LOCKEZ'S PROFILE

How did my game get featured without Liberty mentioning it to me during the six hours we spent on voice chat on Monday playing tabletop games...

author=unity
He'll be whatever the opposite of vindicated is!

At one point I was going to make a sequel called Vindication 2: Complacency...

Gaining specific magic spells from dungeons is certainly a fun way to improve on FF1 design, especially if your game is somewhat nonlinear (even just having basic side-quests would work). In the original FF1, aside from leveling up, your fighter and thief got a lot of their power upgrades from treasure chests, but your mages got nearly all of their power upgrades simply from grinding money and buying new stuff in towns.

Modern game design is much more goal-oriented, even in open world games, and so rewarding the player with a new spell for completing a dungeon or sidequest feels good. And modern game design also de-emphasizes grinding a lot, replacing it with optional tasks the player can do a single time to gain more power or new abilities (aka side quests). The player can still get XP and gold in those sidequests for upgrades, but sticking some treasure in them feels more satisfying, and FF1 is a simple enough game that it's very nice to have even one extra type of treasure you can hand out.

author=LBR
Having said that, I did not like FF9's lindblum. Because I felt like, what was the point of creating this illusion of this really big city that you want to explore, if you're only going to allow the player to continue to explore one part of it over and over again (Saga Frontier 2 also had this problem; fantastic water colored maps but you're only allowed to explore one area, or spend 5 seconds in it) - I thought something like FF12 was more appropriate, because you're actually going through and interacting with every distinct and trying to find out what to buy and gather information etc. Not only is it a big city, but it remains functional and explorable to the player on every level, everything has a purpose.

Huh, I definitely prefer the other way from you in this regard. I don't want to walk down empty streets - just let me pick the correct building from a menu. Cities like Rabanastre in FF12 try to create the illusion of size with long streets you have to walk down, but because they don't have any kind of abstraction, the entire city is still only the size of a single city block. If you want to convince me that this is a real city with a hundred thousand people in it then you need to make it absolutely crystal clear that the parts I'm visiting are only the parts relevant to my adventure, and that there's way way way way more of it that's being skipped over because it's not relevant.

So, let's imagine that you are making a game where the dungeons and other locations are full of interactive objects, and the player is searching for ways to get through. I find this is easy to make interesting in something like Legend of Zelda, Lufia 2, or Wild ARMs, where the player is making their way through a maze-like ruin filled with traps and puzzles, and the things they have to search are obviously just game elements. These traps and puzzles add a lot to the dungeon, and get the player to think about the space in interesting ways, but have little logical reason to exist in the game world. How many block puzzles have you seen in real life, after all? The gameplay often comes at the expense of realism in these games, at least to some degree (although some games are better than others at justifying the nonsense).

It gets a lot harder to make the exploration interesting in a game where the exploration works more like Divinity: Original Sin, Skyrim, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout, or even Phoenix Wright. You know, games where every cabinet and drawer can be searched, and every object can be interacted with in a variety of realistic ways. And where the locations are realistically designed buildings where every room has an obvious use, not insane pyramids with moving pillars that crush you. This kind of exploration system is most common in western RPGs. You can try to put the same kinds of Zelda-like puzzles in your games when they work like this... but they often become nearly impossible to solve, because every random cabinet and drawer is a red herring. This leads these kinds of games to have much simpler exploration, where the most "puzzle" you ever really tend to get is a lever that moves an elevator or a key that unlocks a door. And the player nearly always has to be told a clue about where to find that key, because if you leave them to search on their own, they have hundreds of potential places to search through in the dungeon.

It's that searching through dozens or hundreds of places for things you might need that drives me crazy. It often feels like a waste of time to me. But for certain genres of games, such as games where the plot is focused on solving a mystery, or games where the main appeal of the game is exploration of a fleshed-out world, I completely understand why they work like that. It's not a type of game that I can simply toss in the garbage and say "They should stop making games like this, just make the important objects sparkle and make everything else non-interactive."

My question is, in games that use this second kind of exploration system, where every object can be interacted with in a variety of semi-realistic ways, and every container can be searched, what are some good tricks you guys have found to make exploration still feel engaging and exciting? How do you keep the player *wanting* to go in each room and open each drawer, and not constantly feeling disappointed or annoyed?

And for some related questions that feed into the above question, how often is it okay to have rooms that contain nothing useful for the game - just one or two rooms per dungeon, or do you not mind when most rooms are like that? Do you think that adding lore and narration to each object to explain why it's there and what it's used for is better, or worse, than a message that just says "Nothing of interest" when you walk up to a strange looking machine in the factory ruins a press A to search it?

it's happening again (or possibly has been broken for three years without being fixed)

It's possible the numbers are just too big, and the total number of downloads overflows beyond maxint at some point during the sort algorithm. But if you sort by profile views, it works fine. And every game has way more views than downloads. So if that's the problem, then there must already be a fix in place which was added for views but not for downloads. If so, that should hopefully make it easier to fix?

Some other people on discord were suggesting that the reason sorting by downloads breaks but sorting by views doesn't is because when you sort by downloads it has to loop through all of each game's downloads and add them together, adding an extra exponent to the number of operations that the sort takes to complete. If this is the case then the solution is probably going to involve changing how the sort algorithm works. Which, depending on the site's code, might mean saving something in a variable instead of querying a function over and over during the sort code, or might mean replacing the sort algorithm with a different standardized one, or might mean doing something else to improve the sort's efficiency.