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Hey Hempuli, any way to get on the Noita testing team? I post about it a bunch in the roguelike thread and have made massive OPs in this forum about very similar games. I want a head start on it to study up before I make the Noita thread. Did a 25 copy giveaway of Vagante to people who completed the demo and posted a screenshot of their victory.
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Apr 26, 2019 20:58
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Is there/will there be a way to record solutions? I just started recently and found what I imagine is a non-standard solution to lake-10. Even if my method for this particular level was known before/intended, I'd love to record things like this down the road.
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Apr 27, 2019 02:08
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dirby posted:Is there/will there be a way to record solutions? I just started recently and found what I imagine is a non-standard solution to lake-10. Even if my method for this particular level was known before/intended, I'd love to record things like this down the road. Do you mean forming Key is You?
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Apr 27, 2019 03:37
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McFrugal posted:Do you mean forming Key is You? Yes, but I suspect the way I did that was probably particularly inefficient. I'm not at a computer now, but I juggled Door and Keke and the Is's across, changing what I was a lot, to get to Key. Whether or not that was an intended solution, I'd like to record interesting solutions without something like video capture or making an auto hotkey script.
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Apr 27, 2019 13:52
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This game (to me) came out of nowhere to dethrone Stephen's Sausage Roll and the Witness for mastery of ludomechanist-synergy. I would give you an A in the NYU Game Center's Masters program, and argue against the stupid poo poo in your cohort from getting any recognition. The Open House nights have beem underwhelming
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Apr 27, 2019 14:05
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Analytic Engine posted:This game (to me) came out of nowhere to dethrone Stephen's Sausage Roll and the Witness for mastery of ludomechanist-synergy. I would give you an A in the NYU Game Center's Masters program, and argue against the stupid poo poo in your cohort from getting any recognition. The Open House nights have beem underwhelming Are you a professor at NYU or something?
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Apr 27, 2019 19:45
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Pharohman777 posted:Are you a professor at NYU or something? They sound drunk to me, which I guess is evidence in favor? It does seem unreasonable to expect student projects to be able to stack up against a professional developer, though.
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Apr 27, 2019 20:30
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This is an interesting puzzle game in that I learn there are other ways to do things. e.g. my solution for a standard level worked for an Extra level, so there must have been a more straightforward solution for the standard level. Edit: Oh that's so much simpler goddammit.
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Apr 27, 2019 23:17
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Ha, I was drunk, and wasn't a professor, but felt the need to say this game is incredibly well done and hard as hell. The NYU thing is just because I'm aware of them, but there's a bigger world of pretentious Art Game people that go on and on and on about how important certain low-explanation games are to the artform. At a meet and greet the Zachtronics guy agreed that Miegakure / The Witness / etc are up their own asses and get fawning press despite endless development time. Stephen's Sausage Roll especially was claimed to be the best puzzle game ever made and it didn't have a fraction of BABA's mechanics (or an undo button). Anyway BABA was a surprise and it chumps the fancy competition
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Apr 27, 2019 23:21
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If I were a less lazy man I'd make a bunch of witness-style puzzles in a minesweeper esque presentation and release it as GNUlines. I enjoyed it but there wasnt much functional difference between the environment theyvlaid out and just a bunch of puzzles in series. Anyways, on topic, I bought Baba on itch and I don't think it does any updating. Should I be downloading new versions from itch?
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Apr 28, 2019 00:17
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ItBreathes posted:If I were a less lazy man I'd make a bunch of witness-style puzzles in a minesweeper esque presentation and release it as GNUlines. I enjoyed it but there wasnt much functional difference between the environment theyvlaid out and just a bunch of puzzles in series. That's not really accurate; it might appear that way at first, but a substantial proportion of the Witness's strongest designs only work because the puzzles are placed in a world and can interact with it. Though admittedly that doesn't stop https://windmill.thefifthmatt.com/ from existing.
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Apr 28, 2019 00:32
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yeah I can honestly and without exaggeration say that if you think the witness could be duplicated by extracting all the line puzzles and putting them on a website you missed out on not only a significant part of the game but also easily the top reason why I recommend the game to people
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Apr 28, 2019 00:38
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I played through the whole game, the environments were very nice and the environmental integration was cool, though I want to say a majority of the puzzles didn't involve any. The game is better for having them, but fundamentally the gameplay is line puzzles and variations on line puzzles; that website captures a good 90% of it (the gameplay, not the overall experience). The exhoultation it got as a radical step in gaming never quite fit and the comparisons to Myst were grossly superficial. Anyways, this is all off-topic, BABA is GOOD and HARD and UINQ(ue). (I'd be happy to keep talking about the witness, which to be clear I did like, but let's take it to the chat thread or something.)
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Apr 28, 2019 01:06
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I think you never figured out what the obelisks were about, is what I mean.
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Apr 28, 2019 01:28
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For the record I liked the Witness a lot and had a one-of-a-kind experience playing, highly recommend it. But I followed its development for years after Braid and was really let down. That's seriously all the content Blow's team could make with 8 years and complete creative freedom?
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Apr 28, 2019 01:34
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flatluigi posted:I think you never figured out what the obelisks were about, is what I mean. I didn't complete any of the obelisks, but I found plenty. They were neat, they would have been neater if they were puzzles beyond finding the right perspective.
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Apr 28, 2019 02:26
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The obelisks in The Witness are a) extremely cool b) totally extraneous This is all but stated in the game, multiple times, implicitly and explicitly, directly and through metaphor. They are the nifty hidden secret inside an existing puzzle. They are there to entertain the people who live for the search. They cater to nobody else and serve no other purpose, not even achievements. They exist because the designers thought it would be fun and extremely thematically appropriate to hide a bunch of secrets in the beautiful and intricate environment they created, and also, I suspect, draw some attention to the frankly astonishing level of care that went into designing the island. The Witness is not unique on account of being a tightly designed epiphany simulator, although it is notable for being such because really good puzzle games of that type are few and far between and The Witness is an elegant execution of it (as are Stephen's Sausage Roll and Baba is You). It is unique in that on top of being all the things that it is, it is also very explicitly insightful on the subject of itself. It is a treatise on puzzle game design, in the form of a puzzle game. By necessity, this means that tone-wise it is miles up its own rear end. The thing is, though, it's right, it's right about every god drat thing. The whole thing is on point, and all the included readings and videos are there for the right reasons, and the game's message and themes are earnest. The comparisons to Myst are largely besides the point; The Witness is not intended to be directly comparable to Myst, but was inspired by it; they are both exploratory in purpose, meditative in tone, and set on an island. That's about it. (The Witness has more in common with Myst's sequel Riven than with Myst itself; Riven was notably a game about perceiving, uncovering and solving just two puzzles that between them encompass the entirety of the explorable world and what you can learn in it). It is interesting to compare The Witness and Baba is You. They are, as said, both epiphany simulators (an amusing but unfair turn of phrase; there is nothing simulated about the epiphanies these games cause you to experience). They are both fairly abstract, broadly instanced puzzle games primarily about understanding rules. They both creatively misdirect players and invite them to misunderstand how the rules work, and the key to most of the epiphanies you'll have is confronting and unpacking these misunderstandings and reconstructing your conception of the mechanics. They both delight in presenting series of puzzles in which each acknowledges and invalidates the solution of the previous (though sometimes Baba is You (arguably) cheats at this, altering the puzzles such that the latter, cleverer solutions won't work on the previous puzzles). They both eventually call attention to the situation of their instanced puzzles in the game world - The Witness bases several puzzle mechanics around various kinds of physicality, while Baba is You eventually introduces the Level keyword and all the fun that entails. The Witness has less mechanics overall, but explores each one much more comprehensively, gradually beginning with demonstrations and tutorials and gradually escalating in complexity, while Baba is You is practically bursting with variety and offers what seems like three times the number of different kinds of solutions as The Witness despite having a third of the puzzles by count, often leaving players to deduce the existence of the idiosyncrasies that underlie each solution. The Witness ultimately tells a story about itself, while Baba is You tells no story at all. The Witness prides itself on completely wordless communication of ideas, teaching entirely through demonstration and implication, while Baba is You has words at the very core of its mechanics. I don't know if I'm really going anywhere with all this, except to note that puzzle games are fascinating, and that it's probably more instructive than might be obvious to talk about The Witness in the context of Baba is You. Fedule fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Apr 28, 2019 |
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Apr 28, 2019 03:24
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Out at Sea is crushing my tiny, pathetic brain.
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Apr 28, 2019 04:42
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Thank you, Fedule! I appreciated the post a hell of a lot at the very least.
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Apr 28, 2019 05:03
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Analytic Engine posted:Stephen's Sausage Roll especially was claimed to be the best puzzle game ever made and it didn't have I remember having an undo button.
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Apr 28, 2019 05:15
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McFrugal posted:I remember having an undo button. I overdosed on haterade there and forgot. I do remember loving the beginning but getting exhausted by the huge number of steps required in the later puzzles
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Apr 28, 2019 07:59
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Is "A Way Out?" supposed to be noticeably harder (conceptually) than prior levels? I'm not even sure where to start! I figure I need to make "ROCK IS PUSH" somehow in order to access the lower areas, but all of the ways I can see to interact with "ROCK" end with it in a blind corner. The best I can figure, "IS" and "PUSH" also get stuck in the vertical part of that area, with no way to get them down.
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Apr 28, 2019 15:45
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Davin Valkri posted:Is "A Way Out?" supposed to be noticeably harder (conceptually) than prior levels? I'm not even sure where to start! I figure I need to make "ROCK IS PUSH" somehow in order to access the lower areas, but all of the ways I can see to interact with "ROCK" end with it in a blind corner. The best I can figure, "IS" and "PUSH" also get stuck in the vertical part of that area, with no way to get them down. Definitely; it's supposedly the finale so it's one of the hardest non-secret levels, much harder than its unlock requirements would indicate; feel free to leave it and come back to it later. Also unless there's been a Switch patch it's quite different between PC and Switch, so if you want hints for it you'll need to say which one you're playing on.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:19
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NRVNQSR posted:Definitely; it's supposedly the finale so it's one of the hardest non-secret levels, much harder than its unlock requirements would indicate; feel free to leave it and come back to it later. Oh, right, I'm on PC. Sorry.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:23
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Davin Valkri posted:Oh, right, I'm on PC. Sorry. The PC version of it is very hard, and difficult to give hints for. All the solutions I know of require quite detailed understanding of how the mechanics interact. Broadly, though, you're correct; making ROCK IS PUSH will usually solve the level. Baba can't make that alone; they'll need help from belts, Keke or both. Various hints that may or may not be useful, in no particular order: You can make Keke move, but once they're moving you can't stop them or push them. You can stop belt being shift. You can later make it be shift again. Text and Keke are not hot.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:48
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Analytic Engine posted:For the record I liked the Witness a lot and had a one-of-a-kind experience playing, highly recommend it. But I followed its development for years after Braid and was really let down. That's seriously all the content Blow's team could make with 8 years and complete creative freedom? I think the amount of content isn't surprising if you know that Jonathan Blow wrote a programming language to replace C++ in the middle of development in order to make the Witness.
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Apr 28, 2019 16:49
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My take on The Witness's readings and videos is that they are by and large irrelevant to the game itself(even the themes of the game) and serve mostly just to reinforce the designer's philosophical beliefs. This lessens the game overall, as unless you're of the same mindset, listening to/watching them is irritating at times and baffling at others. Like, I found one in the starting area where some idiot goes on a rant about how scientific explanation is useless because it implies physical action is excessively difficult. The obelisks are great! Except that some of the perspective puzzles are underground and the obelisks only direct you towards the puzzles by horizontal orientation and distance. This means the underground perspective puzzles are incredibly frustrating to track down and even though I liked solving them I eventually got fed up and quit. Also, one of them requires you to sit at the computer for an entire hour as a video plays, and the video is locked behind a timed puzzle gauntlet.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:25
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The audio recordings in the witness are a bit weird, but based on the diversity of the videos you see in the theatre and the conflicting range of topics, its hard to say they are supposed to be a reflection of the designer himself. But that said, he does like to screw about with they players mind and expectations. For example one of the obelisk puzzles requires you to sit and wait for maybe an hour for a moon to slowly move across a video so you can connect to the other side.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:37
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ItBreathes posted:If I were a less lazy man I'd make a bunch of witness-style puzzles in a minesweeper esque presentation and release it as GNUlines. I enjoyed it but there wasnt much functional difference between the environment theyvlaid out and just a bunch of puzzles in series. Unlike most storefronts Itch doesn’t force you to update if you open the game executable directly. You need to open the Itch app and the play button will be replaced with an update button. Not sure how to update via the website.
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Apr 28, 2019 18:47
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McFrugal posted:Like, I found one in the starting area where some idiot goes on a rant about how scientific explanation is useless because it implies physical action is excessively difficult. You uh, misunderstood it. Arthur Eddington was a physicist and mathematician; he didn't think scientific explanation was useless.
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Apr 28, 2019 21:11
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The audio stuff in The Witness works on a couple of different levels, most of which aren't literal. Take the Arthur Eddington one about the scientific man passing through a door. These are the levels; 1) Literal. This log is found just after the start of the game, at which point the player opens and passes through a large gate leading out of the starting area and to the rest of the island. The playback device is literally located on the top of the gate. (The game loves this juxtaposition and uses it repeatedly. Consider also eg, the reading of the meditation on the visible and invisible but equally existent aspects of God, which is found right next to a series of puzzles in which the player must simultaneously draw visible and invisible lines that both must satisfy the puzzle conditions.) 2) Game design. There is far, far more going on in The Witness than a new player will be aware of when leaving the starting area, even just in the starting area. It would be folly on multiple levels to explain all of these things to a new player when they are starting out, both because it would ruin the intended process of discovery and also because the understanding of all of these things is predicated on understanding of the bigger picture, which is still being taught at the beginning of the game. Before The Witness can explain that the line will bisect areas on the grid which must precisely match a number of active conditions, players need to understand that they need to draw lines on boards. 3) Life lesson. There is an obvious nugget of wisdom in this passage; many of the workings of the universe operate independently of your understanding of them, and it is pointless to try to apply very low level principles to very high level problems. 4) Plot. In the fiction of The Witness, these recordings are all here because they are meditations on the nature of knowledge and the island is an experimental simulation intended to encourage the user towards enlightenment, by having them meditate on philosophical lessons while having their brains activated by solving puzzles. The player is the first long term tester, and the simulation is being appraised with a view of being marketed to the public as an experience. The simulation is open-ended and loops until the user learns to perceive the secrets in the environment, which are used to open the exit. 5) Thematic. In the meta-fiction of The Witness, The experiment is a failure, and the user emerges from it after an indeterminate amount of time confused, disoriented, and with a pervasive preoccupation with circular objects. The reasons for this failure are never clarified but seem implicitly to be because the blue-sky-headed fast-moving thing-breaking development team failed to heed the lessons with which they were filling their pet project. Not all such lessons are directly applicable, but Eddington's Door is almost perfectly so, because they missed the implied corollary in his lesson; misapplications of the minutiae in the course of applying the higher level processes will still cause problems if you're not careful, and the true (and arguably unattainable, and definitely not directly impartable) wisdom lies in being able to ascertain when the things you don't know do and don't matter. To bring all this screeching back into being about Baba is You, it's kinda sorta alarming how neatly the basic and meta plot of The Witness compares to the basic and meta plot of Baba is You, considering how the latter doesn't have one. All Baba is You has is a notional main character (You) in limited control of a simulation, some very loose seed/flower imagery associated with progress, one ending attainable through an unremarkable progression path that suggests a clean termination, and one ending attainable by poking at some low level rules until they apply to a high level operation, exposing a thread that unravels nested levels that require their own rules to be leveraged against them, ultimately leading to the All is Done puzzle in Center, which completely breaks the simulation, with uncertain implications. But for the introspection these seem to me to basically be the exact same plot, right down to the observation that players immersed too deeply with the game wind up with their perception of reality altered; The Witness players by noticing the circle and line patterns on objects in their lives, and Baba is You players by having the game's rules come up in normal vocal speech and making you sound to an untrained observer like you've completely forgotten how language works.
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Apr 28, 2019 21:23
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Fedule posted:The audio stuff in The Witness works on a couple of different levels, most of which aren't literal. Is that really the plot? I didn't see much of anything supporting that conclusion in the game, and that ending just looked to me like the after-effects of playing one game for a long period of time. Like playing tetris so much you see blocks falling when you close your eyes. It might even be another statement on obsession, which was the main theme of Braid. Also, the person wakes up in the development studio for the game, so I don't think they're a tester, more like one of the designers playing their game. Wouldn't they be monitored or something if it was the first time anyone tried playing it for that long? I read that it's Jonathan Blow's house, even.
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Apr 28, 2019 22:21
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In the switch version, I have 219 dandelions, 11 flowers, and 3 orbs. Is there anything else to get?
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Apr 28, 2019 23:40
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McFrugal posted:Is that really the plot? I didn't see much of anything supporting that conclusion in the game, and that ending just looked to me like the after-effects of playing one game for a long period of time. Like playing tetris so much you see blocks falling when you close your eyes. It might even be another statement on obsession, which was the main theme of Braid. Also, the person wakes up in the development studio for the game, so I don't think they're a tester, more like one of the designers playing their game. Wouldn't they be monitored or something if it was the first time anyone tried playing it for that long? I read that it's Jonathan Blow's house, even. It's been a while since I've played it, but I remember that basically being the gist of all the post endgame 'candid' audio logs in the 'unfinished' areas.
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Apr 29, 2019 00:53
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it's very possible that mcfrugal didn't know you could get into the underground extra areas within the mountain and never discovered those parts of the game
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Apr 29, 2019 00:55
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McFrugal posted:My take on The Witness's readings and videos is that they are by and large irrelevant to the game itself(even the themes of the game) and serve mostly just to reinforce the designer's philosophical beliefs. This lessens the game overall, as unless you're of the same mindset, listening to/watching them is irritating at times and baffling at others. Like, I found one in the starting area where some idiot goes on a rant about how scientific explanation is useless because it implies physical action is excessively difficult. holy  alert
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Apr 29, 2019 01:34
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flatluigi posted:it's very possible that mcfrugal didn't know you could get into the underground extra areas within the mountain and never discovered those parts of the game I got in there. That's where the timed puzzle gauntlet is, after all. I think I completed every puzzle panel outside of the gauntlet. I've found very few audio logs and I thought all of them were just quotations or speeches from various people so I didn't really search for them very hard. Sounds like that's where the plot is.
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Apr 29, 2019 02:44
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Lutha Mahtin posted:holy ahahahaha I missed that famous idiot, Sir Arthur Eddington
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Apr 29, 2019 02:58
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Lutha Mahtin posted:holy flatluigi posted:ahahahaha I missed that "Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a scientific man to pass through a door." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OG30GKRLODI This is the audio log. It reeks of a layman reading of advanced concepts in physics and deeming them nonsense due to how absurd they would make simple actions. I don't know if that was meant as a parody or something but he sure as hell doesn't sound like a scientist there. It sounds like he's mocking scientists. I honestly don't know how to interpret it otherwise, though if you ignore what's being said and instead look at the topic being discussed (rules of the world and a door) it's in a good spot game-wise. McFrugal fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Apr 29, 2019 |
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Apr 29, 2019 03:13
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I'm familiar with the quote and the astrophysicist in question, which is why I'm laughing at you and why I'm laughing at you even harder for doubling down
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Apr 29, 2019 03:18
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