i played harvest moon grand bazaar on ds just long enough to realize that there was a double jump and then i stopped playing videogames for like six months
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TIGSource makes me think that maybe the reason people are making so many rogue like games is because they can’t be bothered to learn level design.
Level design is an interesting topic regarding this matter. I see the same layouts over and over. Not so bad in the sense that the designers have a decent sense of spatial awareness, but from a topological perspective, it is quite dull and uninspiring.
Screen-wrapping is an underutilized aspect of level-design that could complement more innovative spaces from which a player’s avatar may jump to (being on the topic of platformer). Just look at Kid Icarus’s first level. There is a whole world to be explored with just screen-wrapping; for it is technically stating that the 2D plane is cylindrical (or in Kid Icarus’s case, a spiral).
Imagine using screen-wrapping to create a mobius strip. Phwoaaah.
Most games I look at on Tig Source send my eyes directly to hell if I look at them, so I may not be the best person to talk about this!
rrrreason number three for me to make a blasted roguelikes general thread for KOP: slide in a less transient spot for me to prattle on about how the key to procedural level generation is to build contrast and secondary themes into otherwise single-concept algorithms, to make controlled minor variation omnipresent for hand-crafted sections, to actively call upon combinatorics instead of pseudorandom inanity.
it goes without saying but procedural level generation requires indefinitely more level design effort than conventional level design, and the looseness of how it’s normally handled always makes fangs line my brain. there’s also so little analysis resources centralization or effort, when C**** has piles of open source algorithms, Spelunky’s wang tiles and Brogue’s cellular automata have been explained by their devs, Necrodancer successfully provides enough concentrated context to justify the simplest of level design arrangements, and so on. Roguebasin actually has a single point of use in explaining those generators only to lack any sort of design commentary, too.
also I could never really get into Hydra Slayer but I hear it did screwy plane concepts deep in its mathed depths. the canon quintet was never good at terrain that wasn’t essentially some form or another of damage-tile trap or hedge, but it’s severely difficult to even pull out spatial awareness from the more famous three of them anyway.
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Have you looked at Unexplored? Their concepts of dungeon generation work pretty well in practice (the game seems to be a proving-out of their thesis rather than a game for its own sake) (unfortunately the game itself has all the interest of a bucket o’ beige, but)
I might have mentioned this but at 17-BIT our engineer spent a few weeks implementing more algorithmic, loosey-goosey level generation before I talked him into Spelunky-style handcrafted rooms with random variables. Layout ended up a combination of his branching structure and me trying to calculate distance from start node/branch points to build escalating tension and reward points. No loop concept or out-of-grid concepts, unfortunately, due to budget reasons and locked-in from starting technical decisions. For us we had to run with what we had after the first 2 months of prototyping, especially since that game a year into the project.
I am pretty sure this DLC is being pitched as “THE DEATH OF AMBIGUITY”
idk I’m a lot more excited about snek
an active demonstration of jacquaying and setpieces is nice. a good friend of mine and fellow former roguelike developer has talked up how Unexplored is basically an less refined action version of Brogue. what sticks in my mind is that they extended the concepts of consumable lock-and-key design from minor puzzles into outright branching points of both limiting and ensuring some given asset is found and required for interlevel progress. what also sticks in my mind is that their final boss set is a rainbow of non-threatening elemental European drakes.
it sounds like you did decently with what you had. does sort of speak to how stronger ideas of structure unsurprisingly need to be involved form the start, though.
…this discussion probably shouldn’t continue in the News thread, should it.
to be fair, the igavanias never had any idea what to do with double jumps either
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IGAvanias place so much emphasis on ‘gamefeel’ and movement/travel for its own sake that the double jump at least serves to bolster that experience. Plus it’s handy for certain boss battles; idk.
You’re not wrong, but the double jump has more of a place in IGAvanias than in many indiegames, IMO.
And Super Metroid did nothing with wall jumps except for being a universal sequence-break master key (it’s not clear to me exactly how intended that was)
IGAvanias never had a good idea what to do with most of their mechanics
I think the most consequential implementation of a double jump has been for the SSB series, the first and Melee in particular
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“Nothing, except this pretty significant thing”
Picking a competitive game sort of feels like cheating. In something hyper-competitive, almost every mechanic is consequential at a high level.
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I’m not even talking high level. Just the fact that half of Melee is about aerially recovering in the face of a waiting opponent makes the double jump important in a way that I don’t think it’s ever been in a platformer.
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Prob. I am curious about a few things, though
- Are the devs going to reinterpret any of DS2’s areas
- Does the setting do anything interesting with the series’ accumulated visual themes
- What does Big Bug Satan Gargoyle’s face look like
- Just what does From do in ostensibly the last Dark Souls thing to show off their craft
There’s not really anywhere to go at this point with making the bosses harder, even though I’m sure the devs pushed it as far as they could (how many lifebars will the final boss have??? three??? four???), but I do think there’s room to do a few novel things with the level design despite the conservative mechanical adjustments
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bring back ds2 bandit axe
i hope they’ve done something good with bosses other than just the difficulty. i made it to the final phase of the boss on the first dlc and died and haven’t picked up the game since.
what the christ
this is like finding out about the SM64 two player patch
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