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That guy is hilarious. "One day I'd like to produce a horror game. You know, I can't code for poo poo, but I've got ideas rattling around my head." Yeah, because the one thing the games industry absolutely needs more of are tech-illiterate idea guys.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:28
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| # ? May 27, 2024 00:06 |
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Don't talk poo poo about MrKravin.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:30
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Hey, just saying.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:48
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Cardiovorax posted:That guy is hilarious. "One day I'd like to produce a horror game. You know, I can't code for poo poo, but I've got ideas rattling around my head." But at the same time when this happens over and over again al-azad posted:Within the first 5 minutes the game tells you the plot directly and stop me if you've heard this before: the father of a dysfunctional family murders his wife and is now stuck in his own personal hell.
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Oct 19, 2018 19:56
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Skyscraper posted:clearly there's a lack of ideas somewhere in the process.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:01
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who are the other auteur's out there like scott cawthon?
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Oct 19, 2018 20:07
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The_D
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Oct 19, 2018 20:07
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Parachute posted:who are the other auteur's out there like scott cawthon? Puppet Combo? Kitty Horrorshow?
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Oct 19, 2018 20:10
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exquisite tea posted:The_D MMMMMMMMMMM
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Oct 19, 2018 20:14
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Cardiovorax posted:That guy is hilarious. "One day I'd like to produce a horror game. You know, I can't code for poo poo, but I've got ideas rattling around my head." You're not wrong but to be fair the horror genre seems to be where good ideas go to die. They're being produced by competent artists and programmers but the actual narratives all scream "I liked Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia, nothing else matters."
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Oct 19, 2018 20:16
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I'd take bonsai head guy over another "I killed my family and forgot about it"
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Oct 19, 2018 20:20
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al-azad posted:You're not wrong but to be fair the horror genre seems to be where good ideas go to die. They're being produced by competent artists and programmers but the actual narratives all scream "I liked Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia, nothing else matters." It's like, every lovely RPGMaker game on Steam started just like that at some point, you know? Hell, I know David Cage definitely did. The genre definitely needs fresh blood, but it needs fresh and interesting gameplay ideas that make competent use of current technology just as much. Otherwise, you get Penumbra, which has all the physics tech and no clue what to make of it.
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Oct 19, 2018 20:24
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How about Arcane Kids (Tattletail, Sonic Dreams Collection)?
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Oct 19, 2018 20:58
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I like Puppet Combo's games conceptually but they really need someone to reign in some things. Their newest game Nun Massacre is a pretty good escape-the-house style game in the vein of Granny but holy poo poo do not wear headphones. Every game has like one issue that keeps it from being truly solid, like Nightripper has these jank rear end platform sections in a game where you have realistic momentum, and Babysitter Bloodbath has the slasher spawn randomly right in front of your face, and so on. I'd say Stay Out of the House is the strongest game just because it find the proper balance between LOUD NOISES and gameplay you can figure out but the villain doesn't make any audio cues like the villain Nightripper, but the Nightripper villain you basically can't outrun like the nun so if you're spotted you're dead.
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Oct 19, 2018 21:17
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al-azad posted:You're not wrong but to be fair the horror genre seems to be where good ideas go to die. They're being produced by competent artists and programmers but the actual narratives all scream "I liked Silent Hill 2 and Amnesia, nothing else matters." That's increasingly bizarre to me too, because while I enjoyed SH2 as much as the next horror fan, I finally got around to playing Amnesia earlier this year and found both the story and long swathes of the actual gameplay to be aggressively meh. Like, I know it's been said before, but for a company that focuses so heavily on narrative design and touts narrative as a huge part of game design in general, Frictional didn't really bring anything that amazing to the table. I acknowledge I may feel that way in part because I came to Amnesia pretty late (though I'm consistently years behind on games in the horror world) but I didn't find the story or how it was presented to be all that engaging. Plenty of neat scary moments and such, though the group I was playing with got more bored than scared in the prison.
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Oct 19, 2018 21:54
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MockingQuantum posted:Like, I know it's been said before, but for a company that focuses so heavily on narrative design and touts narrative as a huge part of game design in general, Frictional didn't really bring anything that amazing to the table. Can you see from that where the increasingly unrealistic love for the few big-name good titles in the genre comes from? It's not that they're bad or that they're outstandingly good, either, it's that they're the decent, honestly playable servings available in a genre that just plain doesn't have much of a lot of anything.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:06
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I can agree with that assessment. A similar situation is that I thought Layers of Fear was mediocre at best (with a couple of really good moments) and had a story centered around a totally unbearable character, to the point that I was rooting for him to die. It's sad that the bar is not one of whether a game is really good or not, it's usually whether it's competently done. Not that I think all horror is terrible, I actually think there's a lot of good stuff out there that didn't get the attention it deserved. I guess my problem is more that I tend to not agree when games explode in popularity, like Amnesia or Layers of Fear did. I don't really get what sets either of them apart from the rest of the crowd. I guess it's partially competence, partially luck, maybe a certain degree of adhering to familiar story ideas and gameplay tropes, while twisting them just tiny bits here or there so you get a nice balance of new and comfortable. Also, I thought a lot of the environment-manipulation aspect of Amnesia ranged from tedious to downright annoying. (I also really hate the hide-and-seek gameplay but that's not exclusive to Amnesia). So even in that case, while I agree it has good production values, or did for when it was released, I'm not sure I'd rank "fun to play" at the top of its positive qualities. Also also, I know Layers of Fear isn't exactly a banner of the genre or anything, it's just the most recent game I can think of that I played at or close to release, while the hype train was still rolling.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:16
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MockingQuantum posted:Also, I thought a lot of the environment-manipulation aspect of Amnesia ranged from tedious to downright annoying.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:22
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hey was that OSHA Nightmare simulator any good?
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Oct 19, 2018 22:26
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MockingQuantum posted:I can agree with that assessment. A similar situation is that I thought Layers of Fear was mediocre at best (with a couple of really good moments) and had a story centered around a totally unbearable character, to the point that I was rooting for him to die. I'm trying to remember but I think Frictional reduced some of the environment manipulation for Soma, or at least improved on it so it wasn't as annoying.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:28
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On some level I'll argue that good gameplay is near impossible in a horror game because of how difficult it is to balance player agency. The more I understand and interact with the game itself the less engaged I am with what is going on. If I can shoot the thing that's chasing me, I'm disengaged. If I can only run from the thing chasing me, I'm disengaged. The sweet spot is something like RE7 but even that game runs out of ideas once the player is toting an armory of shotguns and grenade launchers. I see the opposite problem that horror games have generally fine gameplay but nobody has any spooky ideas that aren't disconnected tropes. Like Kravin always jokes "every horror game has to have an elevator scene" and dammit they all do, even big budget AAA games must have an elevator sequence where you see something spooky as you pass by a floor or a monster starts tearing up the roof around. More so than any other genre horror relies on tropes but is also easily destroyed by tropes. We've all seen the action movie where the hero has to beat up guys to rescue his daughter, but if the fights are exciting who cares. A horror film with a boring premise you can just sit back and break down the illusion. "The camera just panned to the right and there's no music playing, it'll pan to the left and something spooky will happen I know because I've seen at least two horror movies in my life."
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Oct 19, 2018 22:30
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I don't blame big developers for avoiding horror, it's honestly a very difficult genre to get right and it's not a problem that you can throw money or manpower at. You need a designer that really gets how to convey dread through the environment or encounters, and there's no guarantee that those who can also know how to expand that to more than an hour or two of gameplay, or even make it fun. It's a realm dominated by indie efforts for a reason.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:36
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al-azad posted:he sweet spot is something like RE7 but even that game runs out of ideas once the player is toting an armory of shotguns and grenade launchers.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:42
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As someone playing Amnesia for the first time this year, I'll defend it a bit. The presentation of the narrative is bland (lots of voice overs and notes) but it does a lot to build its atmosphere with some really spartan tools. More importantly the game operates with a logic you can follow but still leaves room for surprises. Like the main monsters have distinct audio cues for when they spawn, when they're searching for you, and when they're chasing. Instead of keeping these guys around the game smartly despawns them when it's clear the player has overcome their challenge because a big problem with games that have wandering monsters is you trigger one, run and hide, then have to wait for ages for the monster to go far enough that you won't immediately trigger it by leaving your hiding space. The sanity and darkness stuff could've been done better, but it actually encourages the player to act swiftly and aggressively since your sanity restores as you make progression. I find myself playing this game fast and recklessly, something I absolutely don't do in even action heavy games like Dead Space. In doing so the mistakes lead to more surprising moments and the pressure of just getting out of a bad situation creates some nice pressure that doesn't exist in a game where you can hide or fight indefinitely. The quiet moments in Amnesia really feel like you're stepping out of the darkness to gasp for air.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:43
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The obvious and rather laughable downside of the sanity stuff? Monsters can't see you if you can't see them, to the point where holding a drawer in front of your face is enough to be straight-up loving invisible to the monsters while literally jumping around right in front of their faces. Seriously, there are Youtube videos of this and it's as ridiculous as the descriptions would make you assume it is. There's another downside of the "incompetent programmer" angle for you, I guess, because that's not a mistake someone with more experience in programming antagonist AI would have made.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:47
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al-azad posted:On some level I'll argue that good gameplay is near impossible in a horror game because of how difficult it is to balance player agency. The more I understand and interact with the game itself the less engaged I am with what is going on. If I can shoot the thing that's chasing me, I'm disengaged. If I can only run from the thing chasing me, I'm disengaged. The sweet spot is something like RE7 but even that game runs out of ideas once the player is toting an armory of shotguns and grenade launchers. I agree with this wholeheartedly, given that the group I was playing Amnesia with said at numerous occasions that they'd kinda rather there wasn't any game there, or that the gameplay diminished the actual atmosphere or impact of a few moments. I do agree that RE7's one of the best in terms of making me feel like there was a give-and-take between being able to fight the scary things, and maybe possibly just running the gently caress away is better, at least in the early game. I also think it's why the early Silent Hill games did it for me, in terms of actually frightening me instead of just enjoying the atmosphere of the game-- I wasn't really that frightened by the prospect of fighting a nurse or a weird bed person, the frightening aspect was more that the game could throw anything at you without you really knowing what to do about it initially. Just my two cents there, but I think that's a big reason why I haven't been wowed by a lot of recent horror-- the best stuff sets up very specific expectations in the player, and then delivers on them exactly as promised, and that lack of surprise sometimes kills the experience for me. Of course, this is all just reiterating the fact that horror is really loving hard to do well. You're never gonna surprise or intrigue every player every time, and even if the balance between threat and the ability to do something about a threat is perfect for one person, it probably won't be for another. That said, hide-or-die is loving stupid and feels a bit like game designers shrugging their shoulders because it's guaranteed to scare whatever population of players it doesn't immediately piss off, which I guess is a better ratio than a game being potentially frightening to no one. Not really directly relevant, but this does relate to a conversation I had with a friend about how "horror" as a genre descriptor is kind of dumb. In most media, it's sort of the only genre that's defined by whether it draws a very specific visceral reaction from the audience. Now, that's kind of neither here nor there regarding this discussion, but it does make me wish there were different words for "horror that is meant to cause fear or shock in a player" and "horror, in the sense that it includes common horror tropes/moods/themes/atmospheres/setpieces/gameplay but doesn't concern itself with scaring the player as the main goal." Honestly, I kind of games that fall in the latter category a whole lot more than the former.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:49
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Cardiovorax posted:The obvious and rather laughable downside of the sanity stuff? Monsters can't see you if you can't see them, to the point where holding a drawer in front of your face is enough to be straight-up loving invisible to the monsters while literally jumping around right in front of their faces. Seriously, there are Youtube videos of this and it's as ridiculous as the descriptions would make you assume it is. That's not a programming error, all the monsters are Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts of Traal.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:50
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Big Mad Drongo posted:That's not a programming error, all the monsters are Ravenous Bugblatter Beasts of Traal. quote:Not really directly relevant, but this does relate to a conversation I had with a friend about how "horror" as a genre descriptor is kind of dumb. In most media, it's sort of the only genre that's defined by whether it draws a very specific visceral reaction from the audience.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:53
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al-azad posted:The sanity and darkness stuff could've been done better, but it actually encourages the player to act swiftly and aggressively since your sanity restores as you make progression. I find myself playing this game fast and recklessly, something I absolutely don't do in even action heavy games like Dead Space. In doing so the mistakes lead to more surprising moments and the pressure of just getting out of a bad situation creates some nice pressure that doesn't exist in a game where you can hide or fight indefinitely. The quiet moments in Amnesia really feel like you're stepping out of the darkness to gasp for air. So I don't know if this is a statement on us or the game... but what even happens if your sanity gets too low? It really wasn't clear when we were playing. Aside from bugs showing up and some visual distortions and stuff, it honestly didn't feel like low sanity actually had that massive of an impact on the experience. We sort of assumed it would cause more monsters to show up or something but we were never able to draw the line between low sanity and an actual consequence. Do you just straight-up die of insanity at some point? In general we weren't clear on some of the game's "rules", mostly surrounding sanity. Not that it really mattered, the game just told us dark=bad and we went with it, but I couldn't always articulate what was going on, other than "maybe you should not go down that pitch black corridor without some lamp oil because reasons"
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Oct 19, 2018 22:55
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Cardiovorax posted:I made the same point just a few pages ago in this very thread about how "horror" is a genre about how people feel about a game while action and RPG are descriptors of how a game actually plays, so there's at least one guy out there who really agrees with you on that particular issue. Well two, because the friend I was talking to was also pretty passionate about it. Though the conversation was in context of horror as a genre in novels, and how it's even dumber of a descriptor there than in visual media.
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Oct 19, 2018 22:56
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Sanity effects that actually DO something are literally still patented by the people who published Eternal Darkness, so the fact that it's basically meaningless isn't exactly their fault. The fact that they advertised a sanity system as meaningfully existing, however, is.quote:Though the conversation was in context of horror as a genre in novels, and how it's even dumber of a descriptor there than in visual media. Feel free to mark it down for later and hit me up about it at any time, I'll be pleased to discuss it.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:00
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Cardiovorax posted:The obvious and rather laughable downside of the sanity stuff? Monsters can't see you if you can't see them, to the point where holding a drawer in front of your face is enough to be straight-up loving invisible to the monsters while literally jumping around right in front of their faces. Seriously, there are Youtube videos of this and it's as ridiculous as the descriptions would make you assume it is. I wouldn't call it incompetent programming so much as something a playtester didn't catch. The game uses the player's "head" as the hitbox which makes hiding much easier to manage. A lot of games with hide-and-seek gameplay don't really make it clear when you're hidden but Amnesia is simple: if you're crouched behind a waist high object, you break line of sight. Furthermore monsters can still hear you and just being in their presence causes sanity to drop which eventually leads to the monster just spotting you. Frankly I think they knew about it and just left it in. If it was unintentional they had almost a decade to patch it out. I think it's one of those things where the average player isn't going to think to do it while speedrunners and hardcore fans will have fun with it.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:17
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al-azad posted:I wouldn't call it incompetent programming so much as something a playtester didn't catch. The game uses the player's "head" as the hitbox which makes hiding much easier to manage. The thing is, that's the sort of thing that you have to design in from the ground up. It doesn't happen by accident, it's a conscious design choice you make. It means that the monsters, as in-game actors, do not have a real perception of their own. They just wander along the navmesh and leech off of the player actor's perception to decide whether you are close enough to be seen by them. It's basically entirely hooked into the sanity mechanic. That's not the kind of thing I can see as anything BUT a gently caress-up. From the very start, that's not how enemy actors should work to begin with. It's the result of someone having a clever idea, but never following it all the way to its logical end - at least, if you ask me.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:23
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There's about 2 more years left on that patent. Then maybe Denis Dyack will come back to pitch "Forever Night" on Kickstarter.MockingQuantum posted:So I don't know if this is a statement on us or the game... but what even happens if your sanity gets too low? It really wasn't clear when we were playing. Aside from bugs showing up and some visual distortions and stuff, it honestly didn't feel like low sanity actually had that massive of an impact on the experience. We sort of assumed it would cause more monsters to show up or something but we were never able to draw the line between low sanity and an actual consequence. Do you just straight-up die of insanity at some point? There are some minor visual effects with low sanity, but the important thing is that monsters become more aggressive at low sanity. Eventually your character will stumble on the ground and this triggers all monsters to go into "search" mode automatically.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:24
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Cardiovorax posted:See, speaking personally as someone with a professional education as a programmer, this seems to me like the kind of thing you can't really fail to catch, not if any of your playtesters are also your developers, which I admittedly can't know for a fact actually happened at any point during the development of this game. Basic playtesting will tell you that absolutely everything about monster perception is tied to how well the player can personally see them at the current moment. But you have to think of the intentions of the game and what it's trying to accomplish. The monsters are there as a sort of gate, either to subtly guide the player, encourage them to move faster, or hastily remember the location of the nearest room they can duck into. They're a temporary obstacle to break up the gameplay while you're finding the next key or object. They'll see you if you're in their direct line of light, looking at them causes them to intuit your location, and they'll automatically spot your lantern light so it ramps up the tension when your best defense is staying low, in the dark, staring at the floor. Like I said before, there needs to be a middle ground or nothing works. If the monsters were too smart then Amnesia falls apart because it's not designed to deal with enemy encounters, it would be like Alien: Isolation with no weapons. It's ultimately a non-issue that doesn't negatively impact the gameplay. Nobody playing the game casually is breaking the monster AI, and even the people speedrunning the game find that it's not efficient when you can drop stuff in their path and run.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:45
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Sure, it works, but making it work only on that basis and nothing else leaves you with a bunch of hilariously stupid unintended behaviour. It's not really an issue of making the monsters smart or stupid, it's making their senses entirely dependent on the player's own that is the issue. It's the fact that fixing this would have (in some senses) been easier that makes this feel like weird-rear end incompetence to me.
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Oct 19, 2018 23:51
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Cardiovorax posted:Sure, it works, but making it work only on that basis and nothing else leaves you with a bunch of hilariously stupid unintended behaviour. It's not really an issue of making the monsters smart or stupid, it's making their senses entirely dependent on the player's own that is the issue. It's the fact that fixing this would have (in some senses) been easier that makes this feel like weird-rear end incompetence to me. They have their own perception. They can see and hear the player, it's just that their line of sight is to the player's head. Holding a box up is funny but as soon as you move or your sanity dips too low you're done. I just don't see it as a failing of the game's design.
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Oct 20, 2018 00:04
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Cardiovorax posted:Sanity effects that actually DO something are literally still patented by the people who published Eternal Darkness, so the fact that it's basically meaningless isn't exactly their fault. Patenting game mechanics needs to be thrown out the loving window forever.
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Oct 20, 2018 00:48
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Can you plop a bucket on the monster's head a la skyrim?
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Oct 20, 2018 01:45
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I mean off the top of my head, Dark Corners of the Earth had sanity effects that would range from making you hear voices to your character killing himself. So if there's a patent, it isn't a rigidly enforced patent.
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Oct 20, 2018 02:09
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