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DFalcon
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Software engineer and amateur game developer with a focus on challenging non-twitch gameplay. I set the bar for "challenging" pretty high.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
Other major chunks of interest go toward reading, math and tabletop games of many stripes.
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How to expose higher difficulty to players?
Alternate title: Even in RMN, F.O.E.!
If a player is going to be battling a lot in an RPG or really doing anything game-mechanical, it's important to keep them at an appropriate degree of challenge. At least some of the time - I think we've had other discussions on pacing.
Some RPGs do this by restricting the player to a relatively linear flow and possibly giving them self-selecting options to fine-tune things: e.g., grind to make things easier. I include here many games where you can return to previously visited areas; the important question is how laughable the fights are when you do.
But sometimes we want to either allow more non-linearity, or perhaps let the player select a difficulty level more explicitly. And it can be hard for the player to figure out where they want to be on that without trying and risking failure for any new thing. Possibly, trying an entire dungeon and failing at some point. Even in games where recovering from wipeout is relatively smooth, this can cause some pain. (Alternately, a player might also have to run an entire dungeon to find out the boss was too easy.)
So I'm interested to hear if people have methods or ideas for letting people experience harder and easier sections smoothly.
If a player is going to be battling a lot in an RPG or really doing anything game-mechanical, it's important to keep them at an appropriate degree of challenge. At least some of the time - I think we've had other discussions on pacing.
Some RPGs do this by restricting the player to a relatively linear flow and possibly giving them self-selecting options to fine-tune things: e.g., grind to make things easier. I include here many games where you can return to previously visited areas; the important question is how laughable the fights are when you do.
But sometimes we want to either allow more non-linearity, or perhaps let the player select a difficulty level more explicitly. And it can be hard for the player to figure out where they want to be on that without trying and risking failure for any new thing. Possibly, trying an entire dungeon and failing at some point. Even in games where recovering from wipeout is relatively smooth, this can cause some pain. (Alternately, a player might also have to run an entire dungeon to find out the boss was too easy.)
So I'm interested to hear if people have methods or ideas for letting people experience harder and easier sections smoothly.
Suggested feature: subscribe to developer
Maybe I should start by pointing out that I have periods of being an off-and-on visitor, and I don't track the new-stuff feeds very closely. So I rarely have a very good sense of what's going on games-wise except for what pops up in other contexts: featured games, articles, etc. I doubt this is that uncommon.
One specific thing we could do to improve game discovery is to let people subscribe to developers, similar to how we subscribe to games right now. It would work a lot better with the way games get made in the community, I think. Usually we subscribe to a game because we're impressed by the work the one or two creators did on it, and we'd be happy to know about another game they're doing after that thing we liked gets cancelled. (Or even finished!)
The main use case I see is subscribing to games (maybe only new games?) by the makers of an existing game, though maybe someone would want to suggest "show me when Solitayre posts an article" or the like. I'm not familiar with all the positions that can be set now, but obviously we'd want to screen out testers and the like if we went that direction.
One specific thing we could do to improve game discovery is to let people subscribe to developers, similar to how we subscribe to games right now. It would work a lot better with the way games get made in the community, I think. Usually we subscribe to a game because we're impressed by the work the one or two creators did on it, and we'd be happy to know about another game they're doing after that thing we liked gets cancelled. (Or even finished!)
The main use case I see is subscribing to games (maybe only new games?) by the makers of an existing game, though maybe someone would want to suggest "show me when Solitayre posts an article" or the like. I'm not familiar with all the positions that can be set now, but obviously we'd want to screen out testers and the like if we went that direction.
Tutorial design
What makes a good tutorial?
I'm mostly thinking of RPG battle-related tutorials, as those tend to be far and away the most complex things you have to explain in RPGs (HP and MP and CT and items and skills and elements and statuses, oh my!), but the discussion needn't be limited to that.
Do you like to:
- Have something hold your hand to the point of telling you exact actions, possibly not even letting you do anything else? (e.g. Fire Emblem US)
- Start with an easy fight or two and trust that the player will figure everything out eventually? (e.g. FF Tactics)
- Have a bunch of people standing in a room somewhere to describe what the seven statuses are? (e.g. several FFs)
- Toss them in the deep end and hope they find the readme file?
- ??
Tales of a happy medium would also be welcome.
I'm mostly thinking of RPG battle-related tutorials, as those tend to be far and away the most complex things you have to explain in RPGs (HP and MP and CT and items and skills and elements and statuses, oh my!), but the discussion needn't be limited to that.
Do you like to:
- Have something hold your hand to the point of telling you exact actions, possibly not even letting you do anything else? (e.g. Fire Emblem US)
- Start with an easy fight or two and trust that the player will figure everything out eventually? (e.g. FF Tactics)
- Have a bunch of people standing in a room somewhere to describe what the seven statuses are? (e.g. several FFs)
- Toss them in the deep end and hope they find the readme file?
- ??
Tales of a happy medium would also be welcome.
What RMN game are you playing now?
Tell us about an RMN game you're playing, comment on somebody else's post, or both! Because you can't see a comment on a game unless you're already looking at the game page.
Everybody's seen the "What are you working on now" thread by now, the concept shouldn't be too different.
Some guidelines:
-Do NOT tell us about playing your own game. We all testplay, and we don't want to hear about it here.
-Responding to other players is encouraged, even about your own game. The purpose of the thread is to foster discussion! That said, long back-and-forth exchanges where the creator grills one person about things they liked and didn't like might fit better somewhere else? We'll play that by ear.
-No concrete spoiler policy, but keep in mind people may decide to play games based on posts here.
-Meta discussion about the purpose of the thread/what should be in this post is also welcome, as long as it doesn't take over the thread.
--------------------
I just finished Dhux's Scar. PE was an interesting idea that I don't think really worked out right. Save points were rarely at logical places with regard to saving PE (i.e., the beginning and end of a zone) so the effect was mostly to make me run away from everything in a zone until I reached a save point, then backtrack to that save point until I had to move on. Which was a bit tedious.
(The zone with enemy groups with multiple multitarget stun users may have contributed to this caution.)
Anyway, as my caution would suggest I got the B ending. The plot was really well done; despite the above and some other caveats (bosses really dragged, especially the storyline-only ones) I enjoyed it.
Everybody's seen the "What are you working on now" thread by now, the concept shouldn't be too different.
Some guidelines:
-Do NOT tell us about playing your own game. We all testplay, and we don't want to hear about it here.
-Responding to other players is encouraged, even about your own game. The purpose of the thread is to foster discussion! That said, long back-and-forth exchanges where the creator grills one person about things they liked and didn't like might fit better somewhere else? We'll play that by ear.
-No concrete spoiler policy, but keep in mind people may decide to play games based on posts here.
-Meta discussion about the purpose of the thread/what should be in this post is also welcome, as long as it doesn't take over the thread.
--------------------
I just finished Dhux's Scar. PE was an interesting idea that I don't think really worked out right. Save points were rarely at logical places with regard to saving PE (i.e., the beginning and end of a zone) so the effect was mostly to make me run away from everything in a zone until I reached a save point, then backtrack to that save point until I had to move on. Which was a bit tedious.
(The zone with enemy groups with multiple multitarget stun users may have contributed to this caution.)
Anyway, as my caution would suggest I got the B ending. The plot was really well done; despite the above and some other caveats (bosses really dragged, especially the storyline-only ones) I enjoyed it.
Looking-for-game friendliness
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who thinks that RMN is not very good at helping random passersby find a game they might want to play. To some extent, if WIP says the site's focus is to provide tools to developers, that's fine; but I'm sure there's some simple stuff that can be done. I'm hoping some of you have got to have ideas.
I'll start conservatively by suggesting a slight change in naming. To a visitor, something is not a "game" unless it can be downloaded and played. So perhaps instead of the "Games" section we could have "Projects", and instead of "Newest Games" we could have "Recently Updated Projects".
Following on that, it might be useful to have a separate section for games with newly updated downloads, or a way to filter lists of projects so that only ones with downloads show up.
I'll start conservatively by suggesting a slight change in naming. To a visitor, something is not a "game" unless it can be downloaded and played. So perhaps instead of the "Games" section we could have "Projects", and instead of "Newest Games" we could have "Recently Updated Projects".
Following on that, it might be useful to have a separate section for games with newly updated downloads, or a way to filter lists of projects so that only ones with downloads show up.
Page list at top of thread page
Often when reading in a thread I find myself at the top of a page, see what's there and determine I need to go forward or back a page or two. It'd be nice to have the page-turn navigation from the bottom replicated at the top.
Long-form game-specific non-reviews?
Basically I was wondering if there was an intended path for posting walkthroughs and the like for games. For example, I had a pretty long forum post (that was disappeared in the update to RMN3) explaining some of the not immediately intuitive aspects of Visions & Voices.
The RPG difficulty problem
Basically, the built-in difficulty players encounter in battles has nothing to do with how good they are at battles.
If you look at the very earliest video game RPGs, the difficulty paradigm seems clear: if you're having trouble fighting someone, go explore for loot or level grind for a while to bring your stats up. While that takes some time, there's an interesting idea here: automatically self-selecting difficulty at a pretty fine grain. (We can leave the fairly unwarranted assumption that our hypothetical game's battles are interesting at any difficulty level for another time.)
Fast forward and add another layer, and we begin to have a problem: exploration is kind of fun, and a lot of the people who play RPGs do so because that's what they like. But the bulk of rewards are recognizable as such because they have stat effects, and often:
a) exploration automatically adds level grinding due to random or hard-to-avoid encounters;
b) exploration is required often enough (to find a switch or the like) that people won't be able to recognize many of the times it's optional until too late;
c) level grinding is out of fashion, so the developer makes sure anyone who's been through all the optional parts of the dungeon is set up to pretty well breeze through;
d) the player isn't certain how hard a boss is until he fights it, and who wants to waste time losing?
Putting these together basically eliminates the feedback between effectiveness in battles and effort spent making battles easier; how strong the characters are no longer has much relationship to how skillful the player is.
IMO making a battle interesting is a very difficult thing to do at any level of character power; so why go out of our way to make the problem harder by varying the in-game resources players can have so wildly? Anyway, I'm curious what people think are the best solutions/ameliorations. Certainly not everything follows the stereotypical pattern I've presented.
If you look at the very earliest video game RPGs, the difficulty paradigm seems clear: if you're having trouble fighting someone, go explore for loot or level grind for a while to bring your stats up. While that takes some time, there's an interesting idea here: automatically self-selecting difficulty at a pretty fine grain. (We can leave the fairly unwarranted assumption that our hypothetical game's battles are interesting at any difficulty level for another time.)
Fast forward and add another layer, and we begin to have a problem: exploration is kind of fun, and a lot of the people who play RPGs do so because that's what they like. But the bulk of rewards are recognizable as such because they have stat effects, and often:
a) exploration automatically adds level grinding due to random or hard-to-avoid encounters;
b) exploration is required often enough (to find a switch or the like) that people won't be able to recognize many of the times it's optional until too late;
c) level grinding is out of fashion, so the developer makes sure anyone who's been through all the optional parts of the dungeon is set up to pretty well breeze through;
d) the player isn't certain how hard a boss is until he fights it, and who wants to waste time losing?
Putting these together basically eliminates the feedback between effectiveness in battles and effort spent making battles easier; how strong the characters are no longer has much relationship to how skillful the player is.
IMO making a battle interesting is a very difficult thing to do at any level of character power; so why go out of our way to make the problem harder by varying the in-game resources players can have so wildly? Anyway, I'm curious what people think are the best solutions/ameliorations. Certainly not everything follows the stereotypical pattern I've presented.
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