WHAT ARE YOU THINKING ABOUT? (GAME DEVELOPMENT EDITION)

calunio
Explaining too much is not always a good thing, though.

Everything in moderation and plenty of it, yes, but making a game accessible goes beyond explanation and into intuition/design/flow/interfaces/button mapping/visibility/etc.

If you need a ton of explanation, you might have made a few wrong turns trying to drive to Smooth Gameplay-ville. (That was a metaphor, all right.)

I think with good map design you can subtlety tell the player when it's a good time to save without using save points. There's action adventure games where you sometimes find yourself in a big open arena and you know there's going to be a boss fight soon. You can replicate this in your dungeon design. In Legend of Jipang (I had a computer crash and accidentally closing the wrong program with it so far, twice I lost progress :( ) I haven't decided between save anywhere and have Dr. Chada serve as save points but in any case the final dungeon hints at where the boss is. Eventually at the end you emerge on the roof, the music stops besides the wind, there's no more encounters, an open area with a small shrine in the middle, and at no point does the game enter a cutscene without the player's intervention. The player has to initiate it, it isn't triggered by walking through a door (really big imposing looking doors work well for "don't go through here until you're ready" sign too) or stepping on an invisible trigger.

All this script writing makes me want to write a Noire point and click adventure detective game. That would be mad cool.

This weekend, I used how to use the most basic rudiments of CSS and how to use Paint.Net to create text and/or graphics without a horribly ugly unintended outline or fringe of pixels, thanks to layers and transparency.

Hooray!

Avee that's interesting, but hard to pull off, of course. Good luck!

@Avee : that is really an interesting idea.

I once thought of an alternative to character progression:
Instead of your character getting stronger throughout the game, he gets more and more handicaps (typically lowered stats and harder gameplay mechanics) because he suffers from a deadly disease.
The players therefore have to adapt their strategies and moves to overcome new handicaps, take advantage of enemies' weaknesses more and more, plan and execute their moves ahead of time, etc.

I had a complete scenario about a game that used this concept and I believe the narrative could be very interesting with it.

I HAD THIS EXACT IDEA YEARS AND YEARS AGO. I'VE EVEN RECONSIDERED IT EVERY FEW YEARS FOR THE PAST DECADE OR SO.

I never wound up developing it but holy crap, I am SHOCKED that anyone else had this idea.

author=calunio
Well, in my current project there's this meter that grows faster the higher your level, and when it gets too high you die. I guess it's some sort of negative progression.

Nice idea.
For instance I could picture it like this: the character has an Adrenaline gauge. Increases in adrenaline strengthen stats but reaching the limit causes physical and mental breakdown.
Perfect for Survival Horrors.

I had the idea about the handicaps and disease when I watched that silly movie Crank :P

@Darken: You know, it'd be great if someone wrote an article about how to innovate.

Still figuring out a limit to the amount of each individual type of action should be available for each usable item available.

Echoed.