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@alexchristin
An upcoming card game coming soon to Kickstarter!
A Different Approach to Difficulty
The problem of difficulty in games has been debated to great depths for a long time. Various alternatives to the traditional approach with different difficulty modes at the beginning of a particular game have been proposed, analyzed and implemented. And yet, as much as they patch up the errors of the traditional approach, within them arise numerous inherent problems and difficulties. As such, I would like to propose another alternative–not so much a mechanical solution that requires implementation, but rather a different approach to difficulty design.
One thing I’d like to stress is that, this has been applied in various games quite successfully before, and I’ll mention them later on, but not to the extent to which it can deservedly become a central design philosophy, in my opinion. This I presume is due to a lack of a rather clear and deliberate approach to difficulty design.
But first, let me attempt to briefly summarize a few popular criticisms of the traditional difficulty modes approach and its alternative.
I’m getting back to pixel art
And I’m selling my art on Fiverr right now to help pay the bills :D
https://www.fiverr.com/alexchristin/draw-you-a-pixel-icon-of-whatever-you-fancy
Hit me up if you’re interested or have any suggestions!
Hello World!
Considering this is the very first post on this development blog, I suppose I should take the chance to talk about the game just a little bit, right? That’s what we’re all about here at Fine Monkeys.
Growth Device is basically a narrative-driven, simulative, roleplaying, text and GUI only, idle game. The story will unfold gradually in many forms imaginable from the structure we’ve developed for the game, with a simulated chat system at the center of the narrative.
Meanwhile, between story points, you get to manage an entire organization, guiding the R&D department, assigning staff to various positions, and sending field agents to missions. What you do in the base management layer of the game will influence the story and the narrative. And what you choose to say (or not to say) will also affect the shape of your organization. It is just as essential to consider what you say, what secrets you reveal, what you demand from your people, as it is to manage daily operations at your organization.
Stay tuned for more updates coming very soon!
This is the project I’m currently working on. If you’re interested, feel free to follow us over here! Can’t wait to share more about the game with you folks.
Mark my dear friend,
What do you mean "Dark Souls only needs one difficulty mode?" You yourself know and have made a video on the fluid difficulty of Dark Souls. In my book, that's how accessibility should be handled. Text and UI options are THE WORST when it comes to communicating game elements and mechanics for many reasons I'm sure you realize. They don't really show how much you care about diversity of players as much as they show that you're hesitant about letting players tinker with your design.
In short, good difficulty design is where, to the player, there are no difficulty modes at all. Instead, there are only the effective/efficient strategies (but more grindy, repetitive, boring) and the not-so-efficient strategies (but more challenging, varied, satisfying). The problem here is, you should NOT put players on a linear graph of 'play ability' where there are people who are simply "better at games" than others. Instead, you should put players on a spectrum between "people who prefer the outcome over the gameplay itself" and "people who prefer interesting gameplay over how effective/efficient their approach is." If you approach difficulty that way, nobody will find any approach to the game superior or inferior to any others.
I can give you some examples off the top of my head.
So I'm no Overwatch veteran, but I know in that game, Bastion is a VERY STRONG hero, and there's not a lot of mechanical downside to playing him. The real downside is, Bastion is incredibly boring to play. He has a typical self-repair ability, and his killer mode is a static turret form. Any Overwatch beginner will likely love him because he can help them even up the playing field with the more experienced players. But when players reach a certain level of experience, their need for variety of gameplay, to show how skilled they are and how well they know the in-and-outs of the game, will start to trump their need for effective gameplay.
Another shining example I can give you is from XCOM (I'm talking about XCOM2012 here). Even though I picked up this piece of design from the Long War mod, but just for the sake of understanding, I'm going to summarize the mechanics a little bit, and they may not seem the same with the vanilla game. So there's a "cheesy" tactic in that game that can almost ensure victory, that is to have a cloaking unit spot the enemies for a sniper from across the entire map to pick them off one-by-one safely without any real repercussion. This strategy is perfect in virtually every mechanical aspect of combat. The only problem with it is that it is INCREDIBLY BORING: your snipers just simply shoot every turn, and you can only take a few shots every turn, not to mention reloading. This strategy is best suited for (1) beginners and (2) people who have made mistakes and want to get out of the downward spiral. On the other end of the spectrum, there are players who understand how the game and the AI of every alien unit in the game work, so they are more confident about moving up close and personal with the aliens with minimal armor. Because for them, it's not about defending against the aliens, but about manipulating, "nudging" the aliens into behaving the way these players want them to (nobody needs armor when aliens are only gonna shoot at the tank; nobody needs to take good cover when aliens are too scared to move to flank in front of your Opportunist unit; etc.)
All of the above is to say two things:
Difficulty should not only be designed around the mechanics of a game. It very much should also take into account the AESTHETICS or ELEGANCE of those very mechanics.
You should not put people on the linear graph of "playing ability" where some people are simply "softcore, not-so-good at video games" and some other are "hardcore and challenge-seeking." The idea alone is absurd, because people on such a graph would move up and down constantly, even during a single playthrough. Some people pick things up faster than a game can predict with its tutorials' pacing. Some people due to real life reasons have to abandon the game for some time, and they lose a bit of their touch when they come back to it. People should be put on a spectrum between "effectiveness" and "aesthetics of play", and games should be designed so that they can accommodate almost anyone on that spectrum.
Design for Theorycrafting
Recently, Danny O’Dwyer and the team over at Noclip have done a documentary series, interviewing prominent independent developers (Derek Yu of Spelunky, Jim Crawford of Frog Fractions, and Jonathan Blow of The Witness), talking about the games that inspired them as children, discussing their own takes on the significance of mystery in games, and explaining how they weaved elements of it into their design fabrics. The documentary series is fittingly titled “Rediscovering Mystery,” and a solid must-watch.
It takes courage for a developer like From Software to even attempt to include such a vast, and totally missable areas such as the Painted World of Ariamis or Ash Lake in the original Dark Souls. And there’s no doubt, that the effort from Jonathan Blow and his team, to build an island full of mystery and surprising treats, elegantly placed on the fine line between obscurity and conspicuity is absolutely commendable. However, aside from being a big help when you need it, the Internet is also a land riddled with spoilers. People are always discussing, debating, and engaging in joint-efforts to unearth even the most obscure secrets of all in games. And often as a result, the easy and most logical answer from developers on how to retain the player’s interests in games is to keep expanding their worlds, and to include even more obscure secrets for them to find out.
I do believe that this approach is, not only costly for sure, but also fairly limited in its efficiency. Not to undermine developers’ effort and control over the experience, but there’s one thing that many designers I know will probably agree on: the most profound, interesting, valuable and effective drive of all stems from within people’s heads. And the most common manifestation of such drive that one can see, comes in the form of theorycrafting.
I guess I’m into Attack on Titan?
11 colors, including alpha channel. It’s been what, almost a year and half now since I last did anything pixel art. I can definitely feel the rust flowing in my veins.
I received a copy of Regalia: Of Men & Monarchs.
Apparently I was a backer of this game. Props to them for actually finishing a project. That’s a big deal.
Apparently I also liked the character art. That’s why I backed the game. I still like it, but I’m a little bit disappointed how the environment and UI art did not evolve after the Kickstarter campaign. The game is pretty, but it’s pretty in a very uninspiring and perhaps Thomas Kinkadey way. Turns me off quite a bit, since I’m (still) an artist.
I was able to try it for 10 minutes or so. In this game, you can skip a cutscene and the game will display a summary in text of the previous cutscene for you. That makes me nervous. Really, if your cutscenes can all be summarized in text, then either they’re really (I mean, really) crappy, or you’re missing the whole point of cutscenes. Cutscenes are (at least) about nuances and subtleties—things that cannot or are not easily expressed through other means. Maybe you want to put a foreshadow here. Maybe you want this character to very slightly change their attitude through the character sprite or whatever. That’s why cutscenes exist. They are not just about characters taking turns to speak.
A new talk from game designer of Braid and The Witness, Jonathan Blow, where he’s announcing and introducing his WIP programming language currently named JAI, and revealing a very brief glimpse of what might turn out to be what he’s called “Game 3″ in the past. A fairly educational and inspiring talk.
Why do I have to install your goddamn custom engine for a small script that animates the freaking water in a 2D platformer.
Sincerely Everyone
I was writing this as a comment, but apparently there’s a character limit. So I’ll reblog this.
This is not meant to be an encouragement or an urge to you. I just want to say that when making games, especially when you're new and just starting out, it is okay to not finish something. Don't get me wrong, finishing something is harder than the word implies, and when you do it is already an extraordinary accomplishment. However, making games also takes a long time. Most of the time it takes years. When you're starting out and learning new things as you go along, you learn at an exponentially faster rate than an experienced person making a game. So what often happens is by the time you get to the second half of the project, you’ve become a lot better at doing things, and you look back at the things you made for it 2 years ago and and it’s really terrible, sometimes even cringe-worthy. And you end up going back and redoing a lot of things and it’ll take forever. And this has happened for me so many times. The worst scenario is even after you’ve redone a lot of things, you still don’t feel right because the thing you started 2 years ago isn’t even that good structurally—which I hope doesn’t happen for anyone, really. But in reality it does, a lot.
All I’m saying is, especially at this point, be very honest with yourself and don’t let your (supposedly) pride or sense of responsibility to your audience make you suffer through a hard time making something you’re no longer happy with. New people improve A LOT when starting out. You can make an even better game.
Today was a long one. I had some time to make more progress, albeit not much. Some improvements for fundamental code for the character include:
Display sprinting sprite frames
Stop sprite animation at the correct frame when idle, even if the Sprint button is still being held
Optimized the way GMS2 takes the spritesheets
Also I managed to get GMS2 to properly upscale the game screen to 2x without breaking pixels, which is frankly quite a big deal for me and those using retina or other high resolution displays.
So I guess I’m reviving this project. Yes, again. Testing the water with GMS2 at the moment to see what happens, since they’re promising a Mac version soon-ish.Â
So far what I’ve got from it is, GMS2 doesn’t fully support Unicode (and neither did GMS1.4), which is a real shame. You can sort of still, but it involves a heavy amount of cross-referencing to make sure you get the ID of the Unicode character you want right. Not optimal at all if you want a game with heavy use of text in any Unicode languages. Which mine is, sadly. I do wanna try localizing the game into my own primary language at some point.
Another thing is I’m not exactly happy with the performance so far. Maybe it’s still early in the game. Maybe it’s because of my collision detection algorithm. I’ll play around some more to be sure.
What I’m quite happy about though, is that you can get a basic top-down pixel movement and collision system done really fast with a very easy to understand piece of code.
place_meeting is a very clever method.
So this is what I’m currently involved with. I’m not allowed to say much other than that I’m super excited to be a part of this team and this project.