Mechanic Analysis

How is Ammo Different from Cooldowns?

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You’ve said cooldowns are uninteresting. Isn’t the stamina in SoulsBorne essentially that? just it’s shared between defense and offense, which makes it a more interesting dynamic, but it’s still about controlling your opportunity cost, which I think is the criticism you’ve made against cooldowns.

I said they were uninteresting because when you design with cooldowns in mind, you don’t typically design moves with good counterplay. Dark Souls attacks have very obvious counterplay in the form of startup and recovery times. You can counterhit people, and whiff punish them. So even without stamina, the system would work (except blocking would be OP). Beyond that, stamina in dark souls isn’t a pure cooldown, it’s a resource. Because it’s not made in that particular way, you’re not getting essentially risk-free chances to do a ton of damage that you either spend at the right time or don’t. You’re not being asked to essentially choose the optimal time to use the attack or lose the opportunity to do it then (this wording is weird, and might be a bit hard to understand what I mean by this). Cooldowns are essentially about saying, “I have to choose to either use it now, or hang onto it.” Dark Souls lets you attack twice in a row, the question is more, “Okay, I can attack and do moves now, but as I attack more, I’ll eventually have to pay the price unless I rein it in a little.” Continue reading →

Real-Time Pause Menus

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What do you think about games having menus that freeze the in-game action? Should more stuff happen in real time? I vastly preferred how TLoU handled the backpack feature, than MGS3. gilgamesh

I’m kind of ambivalent on it. I’m fine with a lot of games freezing time for menus. In most cases, I don’t think it seriously matters.

Cases where I’m not fine tend to be games like Skyrim, where you can pop into a menu and heal yourself with an infinity of healing items. If you could do that in Demon’s Souls or Dark Souls, that would be horrible.

Basically, when you have a menu that pauses time, you’re effectively making any action that takes place inside the menu instantaneous. This is why all the games with weapon wheels slow time while you’re looking at the weapon wheel. Because they want switching to be instantaneous in game time.

If healing is instantaneous, it’s not risky. If you can carry an infinite number of healing items and healing is instantaneous, then you have infinite health. Megaman has subtanks or etanks you can use to heal in menus, and that’s fine.

If healing is limited, then instantaneous healing means you effectively just have a slightly bigger health bar. If you can carry unlimited healing items, then you have an unlimited health bar, which sucks.

Menus not pausing means that whatever’s in your menu, you better have set up before combat comes, or take a risk setting it up when combat’s happening. Witcher, they don’t want you brewing potions mid-combat, they want you with that stuff set up ahead of time (menus in witcher do pause, but you can’t brew potions I believe). In Dark Souls, similar deal, you gotta put on the right equipment ahead of time or pay the price in the moment.

I think it ends up being more about tone than substance most of the time. You can choose to have them real-time to make switching things in combat riskier if you feel that’s important to the tone of your game, but I can’t think of any specific game dynamics that rely on the player not being able to instantly do whatever in the pause menu.

Stealth Game Distraction Tools

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Stealth games need more distraction tools, here’s a list:

Old ideas:

Tap, bring enemies over to your position via sound, tapping on walls, or simply making noise in place
Coin, throw an object to make noise far from you

flash bang, temporarily disable enemies, but alert them. Can stun them during alert phase to allow for an escape.

Smoke Grenade, Obscures vision inside of and into an area temporarily, but alerts guards

Tranq, shoot someone from afar, they conk out after a delay

Sneak/Crouchwalk, move silently, but slowly.

blackjack, hit someone from behind/up close, they conk out.

Remote detonated noise maker, makes a noise, needs to be planted in advance

Water Arrow, shut off light sources

Moss Arrow, dampens sound on a surface

Decoy, guards will follow it when in alert if they can’t see you, will be drawn to it otherwise, dishonored 2 lets you swap places with your decoy and leaves the decoy to fight

Cardboard Box, move slower, but ignored while staying still, unless directly in guard’s path
Camouflage mat, like cardboard box, but must be set up

Fulton, dispose of guard bodies

Stealth Action Camo/invisibility potion, cannot be directly perceived, lasts a limited amount of time.

Disguise, allows access to areas granted by disguise. Certain suspicious actions may trigger an alert
Possession, like disguise, but possess a guard or animal, moving them around until they’re released.

Run Silent, removes the sound of your footsteps temporarily, allowing you to move fast silently.

Camoflage, blend into certain areas/surfaces, can be changed to match surfaces, octocamo in MGS4 changed automatically based on staying still

thermal vision/wallhacks, lets you see through walls, usually blinded by sources of light or heat, like grenades or flashbangs

Scouting Orb, see from another viewpoint, limited use

Lean, see around corners, making yourself slightly visible in the process.

Directional Microphone, Hear further in a specific direction

EMP/Chaff grenade, disables electronic sensors temporarily without alert

Magazine/stuffed puppy snare, lures enemies in and holds their attention, even when in investigation mode

Fake Death/Revival pills, Allows a player to fake being killed during an alert, then revive themselves, wait too long and die for real

Handkerchief, inconspicuous melee conk during disguise
Cig Spray, inconspicuous slightly ranged conk during disguise

Colored Smoke Grenades (Yellow, Red, Green, Blue), From MGS4, trigger enemies to laugh, get mad, scream, or get sad, then fall unconscious afterwards. Laughing has enemies kill those on their side, anger has them kill other non-allied enemy combatants. During these last two they’ll ignore snake. While screaming they’ll run around.

Bamboo dart, stuns enemy very briefly, causes them to investigate where it came from

Caltrops, stuns enemy when walked over

Blink, instant teleport to a position, ignoring everything between including guards and their line of sight. Can get away when spotted, ideally sets the investigation point to where you teleport to.

Swoop, move quickly across a short distance without making sound, limited by a recovery/cooldown time.

Bend time, slows guards, making it easier to move around them.

Stops guards, making it easier to move around them, or possibly through their line of sight temporarily.

Remote Drone/clone/spiderbot, can scout areas, sometimes using different routes and movement abilities than you, attack or interfere with enemies without risking yourself. Usually has limited environmental interactions, being incapable of completing some objectives

Patsy, accuse other guard of being a bad guy while disguised during a clearing phase

New Ideas:

Blur Ward, Place a small zone that when guards step into it, they cannot perceive anything outside that zone, but don’t realize something funny is up unless something egregious happens, or maybe the effect wears off based on how long they stay in there.

LIFE gun, Nonlethal tranq weapon that overheals enemies and buffs them for when they wake back up, so you can tranq people, but in the process you’re making them more powerful later

Holo-wall, an object that makes a detour guards must move around, can make hiding spots out of dead end hallways. Expires when passed by too much or after a period of time

Mass Mind Tuner, changes guard’s affinities towards certain objects, lets say red, yellow, and blue arbitrarily, so they patrol around these objects more frequently. Allows you to adjust the guard patrol patterns, but as a matter of level design, this opens up and closes different routes as well as forcing guards in the short term to move by you, so you gotta keep your wits about you (this absolutely depends on good level design and guard scheduling). Can have differing effects based on each guard’s distance from the affiliated object at the time of tuning, determining the direction they go, so the player needs to use timing and adapt in the moment.

Smelly garbage, makes guards adverse to moving near an area, might make them surround the areas around it though. (needs a better drawback, and a clear counter)

Reversi, Reverse guard patrol schedules, so they patrol backwards

Fake Grenade, makes guards rush away from a specific point, potentially onto the player’s position.

Slow Guard, makes a specific guard’s movements slower or stopped temporarily, broken by alert. Slow people while they’re in favorable positions. Faster to alert in this state, maybe wider peripheral vision

Caffeine Shot. Guard spends less time standing still, goes through patrol route faster. Speed people up to get them out of your hair quicker. Alert triggered more quickly, buffs enemies during alert.

Recall Point. Set a point that can be teleported back to, maybe takes time to teleport back to, maybe the point is conspicuous and can be destroyed.

Fear Gas, (inspired by the MGS4 green gas grenade) causes enemies to temporarily run in fear, ignoring the player while doing so, mixes up guard positions all over the place, potentially in good and bad positions, gives you a chance to move through enemies in the short term. Alternatively, you could need to hide while the fear effect is going on and take advantage of it afterwards.

Darkness aura, decrease guard vision cones in a limited area, triggers investigation and clearing of area. Like a less effective, but presumably larger radius smoke grenade.

Pretty Painting, draws guard attention, they don’t investigate it, but they can’t look away from it while patrolling, effect is stronger as they get closer to it. Won’t look over their shoulder at it though.

Position Swapper, swaps your position with a guard or other person. Makes them want to get back to where they just were.

Sleep gas but slow, temporarily makes a small area that will put enemies to sleep if they stay in it for too long.

Sleep poison, sets guard to clearing mode, gives them time limit to find you before succumbing to sleep, ineffective on alerted enemies

Shoulder Tap, causes enemy to turn around in your direction and look around for a bit.

Instant Barricade, throws up a wall behind you that enemies need to destroy or go around. Very loud.

Push, shunts enemies further away from you, making space to run. Obviously triggers alert.

Trip Wire, a wire that trips enemies who run over it, temporarily stunning them, ineffective on enemies in idle or investigating states, will be removed by those and trigger clearing. When Tripped, extra time can be devoted on knocked down enemies to easily knock them out.

ADHD Inducer, Guard in Alert or Clearing is temporarily forced down into doing an idle patrol of the immediate area. If they can directly perceive you when hit, they will only have a momentary lapse in concentration.

Swift Kick in the Shins, slows guards down.

Sonic Flashbang, deafens guards temporarily, also stuns for a brief period. Causes them to go into clearing or alert phase while still deaf.

Meme Machine: Change a guard’s memory so it remembers everything that they currently know as being in the wrong state

Amnesia: Wipe all current object state knowledge

Meme Virus, set a charge on one guard, have them pass it off whenever they encounter another guard, so it gets passed between guards one by one. Not duplicated, just passed. Then some effect on whoever’s holding it.

Block off doors, either with an adhesive tool, or by physically moving objects in front of them.

Recorder/tapedeck, record guard conversations and play them back in different places for an effect, maybe to keep people out of a room

Sticky floor: Slows down pursuers who walk through it. Useful in escapes.
Glue bomb/thrown object: throw at people chasing you to stun them briefly, giving you a chance to run away. Probably only stun for like half a second, because more than that would end the chase completely.

Constraints to think about:

Guard movement paths through levels, predicting and affecting it. How can you reward someone for predicting where a guard will be in the future? How can you reward them for predicting where multiple guards will be in the future? How can guard paths be altered strategically, how can this have drawbacks as well as benefits? Maybe tune guard affinities to inspect and patrol around certain areas?

Items targeted at interacting with different guard states (idle, investigate, clearing, alert, unconscious, dead). How can you interestingly move them from one state to another? How can you differentiate the states? How can you manipulate them while keeping them in the same state?

How can these be made to have varying effects based on when and where they’re used in relation to the guards?

How can the guards’ scheduling be affected?

Scale, how can you make people worry about future and past encounters more? Maybe a way of setting up

Affect guard vision, change what they look at?

How can escaping be made more interesting? Ideally in cycles of causing the alert, running away, and triggering more alerts as you go.

How can clearing phases be made more interesting? How do you force people to pick good hiding spots, then move from them regularly? How do you give people options when they’re cornered? How do you give people options to get the guards to not look where you are currently hiding versus the other hiding spots in the room? Rather, how do you make selecting a good hiding spot a fuzzy heuristic evaluation instead of a binary right or wrong?

Guard states

Idle: No perception of the player, purely following schedule
Investigation: moving slowly to look at something outside of patrol, small perception of player, not coordinating
Caution: Follows Alert and Clearing phases, like Idle, but skips investigation phase to go directly to clearing, and has more aggressive and fast patrol patterns.
Clearing: Moving quickly to check over areas, follows direct perception of player, but not currently perceiving player, coordinating together
Alert: Moving to attack player, directly perceiving player, coordinating together
Unconscious: Cannot act, revives after a timer, can be revived by other guards, triggers investigation or clearing
Dead: Cannot Act, triggers clearing
Injured: Can act, Actions impaired during active states

On guard AI: maybe enemies could have narrower vision cones during alert and clearing phases and more wide ones during investigation and idle. So they have the easiest time seeing you when idle, and the hardest time while alerted. This also incentivizes moving around more during clearing and alert phases, when players normally want to bunker up.

General categories of tools in Stealth games:

– Distraction

– Escape

– Information

– Self Obscuring

– Disablers (weapons)

– Mobility/Area Access

Enemy Ideas:

Eleven Men, an enemy that can split off and rejoin

An enemy that can see in all directions but not hear (dishonored 2 sort of did this with jindosh’s robots, but only 2 directions, which makes more sense than seeing in all directions, which is kind of dumb actually. narrower vision cones in multiple directions makes a lot of sense)

Enemy that is blind, but good hearing. (feel like this has been done before)

An enemy that can see extremely far, but tight like a laser beam

Enemies that function like pacman ghosts, alternating between investigation phase and sleep phases, regardless of what you do and whether you trigger them, so there’s always some enemies that aren’t just purely patrolling (and therefore function as simple timing puzzles), but are actively looking for you and thus need to be avoided.

Halo 1’s Unique Success at the 2 Weapon Limit

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Where do you think Halo 1 succeeds with the two weapon limit system where Bioshock Infinite and other games fail?

Actually, I think Halo 2 fails at the 2 weapon system for similar reasons to other games, which I’ll discuss in that review (which is mostly done, I just want to comment on each level a bit).

Overall, I think if you limit a game to 2 weapons at a time, then it creates a situation where you can’t have a wide weapon diversity, and all weapons need to be good at all ranges, with more situational weapons only vended out for specific sections (like that one sniper section in BS:I where you have a barrel with a sniper rifle in it right before like 3 snipers). Continue reading →

Dynamic Difficulty

Celia Wagar3 Comments

Thoughts on this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB84uBc68QE

The video is excessively pessimistic about difficulty levels. Difficulty levels work fine in a lot of games. The big issue with them most commonly cited is that players don’t know what the difficulty levels are like before they try them, so they can accidentally get slotted with the wrong one. I played Nier on hard and it was a shitty experience. I for some reason chose to play Metroid Prime 3 on easy, I still don’t know why, and that was entirely too easy. Players are basically being asked to be mind readers about which of your difficulty settings is right for them.

I’m a bit conflicted on how exactly difficulty should be handled here because I’ve accrued some beliefs that don’t totally line up.
Continue reading →

Simple Actions with a lot of Depth

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What are some simple actions in games that actually have lots of deph? I’d say Mario’s jump is a good example due to the level of control you have over it. Got any others?

Double Jumping
My goto example a lot of the time. You can jump at many different points during your first jump to get a variety of combined effects, meaning that between both your jumps there is a lot of depth.

Weaving through projectiles (shmups)

Wavedashing (smash)
Different angles give you different lengths, you can jump up through platforms and do it, and as you land. Can also get you off platforms and be done out of shield and other actions.

Edge canceling (smash)
Can be done at any point in a move and off of many moves for varied effect

Strafejumping (Quake and derivatives)
Lots of variance possible on each frame, lots of variance possible in the overall arc and trajectory.

Kick Glitching (Mirror’s Edge)
Is modulated based on input speed, look angle into the wall, and time you kick off the wall. Allows different followups too

Side Boosting (ME)
You get different amounts of speed off it based on how cleanly you do the motion, both turning to set it up, and turning when exiting the boost.

Pointing and shooting while moving (especially rockets)
Pretty obvious, you can aim in a lot of directions, move in a lot of directions. Rockets and other projectiles you need to lead are really interesting too. Aiming is fundamentally tricky and has a lot of possible places your cursor can pass through and become active on.

Skiing (Tribes)
Activating the jetpack and going up and down the right hills to gain speed requires good timing and reading of the environment.

Drifting
Depending on the game this requires good prediction ability for where to start drifting and how long to drift, as well as what direction to hold during it, such as to get the right angle.

A lot of Micro stuff in Starcraft Brood War
Moving units around and having varied results for different formations is fundamentally deep. Like pulling weakened units off the front line and having them assist from the back, or using tighter or wider or shaped formations versus certain other enemy types.

Directional Influence (smash)
I’m kinda cheating with this one, DI is deep because of a lot of assisting mechanics too. Actually trying to control your trajectory in the moment is kind of simple, just point the stick perpendicularly to the angle of knockback.

Tossing objects with gravity.
Getting parabolas right is tricky. Humans have natural physics simulating mechanisms that assist us with this.

Attacking in Chivalry
The sword moves and you can look to control it as it moves. Control over these two simultaneous elements means there’s a lot of different trajectories you can send your sword in. You can delay your swing in place by rotating your view the opposite direction, or spin wildly to slash everywhere and potentially around blocks.

Rebounding off a corner or incline
Judging angles of reflection is tricky, and can go a lot of different ways. Can quickly become too chaotic for humans to easily judge though.

Shooting an object that bounces off surfaces
Same as the above, but an object instead of you.

Staying atop an object moving under you.
Not quite the same as balancing below, this is more about

Balancing
Walking the Slack Line taught me that there’s a lot involved with balancing properly. Even in the Tony Hawk games, trying to balance on a fine line has a fair amount of complexity, even if it’s a simple action overall, and being good at it can be tricky.

Trying to get maximum coverage of many objects with a limited area or set of areas.
This is a pure math thing. It’s the knapsack problem basically. A lot of math problems like this are inherently deep, like the traveling salesman problem. They require the use of heuristics to properly analyze. Actions like placing sentries, towers, or AOEs typically fall under this category.

Getting an object that is attracted to you gravitationally to orbit you, or redirecting it in general.
Lots of variables operate in synchronicity in these cases and you can get a lot of different results out of them with careful movement.

Bashgliding (Ori)
This one is cool primarily because you kind of need to balance the direction you bash with how much velocity you want to get off of it. Also the input is cool, you literally release the stick at the moment you bash. Then you can glide and double jump, and as long as you don’t press the stick, you’ll keep all the bash momentum. It’s possible before you gain the ability to glide to do this, but it’s obviously not as effective, and you definitely need double and triple jumps to really make it useful.

Divekicking (divekick)
All the divekicks and different styles of divekick in that game are so expressive. Like The Baz deserves a special shoutout for both versions of his divekick, the original one where he could jump straight up and then press and hold kick to choose an angle to fire, and he had to draw a line behind him that would be what actually hurt people, as well as the new one where he presses and holds in the air to extend a rope further or shorter, to determine the radius of the arc he will swing in, then he can do this again off the first swing. The fact this works SO WELL with the existing divekick characters is fucking incredible. It has a totally different type of counterplay where you need to basically kick him in the crotch, into his body, rather than at him the same way as the other characters, yet every character counterplays against this great.

Shielding (smash)
It has variable density, depending on how hard you hold down the trigger, which can have variably more pushback/shieldstun/damage taken when you hold it lighter, and it can even be tilted to cover different parts of the body. So truly effective use of the shield can be really nuanced.

Palmbombing (psychonauts)
It’s like the reflection examples and tribes skiing above, you can use the palm bomb to reflect off a surface, then redirect this velocity elsewhere. Helped by the fact that bunnyhopping conserves momentum in psychonauts.

Damage boosting
This one goes back to Quake, but involves a lot of games. There’s many forms of this, from rocket jumping, to grenade jumping, to getting hit by enemies to abuse mercy invincibility, to getting hit by enemies to get boosted forwards faster, to many other things. It can vary by position, by angle, by when you jump, many factors. Usually has incredible depth.

Canceling an animation with variable velocity over the course of the animation to keep the velocity.
There’s a lot of examples of this in different games, but one of my favorites is the DACUS in Smash bros. You can cancel dash attack into grab or up smash and keep the momentum of the dash attack (which for most characters boosts them forward rather quickly).

Dash cancel to keep invincibility (Slayer in Guilty Gear)
You can do this to add iframes to moves like bloodsucking universe to make them function like pseudo DPs. You can combine this with all of your specials and to jump forward invincibly whenever you want.

Divekick canceling (faust in guilty gear)
You can divekick (like dhalsim’s yoga spear) with Faust, then cancel with faultless defense, then do another aerial at any point in your jump to change your jumping trajectory and do aerials lower to the ground. It’s amazing to see in action and gives Faust amazing air to air and air to ground abilities.

Roman Canceling (guilty gear)
You can do this at any point in a move (after it hits) to instantly cancel the move. The Xrd implementation is even more deep because it can be before or after the move hits, vastly opening up the range of options. You can whiff cancel fireballs to act simultaneously to them, you can extend blockstrings at the cost of meter (I love Kusoru at Final Round XV roman canceling two sweeps in a row to set up a tick wild throw, that’s fucking incredibly cool). You can also YRC moves that put you in the air to do quick aerials, like YRC Bandit Bringer, or Millia’s 6K.

Movement on Ice
It’s tricky, you have a few variables going at once, and you need to judge how much movement will be enough to get you to a place, and how much is overboard. Sometimes you need to move fast, sometimes you can afford to move slow. You need to think into the future about the effect of friction to approximate where you will end up. The range of different speeds and attempts to affect your speed more or less create depth.

Tried to keep this limited to single mechanics, but couldn’t in all cases. Left off a lot of things that were obviously combinations of a lot of mechanics working together, or being decided between.

What do you think of weak points?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of enemies with weak points?

I think weak points help focus you on specific things. Like Dracula needs to be hit in the head, a bunch of bloodborne enemies are weaker in the head, many FPS enemies get wrecked by headshots. When you have weak points it can add an element of risk versus reward, time and space your attack well to get bonus damage, or maybe not get damage at all. Weakpoints can put you in harm’s way more, like how to get the most damage on shmup bosses, like touhou bosses that have tiny hitboxes, you need to stay directly beneath them, or close to them, which exposes you to more projectiles.

Weak points can even be used as an optional difficulty thing, like in Megaman ZX, where hitting the enemy weak points will take the boss down faster, but also hurt your grade and consequently the power of the biometal you receive. Some bosses in that games have weak points positioned that are very hard to avoid.

Weak points can be used as a constraint, like Dracula’s Head or Duke’s Dear Freja from Dark Souls 2. There’s a few different ways to hit each of the weak points on these bosses, but if you’re off then you get no damage. In Duke’s Dear Freja’s case, your sword will bounce off the other part of the enemy, even if you would have hit the weak point. This was fun with a greatsword.

The thing to avoid is making the constraints on the weak points so restrictive that they can only be damaged 1 way. This is when you get to Zelda style boss design. To avoid this I’d say, have ways to damage the boss that aren’t the weak point if the weak point isn’t always exposed, or have the weak point always be exposed, or expose itself irregularly during phases where the player also is doing other things. The point is to make the player question whether they can get damage right now, and how much damage they can get right now. This makes it an interesting choice.

What do you think of escort missions?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of escort missions?

Everyone knows to avoid making them by now basically because it’s irritating to make mission completion dependent on an entity which you have no control over. Like you can’t realistically make this other entity avoid damage. This is more a matter of technology and user perception than an actual mechanical issue with the concept of escort missions. The issue is that players don’t feel a strong connection between their decisions and outcomes.

The annoyance of escort missions is mitigated as the behavior of the entity to be protected is more consistent and predictable. Escorting something that moves on a totally fixed and unchanging path is usually less aggravating than other possible cases, where the escorted target can wander off on its own, get stuck on geometry, engage enemies it should avoid and get itself killed, etc.

Also irritating is if you’re not allowed to move too far ahead of your escorted target, and generally if it does a shitty job keeping up with you. Emil is like this in that one isometric dungeon in Nier. Many games mitigate this by teleporting the escort to you if you’re too far ahead, though this can sidestep the point of an escort mission.

The abstract idea behind the escort mission makes sense, target separate from you that can take damage, it pairs up with a lot of story concepts, like protecting things, fighting alongside a buddy, etc, it just usually doesn’t work out for an assortment of technical reasons, or poorly considered design.

This page lists a bunch of examples, and happens to be nice enough to categorize them by what’s annoying about that particular escort mission.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EscortMission

What do you think of checkpoints?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think of checkpoints?

Checkpoints and death are about creating context and building consistency.

When you screw something up, you repeat it. In a broader sense of fun, fun comes from succeeding at things intermittently, and succeeding more frequently over time (building consistency). So when something is screwed up, you repeat it to build the skill. Through iteration, you learn to overcome it. Guilty Gear Xrd’s missions are a great example of this in effect. They have you perform a simple task that builds a skill for a situation, like performing a specific combo, confirming whether the enemy is hit or blocked, performing a reversal from knockdown, surviving an enemy wave of attacks when you cannot attack. They then have you repeat this ten times, whether you succeed or fail, and judge you based on how many times out of ten you succeeded. All 10 is an S rank. You can repeat these missions whenever you want to.

Death just means sending the player back to a prior point. This can be a checkpoint, the beginning of a level, a mission select screen, or the beginning of the entire game. When you send the player back further, when you space checkpoints further apart, you are creating a context that bridges all the things that happen inbetween. This is especially true if there is health, or other semi-persistent variables that go up or down as you progress. When you have say 10 challenges in a row, and 5 hitpoints, you’re saying that you need to complete all 10 of these challenges, and only allowed to fail 4. Hitpoints allow you to fail in a small way and create this longer bridging context between encounters. Healthbars allow you to have bigger failures or smaller failures, so you can have different types of enemy attacks that are easier or harder to avoid and create challenges of mitigating damage instead of strictly avoiding it.

The key thing is though that when you have widely spaced checkpoints, you ask players to be generally consistent across a set of challenges rather than able to succeed at one. If you have checkpoints directly in front of and after every challenge, players can succeed at that challenge once and continue, if you have checkpoints placed further apart, then they might need to succeed at that challenge many times before they can continue. Across repeated playthroughs of a segment, players might die in many different places in many different ways, because they might have a general consistency at any one challenge, but when asked to do multiple in a row, they need to achieve a higher level of consistency to succeed overall. This is the path to mastery.

A corollary to this is, if there is a checkpoint directly after anything, the player is not expected to master that thing. Bosses have checkpoints after them because they are difficulty spikes to be overcome once, not basic challenges to become consistent at overcoming.

Please play Rolling Thunder on NES. It sort of has the lagging checkpoint system you described. When you beat a stage, you get a password for THAT stage, so when you continue you have to beat it again. Basically you have to beat two stages in a row to make progress.

HAH! That’s funny! I guess it makes sense that it comes from the password era, they did a lot of weird checkpointing things back then if I recall correctly. Dunno if I want to play it just to see how the staggered checkpoints work though, it looks kind of simple. Isn’t Code Name Viper better known for this type of gameplay?

Weapon Imba & Breakable Powerups

Celia WagarLeave a comment

What do you think about games where you lose your upgrades when you get hit?

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BreakablePowerUp
So we got, Super Mario, Cave Story, Contra, Metal Slug, Zeldas with beam sword, and whatever else is up there.

Uhhhh. I don’t really know. It’s an additional punishment for getting hit. It makes a slippery slope where players who get hit are more likely to get hit again, since they can’t defend themselves as well. Apart from that, I don’t really have anything. It doesn’t really introduce an interesting decision, because players are already trying to not get hit. I guess it can be a way to limit damage boosting, but how many games are intentionally constructed around damage boosting, or are susceptible to undesirable unintentional damage boosting to the extent that they’d want to introduce a punishment for it rather than just reconfiguring their levels? Continue reading →