Whats you opinion on giving the player all abilities in the beginning vs gradually gaining them as you progress? Does it matter? Or you can do both but it depends on the execution?

Giving abilities over time prevents decision paralysis/analysis paralysis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_paralysis

Unlocking abilities over time basically never gives a game more depth than having them all from the beginning, unless later skills overshadow earlier skills, reducing the relevant depth of the game (though ideally not more than they increase the absolute depth of the game). So in that case, the game isn’t able to explore all the depth possible in its system unless you play both with and without all the abilities at once.

One approach that I like is the Symphony of the Night approach where you actually have all your spells from the beginning, but just don’t know them. You need to buy or find scrolls that tell you the input. This means that experienced players can play the way they want to from the beginning without needing to unlock anything, while newer players can be introduced to things as they have time to digest that information.

The ability to unlock new abilities over time can contribute to the depth of a speedrun if the time at which you gain each ability is negotiable, making it an interesting optimization constraint to gain certain abilities sooner or later.

On a simple level, it can help the game have a different tone and structure to its gameplay at the beginning relative to at the end. The first example of a game where later abilities overshadow earlier ones to reveal a different style of gameplay is probably a more productive implementation of this.

On a more psychological level, away from the notion of depth, there’s a simple feeling of reward in response to obtaining new things to play with. It feels good to work your way up to something and being given something new, regardless of whether that process is fun or not. This is why collection elements are so strong in so many games.

Some games, like DMC, are clearly more fun when you’re playing with a full deck, where others do better with a steady drip feed, like ……. Well, I can’t actually think of a good example here. Nioh? Oh. Metroidvanias. In those, even progression is tied to abilities.

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 →