What do you think makes a good videogame secret?

This is complicated. Like, a lot of games such as Doom, Quake, Metroid, Dark Souls, these have a mix of secrets. A lot of the secrets in these games are intended to be found however. The trick is, there’s a “secret language” that the developers establish to convey that there are secrets in various places (you should always check under stairs, and bomb off-color blocks for example). There’s a lot of possible tricks you can do for these. Dark Souls always has illusory walls be a bit inset versus the areas around it. Or they show you what’s beyond the wall so you suspect where there might be one. Or they have that boulder wall that needs all the boulders lined up to be broken, which you can figure out on your first try if you’re clever.
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Is it considered bad game design if it involves some trial and error. For example, on the Koei wiki page on Nioh, “The game is specifically designed for trial and error. Developers expect players to retry segments multiple times.” Is trial and error acceptable if minimal?

I think we need to draw a line here on Trial and Error.

There’s like, I Wanna Be The Guy trial and error, then there’s regular hard game Trial and Error.

Here’s someone who has never played the game before playing IWBTG. This is a trial and error game. It sets you up in situations where it will kill you in a way that you almost never can see coming. (Bonus: The game over music is from guilty gear.)

IWBTG is bullshit. It’s alright in a game where you accept that premise and are willing to invest tons of time into dying over and over again. Nioh and the Souls games are not like IWBTG. They have occasional traps. They have occasional death traps. But they give hints about these traps in advance, and never decide to hit you with anything that cannot be beaten by human reaction time unless you place yourself in that situation. That and a lot of traps in those games will not kill you instantly. They allow you to fail without instant death.

Nioh and the Souls games have an element of trial and error in that it is not always clear how enemies work, or what is the best way to clear a stage. In the process of beating a stage, you are expected to try many times, because it is hard, and try many different ways. They expect you to try things out, like approaches, like attacks, and die or get hurt trying, because it’s hard, and then try different things. You are given clues, you are shown an adequate amount of information. If you’re good, you can beat whole stages without dying that you’ve never seen before, but that is unlikely. In IWBTG, that is impossible.

And on a broader level, all games consist of trial and error. It’s connected to the nature of games. You mess up, you try again. It’s just not always blind guesswork.

And the other thing to ask is, is the game still fun when all the surprises are revealed? If someone knows about every trick? In the case of IWBTG, it’s still fairly challenging. I don’t think I’d totally call it fun, for much the same reason as super meat boy, but it’s still a functioning game with a decent challenge.

On the subject of trial and error, do you think it’s reasonable for there to always be a sweet spot for, say, a Souls boss, where they’re totally beatable on a first try but still difficult on a tenth? That seems like a tighter balancing act than it’s worth.

Apparently the way Dark Souls bosses are balanced, the best playtester has to beat them without taking damage, then they’re considered fair. I think this is a bit overboard personally. I don’t think you need to go so far to ensure bosses are beatable on the first try honestly. You just need to avoid instantly killing the player for anything that isn’t totally obviously an instant kill (Bed of Chaos obviously breaks this rule).

For a developer, in your eyes, is it a necessary evil to sacrifice the complexity that translate to depth, in order to prevent alienating their target audience? It is a dilemna I struggle with. I want my game to be deep, which comes from complexity, but not if it means people won’t play it.

I think there’s ways of getting both, and I’d cite Smash Bros Melee for this. It was a commercial success, but it’s also tremendously complex and deep. It was able to accomplish this because the majority of people who played the game have no actual fucking idea how to play it, or what most of the functions are. It has a very simple foothold for people getting into the game. You move around like a platformer, you attack in the direction of your opponent and it usually works. Super simple.

Making a game deep but understandable is about connecting with what your audience actually wants and actually can understand. The key is building a low “skill floor”, the minimum level of skill necessary to functionally play the game.

Street Fighter has a very high skill floor in comparison to Smash Bros. To play on a basic level, you need to know a LOT more and be competent at a lot more, otherwise you can’t even make real decisions.

I think this is what holds back a lot of action games, they have these complex move lists and people take one look at that and go, “like fuck I’m gonna remember all that” or they just mash buttons and it usually works, so they call it a button mashing game.

A ton of really complex games are extremely successful, like league of legends, but they do that by making the players’ most basic means of interaction with the game really simple. You can move, you can shoot, you have like 4 abilities. A lot of the other stuff is more advanced and you don’t need to know immediately. You can feel like you actually understand the game well enough to play fairly quickly. Similar deal with Pokemon, which has hundreds of actual pokemon, hundreds of moves, abilities, and weird other shit, but kids don’t need to know all that just to play.

I think the key is layered complexity, and introducing things one at a time, while not holding advanced players back. It’s a fine line to walk.

What makes for a good “feeling of speed” in racing games? that’s one of those terms reviewers use a lot but I’ve never really understood exactly what it consists of

That’s okay, they don’t understand what it consists of either.

I haven’t done much study on this, but I’d say it relates most heavily to the scale of the camera, it’s position relative to the vehicle (how close or far it is), the scale of the vehicle relative to its surroundings, the scale of detail in those surroundings, and particle effects. Continue reading →

You’ve said that for short games it’s reasonable to reset to begining in case of repeated failure, as in Curse of Issyos. While I can see that, it still comes off as frustrating when you want to practice a specific section, and the game keeps demanding you get from the begining to there. Plus, it creates the problem of unnecessary, trivial repetition, because you have to continually repeat parts that you’ve already mastered, which is a complete waste of player’s time when they’re wanting to practice a different section. Seems better to leave self challenge to the player, rather than ask for consistency, at least at this kind of level that demands a lot of time spending.

All arcade games are this way, and most games to some extent are this way. Dark Souls shunts you back to the bonfire, and you can’t get back to the part that gave you trouble until you get through all the stuff inbetween.

I mean, maybe there’s a case that these games should have more interspersed checkpoints, that’s what Super Mario Bros and Castlevania did on console, but I’m not gonna harsh on games of reasonable length like Contra sending you back to the beginning.

That and frequently you haven’t already mastered those parts, you’re still getting hit. Segments of this length get repeated in games like Ninja Gaiden or Nioh or Dark Souls all the time. I don’t think it’s a big deal to lose 6-15 minutes over this type of thing. It took me like 6 hours to beat contra, it’s probably gonna take me less to beat curse of issyos, both because it’s easier and because it’s shorter. Continue reading →

What do you think of hand holding in games?

Okay, hand holding, it can be a pain, especially in Nintendo games, double especially in Zelda Games.

I think Hand Holding is primarily a User Experience issue. Like, if you use photoshop, or microsoft word, or another such program, it won’t constantly stop you to tell you how to use it, it’ll maybe pop up a tip of the day at the start, which you can disable, and have a separate manual, plus little tooltips reminding you of functions when you hover over things and their key shortcut.

In games, we’ve come to build tutorials into every game, because manuals went the way of the dinosaur.

Old games didn’t need as much tutorialization, because they were simpler. You could figure out the functions really easily through simple experimentation. Continue reading →

What do you think are some games with conveyance issues?

MGR, Parrying. I honestly didn’t get this without guides and the ingame tutorials were not very helpful.

W101, knowing you should buy unite guts and unite spring from the store, knowing you should use unite guts to reflect projectiles, knowing to use the whip to pull spikes off enemies, a lot of things.

God hand, pretty much everything, the basic method you’re supposed to be playing. Continue reading →