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I mean, it was almost the future and we didn't even have our flying cars yet!
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Dec 25, 2023 01:36
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Trying to open doors while wearing the visor must be what it's like to be a colourblind gamer.
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Dec 25, 2023 08:00
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Carbon dioxide posted:Trying to open doors while wearing the visor must be what it's like to be a colourblind gamer. You can experience this yourself playing Prime 1 or 2!
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Dec 25, 2023 08:25
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 Episode 5: Spore Spawn's yoku block madness Ice Man would be proud.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:02
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Spore Spawn is so obnoxious in this hack. I'm not even sure why they felt the need to add a bunch of yoku blocks to the room.
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Dec 26, 2023 19:36
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DoubleNegative posted:Spore Spawn is so obnoxious in this hack. I'm not even sure why they felt the need to add a bunch of yoku blocks to the room. I actually liked him in this hack which surprised me because he's usually a low point for me. A lot of hackers tend to over-correct and make him a lot harder than necessary in the name of it being a change. Spikes everywhere, underwater with no Gravity Suit, absurdly tight space so you constantly have to be moving, etc. I felt this version moved him from "incredibly easy" to "average". There's plenty of space to maneuver, the platforms are a bit more generous than the others (although I can see where they'd be frustrating), and he still has roughly the same health as the original.
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Dec 26, 2023 20:11
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This hack looks really fun, actually. Too bad I don't really dig the control scheme for Super Metroid, otherwise I'd consider playing it myself.
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Dec 27, 2023 17:18
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While I know Super is considered the sacred cow of the Metroid franchise, part of me really does hope they eventually remake it in the Dread engine.
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Dec 28, 2023 04:35
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Super feels like it has a nice balance of just leaving you on your own to explore and find stuff while still having enough subtle clues, which makes it feel great when you locate that fake/destructible wall leading to progress without being too obtuse about it. I'm no level designer but I assume it's not easy at all to get this right.
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Dec 29, 2023 13:40
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Crazy Achmed posted:Super feels like it has a nice balance of just leaving you on your own to explore and find stuff while still having enough subtle clues, which makes it feel great when you locate that fake/destructible wall leading to progress without being too obtuse about it. I'm no level designer but I assume it's not easy at all to get this right. It is not easy, especially because different gamers have different expectations for gameplay and different tolerances for being lost. Some players want to have to bomb every tile to find the way forwards. There's not many of them, but they do exist. Most players want the path to be reasonably clear, but also if they never have to hunt around a bit, then they'll feel kind of...I dunno, cheated? The Portal devs put it well: the goal is to make the player feel smart, not necessarily to actually present them with challenging puzzles. For example, players feel good when they notice a visibly damaged tile and correctly deduce that they can bomb it. Or if you show them a fragment of a corridor, blocked by a wall, they'll be willing to hunt around for a way to access it.
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Dec 29, 2023 14:47
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Going back to vanilla Super is kind of a pain. It's a very important game in the franchise that established a whole lot of series staples, but it's obviously lacking all of the quality of life improvements that have been made since. Even this hack has a lot of improvements in it, restarting the spin while in mid air is probably the biggest one. And I'm willing to bet they also included the modern space jump mechanics, instead of the original one where you have to fall for a while before jumping again, but not too long or you just fall. And modern gamers are too used to explicit hint systems. I've had multiple people tell me it's too obtuse because you have to remember where you saw a suspicious block, instead of the game telling you. Geemer fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 14:48
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The developer commentary in the Half Life 2 and Portal games is a fascinating look into the backbone of game design. They talk about how they answer questions like "how do we get people to notice this thing over there?" or "Testing has told us gamers don't look up (they aren't conditioned to since screens are wider than they are tall). How can we trick them into doing it?" Absolutely worth playing those games to listen to it. Game dev is hard!
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Dec 29, 2023 15:23
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SettingSun posted:The developer commentary in the Half Life 2 and Portal games is a fascinating look into the backbone of game design. They talk about how they answer questions like "how do we get people to notice this thing over there?" or "Testing has told us gamers don't look up (they aren't conditioned to since screens are wider than they are tall). How can we trick them into doing it?" Absolutely worth playing those games to listen to it. Between those commentaries and the youtube channel Game Maker's Toolkit, I've learned so much about how to "read" games. It's like learning music theory, you've always sort of noticed it, but never had a way to express what you were seeing/hearing. Once you've sort of seen behind the curtain a little, you not only understand why something's become a thing (yellow paint on grabbable ledges and objects that contain loot in realistic styled games, for example), but also get an appreciation for the efforts that the devs and artists went through to make something stand out or to hide things in plain sight. It's honestly impressive and eye opening since this is such a new medium. These guys were building the very foundations of how an art form works. The tricks they used to make people look up without just drawing giant arrows were incredibly clever.
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Dec 29, 2023 19:03
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I've found that "why?" is an important question on that front. If a design choice doesn't make sense to me I ask myself why that decision was made and try to see different perspectives. I'm in a rush right now so it may not be the best example but the first example that comes to mind for me is Kaepora from Ocarina of Time. He gets a lot of criticism for being long winded by veterans of the game, but he's not there for them. He's there for the first timers. And you can do a quick scroll through his talking anyways
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Dec 30, 2023 16:24
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 Episode 6: Making a Metroid Cookbook Gaming cookbooks sure are an odd trend these days, aren't they?
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Dec 30, 2023 18:44
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I noticed you jumping and shooting a missile down to get rid of those grasshopper type enemies that latch onto you. It's even easier to just aim straight up and fire a missile.
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Dec 30, 2023 19:48
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FPzero posted:Gaming cookbooks sure are an odd trend these days, aren't they?
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Dec 30, 2023 19:57
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Spoilers for Metroid Dread (on the off chance anyone in this thread doesn't know the ending) If Samus eats a metroid now, is it cannibalism?
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Dec 30, 2023 20:34
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Phazon was maybe radioactive but definitely mutagenic.Rabbi Raccoon posted:Spoilers for Metroid Dread (on the off chance anyone in this thread doesn't know the ending) Metroids are voracious and apparently omnivorous by virtue of being energy vampires, so I'm pretty sure if you put two Metroids in a room without anything else to eat you eventually end up with one fat Metroid. Given that one of the Chozo groups had Metroid mind control, they probably didn't have too much pressure to breed that trait out of them.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:40
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At this point Samus has so much alien DNA in her body she's a bit of everything. She's Chozo, X Parasite, probably some space pirate in there somewhere too alongside the human bits.
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Dec 30, 2023 22:43
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This hack designer sure loves Morphball mazes but gotta be real honest here: so do I
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Dec 30, 2023 22:52
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the metroid cookbook should be one page long and the one recipe is "latch onto your prey and drain the lifeforce out of it"
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Dec 31, 2023 00:03
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Oh those are statues? I always thought it was the husks of pirates who got cornered by metroids. Kinda neat that they set them up to be like pseudo-Chozo statuesbiosterous posted:the metroid cookbook should be one page long and the one recipe is "latch onto your prey and drain the lifeforce out of it" My god, imagine the extra calories! Better pair it with a Diet Coke
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Dec 31, 2023 04:27
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The control scheme of Super Metroid is always what put me off from ever playing it for very long, but thinking on it, I never really fiddled with the controls much. Hacks like this one make me think maybe I should pick it up and try again, because it looks genuinely interesting.
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Jan 2, 2024 08:49
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If you have a gamepad with 4 shoulder buttons, you can put "run" and "swap weapon" on L2/R2, and suddenly the ergonomics of controlling the game become massively better. The right thumb can just take charge of jumping and shooting, instead of having to do those plus running and weapons.
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Jan 2, 2024 18:10
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 Episode 7: Part of a balanced Chozo breakfast "Oh, you don't want that, it's gonna be half millet." - PW --------- Re: controls talk, I personally never really had an issue with Super's controls and this is coming from someone who played it after Fusion. I like the split dedicated shoulder aiming buttons, and over the years I discovered that putting weapon swap to A and cancel on Select is perfectly good for me. Then again, I also don't seem to mind crunching my fingers to do weird dash jumps with run on X and jump on B, so I do understand that my choices may not be representative of the broader experience  .
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Jan 2, 2024 19:28
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Life Temple is where I had to look up a video. I just kept overlooking that bomb passage down
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Jan 3, 2024 00:18
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Geemer posted:Going back to vanilla Super is kind of a pain. The one I see happen a lot in Super for people going in blind is when you need to go to Kraid from the Norfair elevator room. --First time you need to backtrack (if you don't count Morph Ball in the first place, which was entirely dead ends) --First time you need to look at the map instead of just following the open path (some people this won't be an issue, others can go completely map-blind unless you physically point to it) --First time the place to bomb to progress wasn't obviously marked (yeah it's blocks instead of pipes, but that's a big difference from how Charge Beam is marked) --First time the secret to progression is hidden in a room that doesn't impede going the "wrong" way long enough to look around These are all things to teach for the explorer mindset of how to approach getting stuck later, sure. Once you know it's there, and looking back with the "bomb everything" mindset, it's not exactly hidden. Nobody who found it once is ever going to miss it again if they go back to the game. But a whole lot of people will run right through that room without noticing any of that even after they've started backtracking to look for where the game wants them to go.
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Jan 4, 2024 21:44
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I think the best dev trick is the now classic "Lock the player in a room with the new mechanic being the only way out". High jump is a perfect example out of Super, it displays exactly how high your new jump boost works
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Jan 4, 2024 23:40
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pointlessone posted:I think the best dev trick is the now classic "Lock the player in a room with the new mechanic being the only way out". I love it when games do that but it isn't completely clear that's what just happened. Like you said, getting the High Jump, but the trick is that it doesn't really LOOK like you can't jump back out without it*. Yeah, trying it will tell you you can't, but the flow of going and getting it, turning around and jumping out is so smooth, you won't even think about it. It's set up so if the player somehow gets confused, they won't leave without the power up, but it's not like an explicit "grab this to continue or else" that feels forced. *You can of course just wall jump right back out, or infinite bomb jump out, but if you can do those you're probably well beyond anything Super can teach a newbie.
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Jan 5, 2024 00:18
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pointlessone posted:I think the best dev trick is the now classic "Lock the player in a room with the new mechanic being the only way out". This is a good thing for game design, for sure, but a colleague of mine pointed out something interesting about this technique: it can gently caress over randomizers pretty hard. Every one-way passage that requires a specific powerup to get out of is now a softlock waiting to happen, because there's no guarantee that you'll have the items you need by the time you get to that room. You can end up in a situation where the rando requires players to either be willing to reset a lot, or to know in advance not to go into certain rooms. Of course, there's no reason why vanilla game devs should design with randomizers in mind. It's just an amusing wrinkle where a good idea in one context becomes a bad idea in another context..
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Jan 5, 2024 01:05
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The Metroids really aren't great for Randomizers in general. Samus' power growth is just too lopsided. If you don't get at least Morph Ball and Bombs early, it's a frustrating slog. It's also far too common to find yourself either way overpowered early on and trivializing everything, or to find yourself drowning in missiles and nothing else. A good game for a Randomizer has a somewhat open world where your character doesn't become unstoppable over the course of the normal game and a good balance of collectibles versus power-ups
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Jan 5, 2024 01:50
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I will maintain that Ocarina of Time has been one of the best randomizers that I've played because of that very fact. Most items are independent of one another, so progression is less about becoming overpowered early and more about finding the things that let you solve the puzzles or pathing skips you need to do. It also just has so many more major items to find along the way, making repeat playthroughs feel interesting almost every time.
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Jan 5, 2024 02:05
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I can agree with that. I used to think Link to the Past was the best, but it has several places available early on with 3+ treasures, so after a couple rounds you'll just start going to those places which more often than not plans your route for you. I was a bit leery of Ocarina because I didn't know it nearly as well as Link to the Past but I saw that it's very customizable, which was perfect. You can choose whether or not important things are hidden behind Skulltula tokens and minigames. And with the lack of multi-treasure rooms each run is completely unique start to finish
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Jan 5, 2024 03:08
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 Episode 8: Learning about escarpments And other geological features!
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Jan 6, 2024 19:02
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Rabbi Raccoon posted:I can agree with that. I used to think Link to the Past was the best, but it has several places available early on with 3+ treasures, so after a couple rounds you'll just start going to those places which more often than not plans your route for you. I had a great Keysanity seed once where each critical item was locked behind successive Turtle Rock floors and go mode was Trinexx. Felt like it could have been its own game
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Jan 6, 2024 20:30
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I tend to rate randomizers as a spectator sport, so where LTTP and Zelda 1 really work for me is readability. OOT isn't bad, but needs a bit more familiarity with the game to be parsed just because the 3D means the player's controlling the camera and they don't have any reason to show things off that they know are there. On the far end of that scale is games where everything you unlock is an esoteric key for another glorified door. Can be interesting to play, but "getting the ham sandwich means that once [player] finds the alarm clock to wake the old man he can unlock the fire temple" needs a good commentator to convey the puzzle to viewers compared to "with the bombs [player] can blow up those rocks we've seen and it gives extra power when fighting".
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Jan 6, 2024 20:54
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FPzero posted:
Some good stuff in this update. I like the progressive space jump -- like y'all said, it's a good way to give the player a helpful powerup without immediately breaking the entire game open. And ice environments are a nice contrast to the usual fire and acid environments. Bruceski posted:I tend to rate randomizers as a spectator sport, so where LTTP and Zelda 1 really work for me is readability. OOT isn't bad, but needs a bit more familiarity with the game to be parsed just because the 3D means the player's controlling the camera and they don't have any reason to show things off that they know are there. Familiarity is IMO pretty essential to being able to watch randomizers. I can follow the La Mulana randos pretty well, but I expect they'd be totally impenetrable to a first-time casual watcher.
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Jan 6, 2024 22:42
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Oh, I meant to comment before the talk about "what if Samus never got the Morph Ball". Doable but you'd need to base the whole design around it. Dread giving it late was interesting because it turned it from part of her basic starter (close enough) moveset into a mobility upgrade, and could have the same one-block places to use it everywhere for backtracking. But if you never get it at all you either replace it with a crawl (which is a clunky version of the same thing, though Zero Mission made good use of that on purpose) or you just do without. Plenty of other metroid-likes have done the latter.
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Jan 6, 2024 22:46
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Some good stuff in this update. I like the progressive space jump -- like y'all said, it's a good way to give the player a helpful powerup without immediately breaking the entire game open. And ice environments are a nice contrast to the usual fire and acid environments. One of the things that I liked most about Subversion is you get most of the upgrades pretty early on. We've only beaten one major boss and we already have Space Jump (albeit limited). It's how it uses what the game gives you that sets it apart
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Jan 6, 2024 23:41
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