Well, that was fun. Thanks to everyone who joined in.
I found myself feeling WAY less negative than I anticipated. Even watching the game with the sound turned down and missing most of the story, I found quite a bit of stuff that I liked. I might get this once it’s patched up after release.
Link (YouTube) |
After playing the most recent Hitman, I find myself feeling kind of disappointed with stealth games like this. When I clear a room, I know I can basically walk away and forget about it. If you come back to the room later you can feel safe, like you’ve “claimed” this territory. I don’t need to hide bodies, because almost nobody moves. Everyone sticks to a short little patrol. In Hitman there are people with long patrol loops that thread throughout the facility. This means you always have to be paranoid about leaving bodies behind, and you can’t ever relax. Sure, I took out the guards in this room a few minutes ago, but maybe someone else will show up at any moment.
You don’t need a lot of those traveling types. It only takes one or two to give you the feeling of paranoia and caution.
Side note: We were going to stream Mass Effect Andromeda this afternoon, but the game is just a black screen for Josh. This is apparently a common problem, and while there are many suggestions we haven’t found anything that works. So you might get a stream later today, or you might not.
The brute-force approach to tutorials is to jam them all at the very front of the game. Some text boxes will tell you what buttons to push. Once you successfully complete the action you’re given another, then another, until you’ve got all the mechanics down. Then the story is allowed to proceed.
This is bad for a lot of reasons. It’s actually a bad way to teach the player about the game, because you’ve got too many concepts delivered back-to-back. Sometimes you’ll be taught how to do something an hour before the story calls for it. If you take a break from the game, then you’ll likely forget the skill by the time it comes up again. Game designers sometimes guard against this by adding more reminder prompts later on, which makes the game feel patronizing and handhold-y. Worst of all, these brute-force tutorials are torture on repeated play-throughs, since you already know how to do the stuff and there’s nothing else to hold your interest.
Arkham City is a perfect example of how tutorials should be done. It’s a masterwork of teaching through doing, without breaking the flow of the story or patronizing the player. The Arkham series is actually a blend of three entirely different but overlapping gameplay modes. There’s brawling, stealth, and explorationExploration is a big mishmash of navigating + platforming + puzzle-solving + finding secrets and collectibles.. Each mode has numerous concepts the player needs to understand. Batman is famous for his tool belt, and the game is not shy about loading that thing up with a lot of different ways of solving problems. This means the player needs to learn a lot of different controls. The fact that players can glide through these lessons without getting bored is a testament to just how good developer Rocksteady is at their job.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Arkham City Part 8: How To Batman”
Link (YouTube) |
The Omar! I couldn’t remember the name of the blue-suit guys from Invisible War during the show, but that’s only because their name was dumb. It’s the Omar.
I’ve apparently forgotten 99% of my Dishonored playthrough (and watching the subsequent Spoiler Warning one) but I guess I remember the prison level really well.
I hadn’t noticed the similarities, but Chris is right: The world of Dishonored maps really well to Thief in a lot of ways. Daud’s assassins are a secretive group of stealthy manipulators like the Keepers. The Overseers seem to be majoring in fanatical religious authoritarian governance and minoring in steamworks technology, just like Thief’s Hammerites. Delilah has kind of this Pagan thing going on with her nature magic. Our lead character skulks around in the shadows knocking guys out. (Or shanking them, if he’s rubbish.)
Then again, this might be a byproduct of the setting. Once you create a world that’s just entering the industrial revolution, it’s pretty hard to NOT depict a tug of war between technology and nature, religion and freedom, rich and poor. These were all hallmarks of the Victorian Era and were a natural part of a society going through rapid change due to technology. A quasi-Victorian setting without pervasive class warfare might feel kind of toothless and inauthentic.
Sure, you CAN make up a world where this isn’t the case. But you’d need to spend a little more time and exposition on worldbuilding. If you’re just using the setting for aesthetic reasons, then there’s no reason mess with expectations. Throw in a few hints of religious fanatics, poverty, and civil unrest, and the user can extrapolate the rest of the world from the standard set of tropes.
I know that the tone most videogames shoot for is “bombastic hyperslime,” but every now and again it’s nice to play games grounded in the sublime mundanity of everyday experiences. Let’s consider an example:
So I have to dress up as a nun and shoot a guy, and everything I said before was wrong, and let’s freaking do this.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Nan o’ War CH3: A Wimple Plan”
Last week I did an informal poll to see how many people could run the game. The failure rate hovered around 4%, which is pretty bad. Bad enough that I don’t think it would be a good idea to put the game up for sale. If 1,000 people bought it, I’d end up with 40 people who paid for a game that didn’t work. And when they emailed me asking for help, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but shrug.
In the old days, Windows would give you quasi-helpful error messages like, “Unable to load foo.dll”. It wouldn’t tell you why. Is foo.dll missing? Or corrupted? Or does it depend on some other thing that the user doesn’t have? Is it for a newer / older version of Windows? You don’t know. But at least you know the problem is with foo.dll, so when the user sends you the bug report you know where to look.
But these newer versions of Windows don’t like to confuse the peasants with things like information, and so now Windows spits out a generic “This program can’t do the thing.” message. Great. Now the user enters the useless error message into Google and gets back a million different possible causes. They don’t know what the problem is or where to look. More importantly, neither does the developer.
All I know is that for some people, one of the many DLL files I depend on isn’t available. Or it is available, but it’s the wrong version. I included all the DLLs I know about with the program, but for some reason some things appear to be missing or incompatible. What I have figured out:
One of my problems is that I have no experience with deployment. In all the years I spent writing software professionally, I never had to package the software up for the end user. I was either writing in-house tools for myself and my colleagues, or I was adding to an existing codebase where someone else was in charge of deployment. (Also, most of my professional work was a decade ago, and I think deployment has gotten more complex since then.)
Let’s look at the parts of this game…
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Pseudoku: Tool Chain”
This is a really good time for videogames. We’ve got everyone raving about Horizon and Zelda. Later this month we’ll get Mass Effect and STRAFE. Also a major Factorio update is on the way. And it’s only March!
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #191: Horizon Zero Dawn, Zelda, Steam Link”
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
I write a program to simulate different strategies in Starcraft 2, to see how they compare.
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
A wild game filled with wild ideas that features fun puzzles and mind-blowing environments. It has a great atmosphere, and one REALLY annoying flaw with its gameplay.
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
T w e n t y S i d e d
