Talk about anything: Page 15 - Godot Community Forums

Talk about anything

TwistedTwigleg

Sound design is important! While I wouldn't say it has turned me away from a game completely, it definitely has influenced the immersion I feel when playing the game. I do think that good sound design can really elevate a game, while poor sound design can drag other aspects down with it. I've found sound design can be tricky though.

One thing I have found that can turn me away from games in confusing mechanics or solutions that look for a specific solution but do not directly state that is the case. For example, I remember playing an escape room game loosely based on the seven deadly sins, and one of the puzzles was to complete a riddle. The answer to the riddle was "you", which you could input with tiles, but grammatically the answer would be "me". Using "me" wasn't the answer and it had three slots, so I used "man" and "boy" (as it was implied in the game you were male) but neither of those worked either. Ultimately I found the solution was "you" after lots of head scratching, gathering all 26 tiles (one for each letter), and trying three letter words for around 40-60 minutes. After solving it made sense with the riddle (outside of the grammar issue), but I walked away from the experience annoyed, which I do not believe was the intent of the puzzle. Ultimately I think it was just there was too many possible solutions and that is why I missed the one they were looking for. I think it would have been a touch better with either less letters, or perhaps it would reveal a letter after a certain number of tries. (For what it's worth though, it was one of the last puzzles and I finished the game anyway :lol: )

To summarize: I think one big thing with games that has turned me away is a lack of explanations or confusion around possible solutions. I think it's hard because as a developer you are so familiar with the game and all the solutions that it is hard to see it from someone else's perspective, but I think that is what has turned me away several times. I know I have had this issue myself, and so when I make games now, I try to take a second to step back and critically examine my work to see if it makes sense for someone who hasn't played it before, ideally even getting some testers to try it who haven't played and noting their feedback.

cybereality

The game Marc Ecko's Getting Up for PS2. Had a major bug where the sound effects for punches didn't trigger. So you would be in a fist fight and there was no sound at all (the music did work). Totally killed the game for me and I played it for 15 minutes and then never again. And this was for PS2, so it wasn't like they could release a patch. Maybe I'll try the PC version and see if they ever fixed it.

fire7side

I generally quit when I feel the grind. Hard to say when that will be, but I know what to do and I know there isn't going to be much different. Sometimes that can be in a few minutes. Puzzles like TwistedTwigleg described also. Some of them are too technically difficult too early. If they had waited and I was more used to the controls, it would have been all right, but they started out without a good tutorial or a beginner type level and I kept getting killed over and over. Which just, killing people over and over seems kind of mindless to me. There just isn't enough there but many of those games are popular so I'm probably in the minority.

cybereality

I usually finish games I start, but I had to stop playing Claire. It's a 2D horror game where you are a girl trapped in a hospital, but they did a weird thing where the map is sort of 3D but 2D graphics. So you can go into a door in the middle of a room, and then it's a whole other branch. This is impossible to navigate, since there is no spatial coherence. It probably doesn't make sense, but it was so hard to play like that. But the game was actually cool, maybe I'll give it another chance.

Erich_L

I usually give up on a game when I discover it's mostly about a linear narrative and won't be replayable at all. I don't enjoy fiction outside of TV/movies. It always bums me out to see games that have taken thousands of hours to make to be designed for a single play through. IMO those games should free up their assets after they launch at least.

cybereality

I don't mind playing once. There are many movies that were great, but I have no desire to see them again. Also, I don't understand the fixation of 40 hour games. I'd be fine with a game that was 1 hour if it was an insane 1 hour. Like this game Summer of '58. Amazing horror game that was only 90 minutes. Much rather play that then grind for a 40 boring hours.

Bimbam

Lazy fetch quests.

Pushed day 1 DLC/Multiple versions (out of principle. I grew up when games had all the content in them to begin with)

Bad/no lighting, which now I've done some gamedev I should be more forgiving of. But when even basic shadows aren't enabled knowing it's effectively a checkbox . . . urgh. It's mostly the trash 'simulator' games that do this though, they just wreak of laziness/rushed (though tbf, at least they released something right lol).

jbskaggs

One thing I loathe is when a map or level in a game is created to be unbeatable (20 to 30 times your current level) and thus unless you cheat or find a secret game exploit you cannot progess any further. Many times this can be a pay wall, other times the makers just were being jerks. Those kind of games are not hard- they are cheating the player and a waste of money and time.

Bimbam

(20 to 30 times your current level)

Yeh this can be a huge immersion breaker especially when it's shoehorned into a series that never previously had the concept (looking at you Assassin's Creed), or is just downright irritating (wild area in Pokemon Sword/Shield).

In fact I watched my GF complete Pokemon Sword and now I think about it, once she got to the wild area because half of the mobs there were hugely over-leveled she simply stayed there and ground her way up to their level, only for me to tell her she STILL couldn't catch them until she got more gym badges.

She then basically curb-stomped the entire game with an over-leveled Gyrados ^{^.}

cybereality

Or impossible achievements. Like buying all the cars in Cyberpunk 2077. There is no way possible to play the game normally and get that much money (even if you bought no guns or anything). The way I did it was with this glitch, where there was a painting in the game you could sell for like $2,000 to a vending machine, and then buy it back for $1, and then sell it again forever. It was a HUGE grind because I needed over a million dollars to buy those cars, and it was only $2K each time (and the UI was a pain) but I spent like 2 hours just doing that. Then they patched the game to remove the glitch (but people still use mods/hacks).

fire7side

@Erich_L said: I usually give up on a game when I discover it's mostly about a linear narrative and won't be replayable at all. I don't enjoy fiction outside of TV/movies. It always bums me out to see games that have taken thousands of hours to make to be designed for a single play through. IMO those games should free up their assets after they launch at least.

Those are almost all the games I play. I make it ways in a "replayable" game, notice I am just doing fetch quests and killing people over and over and quit. The amount of time played is way less than a game with an actual story. Oh boy, a new shield or whatever to go sell and get some other death instrument. Some of them have enough of an overall linear story to keep me playing a bit longer but hardly ever to the end of the game. The idea of playing it twice is almost beyond my comprehension, like the size of the universe or something, or maybe mowing my lawn a second time. OK, I do mow my lawn a second time, but I don't really enjoy it. I do play scrabble over and over, so I suppose there are exceptions.

Erich_L

@fire7side said:

The idea of playing it twice is almost beyond my comprehension, like the size of the universe or something, or maybe mowing my lawn a second time. OK, I do mow my lawn a second time, but I don't really enjoy it. I do play scrabble over and over, so I suppose there are exceptions.

You're willing to play scrabble over and over because it makes you think. Repeatable fetch quests are not what I meant by being replayable. Fetch quests are garbage that we as devs should move to forget about. Time killer games where you click or drag your mouse across the screen over and over are acceptable for toilet time, but I wasn't thinking of them either.

Games should tickle the imagination while you're playing them and while you're not. When you're young and don't know how games tend to play out it's easier. Me age 12: "I didn't go kill that scary thing in Deux Ex in that underground area, I wonder if that'll impact the game later- wow what a cool world I can't wait to get back into it." Me at age 30: "I wonder if I can get the traffic to work in a city (in city skylines) where cars never have to wait for pedestrians at major junctures?" "I wonder if I can get all these smoke producing objects inside my house and funnel out the smoke with an intricate chimney system? (Valheim)" "I wonder if a colony of naked psychopaths will function better than underground cannibals?" (Rimworld)

To me story games were enjoyable when I was younger cause I could be fooled into thinking there were infinite outcomes and a rich world, now I feel if you want depth in a game you have to add it yourself. As a teenager I just wanted to train my trigger skills and create utter havoc in a walker (Battlefield 2142).

DaveTheCoder

What do you think about games like Oh My Giraffe?

Erich_L

@DaveTheCoder said: What do you think about games like Oh My Giraffe?

Looks like a toilet game or distract your kid game. After looking at it tho I admit it seems to have some fun ideas for what it is. Looks like it's of perfect scale for indie devs to make... if we are wise enough to limit scope

DaveTheCoder

And then there's Cat Alone 2. My cat OJ likes it. He's better at it than I am.

cybereality

I like playing GTA games like it is real life. So stopping for red lights, driving at the speed limit, not killing any pedestrians. It's actually way more fun if you take it seriously. That's what I loved about Cyberpunk 2077. It wasn't a mayhem simulation. You were supposed to play it in character like it was real life.

Erich_L

I just noticed there will be a Homeworld 3, the trailer just made me cry and it immediately inspired me to put more depth and feeling into my game design

Erich_L

@cybereality said: Probably the best book is Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, which is required reading if you want to be a senior programmer. Though it doesn't exactly explain cyclic dependencies, it shows you the structure and architecture of good code so you don't have those issues. https://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional-ebook-dp-B000SEIBB8/dp/B000SEIBB8/

I am diving into the book. I can tell it's clutch just by the list of structural patters on the second page. I feel like it's going to teach me coding chess openers. I have a random report on a random topic I need to do tomorrow, I'd like to summarize a number of these patterns, are there any you suggest that would help especially with game design?

cybereality

This is the synopsis book in regards to game development. You can read for free on the web (or buy it if you want to support the author). It's kind of complex to explain on the forum, but the book is not that long. https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

fire7side

@Erich_L said:

@fire7side said:

To me story games were enjoyable when I was younger cause I could be fooled into thinking there were infinite outcomes and a rich world, now I feel if you want depth in a game you have to add it yourself. As a teenager I just wanted to train my trigger skills and create utter havoc in a walker (Battlefield 2142).

Infinite outcomes are one type of game. When you start thinking they are the only type, it actually gets pretty limiting. I certainly never felt that games that already had an outcome were fooling me in some way. It's like watching a movie, they spend a lot of time with plot twists, character backgrounds, things like that, which you absolutely can't do when you are dealing with infinite outcomes. Those look like little robots because that's what they are. It's basically a simulation of something in real life, but much simpler. I'm in real life now and can do a simulation every day which is infinitely more complex. If there are rules in there that are kind of interesting and the bots can give enough challenge, it works, but I couldn't take a steady diet of it. It's certainly not better than a story game in my book. Much harder to pull off. Most are total crap. They try to do too much and it ends up feeling even more fake and there isn't enough challenge presented. It's very hard to do other than some type of battle system so they get done over and over. There's a reason they love using zombies in their games, because that's all you are ever going to really have. Also you can add bot type challenges to a story game. That works for me off and on. I don't want to just be lead through a story. I want to discover it by finding clues and exploring. If I get in some bot battles, that's o.k. Most games just lean to heavily on the bot battles in my book.

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