SHINAN'S PROFILE

Name: Nicholas "Nickie" Launder
Attire/Descr: White shirt, tie and black pants. Regular office type. Small guy. Gets shakes easily, drinks copious amounts of coffee and is a heavy chain-smoker.
Avatar: Squirrel
Colour: Silver
Weapon: Bazooka

It shouldn't be that hard to make a crap game should it! And since it's apparently for any project sort of kind of then count me in! (unless it happens next week because I can't do next week)

I have to admit that even though I'm a fan of adventure games it is not actually because of the puzzles. The puzzles are usually frustrating things that I just wish were easy so I could go on and find all the fun stuff.

Of course I have also thought many times "Why don't I read a book or watch a move instead then?". Well... That's actually what I've done. I like adventure games. But I hardly ever play them.

But on puzzle design. I personally have always liked the RPG aspects of adventure games. Early adventure games were essentially based on RPGs (King's Quest, if that isn't someone playing out their D&D adventure I don't know what is). And the thing that originally drew me to RPGs were the adventure game-style dialogue trees.

But yeah. On this actual topic I don't really know what to say. What I really want is the RPG adventure game hybrid. A game where you walk around and talk to people but the game itself and its puzzles are entirely open-ended. The strict linearity of many adventure games do annoy me. (bad puzzle design that is)

But having tried my hand at adventure games I also know that good puzzle design is nearly impossible to do. How do you make a puzzle fun, inventive and logical? It's nearly impossible.

To me that is. I tip my hat to anyone that makes good adventure game puzzles.

I really think it should have four fingers so I made this:

I think one thing that could have been done to improve the initial reaction would have been a better original post. I don't really know what game topics look like (I'll go look at two now that I write this... dumdidumdidum... alright that didn't give me much) but I think that a bit more text in some places to describe what is to be expected. Know your audience. I mean I can clearly see what the game is supposed to be in the snippets of text there. "Saga Mara Talon is a game about some people killing a bad thing called Talon" is enough for me to know exactly what the game is. But perhaps the audience at the site has certain other automatic expectations and a bit more explanation could have been good.

(Such as the intent. I see later in the topic that someone says "6 hours of fast-paced gameplay that's just another way of saying unfinished game". When people expect epics you need to be VERY clear that this is not that)

The original topic layout is also fairly shite. The images take up so much space that the informative text between them is easily missed as simple image descriptions. Putting all the text in one box (since there isn't much of it) and then throw all the screenshots last could have improved readability by a lot.


Of course once the buddy response to the criticism was posted there was very little you could to to save it except for jumping in as quickly as possible and defuse the situation by firstly dismissing the nasty comments by the friends and politely explaining to the reviewer that "yeah, the game is not supposed to have much of a story. It's essentially just an arena battle game. For the other criticism blahblahblah" and continue to either adress your intent on things the reviewer might have misunderstood or acknowledging stuff like "hmm yeah, the game could probably benefit from a better tutorial" or just acknowledging that "true, this game isn't easily accessible nor for everyone"


(I know, for example, that I have no interest whatsoever in this game because the only thing I dislike more than the regular RPG stories is the regular RPG gameplay)


The Too Long Didn't Read Version of what went wrong:
The original topic might have been a bit unclear. Especially considering the audience. Not jumping in and defusing the situation before it got out of hand was a clear mistake.