Hey, so I’ve been away a while, busy making things mostly. Spent some time working for a small apps and games making startup, then went freelance, worked on some more games etc.
I’ve learned some new tricks and needed to update my portfolio to show them off, but due to NDAs I can’t show a lot of stuff I’ve done, so this morning I decided I’d just have to make a sample 2D animated game character for demo purposes, and since I’ve made it, I may as well share how it’s done. It’s actually pretty straightforward, so feel free to try this at home!
We’re gonna make something like this:
First we need to draw a character!
I like to use Clip Studio (aka Manga Studio if you’re oldskool) for this because I really like the pen stabilisation and the natural feeling paint blending, but you can use literally any app that can handle layers. I’ll be switching to photoshop later to save out all my pieces for this, so if you just want to work in photoshop from the get-go, then you can!
I like to start by sketching my character, like this:
If I was making this more seriously rather than as a simple demo, I’d now go over this and make a tighter, more detailed sketch, but in this case, I just went straight to the inking. You need to remember that you’ll want to ink each “piece” the model will be made up of on a different layer (also, name your layers now, you’ll save torment later). Remember that you’ll want to make sure that pieces like the back arm and the legs are drawn right up to the shoulder or hip joint, even if in this pose they’re hidden by the body, skirt etc. Otherwise you’ll get gaps when you move them.
I like to put each layer into a group or folder now so that I can group my ink layers with colour layers. I check my overlaps are all looking good by just doing basic grey fills on all my pieces:
And this also helps me notice issues like the right side of the torso I’ve neglected to ink the scale texture. Better fix that!
Then I add colour. Note that you can add whatever style of colour and shade you like, but extreme directional lighting is likely to be very limiting so avoid that style of shading. In this case, for speed I’ve gone for very basic cel shading and bright colours to work with the cartoony lines. They’re all on separate grouped layers so I can pull them apart like this:
If I was planning to build the model in the Anima 2D plugin for Unity now, I’d make the pieces into a spritesheet with a transparent background and save it out as a png file, but in this case, I’m working in Spriter, so I save each of these pieces as a separate transparent background png file and put them all in the same folder to import to that program.
In Spriter, I set up the pieces into the shape of my character, making sure the right pieces are on top or under each other, and add bones to the pieces, creating a parent-child hierarcy so that, for example, moving the body also moves the arms, head, facial features and hair, and moving the head moves the facial features and hair. It’s very much like rigging a 3D model!
Having done all this, I can make animations. I’ll probably talk more on the differences between Spriter and Anima in the near future, but I hope this has given a helpful grounding in the process! You’d be able to export these animations and use them in a game made in the Unity engine pretty easily!
Hey everyone! We ran a demographic survey back in 2014 about our community of developers and we are doing it again!
If you are a developer of Visual Novels and wish to contribute please fill out the survey here!
I would also really appreciate it if you could reblog this post or share it where there are communities of developers, especially languages other than english. I want to try and capture as much of our diversity as possible :)
Thank you and please let me know if you have any questions!
So, this morning I woke up to discover Bishop had gifted me The Witness on Steam, with the message accompanying it being “God help you”. Well, that’s not ominous at all, I thought.
So, playing the Witness for about an hour, I feel like I can see what it’s trying to do, and I feel like there’s value in it, but I also feel like it’s not a game for everybody.
The Witness is a game about the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of curiosity and the pleasure of solving things and knowing things. That seems to be the theme, and that theme is enforced by the gameplay. You are on a beautiful island full of interesting and strange things to look at. You can wander freely and there’s no danger or chance of getting stuck, and there’s no motivation given other than your own feelings of “hey, what’s over there?” “What’s that structure?” or “What was going on on this island, why is it empty? What are these puzzles for?” and “Oh another puzzle, What’s the solution?”
The gameplay is simple, elegantly designed puzzles. No timing stuff like Braid, thankfully, just you and an island full of puzzles you can solve in your own time. Solving a puzzle might give you access to a new area with more puzzles. That’s is so far. It’s the kind of game you want a notepad for, and I respect that, it feels like a modern, streamlined take on old games like Myst. The game cultivates a thoughtful atmosphere, like being at an art exhibition, and you’ll either find that mentally and emotionally refreshing or boring and pretentious... or maybe you’ll find it a bit of each. It thankfully lacks that insufferable tone Braid was prone to by simply avoiding written narrative altogether; rather using recordings of people reading quotes which... may yet become insufferable, I’m not sure, and I am naturally biased on this stuff as an Illustrator who finds this kind of Fine Art Exhibition “Look at How Clever I Am, and Look at How Clever YOU Are for Being Here!” Bullshit to often be insufferable even when it’s high minded and has worthy aspects due to many negative experiences of the sneering Fine Art world’s treatment of my profession.
tl;dr: If a game on the theme of being intellectually curious that celebrates how awesome it is to be clever and wow welcome to the clever club sounds like your personal hell, don’t play The Witness. You will want to stuff Blow in a locker with his piss bottle and steal his dinner money. But if you like feeling smart and being like “ahh finally somebody understands how it feels to be really smart and to just want to find out how things work and to be praised for how valuable that is!” you’ll probably love it.
Experimenting with fantasy portraits ala Baldur’s Gate or Pillars of Eternity (or I guess the original Neverwinter Nights. I don’t normally paint realistically proportioned faces because I’ve always been more of a cartoonist at heart. I’ve found that old public domain black and white photos make a good starting point for reference on the proportions of the face to get me going, then I make everything up from there. The tricky part is finding good old photos of people who aren’t all white :/
Considering making an asset pack of these to sell.
On Undertale, Axe Cop and the Virtue of “Doing it Wrong”
Okay, so one of the things you may know about me already following this blog is I have a Master’s Degree in games design. This means that when it comes to Games Design as a purely academic discipline, I’m pretty highly qualified.
If you follow my personal blog, social media etc. you’ll also know that I really enjoyed Undertale. Like a LOT.
Why am I stating these two things? Well, it’s pretty simple really, it’s because I loved Undertale, but because of my extensive academic study and training in “what makes a good game” I would never have even considered making a game like Undertale, or expected such a game to be enjoyable before I played it....and yet I really enjoyed it.
All right, but where does Axe Cop come into this? Well, you may also be aware that my first degree was English Literature, and that I’m also a national prize winning comic artist here in the UK, so Comics are also a literary form I’m experienced and qualified in... and yet I love Axe Cop, a comic written by a 6 year old boy which basically is just a string of random bizarre stuff happening to a totally overpowered protagonist who tends to resolve them in anti-climactic ways and has no character development.
I’m not saying Toby Fox is a 6 year old here or comparable to one in terms of ability, he’s clearly a very smart, capable and creative guy. He’s just not a “games designer” in the academic sense. In fact, many games designer friends are miffed about the popularity of Undertale because it’s “not well designed”, and honestly... they’re not wrong. Many critics have also brought up how Undertale can be frustrating to play, how the inventory system is honestly not great, how random encounters are an old fashioned thing that we could have done without and how the game despite being in a tutorial for the first hour doesn’t tell you key things, how the lack of an easier mode makes it inaccessible for non-action players or people with disabilities, how it lacks something as basic and vital as a music volume slider and resolution options. They’re not wrong either, I personally ragequit a couple of times myself!
Undertale is not a game designed by a “Games Designer”, and it shows in how the game seems to have been made up on the fly based on whatever the creator thought was entertaining at the time, rather than carefully and extensively optimised to maximise player experience and engagement. Just as Axe Cop, the story is made up based on whatever idea a child thought was coolest at the time; he’s not trained as a writer because he’s a kid! He doesn’t really understand how the “rules” of narratives are meant to work.
Fox similarly didn’t make Undertale how a trained games designer would make a game; he just made up a game as he went based on what seemed like a fun idea at the time. Sometimes this inevitably leads to things that are bad because they’re not thought through in terms of player experience, but sometimes he hits on something brilliant just because he was willing to make the game inefficiently and just throw in a feature for one boss battle, make a whole new music track or sprite for a single gag that’s never seen again, or make a scene that doesn’t further the plot or empower the player purely because it’s funny.
Maybe sometimes you need somebody who has never learned the rules to show you the surprising possibilities that lie outside them. The game has certainly made me think about how I approach designing games!
Or for a more clickbaity title: “THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK CAN MAKE YOUR GAME MORE ENGAGING!”
What do Rogue Legacy, Minecraft, Dragon Age Inquisition, Assassin’s Creed II and Metal Gear Solid V have in common?
All are extremely engaging games. I wouldn’t say I even particularly enjoy Rogue Legacy and yet you’ll find me installing it on a whim and playing it for ages.
The thing they all share is having an “action phase” in which you go out, complete goals, collect resources in a risky environment, and a “building phase” in which you make those resources into useable tools in a more relaxed and safe environment. Some of them, like Dragon Age Inq and Rogue Legacy, the line between phases is very clear-cut, while others like Minecraft and MGSV, the line is more blurred because you can manage and make tools in the field, and in Minecraft you can make a base anywhere, so it’s a little more blurry, but the point is, they all have two modes of play that feed into each other.
This is why base building has become such a staple feature of games. Done well, it massively improves player engagement. For several reasons:
- It allows the flow of the game to follow a natural “high energy - low energy - high energy - low energy...” pattern that gives the player time to recouperate and not feel exhausted and overwhelmed.
- But it makes the low energy parts of the game just as meaningful as the high energy ones because you can craft tools or improve your tools (and that improves your troops and allies. Becoming closer to allies in Dragon Age games yields helpful bonuses to make you better at fighting). So when you return to the high energy stuff you’re better-prepared for it.
-Your base getting fancier and collecting all the cool people and trophies you’ve found, or mementos of the adventures you’ve been on is a visual representation of the journey your character has been on and of their increased status and power.
I have my criticisms of Dragon Age Inquisition’s shortcomings compared to my favoured Dragon Age II, but I can’t deny the base building was extensive and enjoyable. It was great having all the NPCs I’d met hanging around, to be able to upgrade the castle from a rundown mess into this fabulous shiny customised fortress with my own decoration choices, and to find loads of sidequests to do scattered around it. These sidequests of course provided me with new tools, abilities etc. which increased my team’s effectiveness in the action phase. I think one of my favourite features is Fenris’ mural painted on the walls of his room, which is updated after major narrative events and tells the story of what you’ve done, until right at the end it fills the whole room. The mural will depict the specific choices you made in your playthrough, meaning that everybody’s Fenris mural in their keep reflects the decisions and story of their personal Inquisitior. A simple, very clever idea! Assassin’s Creed II also did it awesomely. I loved the feeling of achievement from turning my villa from barely more than a ruin in a muddy run down town, into a grand building with art galleries in a bustling little settlement. I’d often go out to do the missions just so I could return with gold to buy paintings or a new shop or to fix up a derelict building.
It’s an approach I’d certainly like to try myself!
When the game gives you no choice but to do something bad or harmful, even though realistically a person in the situation probably could well have had options that would be way less harmful than what the character can choose to do, then when you’ve done so, the game admonishes the character, in a way clearly aimed at the player, for doing the horrible thing the game forced them to do.
Alternatively, the game makes you do a bad thing, but gives the character no opportunity to explain to a character angry at their behaviour for the reasoning behind their choice (which on the player’s part may have been thoroughly considered out of the limited and often sub-optimal choices offered), and then has the situation turn out badly for the player because of this, and then, once again, the game gets onto a soap box to lecture the player for their horrible decisions, all of which were wrong, even though actually every decision they could have made would have had a similarly poor outcome by contrivance.
I’ve seen this trend particularly in Telltale games, and it’s really frustrating. I don’t enjoy playing them any more because the games just keep pulling the same trick of forcing me into these contrived situations where the only options are all equally terrible, giving me no chance to explain my choices to other characters and apparently those associated with my character having little respect or trust for them, and then inevitably the game will bring up “remember how you chose to do this thing? Well that was a horrible decision and directly caused this new tragic occurrence, you’re a terrible person.” (FYI said tragedy usually will have happened whichever choice you made and the reason it happened will be listed as whichever choice you made, either the dog died because you took it with you on the dangerous adventure or the dog died because you left it all alone unaccompanied while you were away on your adventure and either way you are a horrible dog owner and should be ashamed, wow, what the hell, player? How could you!? Anybody would think the game didn’t give you the option to ask somebody to look after the dog while you were gone! ...because it probably didn’t).
If you’re writing a game with choices, please don’t do this. It’s really tired now and not fun at all. Sure, punish the player or tell them off if they had the choice to be kind or to be cautiously pragmatic or to be needlessly cruel and they chose the last option. And by all means, have unforeseen bad consequences occasionally spring from choices. Just... don’t force the player to be nasty and then tell them off for being nasty without ever giving them any option to be nice.
Lately I’ve been looking into environment art stuff, and I’m going to discuss some stuff here. My main finding is: Final Fantasy X has amazing worldbuilding.
Okay, so Final Fantasy X (great game in one of my favourite series) is based in Spira, an island chain surrounded by sea. Frustratingly in both the first game and the sequel characters speak as though this small archipelego is “the world”, which always struck me as very Japanese. I personally would have really liked if the sequel had revolved around the discovery that Spira wasn’t the world at all, just a small part of the world that had been cut off from everything by their circumstances... but I digress.
So what’s great about FFX? Basically it can answer every worldbuilding question you’d generally ask:
What is the geography and climate? A chain of islands with a tropical climate. Some areas have strange weather conditions caused by probably magical anomalies, such as Lake Macalania being frozen by power from the nearby ice-elemental summon in the temple, or the Thunder Plains where there is a constant lightning storm. The islands contain lush forests and jungles, some plains and hills, and a lot of people live or travel near coastlines. There is evidence of volcanic activity (the Mushroom Rock road), hotsprings up Mt. Gagazet.
What is the government structure? Religious Oligarchy with power resting in the temples. Makes sense because of the world’s otherwise chaotic nature of regular destruction.
What are the religious beliefs? Worship of legendary figures from the past, afterlife in a peaceful place for souls that accept death or are sent on. Natural disaster as punishment for sins of ancestors that will supposedly go away when people atone. Summoners go on a pilgrimage to the ruins of the former great city of Zanarkand to acquire the “final summoning”, and it is considered a holy site. Technology is to blame for mankind’s fall and is taboo. The Al Bhed tribe on the other hand, seem to be Atheists and use tech freely.
What are the religious symbols and what is sacred/revered? The symbol of Yevon, Summoners who defeat the great natural disaster to bring fleeting peace are revered, have statues made in their likeness and prayed to, and during their lives they are celebrated as holy figures. It is customary to do a special prayer bow to show reverence.
What is the tech level? Post-apocalyptic dark age/ Scavenger tech. There are fragments of still-functioning magitech of a past era, but their use it patchy and taboo. Most people live with simple hand-powered or animal-powered mechanical devices of roughly medieval level. There are some exceptions like video broadcast equipment, which may be magical in nature.
Does magic exist? Yes. It is known and accepted, its use seems to be a skill anybody can learn, it is primarily used for fighting and tech. Summoning seems to be a higher form of magic heavily tied up in religion and seems powered by souls. Summons are former humans and very powerful magical beings whose presence affects the surrounding environment. The dead can return if they don’t peacefully reach the afterlife, as monsters.
What are the primary building methods? Most structures are either made from wood, fabric and clay, or sometimes incorporate repurposed ruins and remains from a past age of higher tech. Buildings further inland may use stone because they are less likely to be reached and destroyed. The wood, mud/clay and fabric buildings are designed to be easily rebuilt since destruction is a regular occurence. Wood and mud are also readily available resources in the setting; we see several woodland areas.
What do people eat? This is what we know least about. We know they eat fruit, because Semour’s feast is largely a big display of varied fruit. There is clear evidence that people eat fish in settlements like Kilika and Besaid, and it seems possible from some background details that fish can be smoked or dried to preserve. Alcohol exists because we know Jecht spent a lot of time drunk. Honestly that’s still a lot more than we know about the diets of most videogame NPCs.
What are the most common artforms? Patterned textiles (the game even has NPC dialogue saying Besaid specifically is famous for this), clay and glass beads and wall murals (usually abstract) pottery and maybe metalwork.
Modes of transport? Boats, Chocobos are used for riding on and pulling land vehicles, some places seem to have magical teleportation, but it’s rare. There is also an ancient creature called the Shoopuf, used to cross a specific river.
What are the cultural influences? South Asian cultures, Japanese culture, Art Nouveau. The high tech from the past has elements of Art Deco.
So yeah, pretty comprehensive. When playing a game with a fantasy setting particularly, it’s interesting to ask yourself questions about whether the art, architecture, religion etc. match the circumstances of a culture’s location, available resources and their situation in terms of wars, disasters etc.
Obviously, Splatoon is a vibrantly coloured game and the colours are a pretty essential part of the game-- especially in the Turf War mode. So what about people who are colour-blind? Well, seems li...
Nintendo is taking leaps ahead of it’s competitors by having a colorblindness setting.
Splatoon, Nintendo’s newest up game multiplier for the WiiU is centered around vibrant colors. LOTS of color. As one Reddit user found, you are able to go into the Menu and find the in-game manual, there is a “Color Lock” feature which can be selected. With this feature selected, you can choose between pre-set color patterns for your game.
This was a great way for the people at Nintendo to be super inclusive with a simple feature. Way to go, Nintendo!
Reminder to new Devs: Unreal Engine 4 allows you to view your creations in modes that simulate how it’ll be seen by people with various types of colour blindness, and it’s a good idea to make use of this feature. As a general rule though, never make a game element’s purpose or state be only expressed by colour, and if you kind of have to, like Splatoon (where the whole thing is about spraying colour around), you may need a feature like this. I remember always thinking when playing Crono Cross “god this battle field colour mechanic must be a nightmare if you’re colour blind!”
I made a video about why you should support my awesome Patreon Katreon so I can make fun videos about art, illustration, comics and games design/game art production!
https://www.patreon.com/user?u=783606&ty=h
I have qualifications, loads of experience running workshops on this stuff and a relaxed, informal style to make learning the complexities of illustration and games development a bit less scary!
Check out some art/design/games videos I’ve made in the past:
I’ve been playing Dragon Age Inquisition, and a thing occurred to me: I don’t really like character approval ratings.
Or at least not how they’re generally put into practice. I like the idea of befriending your partymembers and of building that friendship and being rewarded for doing so, and of making it into a gameplay mechanic, but I feel like how most games implement this is weird, frustrating and even a little unhealthy.
There are a few major issues with character approval ratings:
1. Not attempting to get everybody’s approval maxed (or your love interest’s in a Ren’ai) is sub-optimal in gameplay terms. It may lead to missing out on useful abilities, equipment and XP from special quests, put you on course for a bad ending or cause you to lose partymembers.
2. Most characters react well to being agreed with and told what they want to hear.
3. Most of these decisions take place in a case-by-case vacuum ignoring previous scenarios usually with only rare exceptional events where telling a person one thing then doing something else or saying a different thing to somebody else leads to a greater loss of approval than saying something they disagree with then doing so.
This of course leaves us a scenario where the best way to win the game is to be a manipulative, insincere and maybe even stalkery bastard who works out what people want to hear and says exactly that to them in private and doesn’t call them out on unhealthy behaviour but lets them learn the hard way in their personal quests later when it inevitably bites them in the arse, and who chooses who to take on a mission based on guessing what kind of decisions will need to be made and who will approve of them.
This is obviously an unhealthy way to approach relationships. It also limits your viable roleplaying options if you care about both playing the role you want and also being able to complete the game. The game provides you with all these flawed interesting characters to interact with and tells you to deal with those flaws andlove them anyway, but makes them never extend the same courtesy to you. The party, who are usually supposed to be dependable adults, act like total divas and there’s this looming threat of them flouncing off if you don’t agree that yes, bringing back somebody from the dead is a great idea, or of course, the world is absolutely divided into black and white morality, or yeah, killing that person was totally justified!
At this point, somebody will be thinking “ah but she hasn't talked about Dragon Age Two!” already readying their keyboard. Okay, so DA2 tried the interesting idea of having Friendship vs. Rivalry. If you say or do something a partymember doesn’t like, instead of shifting down into negative friendship with the likely outcome of desertion or no special extras, the bar shifted towards rivalry, an equal, but different relationship state with similar but different benefits and some changes to dialogue. It was a nice effort. Unfortunately there’s a couple of flaws with it: What characters like and dislike still runs on a case-by-case line, and it doesn’t allow for the difference between liking a person and agreeing with them, and also it is disadvantageous to be in the middle. Yes, it is better for a character in DA2 to feel outright antagonistic towards the protagonist than to just be kinda okay with them. So I lost a partymember when I played because I wasn’t deliberately mean to them. Characters like Merill can be a nightmare, because she likes you being nice to her, but she dislikes being told anything negative about demons or blood magic, even when there’s an obvious bad situation caused by those things, but doesn’t give nuanced enough conversation options to tiptoe around her feelings “well, SOME demons are bad. Not all demons.... I know the ones YOU deal with are probably okay because you’re obviously not problematic at all and a good person!” and she’s not apparently emotionally mature or insightful enough to realise you’re saying things to be diplomatic and appease NPCs or to maybe consider that you might be right.
I’d love to talk about Knights of the Old Republic 2 here as well, but that game is a whole post of its own and also I’m not 100% sure how it works under the hood without some research. But look it up! The approval system is really interesting because your influence over partymembers actually changes their moral alignment and what they value, which changes what they like and how they act.
I feel like systems where a game could differentiate between liking a person and agreeing with them and also which took into account the integrity and consistency of a player’s decisions would be pretty cool. But of course, that’s a complex system to put into a game! With Vacant Sky, we assumed that if somebody really hated Dakura and opposed his goals, or at least if being with him wasn’t convenient for them, they wouldn’t be working with him, so we made it more so following Dakura was the absolute baseline for the relationship, and from there it can only go up and become more intense, and does so by putting particular effort into interacting with that character. How you interact with them influences various parts of their personality; always agreeing with their world view will make them stubbornly believe in that worldview more, for better or worse, while challenging their ideas all the time will make them more open and questioning, but also maybe less sure of themselves and less driven. There’s no loss condition for it, and the abilities you gain aren’t better or worse; just different. You’ll also sometimes notice events play out in subtly different ways if you’ve been encouraging Sarian to be cautious and pragmatic or bold and unyielding. It’s an extremely complex system that feels very organic, but obviously took a lot of work to make!
I’ll be interested to see people play it and see what the feedback is like so we can do further work on making games with really interesting character interaction.
Vacant Sky Awakening menu portraits. Naora (top right) is the latest one, since she joins the party last, so the three Orkans were obviously the priority since they’re in the game from the very start. Since Naora was done last, of course she’s my favourite one, because like most artists I consider my latest work better than my old work!
So, the menu portraits here are laden with Symbolism, and no, that wasn’t inspired by Dragon Age Inquisition’s Tarot cards, I started making these before that game was out and was surprised by their similar approach! I wanted to use painting for these rather than cel-shading like the dialogue portraits for two reasons: 1. We already had battle portraits for enemies painted by Anna from back when the planned battle system was 2D that we decided could be used for turn order and journals and stuff, and I wanted to at least have a look that’d feel cohesive (Anna actually taught me to paint, so we have similar styles which helps), and 2. I feel like it’s hard to get a really impressive look for a single illustration with cel shading compared to painting.
Each character in the game, we came up with a list of symbols and ideas and words we’d associate with them. In gameplay terms, each character has a “nature” word that describes what trait gives them power. I think my favourite one is Sarian’s nature of “Subversion”, which I depicted by inverting the portrait so that she’s head-down, which of course also works because Sarian’s weak legs give her trouble walking and she’s associated with heraldric snakes as her family symbol, so a lying down pose worked really well. With an English Lit degree, I’m trained in analysing things to look for symbolism and dissecting texts and images for meaning, so being the one putting that stuff in there for other people is fun! Everything from the poses to the expressions to the things surrounding the characters here is meaningful in some way.
I really hope somebody completes the game and goes back to look at these portraits later in the series and goes “Ohhhhh you sneaky sneaks, I get it!”
Steven Universe: Attack the Light hit number 1 in the App Store! Play the awesome game everyone’s talking about, available now for your mobile device!
iTunes: http://apple.co/1DALvro
Google Play: http://bit.ly/1anXttl
Amazon: http://amzn.to/1yH0cn1
Attack the Light is the most solid RPG designed for a touchscreen I’ve ever played. If you’re interested in games design, I highly recommend giving it a spin because the mechanics are really well thought out for the platform. It takes a lot of elements from Mario RPG and streamlines them, uses a really efficient way of moving around maps for a touchscreen, low-end platform and features a good amount of tactical thinking and challenge that should satisfy JRPG fans. Considering that to date even Square-Enix have failed to really grab me with their touchscreen efforts like Chaos Rings, I think that’s pretty impressive! The pacing of this game sits in a sweet spot where it’s engaging but not stressful, and the friendly, encouraging atmosphere coming from being based on a friendly, encouraging show makes you want to keep playing!
On top of that, the visuals, animation (Garnet’s attack animation in particular is a thing of beauty), music and dialogue all feel very much in the spirit of the show and it has just the right amount of references for fans (Purple puma, cookie cats, together breakfast, Steven very occasionally encouraging Peal by saying she’s “Strong in the Real Way!”, and... I believe there will be fusion, but the game is doing a great job of building up anticipation first by keeping mentioning it without unlocking it) without it just feeling like a fanservice product. I’m also really impressed by the way it has built a highly functional game with one character who can act but cannot be targeted or directly attack. Steven just having buffs, heals and items but otherwise not participating in combat works out really well, and I don’t think any game would have thought of that without being based on a show with a setup like SU. It kind of makes me wish Rise ran around with the party in Persona 4 actually because Steven encouraging the Gems from the back of the party as a non-fighter is so great!
Finally it’s a game you pay for and play. No microtransactions. As somebody who feels that microtransactions are a practice that encourage bad games design choices like deliberately withholding fun from the player and messing up balance and pacing, I will heartily recommend it just for that!
So following on from my previous thoughts on healers (there was some interesting discussion in reblogs from that which are worth reading on different perspectives on the issue), I want to record a few thoughts on health itself as a concept in video games.
Hit Points are a funny abstraction we all take for granted because they work. They’re a happy medium between “you get hit once and you die” like a simple game like Pacman or a cinematic one like Ico, and a hightly complex “multiple bodyparts with individual damage levels” like say...umm... Dwarf Fortress (or I guess Fallout 2).
It’s not very heroic to go down like a chump if you get so much as grazed by a bullet, and in a game, it’s a lot harder to clearly place and react to a threat due to your limited peripheral vision, limited depth perception, simplified stereo hearing and lack of a sense of touch or smell, as well as having to run commands through a middle party- the controller and processor. So getting hit once and dying, particularly in a 3D game (The Last of Us has Clickers as a one hit kill enemy, but gives the player listening mode to make up for the less effective senses you have in a game environment, and doesn’t make them intelligent enough or placed appropriately to sneak up on you in places you’re not on alert). HP play a pretty necessary role as a sort of buffer or frustration-negator.
Personally, I’ve never thought of HP as being strictly “wounds”. Rather I think of them as a combination of wounds or pain, mental fortitude, stamina and luck or heroic fate the player character has or has lost. After all, in many games, losing HP doesn’t lead to a drop in a character’s performance. It’s really like “how many hits can I take, or how many times can I parry or dodge before I am too exhausted, frightened or in pain to function effectively as a hero, or just before my luck plain runs out?” If the hero gets to a point where they couldn’t continue in their role, we have diverged from the “alpha timeline” to use a Homestuck term. The hero is not capable of fulfilling their role, so we have to wipe that timeline and try again, even if they’re not strictly dead, for the player’s sake. You can’t keep playing in a doomed timeline in which the hero broke their leg and needed to stay in bed for a week so they missed the opportunity to save the mysterious amulet girl and the apocalypse happened.
So what are some alternatives to HP?
-Status Effects: Instead of taking numerical damage, you incur statuses based on where you get hit, which temporarily put certain abilities out of commission and/or incur penalties, ie. slowed movement, impeded vision, inability to use a key tool or weapon. Presumably this would either last a set time, or until you could drag yourself to a safe place of rest or healing or use a consumable item etc. Upside: Immersive and you’ll feel amazing if you take down an enemy or complete the hard platforming in spite of being half-blinded and limping. Downside: Could be annoying. Nobody likes to backtrack or to wait for a status to go off if a section is impossible to complete while it’s in effect. I feel like this could be extra interesting if maybe certain statuses were necessary to invoke deliberately in certain portions rather than just being a punishment; kind of like the spirit realm in Soul Reaver being more than just a low health punishment.
-No HP. only obstruction. Enemies don’t attack you directly to hurt you, but rather they obstruct your path, try to drag you back, and maybe push you into deathtraps that are one hit kills. If you think about it, an antagonist does not necessarily have to be violent to oppose the protagonist, only to oppose and/or try to impede or corrupt their quest.
-You lose something else. Enemies don’t hurt you, but they take money from you, and dammit, you want that money to buy stuff! Shovel Knight makes a great case for using currency as a life system to encourage a player to try not to die too much while not being overly punitive. Or perhaps enemies keep taking your macguffin or the person you have to escort or even the player character themselves and putting it/them somewhere else. In a sense, this is how Planescape Torment dealt with its immortal protagonist- he always awoke in the morgue if he died, which was inconvenient so you wanted to avoid it. The key here is that the thing you lose should be something that you don’t want to lose, but not something that’s worse to lose than a 1-up would be, or else players will just want to quicksave and reload. Super Mario of course had a system where getting hit means you lose your powerups, like your super-status or the ability to glide or shoot fireballs, and while these powerups were only rarely needed to complete a level, of course you wanted to hang onto them because they were fun and cool and made it easier.
These kinds of systems are not uncommon in games in general, but they are in RPGS, and I think it’d be interesting to explore the idea of RPGs that not only don’t have a healer, but don’t have HP.
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