding a place to throw more axes, he took up the risky move of jumping down and whipping the skeleton as he went, which succeeded. As fish men popped up out of the ground, rather than wait for them to settle on the blocks, he would jump forward and whip them as they rose up. This certainly has a larger punishment for failure and is a lot more timing dependent, but it is allowed to him.
This question was asked by Jason “Dapper Swine” Brown, developer of Seedscape
General question; I have my own thoughts on this, but what do you think of the viability of “NES hard” modern games? Few games really kill you, or demand much attention anymore. I think overcoming adversity makes the player feel good, but it’s “medicine” the player doesn’t always know they like.
I think most of the modern games pretending to be “NES Hard” are pale imitations. You get stuff like I wanna be the guy, Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, etc, where you die in practically one hit and have really short checkpoint/reload times. I’ll give Hotline Miami an exemption here because it does have some actual depth to it, preventing its levels from being repeating the same string of inputs ad infinitum. A lot of these games tend not to feature lives, or care about checkpoints beyond the last one you passed.
Others like Shovel Knight take a different study of NES games, building every single one of its levels with introducing that level’s unique design feature in a safe environment, then slowly building in complexity on it. It’s less like a level intended to challenge you and more like a tutorial. If you read a lot of level design literature, you’ll notice that the majority of it is devoted to teaching the player silently through level designs, almost none of it is on how to actually challenge the player in different clever ways.
Raph Koster has a definition of fun that I think is appropriate, from his book, Theory of Fun. More or less, people respond to achieving something inconsistently. Achieving something inconsistently is more or less what we define as difficulty. We evolved in such a way as to receive a mental reward for achieving difficult things. We’re capable of creating goals for ourselves without reinforcing stimuli such as food, unlike most other animals, whose intrinsic motivation to complete a task quickly fades in the absence of a tangible biological reward. This is what enables us to pursue things like money or psychological stimulation to the detriment of our physical wellbeing.
When we achieve something inconsistently, we have fun. The more rare the success, the more fun we have, the more engrossing it is. If no effort of ours is expended in the process, if the process is randomized, the enjoyment is typically more in the form of desire, than an actual enjoyment of the thing itself. People don’t like it, but they want to continue to do it. Wanting and Liking have been verified to have separate neurological pathways. When you expend your own effort, and occasionally succeed and fail, you tend to come to like the act of doing the thing.
In this way, good games tend to have a lot of big and little things to succeed and fail at. You might not beat the level, you might not get as far through it as last time, but this time you bypassed that tricky part without taking damage, and your consistency at getting criticals or headshots was 40% higher. There are associated skills to master, and they balance against each other synergistically in the overall challenge of beating the level before you.
Games can meet a lot of other psychological pleasures, but of course this is a unique one. I don’t know if it’s medicine players don’t know they want, I think it’s an unmet want in an environment that doesn’t totally know what it’s making.
The point of difficulty is to bring out the depth of the game. The point of depth in the game is to make the difficulty interesting. The two work together. You want to limit the player’s options while also giving them ways forward. Kill the easy strategies, force them to be proactive. Give them lots of tools, lots of ways to use them. Almost never completely eliminate the usefulness of a tool. Just because you want to punish the use of a tool in some way doesn’t mean it should be perfectly countered. If the player wants to do only one thing, give them a reason to want to do multiple possible things. Give the tools themselves drawbacks. Go study Castlevania 3 if you want to go for the retro difficulty thing, that game is a master class in it.
As for commercial viability, I believe people are definitely looking for this sort of thing, however I don’t think you will reach much success piggybacking off those that have made success in this area already. Create an identity for yourself, probably skip trying to cash in on nostalgia. By all means make the individual game challenges difficult, though go ahead and include multiple lives and an actual health bar if you feel those things are appropriate. Most of the actual NES games had those. Demon’s Souls was literally found and saved by the western community by importing a chinese copy of the game because they recognized its difficulty. Beyond that, it’s a lot of guesswork and it depends on your individual implementation.
In a way, the success of NES games is that despite their simplicity, they used the elements available to them in order to give the player interesting choices in how they proceeded through the level, challenging them in the precise ways they executed those larger scale choices. Like in the above video, there was a skeleton below, the guy tried to throw axes, expending resources, but missed. Instead of finding a place to throw more axes, he took up the risky move of jumping down and whipping the skeleton as he went, which succeeded. As fish men popped up out of the ground, rather than wait for them to settle on the blocks, he would jump forward and whip them as they rose up. This certainly has a larger punishment for failure and is a lot more timing dependent, but it is allowed to him.
Those parts that are bullshit are some of the most memorable parts of the game for me. Like in Dark Souls, the dragon slayer arrow knights on the anor londo rafters. You’re right, the difficulty is in a big way what makes them rewarding. If you tone those parts down, then it’s no longer really an accomplishment or puzzle. We make these games as artificial impediments you could say, then to tone that down to the level where they’re cleared without effort, kind of ruins the point.
The way I’d relate this to fun theory is, fun is relative to the rate of success versus the frustration of repetition. If you succeed every time you do something, it’s no fun. If you succeed only sometimes when you do something, it’s a bit more fun. If you only succeed once in every 100 tries, it’s an amazing thing that 100th time it finally happens. If you do the same thing every time, it’s not very fun. If it’s slightly different every time, it’s a bit more fun, if it’s really different every time, then it’s really fun. To build on that, increase in consistency is related to fun. If you used to never succeed, but now you succeed 1 in 100 tries, it’s more fun. If you used to succeed 1 in 100 and now you’re 1 in 10, it’s more fun. If you stay at the same rate of success it becomes less fun. If you get to perfect consistency, succeeding every time, then it ceases to be fun. This is related to Depth and difficulty curves. Depth is in a way about giving players a lot of things to succeed and fail at, so they can slowly move up to bigger things after becoming consistent at the little things, which is also what difficulty curves are about. Depth is about creating variation in every playthrough, through the choices allowed to the player, and situations created by the interaction of their choices and the game’s systems (enemies, levels, etc).
A lot of modern games are concerned about accessibility. This tends to mean that the way the game is designed holds your hand, there’s no advanced functions or ways to play that might be hard to use. Western games and western gamers actually love hard mode. From what I heard once in an interview with a japanese dev, that’s something more requested in the west than east, where in japan they like being able to level up and get to the end as long as they are willing to put up with grinding. The thing is that typically hard modes are number buffs on the enemies, not making them more interesting in any way. One line a friend told me is that western hard modes are made for no one, and tested by no one. Despite having a hard mode, and it frequently actually being hard, it wasn’t designed purposefully and doesn’t bring out the depth inherent in the game.
There are of course cases like Portal where the game is playtested to death so nobody ever gets significantly stuck and the levels are always suggesting their solutions to you, which is pretty lame.
And of course, at the root of any story, there’s a conflict of some kind.
What do you think is the best way to present a tutorial in videogames?
Anyone can tell you that the best approach is generally structuring a level so that it suggests what you need to do and creates a barrier that you can only pass by demonstrating the skill you’re supposed to be learning. Much like Mario 1-1, or many Megaman levels.
Not everyone can read, not everyone wants to read. Sometimes reading is necessary to explain what the controls do, and it’s nice in those cases to present something that users can call up, and which can be called up again once dismissed, much like the soapstone messages in the dark souls tutorial. The downside of these is, they are not automatically activated, some are easy to miss, and many of the challenges in the tutorial can be bypassed without actually learning what the soap stone messages are trying to teach you. This is a good thing for repeat players, because it’s faster and less annoying, but a bad thing for new players.
Mirror’s Edge has a tutorial that holds your hand much more. I don’t really approve of its tutorial design, where you are constantly stopped for cutscenes or tutorial messages that take time to skip or cannot be skipped. It is programmed so you must do every step of its tutorial the way it wants you to do it, ensuring you actually learn the skill they want you to learn, consequently, it’s really easy to break the tutorial, making progression not impossible, but requiring you to go back to the last step. The Mirror’s edge tutorial can be skipped in the menu, which is very nice. The Dark Souls one cannot, which is kind of a pain.
The ideal is to have no tutorial, you want to get to the meat of the game as soon as possible, and the game itself is kind of a tutorial in a way, offering lessons and punishing you for messing up. Most level design literature focuses on the nature of level design as a form of teaching, which is what makes shovel knight, which listened to ALL of that literature, kind of a slog to play, even if it does teach you every level’s gimmick then iterate on it slightly really well, it means that late into the game, you have to endure that type of slow progression until the final couple levels actually try to challenge you. If you need to use a video, consider letting the player control the video, with a mouse and a play bar, much like youtube. Hell, consider this for all cutscenes maybe.
Even if having a wordless cutscene-less tutorial is ideal, sometimes there are concepts that players just won’t get unless explained to them, and even if it’s bad User Experience, you just gotta shove a video or a block of text in their face. This means you have to play test and find out whether players are actually understanding the concepts you’re trying to teach them. Making a good tutorial is a balance between allowing players that understand to pass through as quickly as possible, and making sure players that don’t get it will come to understand it quickly, and not get by without learning it. This is going to be different per-game.
How important do you think tutorials or instruction manuals are? I guess it would really depend on the genre/game. Case by case basis and all.
Nobody reads instruction manuals anymore, and instruction manuals suck these days. The MGS3 instruction manual had a goddamn comic book in it, how cool is that?
Anyway. They’re really important, come on. The more you have to teach people, the more important they become. If you don’t teach people anything and your game requires them to know things to play it, then what the fuck are they gonna do?
Yeah, it does scale by genre/game, because some have more obvious characteristics and less complicated/more intuitive controls, so you don’t have to teach as much directly, but if something isn’t reasonable to intuit, then you gotta teach it.
Fighting games are in a big way brought down because they don’t have good tutorials/single player modes.
Smash Bros has a better single player mode than 99% of other fighting games. The Skullgirls tutorials are kind of fun in their own way because they set up some mildly tricky tasks and have clear completion markers for all of them. Combo trials in other games end up being way too difficult/invariant to represent a solid single player mode for most people. Guilty Gear Xrd has some interesting trials that are similar, and a good grading system on them too, grading for consistency, and their missions mode was cool in AC+R.
Give that a bit more structure, maybe some branching paths between mission unlocks, a bit of story perhaps, and you approach something like the Soul Calibur campaigns in terms of polish. Figure out how AI can be geared to teach players specific fighting game fundamentals (like the blockstring bot in skullgirls), and it will help introduce players to the multiplayer mode, and give them a framework for understanding how the fuck things work.
Do you think 60fps is necessary for action or platformer games?
No. It’s nice, but it’s not totally necessary. It’s not something I’d mark a game down for, but I’d leave a demerit. The faster the pace, the worse low FPS is. If it’s something like Marvel versus Capcom or Smash Bros, then less than 60 FPS is actively hazardous. For RTS games, it can run at 24 FPS and work fine. Brood War ran at that. DMC4 is fast enough that 30 fps is a detriment too.
FPS is more important than resolution, neither are be-all and end-all. Both are more important than graphical fidelity, which I feel is the common tradeoff. We don’t need so many elements making draw calls. We can honestly live with less.
Having low FPS makes it harder to see what is going on when something fast happens. It hurts fast games the most. Higher FPS is always better, 60 FPS is what should ideally be the minimum, but the market does not respond to this, and developers generally do not care. Higher fidelity graphics tends to work better in marketing, because it is more clearly demonstrable. Most people claim they cannot see the difference between different framerates, and their purchase tendencies seem to reflect this.
An animator would argue that there are a lot of effects that are put into even 24 FPS animation that people cannot see, but they feel. For example this tends to be true of impacts, like punching people or crashing into things. A common trick is to have the object touch the surface of impact for a frame before the impact happens, to make it feel slightly stronger, or to have the object stretch to the point of impact the frame before it impacts to make it feel even stronger. The audience won’t notice this, but they’ll feel that there is more transition between frames, so the impact will feel stronger in a completely unrealistic way that never the less works.
I think it’s reasonable to extend this to the 60FPS phenomena, even if people cannot consciously perceive the difference, they will still have a clearer perception of what is going on over time.
I don’t get the hype behind Rising Thunder. Simplifying inputs? And you like Divekick, yet you’ve said that complex inputs are more rewarding (when I asked about PM’s input leniency compared to Melee, or when discussing wavedashing in Melee).
Divekick explores a unique strategic space. It’s fast, and there are things to learn about the game. I played one friend in it and seriously beat him every game for like 20-30 games in a row. I perfected him multiple times during that. One of my friends actually figured out a new way to advance safely, by jumping, then kicking near the end of the jump, which I would normally do at the beginning of a very shallow jump.
There are actually some advanced techniques in divekick, like performing special moves requires pressing both dive and kick at the same time, but there’s a short leniency period, so you can kara-cancel into a special move. For example, Mr N can kara-cancel his kick into his hover, allowing him to effectively kick for a frame before hovering, kicking with less commitment. And of course he can keep doing this as long as he has enough meter.
Rising thunder has unique character designs, like Crow, who is so unique he couldn’t exist in another fighting game because of his invisibility power, or Vlad who has a weird air dash with a meter you can expend as you like, or Dauntless, who has some really amazing combos and unique special moves, along with one of the rare normal anti-airs. I like that with Chel I can cancel sweeps into fireballs (which I almost never get to do in SF, it’s only possible in SF2), and the combos are reasonably interesting. It’s cool to be able to see someone else do a combo I’ve never seen before, then start doing it on them. The kinetic advance system is also cool, it’s like FADC, except you can also jump out of it. Not to mention that combos do get rather execution-heavy at a high level. There are even link combos, usually from M into L.
In its own way, it’s interesting that all the special moves are on single buttons because it very much changes the amount of time you can execute moves in. I remarked on picking up Chel that it was like every character with an anti-air special was a charge character. I mean this in that you can instantly react to jump-ins with just a button tap. I was so trigger happy at first that I even reacted too soon in some cases to jump-ins, whiffing completely, because I expected my fingers to be slower. And the cool-down periods, much as I dislike the use of cool-downs as a balancing measure, do actually add a strategic element to the game, so if your opponent whiffs an anti-air, you know jumping in is safe for the next few seconds. Chel’s projectile has the cooldown negated if it hits the opponent too, meaning that you can keep up fireball pressure as long as the fireballs are hit or blocked, clearly pointing to neutral jump as an answer to Chel’s fireballs.
The other thing is, and I admit this isn’t speaking to the game’s favor, but it’s a proof of concept that even if you simplify the inputs down to the minimum possible level, scrubs won’t magically get good at the game. This is a moral victory for me.
Having inputs that are hard isn’t something that’s strictly speaking a good thing. I don’t think any fighting game needs a pretzel input ever again. I think the move away from FRCs for GG Xrd was a good thing and made the system more interesting, even if there were some OSes that worked in 1.0.
I think that the difficulty of an input is something that should correspond to how helpful the result is. It’s not something that can easily be judged. The difficulty of a given input should be relative to how rarely it needs to happen, so you get easy inputs most of the time, hard sometimes, impossible rarely.
The bigger compromise here is the depth of Rising Thunder in part because of the input system they chose. There are less options, less ways to modulate options, and thus the game is more strategically flat. Having movement commands act as a modifier on top of normal button presses allowed for a larger range of moves to be accessible at once.
Also seriously, wavedashing isn’t hard. You can learn to do it in 30 minutes or less.
How would you implement difficulty in a non-linear game. A good game should get more challenging as it you progress ,but if you can choose what to do in what order you have to make them all equally challenging .This means the game becomes easier as it progresses.
I indirectly answered this already with my metroidvania solution, having areas you’ve beaten get easier, and just straight up tuning all the other areas around a base power level, but you do bring up a point that I didn’t consider: You want endgame areas to be harder, whether by levels or just tuning, but you don’t want players ending up there early on by accident.
When people speedrun Quake, they do it in reverse order actually, because you’re allowed to pick whatever episode you want. So people choose episode 4 first. I think they mix up 2 and 3 because of some routing detail that makes it faster, but I can’t imagine why.
The obvious thing you can do is follow from the metroidvania solution and make the other unbeaten areas harder after you beat one. Actually, if you did it on a level beyond just number buffs, like world tendency in demon’s souls, by changing enemy and level arrangements, then it might add to the replayability of the game, beating the levels in different orders to see their beefed up forms.
The other, probably more obvious, thing you can do is organize the levels so people have to go through the easier ones to get to the harder ones.
Or alternatively, you could not really worry about it. The intention of the warp pipes in the original Super Mario Bros was apparently so if players felt the early areas were too easy, they could skip to the harder ones. It’s one of the things I like about dark souls, going directly to blight town to fight Quelaag, or into the catacombs to grab the gravelord sword/rite of kindling.
The larger issue is making it so unskilled players don’t go to areas out of their league by accident, like accidentally going into the graveyard from firelink. The best way to do that perhaps is to make it so sequence breaking involves low affordance and/or difficult to perform tricks. Like in order to get to blighttown first, you need to either kill ingward so you can get the key to the seal and open the seal, which you won’t know how to do until the late game, or pick the master key and open the door at the entrance of new londo, which you would be hard pressed to find just starting out.
The graveyard at firelink is a good example of how not to do this. A lot of people go that way by accident because it’s really high affordance, you’re practically lead that way. I fought down to the first bonfire in the catacombs on my first time playing the game, not realizing it wasn’t the way I was supposed to go. And that was patch 1.0! The skeletons didn’t even drop souls back then! If the way into the graveyard was obscured somehow to dissuade beginners, then it would probably contribute to a better experience for them, while still allowing advanced players to do as they please.
You’ve stated before that fuzzy, rather than discrete, variables in games usually make for a deeper experience, because of the range of possible outcomes. But what about when something is made discrete, so that the player has more fine control over it, and greater challenges be presented? For example, in Aban Hawkins and the 1000 (or 1001) Spikes, rather than the usual “control your jump height by holding the button”, they have a button for short, and another for long jump, which allows challenges that would be unreasonable without the precise jump control.
Something I picked up from Monaco’s developer speaking at a conference is that when you have really simple discrete states that they’re easily distinguishable, and easily selected between. That can be helpful for making things clear, having nice and obvious signals of what everything is instead of having it be fuzzy. Depends on what you’re shooting for or if people can even reasonably work with it.
When something is more discrete, it’s not that the player has more fine control over it, they have less fine control over it. It’s that they can more consistently hit the values they need to. That and it becomes less about hitting the range necessary (timing skill test), and more about choosing the right one from the options presented (decisionmaking skill test).
I don’t think I can present an overarching rule of thumb here though, it probably depends based on context.
The other thing is when you separate options discretely you can make tradeoffs that can’t be naturally communicated over a wider value range. Like jumping high versus jumping far (see mario 64), it’s tricky to program an analog system that trades off between the two, but simple with a digital one.
I haven’t played 1001 spikes. I don’t think that the challenges would necessarily be unreasonable with variable jump height. I believe it’s more that they wanted to constrain your options so you need to work around situations where it would be helpful to have a different jump height than the ones you’re fixed with. As well as place a premium on picking the correct jump height for the situation over being able to jump any height between the min and max. This is a valid approach as long as there’s a reason for it and the levels test it.
I once asked you about reaching the end of creative possibilities and you responded that there is still so much not being done. You used the example of palette swapping a small picture and receding spikes in a IWBTG mod. Ignoring the fact that that mechanic has been used in Mario games…
I didn’t say palette swap, I was talking about every single possible 100×100 picture. It was a metaphor. Think about it. Every picture you’ve ever saved has a thumbnail, about 100×100 big. You can frequently identify pictures just by their thumbnail. There are a tremendous number of pictures possible that are still identifiable from their thumbnail. Math says there’s a massive number of possible 100×100 thumbnails. The concept I was trying to get across was that if there are so many visually distinct thumbnails, then surely the number of visually distinct full size pictures is many orders of magnitude bigger. The number of different possible thumbnails is so large that it’s impossible for them all to simultaneously exist in the same universe (more permutations than particles in the universe by several orders of magnitude for something as small as a 100×100 picture).
The implication here is that if something that small can have such variation that we’ll never exhaust all the possible permutations of it, then surely something more complex like games won’t run out any time soon.
You got me on the Mario games, I forgot that there were those platforms that switch when you jump. I could be picky and say, “but it’s not spikes,” but that would be dumb. I’ll include a new mechanic in the next post, I thought a game idea up recently that hinged on a mechanical idea.
(and probably other games), I don’t see how you those are proper examples. The picture might have millions of different colour combinations, but at the end of the day, it’s a simple picture and the only combinations that will matter are those that are very distinct (e.g. a red pic vs a blue pic), but being a different shade of red of blue won’t separate it from the original red and blue version of the picture. Similarly, some platforming gimmick that is done slightly differently than another platform gimmick isn’t a very strong example of creativity.
As said, it was a metaphor. There’s a billion ways you could code something, I’m pretty sure we haven’t made up every possible mechanic yet.
Here’s one that I’m pretty sure has never been done before:
I had a thought for an antigravity racing game recently. What if there were 3 thrust modes, regular, one that had you suspended low off the track, and one that had you suspended high off the track? And these thrust modes would change the handling/top speed of the vehicle. And when you switch between the thrust modes from a lower to a higher one, you’d get a jump proportional to the change in thrust. So low thrust to normal thrust would be a small hop, normal thrust to high would be an average jump, and low directly to high would be a big jump.
Courses could have obstacles you can jump/hover over/under and of course crash into, so players need to use their thrust modes wisely to avoid trouble and of course go fast. Beyond that, if you move onto higher elevation terrain just as you jump, it could boost the jump even further, sort of like the same effect in dark souls and bloodborne, adding another skill component.
In low thrust mode I imagine you have better handling, maybe switching into low thrust as you do a turn lets you drift. In high thrust mode you could have a higher top speed, but worse handling since you’re so far off the ground. So if you want to go fast, high thrust is the way to go, but of course in high thrust mode, you can’t jump without going to a lower thrust mode and back first. Naturally obstacles like high rises could be put in the way that need to be gone under in low thrust mode or jumped high over so people who go high thrust all the time crash.
My thought was that racing games have courses that are fairly easy to clear by themselves, leaving the real challenge to time trial. If you had more hazardous courses and more means of traversal then maybe you’d end up with a more interesting single player experience, or maybe just a more interesting game overall.
I don’t have any new platforming gimmicks on me right now, but well, how many games are similar to Gimmick!? You can create stars that bounce and ride on them.
or Fire n Ice? Where you can create and destroy ice blocks, but only downwards diagonally.
or Bio Miracle? where you inflate enemies to use as platforms or projectiles that you push.
Obviously, as the work in question gets more complex, the potential for creativity increases (a simple picture will exhaust its creative potential long before a game will), but there is still a finite space for ‘meaningful’ creativity. And this goes for settings as well, not just mechanics.
Sure, there’s a finite space, but that space is larger than there is room to express using the entire universe as a canvas. Realistically speaking, there’s no limits on creativity relevant to humans.
How often have you seen settings with a hindu or buddhist influence? Or anything eastern that isn’t japanese? What about aboriginal? African? We’ve only had a few instances of arabian, including like prince of persia. If you’re limited to only recombining the world’s existing cultures, you still have a wide-ass palette.
If a simple 100×100 picture can have so many different possible variations that we literally cannot express them all, then what have we to worry about games or art?
What’s the difference between X fantasy setting and Y fantasy setting? So obviously, at some point humanity will enter a stasis until a great cataclysm wipes out almost everything and we have to start over. Or we can keep playing Melee.
What’s the difference between Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga (which actually does use hinduism as an influence)? Between those and Persona or Strange Journey? How different are Kingdom Hearts, The World Ends With You, American McGee’s Alice, Bloodborne, and Final Fantasy 7?
Looking back further, you have a ton of different D&D campaign settings, forgotten realms, eberron, spell jammer, dark sun, ghostwalk, ravenloft, and planescape.
There’s tons of variation possible. I’m working on a setting that I think is fairly unique for a tabletop RPG I’m developing. People just need to get creative.
Do you think 3D is more complex than 2D (or that 2D will be exhausted before 3D)?
There’s a lot of things limiting 3D that tends to keep the complexity about the same. When you’re constrained to a 2d plane, and have gravity pulling down on you, it tends to allow for certain interactions that don’t work as well in 3d. Like fireballs in 2d fighters. In 3d, you can strafe around that shit. That’s why the souls games have projectiles home slightly.
The other thing is, 3d is limited by our controllers. Most of the best 3d games tend to format the game to 2d in a way, then add in subtle 3d interactions. I’m sure you’ve seen the bloodborne video that makes it play from a top down perspective. Of course you can’t play the game the best that way, but it almost works. You could easily flatten a souls game and have something almost as good that would work without the jank (like if you flattened the hitboxes so nothing could go over or under anything else, much like hotline miami or GTA), except they definitely have some z-action going on in the original game, so you lose a bit.
Devil May Cry is sort of like this too, then they add jumping and things with height, but the fixed camera angles help show the game from a semi-top down perspective, almost isometric (except obviously not orthographic).
Also, this is why mortal kombat 9 can feel a bit janky with the hits. The hitboxes are in 3d and at the angle it’s portrayed at, it’s not easy to tell what the hell is going on.
In my opinion, 2d will never die
I’m kind of confused now, are we talking about mechanics or aesthetics? a picture is aesthetic. the way it looks can be infinite, but the painting technique is finite. likewise, ok, I guess there can technically be infinite settings, but mechanics will have to be finite (or infinite, but with negligible differences). there are people who claim that games will culminate in first-person VR, but that idea hinges on genres (i.e. mechanics) exhausting and then all that will be left if the aesthetic. but while you provided many different fantasy games, all of those settings have been done before in literature, film, or visual art. it’s only new for games because games are a new medium. and many of them are not really ‘original’ per se. DMC did Bloodborne first, KH is a crossover, SMT games all have thematic/aesthetic similarities, TWEWY is pop Japan with fantasy. like don’t get me wrong, I do think that there is tons of untapped potential. but then is it mechanical or aesthetic? like D&D has incredible lore, but that’s b/c there are a ton of games and they’ve developed everything so much.
Both. I was using pictures and aesthetics as a parallel.
I don’t think mechanics have a finite number of permutations then they’re kaput. At least none in close sight. Look at all these different abstract strategy games for example.
Only 2 fighting games (that I can think of off the top of my head) have normals that pull opponents in (for the grappler characters), Potemkin in Guilty Gear, and Big Band in Guilty Gear. Lucario (PM) and Slayer (guilty gear) both have teleports that make them invincible which can be canceled to retain the invincibility period.
Are these not different enough for you, or are they only negligibly different and you want wholecloth creation practically? Mechanics are going to be about as diverse as your ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide numbers as well as any derivative thereof. They’re going to be as diverse as your ability to define cross-sections of space and their ability to change over time. Going to be as diverse as the states defined for objects and what conditions will change or modify those states.
Those people who place such trust in VR as an ultimate solution are stupid. I don’t think the idea of eventually exhausting genres hinges on that, I think the idea is ignorant of mechanics. It’s like a form of blindness, to not recognize that you can’t get the same possibility space in an FPS game as an RTS or a 2d platformer.
The primary reason games have similar mechanics is because AAA doesn’t know how to innovate. EA admitted they have no idea how to innovate or roll out a new IP. We continually see the use of Batman Arkham style combat or QTEs because those things can encompass nearly any action from an aesthetic perspective. People don’t have a mind for modeling representational simulations, people don’t have a mind for how to construct a system that tests a particular skill. People don’t have a mind for what skills they can test in the first place or how to create a system of strategy between those skill tests that creates a large number of equally weighted possibilities, which is the real killer.
Far as the settings I mentioned go, I’m pretty sure TWEWY is rather original. Everything we know of fantasy had its basis in something. Invention is the recombination of information. Where else has japanese hip hop graffiti spiritualism happened? Same for the Vortex world of SMT3, literally Tokyo wrapped inside a sphere with a spirit sun at the center, and the Hindu Junkyard of Digital Devil Saga, even if the same artist was behind both looks.
Similar for Star Wars too in my opinion. Where the hell did Jedi come from? They seem like an archetype with no natural origin. As a sci-fi universe, the Star Wars universe always stood out to me.
And as I said, there are a ton of cultures and religions that have not really been explored in games or in media very much and I’m sure there are a ton of ways to twist them.
All the different tabletop RPG settings are like that honestly. Look at White Wolf RPGs. The recent Demon The Descent rulebook outlines a rather unique setting all by itself. It’s not a product of just time alone, they know what they’re doing. Most of the settings I mentioned last post are underdeveloped compared to their more mainstream settings.
When you say D&D has incredible lore, all I can say is, which setting? They all have different lore, and some of them are really out there too, like spelljammer.
I’m using the aesthetic potential out there as a parallel for the mechanical. I know there’s potential in both.
If you think that 2D has so many possibilities even compared to 3D (though that might be because games aren’t designed very much with 3d interactions in mind…), would you say that even… 1D has many unexplored possibilities, that haven’t even been considered? I’m being serious here.
There’s probably a fair amount you can do with 1d. A lot of 2d games could be represented in 1d, like karate champ, or berzerk (old game, think of flatland here). A few 3d games could probably be represented in 1d, like a lot of the Dragon Ball Z fighting games, especially the split screen ones, and the more recent naruto fighting games (kidding here, they aren’t actually one dimensional). There was Senor Footsies a while back which was essentially 1d. I’d say rock paper scissors is basically 1d, or nondimensional. What would Poker be?
I don’t see nearly as much potential for 1d though. I bet there’s a lot we haven’t done, but I don’t see as much we could do with that harsh a limitation. Like, you need to have a few variables that can be varied in some way, otherwise you end up with no means of differentiating options from one another, there’s no tradeoff.
Also also, line wobbler is an actually 1d game (not 2d with 1d vision), though I don’t know if it’s too interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ_5ol_kyL4 I guess more interesting concepts could be explored in 1d, if anyone tried.
That’s cool. Definitely goes to show some stuff can be done in 1d, but as said, I think a lot of what’s possible in 2d just isn’t in 1d, you’ll be a lot more constrained than even the transition between 3d and 2d, because you need a certain minimum number of variables to get a decent sized possibility space.
Also related to that 1d question, there was this 2d first person game (so a 1d display) ages ago on the web, from a 7dfps, but I can’t find it, though I did find this seven dimensions one that displays in a series of one dimension lines (and a point) http://www.marries.nl/games/seven-dimensions/
Ah yeah, that’s like flatland. Cool stuff. I honestly can’t make sense of it from just the video.
How should developers handle balancing in fighting games?
Prior to first release, it’s almost impossible to put out something balanced. The best you can do is playtest internally with skilled players. Try to set a baseline level of power on the character that is felt to be the one most representative of the spirit of the game, like Ryu in Street Fighter 2. Sirlin has a number of good balance related articles:
Beyond that, it’s about identifying which characters are the most or least powerful. This is tricky, because frequently you’ll find that noobs determine one thing is overpowered that isn’t really overpowered, like Ike in Brawl, Little Mac in Smash 4, all sorts of things. Having a bunch of experienced players try to make up a tier list from playing the game a lot with different characters is as good a start as you can get, then beyond that to focus on each individual matchup and why one character wins over the other, altering the characters so they will fight evenly in that matchup without screwing up the rest, like a gordian knot. On the flip side, they will all be a bit biased by their choice in character and try to influence you to do things that help their character. Probably. Pro players have a conflicting motivation from the game designer, they want to win more frequently.
Another key thing that I see a lot is, when an unintended exploit or something comes up, what most frequently happens is it gets nerfed into the ground, or removed outright. What I’d like to see more of is trying to preserve that type of thing, but make it fit into the ecosystem. The key thing to emphasize is that all the parts of the character have a use for something and they all get used, and they’re all distinct from one another. On a larger level, all the characters should be good at something, and they should all be used, and they should all be distinct from one another.
An easy way to balance is to homogenize the characters by nerfing their strengths. The battle in balance is to create diversity. If you have a bunch of totally radically different characters, then one of them is likely to beat most of the others, so low diversity overall. Your job is to ensure that all the characters and all the options are being used, but it’s also to ensure that they all are distinct and unique. If something is underutilized, you need to give it more utility, or nerf the things that block its utility.
Project M and Guilty Gear are perhaps the two most successful examples of balance I’ve seen yet, with Project M currently having all the characters viable except Olimar and Ice Climbers, and those only inviable because of some minor faults, and very open about it.
When creating a remake of a game with sequence breaking glitches, do you think the glitches should be removed because the people who appreciate these things can play the original if they want to or do you think they should be kept in, potentially ruining a new players first playthrough on the remake?
I don’t see how the glitches are ruining people’s playthroughs in the first place, unless they’re easily triggered and can prevent you from completing the game. My big thing is, you should treat glitches like they’re just another feature.
Toggle Escape in Dark Souls is done by mashing to switch your weapon, it can cancel stunlock and let you escape when you might otherwise die. Of course if you roll then that can be punished and you might lose ground, so it’s not without risk. This is something the developers probably should have considered when they made the game in the first place, a way to escape stunlock. Poise was already a measure in that direction because stunlock was such a problem in demon’s souls. Meanwhile, the infinite dragon head duplication glitch that let you infinite dragon roar or spit an infinite number of knives or sparkling stones to lag the game to hell, definitely something that should be patched, because it’s broken and there’s no fixing it.
Cancels in Street Fighter 2 aren’t good because the developers decided to include it in future games, they were kept in because they were a good mechanic. This isn’t something determined by the developers, because someone can entirely deliberately make a game that is stupid and horrible. Someone can also intend to make a great game and it ends up stupid and horrible because they have no vision or understanding.
We need to stop thinking of glitches as some alien thing outside the game, glitches occur in board games too. Sometimes the rules read as written resulting in a funny interaction, Magic the Gathering is full of this type of thing, it’s practically how the game is played at this point. Not to mention the yata-lock in yugioh or peasant railgun or Pun Pun in D&D 3.5. When you have a system of rules, there are going to be some interactions that are strange and can’t realistically be predicted in advance, which is why every TCG has a ban list (though I am impressed with how short cardfight vanguard’s is). And video games are about as complicated systems of rules as you get in games.
The primary question should be, is this something that is realistically likely to ruin someone’s experience or make the game impossible to complete? The second question should be, does this overshadow other aspects of the game so nobody uses those other things? Do you gain more in the main active decision-making part of your game from having it or losing it? Alternatively, take the example of Wind Waker HD, by patching out storage and making zombie hover useless, a lot of other tactics suddenly came into prominence, making it a different glitchy experience from the original (the WR is even 2 minutes faster).
Consider glitch patching like any other piece of game design. Would you patch out save states in Half Life 1? You should.
Okay rephrase, Lets say there is a glitch that can be performed that allows the player to travel into an area they aren’t supposed to be in yet. This area requires the games “HI-JUMP item” to get through but if a speedrunner takes a very careful route then they can avoid falling down pits that need the “HI-JUMP” to get out of. This glitch could create interesting routes for speedrunners and could add depth to the game by allowing you to get certain weapons early for example, but if someone playing through the first time were to trigger it and accidentally save the game, their playthrough is potentially ruined. Should such a glitch be patched out in a re-release, on the chance it could ruin someone’s playthrough or should it be kept in as it makes the game more interesting to play for some players? Would the difficulty of executing the glitch change your opinion on this matter?
I answered this in the original ask actually, you should under no circumstances allow the player to create a state that makes progression impossible.
In such a game, the pits should either have exits that lead back out to areas where the player can get the high jump to progress normally, or the player should have a function to warp back to a prior point, a la the souls games where you have homeward bones and the like, so even if you do get stuck out of bounds or some business you can always warp out.
In the rerelease the route shouldn’t be patched out, the way it makes progression impossible should be. This of course means that it’s still open for speedrunners without impeding ordinary players.
Actually I think there is a case like this in La Mulana, if you save in the Temple of the Moon without picking up the holy grail that allows you to warp between checkpoints then you’re screwed. I think this is true in both the original and the remake.
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