NTC3'S PROFILE

4) Check out The Blue Contestant to see how it can be made a lot better.

Firstly, it's great to see a developer responding to constructive criticism; not by getting defensive, but by really making the needed improvements. Well done! I like the changes you've made; I would only suggest adding some story reason for those battle time limits (i.e. say that you're attacking while the main guard is distracted and sticking around for longer will risk the arrival of reinforcements, etc.)

Also, I did suspect that Rocket Launcher and such might be joke weapons; it's just that they gain disproportionate importance out of 15 or so weapons in total. Trying adding more variations of existing things that are a bit more gritty; perhaps weapons like composite crossbow or pneumatic rifle in order to balance the silliness out a bit.

Anyway, that's it, and good luck with development.

author=Sated
@NTC3Sore Losers was released SIX years ago. If you think that I haven't learnt anything since then, I don't know what to say. There are a lot of things about Sore Losers that I would now go back and change, but that's not how life works. We don't get to erase mistakes, we only get to learn from them.

Damn it, this was actually meant to point out that I do think you've learned, since you now rightly consider the design choices you made yourself at one point mistaken, and that is a mark of self-reflection , etc. I really need to work on making my comments not come off as backhanded praise so often. :(

There is a puzzle involved that allows you to change which rooms contain poison, which means that the player was 100% given the ability to be "poison immune" (since they were given the ability to turn off the poison). That you didn't know this only tells me that you failed the puzzle; it doesn't tell me anything about Sore Losers, or my approach to level-design.

Yes, I know, and I did finish that puzzle, as my second post points out. By means of being poison-immune, I meant a "survival gear" approach with the items that stopped player from getting poisoned, like the Hazmat suit in Iron Gaia: Virus. It would've been easy and expected, and liked that the game did not do that, and gave actual weight to the puzzle instead.

author=unity
Even if you hadn't improved, your point would still be valid. I can make a game that's got terrible music, but that wouldn't negate my point if I made a review pointing out another game that makes my ears hurt.

Also, I don't think any reviewer needs to hear "It's funny you point out this weak spot in this game when your game had that problem." That fact has nothing to do with the subject at hand; the review of the current game being looked at. It's completely irrelevant.

First point: absolutely true.

Second point: true again, although, like I said above, it was meant to be a good thing, even if it unfortunately didn't come off that way. I suppose it's my Guardian experience showing itself: comments in nearly every discussion over there get tons of recommends for doing what I tend to do, and so I kind of got conditioned to think of it as providing context. (Unless it goes against majority opinion, in which case it's ignored or considered "whataboutery".) On the bright side, it did get Cash interested in the game, so I suppose it worked out well enough in the end.

author=Red_Nova
It's the nature of the beast for resource management games, I think. Soul Sunder was modeled after survival horror games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill (the old ones). Near the end of those games, you were practically swimming in ammo and health items (assuming you did a good job of playing through the game), so I expected players to have a decent amount of healing items. Again, though, not nearly as much as what Sated shows.

Ah, the first Silent Hill. I think I finished it with B score, so I was decent enough at it, and I almost always had 6-7 spare health packs, and 50-100 spare ammo. Nevertheless, the game never never stopped feeling tense, because of how often the difficulty and level/encounter design changed. (Except in the hospital, when the hammer is equivalent to an "I Win" button against Nurses. I so wish Konami remakes it like SE is now remaking FFVII, and teaches them to block/counter-attack Hammer blows.) In the end, I also ran out of shotgun shells on the last boss and had to use 30-40 more pistol shots to bring it down. Then again, I did also manage to miss the rifle after the Twinfeeler boss fight, and was very confused at all the rifle shells I found afterwards.

Anyway, to get back on topic, I think a potential alternative to maintaining the challenge for good resource managers is to add a moral connotation to it as well. For instance, the game checks your resource level at certain points back in town, just before confronting you with some people who've been there right after you, and will soon be heading back in as well. If you have a low level of resources, not much happens, and the game implies that they've picked the resources you've missed on your run in the dungeon, and so don't need any.

If it's high, however, it's implied there wasn't much left for them to find, and so they ask you for a share. Agreeing takes away roughly enough resources to make the next stretch sufficiently challenging again, and lets you see them again in time. Refusing keeps the items with you, but dooms those people. It would obviously be too complex to add to this project, but it might be worth trying sometime later.

EDIT: Wait, or is what I said above already the process used to distinguish between Redemption and the more negative endings?

^ Story getting in the way of design again? Damn it! Is there not even a story wiggle room to have two tiers of, say, Frozen Flames, one that's 0.5 AT and another, far more expensive, that's 1 AT? Or, perhaps, make the early version of Frozen Flames deal less damage as the character grows in level? Sigh... I suppose I'll have to see how it all works out for myself in a month's time, as well as to record my own experiences on Survivor with the healing items.

And as for the poison-gas complex in SL, the key word is "atypically weak enemies" : they literally were just severed hands come to life as a by-product of experiments there (yeah, the writing was never game's strong point). As a result, they didn't do a whole lot of damage and missed often, and it was possible to defeat them with just one character of the four left standing, as long as you didn't panic and used healing items on the first turn or just before the battle, to at least have that one fighter at good health.

Plus, there were only a few central rooms affected, and there was a puzzle to solve that would remove the poison entirely. Before you did do that, though, the section was pretty tense. It's probably not something that would necessarily work in this kind of game, but it does provide an example of how else things can be done. (And besides, failing the section because you failed to anticipate increased need for items is technically in spirit of traditional survival horror.) The truly unfair part of SL was actually the goddamned chase minigames, particularly the first one vs. the unbeatable robot spider thing (think car chase in A Blurred Line, slightly fairer, but more far more time-consuming and unskippable.)

^ Yeah, but I'm not sure there's a way to portray it better, at least on screenshots. It should look fine during the actual gameplay.

What would be really cool, though, is to make the ground tiles underneath the spacecraft change their colour to "scorched" just before it lands, perhaps even with some smoke or such. Not essential at all, but it would be pretty awesome.