STORMCROW'S PROFILE

author=Liberty
Teaching your player how to do shit (with the option to skip the tutorial) is infinitely better than just dumping them in the game and saying "yeah, go play. I ain't gonna teach you jack. Have 'fun'."

I love the Souls games, I'm v. far from alone in that, and their approach feels very much like pitching you in to the deep end of a piranha filled pool (well, it's a pool the size of an ocean, which is another thing I like about the Souls games) and yelling after you "have fun learning 2 swim, bitch!". And it's amazing. Just saying. "Oh God, what's happening, which way do I go, HOW DO I NOT DIE!?" And figuring that out with no help is extremely fun and rewarding.

Now, there is complex stuff going on in terms of exploration and the player experience of challenge in the Souls games that I could write a lot about if I had more time, if I was smarter, or if someone was paying me to, but there's a lot more to it than being very hard. Souls games do teach you how to play them, but they do so in a way that feels like the very opposite of "holding hands" (call it "dry humping on a park bench"?).

Obviously challenge is not the only way to make a game engaging or enjoyable, but it is one accepted way. I adore Dwarf Fortress' core philosophy of "losing is fun".

That said, "hand-holding" is something I've always associated with the linearity factor as much as with the difficulty factor, so I'm a little surprised this thread is entirely about the easy-hard continuum and not the tunnel-sandbox continuum. (I first saw "take my hand and follow me" used in video games to describe the beginning of FF7, the whole Midgard first act, which is much more linear than the rest of the game and provides a denser blend of spectacle vs. exploration.)

I assume most people here are familiar w/ the "Nintendo Hard" trope, right? (I'm not going to actually link to tvtropes, I think that's in breach of net ethics.) Basically, videogames have been being "dumbed" down difficulty-wise with each successive generation from the 8-bit era to the 16-bit era to the 32/64 bit era to the last few modern console generations. This has been going on a long time. Likewise, US releases of videogames have often been "toned down" difficulty wise compared to their Japanese counterparts to better appeal to the relatively "casual" market in the US. A couple of console generations back, the idea of what a "normal" difficulty should be gelled, so even if that definition was three to five times easier than the difficulty one could expect in the 8-bit days, to me the increasing easiness of video games in the past few years has really slowed down in pace. Videogames aren't getting harder with subsequent console generations by any means, but the rate at which they're getting easier with subsequent console generations has fallen off sharply. And the industry isn't a monolith, and it isn't a universal trend any more. Outside of the Souls series which has made difficulty a very public aspect of its brand, some recent western games have had difficulty levels that I found relatively shocking, not in and of itself, but relative to how complacent, for lack of a better word, I'd become in expecting modern games to present very little challenge. The two Wolfenstein games and the most recent Doom are the games I'm thinking of here. Wolfenstein more than Doom. As someone who plays a lot of western AAA shooters (for someone on here, anyway), Wolfenstein's abandonment of the "industry standard since Halo: Combat Evolved regenerating health" mechanic in favor of health that did not regenerate in any way shape or form felt brutal. Which is I think part of the retro magic they were going for.

My least favorite developments in video games in the last five years are the nigh-total death of couch co-op and the audacity of games that seriously will not let me pause in single player mode each of which is only tangentially related to this topic. But the latter is a problem I find far more disrespectful of the modern, busy adult gamer's time than almost any difficulty level decisions could be: just because MOST people like to play this game online, I have to decide between going to the bathroom/checking on my kids/pets or not dying in this game when I'm playing on solo? Unfuckingbelievable.

"I hope you like being forced through ten million mandatory tutorials before actually getting to play the game" is another problem related to this issue, but it looks like I'm out of time.

I am sad I missed out on the badges for this.

author=Sgt M
Only if your game is thematically about style clash. i.e. Super Mario Odyssey. Otherwise nah.

Well I've got one that is (The Staircase) and heavily lampshades the fact that characters from Earth are normal proportioned and characters from RTP fantasy land are superdeformed Chibis, but not this project, no.

Thanks for your opinions, everybody. Only a few posts but I'm happy with the consensus (yay RMN). Coelocanth has a pretty good point that the RTP kind of clashes pretty hard with ITSELF.

My thinking is...pretty much 100% aligned with LockeZ' here. It's the least of all evils here.

As to references to "a hobbyist game", these days it seems like everything I make is semi-hobbyist, semi-entrepreneurial. In what I recognize is an obvious bid to have my cake and eat it too, my basic M.O. seems to boil down to: "First part is free, therefore it can have all of the FUN ("unprofessional") stuff: unlicensed music, rips, etcetera; second part is commercial, will only include resources I legally own and can use."

I've yet to really actually get meaningfully past the "first part" stage which is fine. Nothing wrong with doing this for fun. I do have a project (not yet up on here, but related to When You Were Young) called AfterSaga that is all-"street-legal" from the ground up (well, except for a placeholder soundtrack by Nobuo Uematsu that'll eventually get replaced, did I get that name right, it's wapanese and I typed it from memory).

Anyway, I've never played the Metal Slug games (maybe I should) but as I'm already making use of rips from them for vehicles in the thing I'm talking about (Spriter's Resource or w/e it's called is great, got some pretty cool use out of show picture, flying semi-animated vehicles around the map during cutscenes) that's the third option I want to consider. It's unlikely there are enough Metal Slug rips available to give me all of the enemies I want but it'd be cool if there were. The graphics I have looked through are p. cool, I like the style.

Random Blather

Hey everyone long time no see! Life has been crazy for months and shows no signs of getting any less crazy or any less busy so I'm gonna try to bear down and mak gams right through the crazy and the busy.

I doubt I'll be able to post here much, at least until my current unhealthy obsession game project has matured enough that it's worth posting about. If I do post before then, it'll probably be to ask for help with stuff, ask for paid help with stuff (I have become suddenly really broke, but thankfully there is some small amount of money I have in my paypal that's earmarked for use solely on my creative projects), or ask opinion questions like this one.

Okay, so, QUESTION IS: is it okay (i.e. aesthetically acceptable) for a game to use two (or even more) different graphical styles for side view enemies, provided they are never on the same screen together?

In other words, let's say I'm working on a sci-fi game (by which I mean...I am in fact working on a scifi game, lol) and half of my enemy_sv gfx come from Aekashics and half come from the "hidden" scifi resources that came with MV, completely different styles. Is it okay to use both as long as they never actually appear in the same battle? So the style clash between them is never "in the player's face" so to speak.

I have a feeling this is a "there are no wrong answers, just opinions" type question but, please share with me the delicious thoughts from your sweet juicy brains I am not a zombie promise.

https://rpgmaker.net/games/10747/downloads/10214/

I'm sorry (I'm sorry halibabica is the only one reviewing games lol) for the dirty blatant self promotion but I genuinely think this adorable pile of complete nonsense is one of the most underplayed games on RMN.