Games You Played Today: Actress Again: Current Code (Part 1)

[Broco]

Busted, I remember you posted recently about game designers designing by committee according to abstract principles. And you talked about them eventually watching a playtester wander through a barren videogame space in silence, and behind the one-way-glass-window (or more likely videofeed) where it sounded like the observing game designers were presumably isolated from the playtester, the designers nervously came up with ideas about how to spruce up the empty, boring-looking experience, not trusting that emptiness might be leading to a sense of wonder in the silent playtester’s mind. (EDIT: Found where you posted about that, it was this post right in this very thread)

The problem is a profound failure of communication, right? In a way that this scientific/focus-group style of playtesting cannot truly address?

Why do so many of the very best games also have visible D&D influences? I’m realizing that it’s because D&D must be a spectacularly effective context to iterate on a game design. Does a lackluster response lead you to think your overall world structure is not working? Pencil in a few nodes on your graph map, and see if it seems to lead to a better experience in your next playgroup. And the cheerful, social atmosphere, with players often thinking aloud about their plans and asking each other for advice and consensus, might lead to more intuitive understanding about how the players are feeling than the silent, distant sort of playtesting you seemed to describe.

It seems like D&D DMing has the same salutary effect on game designers as standup comedy does on comedy writers. I haven’t played since I was a kid, but right now I’m remembering even with my mediocre DM and group at the time, it was a kind of a special and unique experience, and not only that but priceless game design experience for the DM. Today I’m thinking that if I had continued playing and tried my hand at DMing myself, then my abortive attempt at writing my own Metrovania 10 years ago might not have ended in a strange “game designer’s block” (I spent a long time staring blankly or doodling on a level editor with absolutely no clue what shapes I might draw might lead in the direction of “fun”, and I started to think that I must have no talent for game design). Is one solution to training more and better game designers, and a cure for games feeling so samey nowadays for D&D and its variations to become as popular again?

[Tulpa]

for a time I felt like there was a fruitful exchange of ideas between video game people and tabletop people, mostly through fps level design blogs: I learned so much about what makes a good dnd map from studying Doom levels and reading radiator yang blogposts about Thief and Counterstrike, and in the other direction a few level designers were getting interested in the structure of D&D dungeons.

But it is fascinating how facilitating a game (so long as they’re attentive and receptive to the feedback of other players) leads to a more significant understanding of game design. Dungeon World has a guiding principle, “draw maps, leave blanks”, that I find inspiring. Empty spaces are a fundamental part of texturing the filled spaces. They provide contrast and room for anticipation. Sometimes under-detailed in-game maps end up being more rewarding than fully realized ones. My favorite in-game map comes from mission 4 of Thief.

Look at that, its just 5 boxes with some text on them, and they hardly correspond with the level design itself, but those boxes have just enough text and suggestion on them to let you imagine how they might connect, what they might look like, what they might contain. The promise of possibilities is sometimes better than the immediate gratification found in many modern games

[Broco]

@Tulpa

The promise of possibilities is sometimes better than the immediate gratification found in many modern games

Yes!!

I have 8 possibilities. Which looks like the coolest and most enticing to start with?

My choices have narrowed to this last one. It’s my least favorite, but let me grit my teeth and get through it with the different attacks I have now, and then I’ll have beat the game.

Oh, I didn’t beat the game at all! 5 more levels now in a linear gauntlet… and this looks like it’s gonna be hard…

Wow, what a troll

[BustedAstromech]

@Broco

I’m thinking again of the brilliant player-made Dragon Quest “map of meaning” from a blogpost

One of the great things about that post and map is how universal and obvious those observations are – the strength of Dragon Quest and many contemporary RPGs (Hydlide, early Ultima) is the clarity and purity of the leveling and progression. Speed of movement and player freedom are critical and as RPGs added complexity they quickly shed this progression-optimizing game, so we mostly see it in hard Metroid-likes and the Souls games. Divinity: Original Sin is a notable counterexample, which has a dense & compressed space but clearly-marked encounters which the player is encouraged to test and back out of to find the right scaling path. And backtracing this line of thinking, King’s Bounty always worked like this, too…

@Broco

The problem is a profound failure of communication, right? In a way that this scientific/focus-group style of playtesting cannot truly fix?

Absolutely. I can’t communicate like this at work because we are too far apart even in basic principles and methods of design; it’s why Ubisoft and Warner Bros. Interactive both promulgate a design framework (Immersyve’s PENS) just to give developers any shared ground to communicate.

But there’s not enough trust and teams are simply too large to effectively communicate about abstract issues. Lacking that, we fall back to cliches because they’re the pidgin vocabulary we have.

@boojiboy7 & @doolittle, I really enjoyed the Destiny episode of Hinge Problems and getting the Full Nerd experience. But when you were speculating about why Destiny got away with so much weird lore and wondered if Activision just allowed Bungie to do it because of their prestige? I knew the answer was much simpler. People working in games aren’t really against literary techniques or cohesive metaphors or discursive character studies. But they aren’t set up to create them and promulgate them across a studio. Bungie had a strong enough culture that it was able to find a pocket of cheap content (text dumps) that were historically justified (Bungie terminals!) and solid leadership could communicate these values to the sealed writers’ room.

In my experience, groups of writers and designers are usually pretty good at lining up rhymes between mechanics and narratives and at diagramming character dynamics. They can set up functional characters with plausible tensions and satisfying arc. But they fail to coordinate complex, abstract thought; grand meaning, sincere representations of belief (unsurprisingly, game developers are very stuck inside a modern materialist perspective), unanswerable questions.

I’ve come to believe this is tragically only solvable by empowering specific voices; directors with more dictatorial control, smaller teams with my complete mind-melds. It’s why I believe the more hierarchical nature of Japanese studios more regular produces personal, meaningful games (at the cost of difficult scaling up of team size).

@Broco

It seems like D&D DMing has the same salutary effect on game designers as standup comedy does on comedy writers.

That’s always one of my first bits of advice to students. Running pen & paper games is what made me a designer before I knew it.

Playtests as traditionally done can only point to certain solutions: they tell you where you’re failing to describe things and point to smoothing and simplifying. For tutorials and controls, this can be very useful, but anything beyond surface-level problems won’t be touched.

I am very fond of designing towards a player; an embedded QA I deliver builds to for the purpose of delighting them. Designing for a friend is designing towards a narrow player but you can dig so much deeper and, crucially, it’s one of the quickest ways to design with love – distinct from empathy, finding moments to delight and amuse.

[wourme]

I tried Post Void today and I can’t get anywhere in it. I like the atmosphere, or what I assume the atmosphere would be like if I could survive more than ten seconds.

I like the contrast between the tutorial and the game itself, but I’m afraid it’s just a little too frantic for me. I checked the menu and there is no easy mode.

[Felix]

hit the 75% done milestone with this patch tonight

[Felix]

[daphaknee]

i was going to post about how mad i am at this flashback part in x-men legends but webhead731 seems to have had the same experience as me in 2006

replace nightcrawler with wolverine being left and UGH!! THIS PART SUCKS

we’re currently killing one sentinel at a time and running back to save, I THINK WE GOT THIS

@iguferon is being a Pure Pro Gamer

[GlamGrimfire]

iconoclasts went into development in lile 2013 and for whatever reason konjak kept letting the project bigger and change size shape and focus. it really bummee me out on release much like owlboy. baked too long, no focus, rip

[iguferon]

i fought with the power of mao and soundly dominated the sentinel flashback. 7 year old veronica putting her hand on my shoulder thru time itself in solidarity

[thecatamites]

i always feel a little suspicious of level design in videogames just because it’s had a weird tendency to absorb and literalise the metaphors people use when talking about art. the concept of “leaving space for the audience” (to imaginatively respond, etc) comes to mean literally opening up space for them, as if the restrictiveness of a corridor were a direct stand-in for the attitude of the work itself. the idea of open and closed works becomes that of open and closed spaces. there’s obviously overlap across these things (it’s a lot easier to make emotionally prescriptive work if you’re also prescriptive about how to move through it, etc) but i think emphasis on medium specificity means it tends to be sold as more of a 1:1 relationship than it really is.

i guess this is my main problem with both metroidvanias and open world games: that i.m.o. vgames get more boring when the dynamic of a person engaging with an object is compressed to that of an avatar engaging with a game space instead, when things like exploration and curiosity become specifically aspects of the latter instead of the former. and i think what unites the two genres is the way they buy into a kind of master narrative of spatial design, as the thing that sits above and unifies everything else in a game. the “freedom” of open world games is tied to space in a way that’s right there in the name, while the twisty-turny landscapes of metroidvanias stand in for the engaged back-and-forth between designer and player that is their intended experience. but experiencing these spaces as such means having to buy into a set of other relationships - player to avatar, avatar to environment, player to UI, etc - which become ever more blandly immutable as the spatial metaphor has to carry more weight. it’s like space in these things has cannibalised all the other ways that a videogame can feel nebulous or uncertain.

well, i’m starting to sound like chris crawford for some reason. but it is interesting to me to think that “all games approach becoming open world / metroidvanias” because the spatial metaphor kind of gives these things a way to convert their own uncertainties from a bug into a feature; to eat and then reproduce their own limits in second-order, aestheticised form. maybe that’s why they feel so dead to me - as if they’ve finally managed to cut out contingent irritations, to exist in their own formal bubble, frozen cathedrals of orthodoxy.

[VastleCania]

Gotdamn y’all are good at this. I’m over here thinking “I hate gtav because it’s a dogshit, just a big dogshit”

[HoboSupportAct]

Fired-up SOR4 again and completed Mania with both Adam and Blaze on first attempt each, leaving only Axel and Cherry to go before declaring the game done and done (unless they correct Max’s aerial throw arc)

Now playing Dark Souls 2 again because I haven’t touched it this year (annual traditions and such) but always find myself toying with the progression order because I sometimes forget where the best gear/items are. Currently hunting for the mannequin claws in Harvest Valley to complete a STR/DEX build with slashpunch potential but the ole trusty halberd is a hard habit to quit

Got rolly-pollied to death by the Covetous Demon while enjoying his facial animations for a few seconds too long, which actually counts as the first time I’ve ever died against it (the shame)

[sleepysmiles]

i think dying to the covetous demon while admiring him seems appropriate. he’s a good boy

[HoboSupportAct]

he’s a good boy

This nails the sensation perfectly

[Gate88]

Aw, sorry you didn’t have a good time with it – skill floor is an aspect of games I don’t think about enough. I underestimate my skill, and I’m reminded of that every time I release a game or a Mario Maker level. I think my stuff would be better if I kept that in mind.

As for this game: it’s definitely frantic, even when you’re playing well. Go for headshots – maybe turn your sens down. The start feels about like mid/late game Hotline Miami to me, but I haven’t played that in a long time so I might be misremembering. You may be able to beat a level or two with some practice.

I had also been playing a ton of Titanfall 2 before this, which likely made this game easier for me to digest.

[Broco]

Looks fun, and also definitely looks like it would take me at least an hour or two of derusting fundamental mouse movements to get anywhere in it. When I go back after months or years to a really fast game like Nuclear Throne that I used to be solid at, I die instantly a lot, mostly because my brain isn’t ready to react to threats within fractions of a second anymore. Yeah, that Titanfall 2 right before might’ve been essential.

Interesting that the Steam reviews are “overwhemingly positive”. Tells you a lot about the Steam audience for a game like this

[daphaknee]

I DUNNO LOOKS LIKE A LOT OF WORDS TO SAY SUCKS OR DOES IT

just kidding i love stealing everyones intelligence and pretending it crystallized inside me on my own when i impress outsiders with it

double kidding i always go OH ON THIS COOL SITE SELECTBUTTON… and then say the coolest stuff after

[Tuxedo]

I’ve died against Covetous Demon once but beat Orphan of Kos on the first try

I continue playing Chocobo’s dungeon Every Buddy. It has triggered a lost memory of this song in my brain and now I unfortunately think about it constantly while playing

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Soundtrack - Crazy Chocobo

Very weird to play a game with a generic RPG plot in which the main character is this animal who can’t talk. Chocobo’s involvement in the plot is minimal but not entirely absent either. It mostly 1) emotes (correctly) while watching the plot unfold and 2) kills

I’m often wondering about Chocobo’s cognitive capabilities and just how much of the plot it understands; honestly it’s probably just like, a dog who doesn’t have any ideas what’s going on? It attacks for food and when major plot events happen it just reacts according to the general vibe in the room. It saves the world but only out of hunger for more gysahls

The big reason I’m still playing is the job system, it’s so great. I wouldn’t say the jobs are balanced but almost all of them significantly alter the way you approach enemies and dungeons. Scholar isn’t great at fighting but it gets access to the entire map and can look for items and avoid enemies easily. Beastmaster can heal its ally and as such can lean back on a very offensive frail buddy unlike every other job. Red mage sucks but access to Cure makes it not worry about finding sources of healing + it can use protect/shell to further mitigate damage and sleep/silence spells for crowd control. Etc. Changing jobs is easy and doesn’t require any dreadful equipment / skill swapping nonsense you’d see in another game

On hard mode all the major bosses just use OP broken skills that need to be countered with your own batch of OP broken items and skills like you’re Yugioh. The major jumps in difficulty are jarring but it’s been pretty fun, I especially like how leveling all jobs is paying off there and how poison has been an essential part of my strategy against every single boss so far. I <3 poison

[Broco]

@VastleCania

Gotdamn y’all are good at this. I’m over here thinking “I hate gtav because it’s a dogshit, just a big dogshit”

Also, in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, Bloodstained: RotN and Momodora: RutM are some fuckin sweet indie metrovanias. Nothing wrong with em except the camelcase acronyms