While we didn’t record it with Halloween in mind, I guess this is our Halloween episode. This year we decided to dress up as guys with audio that cuts out worse than usual for no reason. What’s your costume this year?
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Hosts: Rutskarn, Josh, Chris, and Shamus.
Show notes: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #34: The Stanley Parable, Elder Scrolls”
I’ve added some text damage indicators to show the player how much murder they’re dishing out. When they shoot a robot, a number pops up to show the resulting damage. On one hand, screen clutter is bad. On the other hand, if players don’t understand the mechanics it can lead to frustration and confusion. Oh sure, I could just TELL the player about how laser power, energy drain, and armor interact, but showing the player some math outside of gameplay is going to be a lot harder to understand than just showing them how hard they’re hitting.
I sent this version out to my testers last week. We’ll see what they say.
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My guess? “Make it an option”. Everyone says to make things an option. It’s often good advice, but making EVERYTHING an option makes for complicated interfaces, complicated debugging, and gutless design. If possible, the game designer should really just figure out what kind of game they want to make. Telling the user, “There’s a good game in here someplace once you get all these sliders and checkboxes sorted out and adjusted” is probably not the most direct route to fun. Some things must be options, some things should be options, some things can be options, and some things just waste the user’s time and fill them with doubt. A simple checkbox at the start of the game for “permadeath mode” probably won’t overwhelm the user. But adding a dozen checkboxes and sliders? That’s fine for strategy games, but it’s probably bad form in a simple action game.
But like I said: We’ll see what testers say.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 27: Missiles!”
Link (YouTube) |
At the 14:40 mark, the loading screen says, “Ammo is precious in the Metro. Be sure to conserve your ammo and scavenge your surroundings for extra rounds.” I think this should be replaced with, “Ammo is precious in the Metro. Be sure to not waste it in a pointless war against other humans.”
At the ten minute mark, we hear some commies talking about Nazis using “a pack of suicide bombers”. That’s just… stupid. It’s just Lazy Writing to pound us over the head with the notion that Nazis are bad, in case we’re still conscious from the last 50 blows to the head with the same rhetorical blunt object. Humans are about the most non-renewable resource you have in the tunnels. With populations this low, suicide attacks are comically derpy.
Yes, Nazis exist in real life. Soviet Russia existed in real life. Pointless meatgrinder warfare exists in real life. Suicide bombers exist in real life. But the reality of these horrors doesn’t give a writer a free pass to stick them in a story without explanation. The fact that these things COULD happen doesn’t relieve the writer from their burden to explain why it happened here. When two entire societies act in ways that are impossible and insane, you can’t handwave it with “LOL NAZIS!” and call it a day.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Metro 2033 EP8: C is For Nazi, Good Enough for Me”
It turns out that the most capricious, buggy, unpredictable, and mysterious part of my program is the vertex shader. This is frustrating because it’s the thing I know the least about, the thing with the least documentation, and the thing that’s hardest to debug. Of course, these are also the reasons the problem exists in the first place.
The vertex shader malfunctions on about half of the testing machines, and it malfunctions in a different way in each place. There’s no pattern to these behaviors as far as I can tell. It works fine on one Linux machine, and malfunctions on another. Fine on one XP machine, not on the other. Works great on my Windows 7 machine, but goes crazy on another. Maybe I could nail something down if I started collecting data on driver versions and graphics card manufacturers, but that’s probably not a good way to spend my time. I mean, if I discover the problem is with laptops using ATI cards, that doesn’t help me solve the problem. I’m not John Carmack and I don’t have encyclopedic knowledge of all the various drivers and their quirks and exceptions. For me, knowing where the problem happens doesn’t put me any closer to the solution.
I need the game to run properly on all these machines, and the stuff I’m doing is so stone-age simple that there’s no reason for this chaos. It should just work. Barring that, I would hope the system could at least have the decency to fail predictably.
I’m sure all of these problems are either from bugs in my shader code or from holes in the documentation. But I can’t find the problem if I don’t understand it.
I’ve described how shaders work before. You might remember this diagram:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 26: Shader Shenanigans”
Link (YouTube) |
I forgive this part of the game because the previous section was so strong, but this was really frustrating. I would gladly have traded this whole two-hour adventure of Nazis vs. Commies for another 15 minutes of spooks and mystery. Let’s talk about why this doesn’t work for me:
I’m not saying you can’t make a story about Communists and Nazis fighting quasi-trench warfare in the subway tunnels after the apocalypse. I’m sure with the right world-building and proper setup you could make something like that seem plausible in a really pulpy way. But that groundwork was not done here. These two towns, their governments, their politics, and their ongoing war run completely at odds with the world the game has revealed so far. It’s been showing us a society of villages struggling against ghosts and monsters, and now it’s portraying something completely different in tone and scale.
Also, the game continually captures you in cutscenes, then has you escape in cutscenes. Then you get surrounded, but the bad guys don’t shoot you because they’re too busy talking. Then you are saved by dumb luck. This happens more than once in the game.
Dear Metro 2033: You don’t need to copy those other games. You’re better than them. Just be yourself.
It’s been two weeks since the last Diecast. The crew have a lot going on and other things have pushed aside the recording of our 90-minute exploration of fractal digressions. So in the spirit of the “what’s happening this week?” section I thought I’d do a drive-by of the stuff I’ve been doing when I’m not doing this.
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Are you sitting down? I guess that’s a stupid question. Who takes their laptop jogging? Anyway, are you positioned in such a way so as to reduce the risk of injury when hearing shocking news? No? Well then get into one of those positions, because I’m done with this clumsy intro:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “NOT the Diecast: What’s the Haps?”
I’ll never be able to do this. I’m wasting my time. It was stupid to even begin this project. It’s too big for me. It’s too hard. What if people don’t like it? What if nobody buys it? What if I can’t even finish it? What if the game just erases people’s hard drives?
Hey Shamus, you could always finish that book you started!
Ok, so let’s make a videogame.
At this point in the project, there’s not a lot to talk about. Sure, I’m DOING a lot of things, but it’s all fussy polishing, balancing, debugging, and code-cleaning. My change list looks like this:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Good Robot 25: Reader Questions”
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
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 was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
Scenes from Half-Life 2:Episode 2, showing Gordon Freeman being a jerk.
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
T w e n t y S i d e d
