CATMITTS'S PROFILE

*spends literally years building custom menu systems and chipset lightings in a hideously inflexible engine for children* *is about 4/5ths of the games on this site*

I'm not really involved with the XxHardCorexX gaming community at all so I could be mistaken, but I think it's better to give the player an illusion of difficulty rather than actual difficulty. Difficulty is fun mostly in the feeling of accomplishment you get for overcoming it, unless you dig that masochistic I Wanna Be The Guy stuff. I guess what I mean by illusory difficulty is that it makes the player feel proud of themselves for overcoming it but with the minimum of frustration that comes from the task not being incredibly hard, really.
I guess an example would be a part of a Mario level where you have to get across a large gap by bouncing from one flying koopa to the next. Mostly the koopas are set up to not require split-second timing, and the actual task isn't that difficult, but the sense of constant danger that comes from bounding quickly off platforms over a void and the fact that the only options after making the first jump are to succeed or die makes it pretty engaging and satisfying to pull off.

I'm not sure exactly how this would be accomplished in terms of rpgs: maybe by making certain enemies difficult enough to provide the constant specter of death while setting up the mechanics so that the player rarely actually dies. An example would be an early build of Mog's Chronology Of The Last Era game, which made the enemies quite tough at the start but they gave you potions when you died and iirc you had a heal spell too (?) so there was the sense of danger without actually being hugely dangerous. Apparantly other people found that version too difficult though so I could be wrong, but the principle's the same. It's similar to that in horror games, where you want to keep the player frightened of dying without actually dying because if they die, well, it's just a 'continue' screen, it lets them know that it's just a game and that the monster is just another challenge to be overcome by a certain strategy, and the immersion is broken to a certain extent.

In terms of puzzles I think you can break it down to a few rules, such as:

- always have the player know what they're meant to be doing: get past the rockslide, persude the king, etc. and whenever possible have this be as exact as possible: if the player comes across a locked door, say, try to use things like the description of the door, the comments of npcs, signposts etc to let the player know the distinction between, say, a locked door that means you have to find a key to progress and a locked door that means you have to break it down in some way to progress and a locked door that means you have to find a different way in to progress, etc. You can blur these distinctions to a certain degree but I think it's better in general to err on the side of giving the player more information. there's no fun in finding the cave entrance has been blocked by a landslide and spending an hour running around trying to get to another exit before realising you had to have blown up the rum barrels you saw earlier to, etc.

- Rei-'s comment about giving the player leads is a good one too, but I think it's also important to be consistent about this stuff. This is easier for adventure games because players are used to every character and object and line of dialogue meaning something: in rpgs it can be more difficult to distinguish between comments and events which happen to signpost the player and ones which are just meant to provide ambience. Essentially this amounts to helping the player decide what's relevent and what's not. Sometimes ambiguity and red herrings can make things more interesting but mostly this is the bad kind of difficulty which isn't really testing the player but their patience.

- Similarly, if you're gonna do a puzzle with multiple segments, make sure the player should be able to make some kind of intuitive causal connection between the different parts. This is mostly an adventure game thing but the classic example of scaring the cat to run through the duct tape to get hair for a moustache so you can impersonate a man who does not actually have a moustache still holds as a pretty good demonstration of what not to do.

I'm generalising horribly but you know.

this is very good. excellent work. i liked the speech protoman made and the part where the pastor told megaman that everyone loved him and was very proud of him. it was pretty neat seeing protoman open up like that as well. i mean it.

in an orderly society there would be no screenshot topics but a loosely connected network of rugged individualists forging their games out of raw passion and finely-honed samuraiesque technique. rather than debate the minutae of chipset errors a true gamemaker spends his or her time in solitary contemplation upon the ultimate meaning of games and then, hawklike, striking to produce an expression of the self. "to make videogames, you must first destroy videogames" - mr. miyagi

whoops, guess i should try reading stuff in future huh!