Hey again (I asked about Gunvolt, super happy you enjoyed it as much as you did), I saw your blog entry about secrets and wanted to ask if in this age of the internet and datamining, do you think it’s possible to hide secrets as well as older games have done? Any special methods you can think of?

The easiest thing you can do is encrypt or keep resources off the hard drive. Don’t describe whatever it is in plaintext, because that’ll get dumped then ctrl F’d. Don’t store whatever you’re hiding in plaintext anywhere. Don’t name the files after it, don’t name the folders after it, don’t have any references to it in any image or sound file, unless you encrypt those files, and hide the encrypted result inside another file that is of a type people would overlook.

The key for hiding things from modern day datamining is Steganography paired with cryptography. Cryptography means nobody can hit ctrl F and find it. Steganography means nobody thinks to look for it. Continue reading →

What’s wrong with “it’s scarier if you walk like you’re drunk” if the game’s built around it? It reminds me of when people call Castlevania’s jump unfair. Power IS agency, right? To be challenged, the player must have weakness. What defines “bad” control limits for a game to impose?

I think agency is the wrong word to use with regards to a video game, because unlike real life, there’s no relative scale between games as to how much “agency” they have. In real life, agency is your control over your environment. It’s very easy to compare types and measures of agency between homeless people, stock brokers, weight lifters, and programmers, but in a virtual environment none of that means anything. Do you have a high level of agency in a life simulator where you can buy a home? Do you have more agency in a city builder than a life simulator, assuming they’re of similar complexity? Do you have more Agency in Fallout New Vegas where you get all these narrative choices to do crazy things like disband factions, manipulate people, and shake up the balance of power or whatever, or do you have more agency in Devil May Cry, where you have this overwhelming fine-grain control over what the character can do? Do you have more agency in Chess or Go? What about Tetris? Continue reading →

Kay, so Position is something that can be in a lot of possible states. You have X, Y, and Z coordinates. Any object can potentially occupy any combination of these coordinates. Each of these possible coordinates is a state.

In a game oriented around combat, you have your character’s position, then each enemy’s position. So if you had an absolute possibility space lookup, the maximum number of states is every combination of X and Y coordinate between you and the enemy. That number of possible positions is really big. It gets even bigger in 3d games which use floating point math to determine object positions.

So here’s the trouble, redundancy. Realistically, you’re not using all that space. Realistically, any set of coordinates where the difference in position between you and the enemy is the same is the same state for all practical purposes. Realistically, if you and the enemy are too far apart to fight each other, then all the states are redundant until you’re close enough for there to be significant positional play. And the Z coordinate tends to be a bit constrained by gravity, so most 3d games only really play out on an X/Y plane with a bit of Z-Action within that limited height the character can jump, or have the high ground relative to an enemy. Continue reading →

I remember you showed a writeup on how to design enemies from a Platinum games dev who said enemies with patterns would get too boring. Would Lil Horn from Super Meat Boy and Gelaldy from Ys Origin be good examples of that? Each attack pattern for them is exactly the same for each phase.

I feel compelled to say there’s probably exceptions to that rule. Like imagine a boss with patterns that speed up steadily over the fight, or one with patterns that are reactive to the player’s position and therefore are a bit different every time you play. Ninja Gaiden NES even had a perfectly serviceable boss who just walked left and right. Hell, a lot of old NES games had serviceable pattern bosses.

I think Lil Horn is absolutely a terrible boss fight though. Essentially you just repeat it until you memorize where to stand. Most of the boss’s attacks are designed to be unreactable, so you really just need to know in advance what will happen and the same thing will happen every time. There are some randomly spawning obstacles, but these are trivial. Continue reading →

Where would you draw the line with developers using movies to influence game design?

I don’t think there’s a line to be drawn so much as there needs to be a methodology.

Creating games is about creating systems, and movies and other stories ostensibly chronicle the interactions of fictional systems, or the interactions of real life systems. So you can look at a movie and say, “whoa, there’s a big focus on kung-fu here, how much of that can I adapt into a game?” Continue reading →