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Item Getter posted:The Deadly Brain is oddly enough I think a bit of an exemplar of pre-Halo Bungie's odd approach to boss fights, I think Oni was arguably their first game to really have conventional bosses. I guess I'm thinking of a recurring thing going from Pathways into Darkness to Marathon 1 to Myth where "bosses" that are hyped up beforehand in the story end up being pieces of scenery that are incapable of moving or directly attacking you. Speaking as a game developer, bosses are hard! They require an awful lot of custom work, which (being custom) is only relevant for that boss. Unless you re-use the boss later on, that means you're spending an inordinate amount of time on a few minutes' worth of gameplay, in a game that's expected to take many hours to beat. You also have to tread cautiously when making a boss, because it needs to work well with all of the gameplay mechanics that the player has access to. If you do a boss badly, it can become a roadblock for players. Take Halo, for example. To simplify, it's an FPS where you have 2 weapons with fairly limited ammo for each, grenades, a melee attack, a shield, and non-regenerating health. To make a boss that works with those constraints, you need to consider things like:
To put some numbers on this, I can generally expect to finish a non-boss mission for my game in 1, maybe 2 weeks. I've yet to do a boss mission in less than 3 weeks, and usually they take a month at least. This may not sound like a lot of time, but it is: put another way, having lots of bosses in my game is delaying its release by months.
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Dec 8, 2021 19:23
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 22:52 |
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berryjon posted:Watchliste'd! AtomikKrab posted:Same for me as well. I will likely pick this up next paycheck and give it a spin. I love me some shipbuilders. Thank you both!  Item Getter posted:Thanks it's all interesting to consider. In the case of early Bungie though, even though the real reason was probably to save time in development I think that the lack of conventional fights sometimes works very well from a narrative perspective. Like in their Myth games where it gives the feeling that the main antagonists are so powerful that your heroes only have a chance to defeat them if they've first been magically immobilized, turned to stone, etc. Yep, that's also definitely something to keep in mind when you're making a game. You want a story and theme that suits the mechanics you're able to make. Trying to shoehorn in a concept that you can't execute well is dangerous, but you can still provide a narrative climax even if the gameplay is lacking. In the case of the Deadly Brain, for example, the gameplay is extremely simple, but the dialog and humor help keep the player invested.
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Dec 9, 2021 04:54
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The "real-world locations" thing is the kind of thing that sounds compelling, but it makes your life as a game developer vastly more complicated than you might initially think. The next time you're playing a "realistic" game where people go into buildings (e.g. a GTA, Yakuza, Persona, etc), stop and look at the interiors and compare them to real-world interiors. Odds are that they have extremely high ceilings, lots of empty space, and are just generally more open than you'd see in reality. I expect that Bungie started out trying to make a realistically-dense environment, but they discovered that: - The environment was hard to navigate for the player, who kept getting hung up on corners - The camera kept getting stuck or clipping through things - The AI kept getting stuck and being unable to navigate to the player - Fights in tight spaces weren't actually any fun because the player couldn't maneuver So instead, they opted for, basically, big flat open areas, where combatants could just square up and go at each other without having to worry too much about where the walls are. Easy to navigate, no camera issues to speak of, the AI can get around just fine, and the combat, which is really the focus of the game, is way better. It came at a cost of the environments being pretty boring, but I can easily imagine the designers deciding the trade was worth it. (of course, ideally you'd find a way to make the environments interesting without also having them get in the way...) God Hand is another 3D over-the-shoulder brawler, and it did similarly with its environments. Very sparse and simple, because the focus ought to be on the fighters.
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Dec 10, 2021 16:30
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berryjon posted:Also, how do you botch a skybox so badly you leave black-bars along the edges of your box? I'm going to hazard a guess that this is a side-effect of whatever system you're using to get the game running on a modern OS. Or maybe some kind of up-rezzing gone wrong. Fun fact: for a long time, the top face of some of the skyboxes in my game was misaligned, and nobody noticed because there's no reason to look up  It's a shame that Konoko's three-punch combo (and, to a lesser extent, the running neck-swing) is so effective, because it disincentivizes the player from experimenting with Konoko's many other abilities. Are you planning on specifically going over her special attacks (like the hurricane kick, shoryuken, etc) at any point?
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Dec 12, 2021 18:41
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berryjon posted:But the real missing chunk, the one we do know the most about, is the missing chunk between levels 14 and 18. These three levels are known to be the "BGI Arc" of the game, as the BGI - or Bad Guys International was meant to be a more mercenary group of criminals that was in conflict with the TCTF, and some sections of the Syndicate while at the same time providing resources for both. In the last level, there's a terminal that mentions them, the only remaining evidence in the playable game. Oh man, this name is amazing. Doubly so because my internal name for the villains in my game is "BGO", a.k.a. Bad Guys Organization  (that name is not revealed in-game anywhere, I just needed something to call them during development)
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Dec 20, 2021 00:31
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Konoko does have other moves that have a bit more coverage. I think she has a tatsu / hurricane kick for one of her supers, for example. The neck lariat can also hit nearby enemies. But really, if you face a group, your best bet is probably to shoot some of them. At the very least, try not to get surrounded.
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Jan 4, 2022 02:17
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I remember getting a fair amount of use out of that homing screamer gun, mostly because you could toss it around a corner or through a door, and let it take care of enemies that had killed you in a previous attempt. I certainly don't think it's a bad gun, but it does lend itself to a fairly boring playstyle. I will never stop being annoyed at you using hypos in the middle of a fight and immediately getting all the potential healing punched out of you. That first attempt at the Griffin fight, I am damned certain you were trying to grab that hypo on the ground while being punched by all three goons!
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Jan 9, 2022 17:48
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If you kill the minions who are just following orders, you should 100% kill the guy giving those orders. Don't treat him specially just because he has a name and a portrait. Moreover, at this point all of Konoko's dialog has been reinforcing that she's on the warpath. Having her pull an about-face right after seeing her friend/sister get gunned down feels wildly out of character for her.
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Jan 17, 2022 03:44
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| # ¿ May 19, 2024 22:52 |
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Lugaru was a wuxia-style 3D fighting game that, like Oni, was happy to completely wreck you if you got into a fight with more than one enemy at a time. It was also a much more limited game -- two enemy types, few moves, simplistic environments, etc. Too bad that when the game got rereleased, its physics got completely screwed up, completely wrecking the game balance in the process. The original version had a very fun level of risk to it, where the wrong approach to a level would very likely kill you in short order.
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Jan 31, 2022 01:36
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