Slow & Great Stealth Games

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Why do stealth games end up being so slow frequently?

Frequently stealth games have multiple speeds you can move at, like running, walking, crouching, and crawling. The idea is that the fastest movement speed will actively attract enemy attention, and the slowest will prevent enemies from noticing unless they look directly at you. Frequently crouching, such as in Dishonored and Deus Ex Human Revolution, will completely squelch your footstep sounds.

The trouble I have with this is, a ton of stealth games end up being about moving slow as balls most of the time, assuming you’re actually playing stealthy, until you memorize the level layouts and find fast ways to move through them. And who likes moving slowly?

The tradeoff here is really obvious, moving slowly makes you less noticeable, and incapable of being perceived without direct vision, at the cost that you’re staying within view for longer periods of time, tempting fate that a guard might turn around and stare at you.

The downside is, how often is this really played with in any way? How many guards have you seen that just face one direction, so you have to crawl on your belly to get close to them?

How can we fix this? Have guards turn around more often, maybe give them a little spider sense, feel the player’s gaze on their back. And importantly, establish some kind of tell before they do it so the player knows to get the hell out.

What about a game that reversed this? What if you needed to go fast in order to stay invisible? And the slower you go, the more noticeable you are. Dunno how it would all work out, probably based on the player moving so fast that they trip over something, lose all their speed and get caught, but hey, might be worth a shot. That or skipping the movement speed = noise thing altogether.

Alternatively increase the gamespeed, so the slowest form of movement is faster, but still proportionally slower. Adjust enemies so reaction time is still balanced.

This is probably something worth playing around with.

What elements make a great stealth game?

Good level design, good enemy spotting AI, good investigation AI, good distraction mechanics, good chasing AI, good movement mechanics.

Without good level design, you can’t move around enemies. You can’t really have a stealth game in a single hallway. Also if you don’t have chokepoints and good patrol patterns, then it’s either too easy or too rote.

The way enemies spot you, and the reaction they have to it is important. You gotta have some tolerance zones where they sort of detect you, otherwise everything is over when you enter their vision cone. I think dishonored broke this down in a neat way with eyes, head turn, body turn, though failed at investigation and sub-alert states.

Investigation is important for the distraction aspect. It’s also the primary interplay between the player and the enemies. It’s where the enemies try to actually find you, based on where they think you are, or other factors. Thief 1 & 2 did the best job of this in my opinion, I still remember a tense encounter in thief 1 of trying to avoid a guard in a pitch black room with a tiled floor. He couldn’t see me, but he kept moving around, getting close to me, and I had to keep moving aside on the loud floor, which clued him in on my positioning even more, but I’d get out of the way, and he’d lose me briefly before the cycle repeated.

Distraction mechanics prey on the enemy’s sense of vision or hearing, they’re able to help you pull enemies away from choke points, or get them off your back if they’re about to find you. They can be close range or far range. They can draw enemies directly to you, or pull them to a different point, and they induce risk because enemies then try to find you afterwards. MGS3 and MGSV are kind of the kings of this in my opinion.

Good chasing AI is part of what keeps the game fun when everything gets fucked up. Good AI here will try to close off exits, chase the player directly, get into position ahead of the player, or other such routines. Pac-man ghosts are good for understanding this type of principle, http://gameinternals.com/post/2072558330/understanding-pac-man-ghost-behavior and Monaco generally excels at this type of stealth, practically being built around it.

Good movement mechanics fit in any game, in the case of stealth games, movement is both a matter of traversal, and tradeoffs between visibility, noise, and speed. Some of the most interesting here would be Dishonored, though blink kind of broke the stealth unfortunately, MGS3, MGSV, and Mark of the Ninja (especially this one).

The Joy of Souls Combat

Celia Wagar1 Comment

What elements of the souls series gameplay do you like?

I love winding up attacks early as enemies walk up to me so they’ll hit enemies right when they reach me and interrupt them trying to attack me. I love walking out of range of enemy attacks and hitting them when they miss. I love moving around enemy’s attacks to hit them from the sides. I love using strong attacks to hit enemies from outside their range as they attack. I love weaving between multiple enemies and slowly whittling them down. I love running past enemies and zig zagging to avoid their blows. I love learning and memorizing enemy movesets. I love locking enemies in hitstun at critical points. I love using the terrain to crowd control enemies, separating some off from the others, or standing in a place where I can temporarily hit them without them hitting me. I love stepping into enemy ranges to lure out attacks. I love dodging at the last instant to get through attacks. I love pushing enemies off cliffs. I love managing stamina to get in more slashes while the enemy becomes vulnerable. I love releasing my shield or pausing my attacks to get some stamina back at risk to life and limb.

The thing about dark souls is that enemy attacks are reactable, and so are the player attacks, they’re on a similar timescale, but the game is still fair because the enemies are reactable and your defensive options are instant. Whereas other action games like Bayonetta, DMC, Zelda, etc, have player attacks that are unreactable (significantly faster than enemy attacks). So attacking in dark souls is this commitment, and you need to evaluate when and where that type of commitment is safe, and you’re given enough information to determine that.

These are all things that the combat system of Dark Souls accomplishes that are individually really satisfying, and together, fucking excellent.

Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines Overview

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Thought’s on Vampire the masquerade?

Okay, I played this game like 3 times, having to restart for various reasons. A ton of dialogue is recycled between different dialogue choices, with minor minor differences. This is especially noticeable with Therese and Jeanette.

I really like the backstory to VTM, but the game is crap overall. The fighting is crap. The dialogue choices are crap. The stealth is crap. The fighting is like, it changes what attacks are performed based on which direction is held, and somehow that affects whether enemies block, I think. In general just mash the attack button and directions and you’ll be fine. As the game progresses you need to fight more and more.

You need to run around back and forth a lot for all sorts of boring reasons. It’s built on the source engine, so there’s bunny hopping. I’m not very good at bunnyhopping, you can apparently go twice as fast that way.

It’s a pain to figure out which way to go some times, some areas have some cute set pieces like the ocean house hotel, whatever place does the mannequin trick, and a couple others.

There’s a bunch of useless skills, because whoever made the game wasn’t very careful. There’s also a bunch of bugs because it was probably rushed. The animations are silly as all hell.

I got to almost the end, and got stuck by a bugged door that refused to open because I didn’t install the fan patch. Installing the patch at that point didn’t fix it and I wasn’t seriously replaying the whole thing again.

There isn’t much to comment on, I don’t think there’s much to defend. It doesn’t seem to succeed even at the things people typically laud the game for. The interactive things at least. Though I guess it’s kind of faithful to the universe in terms of writing and content.

Favorite WRPG

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You’ve been asked numerous times about JRPGs, so time for something different: what are your favorite *W*RPGs (if any)?

Dark Souls.

Uh, none. I don’t really like any of them. I guess Mass Effect 2 sort of wins by default? Maybe Deus Ex? Least hated? Actually I liked Fable 1 way back when I was younger. Don’t know if I’d think the same now.

I’ve played at least some of Mass Effect 1 and 2 (beat), Dragon Age Origins (only started), deus ex, dxhr, Elder Scrolls 3 (started), 4 (beat), and 5 (started), Fallout 3 (started), Borderlands 1 (beat) and 2, Diablo 2 (beat), System Shock 2 (started), Planescape Torment (started), Fable: The Lost Chapters (beat), Risen 1 (beat) and 2 (started), Guild Wars, Jade Empire (started), Gothic 3(started), Dungeon Siege, Vampire the Masquerade Bloodlines (almost beat), Witcher 2 and 3, and Dark Messiah (beat).

Wait, yeah, Dark Messiah wins, if you count it. It’s kinda borderline.

If I had to sum them up, I think WRPGs have weak action gameplay, they’re a bit too bound to the concept of the character growing stronger rather than the player. The Witcher series improved at this over time, but in my opinion never really succeeded. Some attempted to investigate non-violent gameplay, pacifism, but it came down to just knowing the right dialogue options and sometimes having a skill level high enough, which doesn’t involve much interesting choice or dynamic. Either you can skip this fight or you don’t.

I think if Japanese RPGs are about the joy of growing stronger (grinding), Western ones are about the joy of personal expression (stat investing, character customization, or story choices). Both usually fail in my book, because neither try to really push interesting choices with short term consequences. They’re both caught up too much in the tradition their systems were born out of. Both were presumably inspired by dungeons and dragons and other tabletop RPGs in different ways originally, and since then have followed the tradition of the digital RPGs that came before them rather than really trying to make interesting combat systems, either from scratch (dark messiah), copying arcadey games (zelda, Ys), or using the format they had (SMT).

To me, stat systems like that are supplementary, they augment what you have rather than creating value in of themselves. They don’t have very strong short term consequences or much implication on short term consequence choices, so they’re not very challenging to work with. Sure, it’s cool to work out a new build, it’s cool to grow stronger and find stuff that was originally hard much easier, but both of those things are so far removed from the world of short term consequences, they’re almost outside the game.

Super Meat Boy Overview

Celia Wagar2 Comments

What’s your full opinion on Super Meat Boy?

It’s repeating the same thing over and over again until you finally win. You don’t really have much choice in how you do it, you just gotta repeat until the inputs themselves are drilled into your head. The short level length exacerbates this, despite making the game easier, because the sections of repetition are really tightly packed together, so it’s extremely obvious that you’re doing the same thing over and over again. I’m not a fan of this style of difficulty.

Hotline Miami is closely comparable, but its application of randomness and subtle shifts in enemy patterns based on minute changes in timing allow for playthroughs of a given floor to play out very differently from one another, where everything in super meat boy is deterministic and very similar across repeated playthroughs. There’s a lot more possible variation in Hotline Miami, a lot more ways to approach any given problem (except the bosses, which they were sensible enough to not include in the sequel), where in super meat boy there are very few.

Levels in Super Meat Boy are very deliberately constructed to limit possibility space, much like Kaizo Mario style levels. This does make them harder, but it also makes them boring. Super Meat Boy is probably my definitive example of why difficulty or challenge alone does not make a good game. It was what spurred one of my early thoughts that it’s really easy to make a hard game, but a lot harder to make an interesting or “challenging” one. Now I would say a lot harder to make a deep one.

Yes, it is about the challenge, but deep games give you a lot of ways to approach a challenge, they have different measures of small successes to allow you to continue to push forward in some small way while getting closer to the big success rather than just ram your head against the wall making no progress on this one thing required to progress. This prevents frustration with the game, and usually provides avenues where more skilled players can find challenges up to their standards. They’re harder to build, but more rewarding to engage with, retaining more attention from players.

Though, I think Super Meat Boy was a financial success, it sold at least 1.5 million copies, so who really knows?

Just Cause 2 Overview

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What’s your opinion on Just Cause 2?

It’s fun. The weapons are really accurate even if you don’t focus them, the combination of the grappling hooks and infinite parachutes feels really excellent, blowing up stuff attracting the military works pretty well, makes any spot on the map potentially a fight zone.

The story missions are generally rather linear and boring in comparison to free roam destruction. The faction missions are a bit better. Both do an alright job of breaking up the repetition of just going around the map and blowing stuff up, which isn’t very organized or focused, but story missions require a certain amount of chaos before you can do them. The trend kind of ends up being that you’re stuck grinding before the next story mission, which itself is more limiting in many cases and less fun than the open world stuff, but I at least feel the need to get to it, because that’s what progression is defined by. It would be nice if they tried a bit harder to give the player more open ended quests as just things that were going on across the world, rather than segregating them into their own mode. Especially because you can visit anywhere on the map, including mission locations, early and fuck them up in advance, making the missions easier. You might as well have the missions be more based around locations than becoming on-rails segments temporarily, it would all fit together better.

A number of the missions are pretty cool, like the one where you take down the missiles as they launch, or the island that’s a ripoff of lost, then you get components that are annoying like driving sections where you have to follow a single path and your vehicle controls like ass and the car is liable to blow up after getting shot too much.

Downsides are the limited number of weapons you can carry at once, really prevent use of the more exotic weapons and sometimes I was constantly running out of ammo.

Also the map is really big and travel to new locations can take a lot of time. You can only fast travel to places you’ve already been, so you need to invest a fair amount of time into going around the map so you can fast travel it later. Also it feels a bit more annoying than I think it should be to grab all the vehicle, weapon, and armor parts. On top of that you have cash stashes and faction collectibles all spread out across this massive massive map. This is completely filler, much like a ton of the smaller things you can blow up to get chaos are filler. If they didn’t have the heat mechanic bringing the military down on you all the time, then it would be completely uninteresting.

Running out of C4 and grenades sucks, because those are the primary things you use to blow up structures, however I think JC3’s decision to just make those unlimited was a poor decision, given that they’re some of your strongest tools. If they aren’t limited in some way, then you have no problem using them all the time on enemies. At that point you might as well scrap the ammo economy completely.

I feel like the C4 and Grenade shortages could be solved as a level design problem, or by having enemy drops, rather than just giving the player infinite.

Like overall I like the game because the movement is great, the shooting is pretty great, and the missions are generally pretty good too even though I harshed on them a bit. I feel like a ton of the game is built up as filler however rather than focusing the key aspects that make it interesting. You’re practically expected to sweep every area destroying every little thing, while picking up all the collectibles too and passing through large sweeps of land where there’s nothing inbetween the discoverable points. Having a completion counter that gives a bonus reward when you hit 100% is even more painful. Keeping the objectives more limited, or having a threshold where you automatically accomplish everything once you’ve done enough in an area would be a lot more tolerable. I think the design goal was really to drive up the play time by all means necessary, rather than consider whether the boring parts overstayed their welcome or not.

Other things that would help would be a bit more enemy variety. The ninjas are nice, but they’re introduced late in a story mission and I think they only show up in story missions (wiki check says yes). Otherwise most enemies are just footsoldiers with hitscan weapons.

Also I was apparently only 2 missions off from completing the main story. Damn. Might need to finish that.

Probably the most enjoyable open world game I’ve played, despite the faults.

Worst Rival Battle: Dark Link

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Rival battles (Vergil, Devil Hand) are usually one of the highlights of character action games. But what would you consider to be the worst rival battle(s) you’ve ever played and why?

Dark Link in OoT.

Check out how lame this is, for what’s presumably the average player. At 7:46 or so.

Link’s moveset wasn’t really designed with any type of counterplay in mind, so it’s not surprising that if you face yourself, you’ll end up with a really boring battle, especially since your swords clank on each other, and he’s scripted to attack when you do.

So it’s better to use attacks he can’t copy to cheese him, if that’s even cheesing, it’s practically a puzzle. You just need to use an attack in a position where it will hurt him but not you, and repeat until he dies.

This is a more comprehensive breakdown of how dark link works.

Open World Design

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What’s with open world games and why don’t people make good ones?

Hmm, this is just a guess on my part, but I think it’s that when you make an open world game, the focus is on the open world, which maybe detracts from the focus on the other elements. Open world has some implicit assumptions in the development process that probably negatively impact the game’s design, because of a need to create a ton of content, even if a lot of that content is recycled. The implicit thought is probably, “What are we making, and how much value can we get from every piece of content we make?” How many times can it be reused? This is something that developers think of in regular games too of course, but in open world games it’s especially emphasized.
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/JoelBurgess/20130501/191514/Skyrims_Modular_Approach_to_Level_Design.php
A lot of my thoughts on this matter are derived from this by the way.

In general I think that the value in a game lies in the core gameplay mechanics and level design more than the amount of content. Open world is a style of content presentation and level design that comes with expectations about the amount of content, so the main things tend to take a hit. In open world games, the assumption is that you can access most of the points of interest at any time without roadblocks. Progression becomes modeled based on whether certain events have been completed rather than whether you have physically accessed new areas, and left the old ones behind you.

Open world games, like Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, seem to demand you search for a billion trinkets scattered everywhere to get whoknowswhat. MGSV’s side ops and animal collection were lousy with this. This type of stuff tends to exist to inflate the gameplay time, and leads to the game overstaying its welcome as you need to play through the same content over and over again.

On the fun side, you get Just Cause 2, which I think is one of the best open world games I’ve ever played, barring some of the story missions. Hell, story missions in a lot of these are kind of a blight, they set up specific goals typically and don’t let you do other things until you exit the mission, typically returning you to an in-mission checkpoint if you die, fail, or stray. In the case of the Far Cry games, assaulting the various outposts is way more fun than the story missions, which practically seem unrelated. However in MGSV’s case, the story missions were usually more fun than wandering around the map, because they changed the patrol patterns for those and gave them more thought.

Meanwhile Bethesda games don’t really have the same mission or collectible structure at all, and I guess that’s pretty nice on their part actually, just the level design kinda sucks, as does combat with enemies.

This mod has way more care put into its one room than any other area in Skyrim.

Lemme collect my thoughts a little:

Good open world games: Far Cry Blood Dragon, JC2, MGSV, Zelda 1, Infamous 1
Bad open world games: anything by Bethesda, Asscreed
Inbetween: Far Cry 3, Minecraft, Witcher 3

Elements I like: being able to freeroam anywhere, multiple angles to attack objectives from, route planning across the world to hit hotspots,

Elements I dislike: Collectathon style padding, big flat open uninspired level design, sandboxed mission structure (as in, forcibly made separate from the rest of the game, whether by actual geometry constraints, or rules forcing you to follow the mission)

MGSV did something sort of clever in the way they built the world, the mountains serve to funnel the world into these lanes, so you kind of have to pass by most bases in a sort of linear fashion, giving the designer a bit more control, allowing them to funnel you into their level design challenges, so you can’t always go around everything.

Far Cry 3 and Blood Dragon both have shitty story missions that are linear, but they both have really nice capturing of outposts.

It’s nice to have some element of collection driving you across the map, but if you split up the stuff to be collected too much it gets exhausting. It would be better to try to consolidate that aspect a bit so challenges could be a bit more loosely focused on locations instead of sweeping over and collecting literally everything possible. Set some limits on how many times you make someone return to the same place, maybe 1-3 times so they don’t get worn out on it. Try making the collectable elements more important. The places of power in Witcher 3 are pretty nice, a lot of the other collectable things on the map are trash. I enjoy going across the map collecting things, but I don’t enjoy finding out that all of it is just junk, that makes me personally get fatigued, because I’m out there collecting tons of junk.

Just Cause 2 had a cool way of doing it, you had to go around the map blowing stuff up, which caused the enemy to attack you and call in reinforcements. Awesome core dynamic. Then there’s a ton of little things to destroy that don’t net you much chaos (it’s like a currency that goes up and unlocks new stuff when you have enough, including missions), but they’re still sitting there. And it’s not like Katamari where small stuff in great quantities is awesome because you can roll it all up at once, it’s like picking up grains of rice with a pair of chopsticks, it’s time consuming for not nearly as much reward, but you feel obligated because it’s there. Take a hint from Katamari on that one and just totally stop having them once the player outscales them significantly.

The thing is, a lot of this collectible stuff is optional, it’s not designed to be important or necessary for progression, so no effort is put into creating it. Ostensibly, the game is designed so you can complete it without needing to engage with any of that collectible stuff. Why bar the player’s progression for them to collect things that aren’t part of the main story? So the rewards on a lot of them are really weak also, because they don’t want to upset the difficulty balance in the main story missions.

But on the other hand, a lot of these open world games just want to be big hamster wheel things, that’s why they have so many progression systems, they know that their main story missions aren’t enough to satisfy the player alone, because the level and encounter design isn’t very strong, so they add filler content and progression systems to keep the player busy.

So what should they do? Probably take a page from Metroidvanias, and Crysis Warhead, Far Cry Blood Dragon & FC3’s outposts. Keep the collectibles limited. Focus on the locations, the strongholds, make places in the world that are difficult to assault. Make level design across the world that is difficult to pass through unfettered. Metroidvanias are primarily about getting from checkpoint to checkpoint without dying, they set up things in your way that are difficult to get past without losing some health. In Metroid, save room to save room, same for Castlevania, La Mulana, Dark Souls. Exception is Ori and the Blind forest, but it has a really funky checkpoint system and really linear level structure overall to make it work.

The thing to get good at is probably controlling how players approach stronghold type structures, having enemies be better roadblocks in the wild, and a general study in good level design of terrain for moving around the map that allows free movement generally, but still restricts the player on an encounter level. The place to look for this is probably the original Zelda, which had limiting terrain all over the place. Figure out a suitable equivalent in 3 dimensions and you’re set, or start from 2d and work up to 3d.

The other big thing is, more elements in the open world should have more care put into them. A lot of stuff in open world games gets recycled, so the world starts feeling rather samey when you’ve seen that same art asset so much. Dark Souls is a fairly large game, and all of its areas are very deliberately crafted. Rather than aiming to make everything modular and reusable, aim for giving areas distinct touches. Plan how to make the most interesting areas possible. Probably work iteratively, building out from a central place. Quit trying to make a ton of filler content, focus on a smaller amount of more meaningful/challenging content in the open world format.

This was a bit rambley and probably not as straightforward as I could have written it.

Skullgirls Overview

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What do you like about the game mechanics of skullgirls?

I decided to field this one to my friend from the previous ask, seeing as he’s the best skullgirl in ‘Straya, “my tl;dr of why i like skullgirls mechanics is because it’s a balanced vision of an unbalanced game with good mechanics(mvc2), every character is functional and viable, there is a very high skill ceiling due to the wealth of relevant mechanics that is unfortunately invisible to most competitive players, and there are very little redundant moves on characters”

What I’d personally say is, the buffer, the flexible cancel system, the ability to cancel any move’s startup into any move it validly cancels into, these make the combo system feel extremely smooth, like everything slides into one another, like the actual endpoint of each move has a little leniency.

They have a cast of characters with tons of original abilities per-character, and weird combinations of moves that somehow fit together into a coherent gameplan. Some characters are clearly missing things, like there’s no character with a good zoning game that also has a good invincible uppercut, to force you to fit those characters together on a team. Even the conventional characters try new things, like Filia is supposedly a shoto, but she has a ton of weird normals, a weak zoning game, and instant airdashes, Peacock plays a zoning game with hidden missiles that you can control at different zones, 3 little bombs that lock space down and more conventional projectiles (one is on a normal for some reason too). Eh, I’m not gonna go through describing the whole cast, just trust me that they’re pretty crazy.

Also cool is how there’s so many ways to link things into other things. Just today I went into training mode, and was like, “Maybe I could tiger knee a hairball with filia?” then I did it, realized MK would work better, and airdash canceled that into a j.mp, lowering them to the ground, with an j.HK as a restand. Apparently this is practically good for almost nothing (less good as an approach than instant airdash, because it skips to stage 3 when you enter the ground phase), so whatever, but there’s a lot of stuff like this in the system, you just see a possibility and maybe it works. The Undizzy system and adjusted IPS have forced combos to become a lot more efficient too rather than just the same loops over and over, and optimized combos these days look really cool.

That’s about all I got.

Designing Games for Kids

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Since you said you don’t believe in factoring age as part of judging the quality of a game. I’d like to ask how’d you design a game for kids? What properties do you think could make good game elements while primarily appealing to 5-12 age demographic?

lol what. Wait, I think I meant age like how old the game is, not how old the audience is.

Okay, the strongest properties in making games for young children is probably keeping the core mechanics simple and high affordance. Affordance seems to be my theme word of the week here. Don’t require a lot of reading unless the reading isn’t really that important.

NES games are great for this, the NES only has 2 buttons. Some NES games have weird hidden information though, but those don’t tend to be the most popular ones.

As they get older, like I think 8 or 10, they can probably afford to play something complicated, because they’re a kid, they have plenty of time to figure out how the whole system works. I learned how to read from playing Pokemon, because it was a big deal back then and I wanted to get into the game so much. The game lays out the type weakness chart in the instruction manual.

If you want to make a good game that appeals to someone that age, it’s a process of sort of building 2 games. Sure, any kid can play a pokemon game, but there’s a lot about Pokemon that goes beyond just beating the gym leaders. There’s the EV system, IV system, STAB, and other subtle factors. Any idiot can play smash bros melee, I did as a little kid too, but there’s a lot more there if you dig into it. The game needs to be layered where people can function on an effective level. Sakurai talks about this in his statements on smash 4 as a game, and he’s remarkably on point there.

“The Act of Balancing” Sakurai’s Famitsu Column vol. 480


“Furthermore, if I went with what is fair according to advanced players, the beginners wouldn’t be able to keep up. For example, Kirby’s Stone attack probably won’t hit a player above intermediate skill level, but if I made it more powerful, it would destroy beginners. At the end of the day, I’m aiming for intermediately-skilled players to be able to properly enjoy the game.”

At least, he’s on point in identifying that there are different skill levels, and based on the way you design moves, things will be more or less successful or effective based on your skill level. The thing he’s not on point about is failing to recognize that seriously, project M made kirby’s down B more effective and it still doesn’t destroy beginner players, and smash attacks come out fairly frequently in Melee because they’re safer and you can move faster to position them.

Traditional fighting games, probably not for kids, because the basic tools in them are low affordance, it’s hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. On the other hand, kids have a lot of time to figure them out, and they have a tendency to get fixated on things, so it could work out in the right environment.

RTS, also probably not for kids, but MOBAs work fine, because it’s only movement and like 4 abilities at any one time.

Keep the options at any one time limited. Make them clear in primary function, add more subtle secondary functions.