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Lemming posted:
You're interpreting me too absolutely. When I say the game fails as a design, it's in the context of that player, with no game being 100% successful. I'm not saying if even a single person doesn't get it, the Thing Sucks Now. But in the case of Getting Over It, there's desired frustration which is when the design succeeds, and then there's undesired frustration, which is the "never even the first obstacle" situation. Reducing the latter so players can access more the former makes the game more successful for that player. To analogise, it's rather different when a book makes a reader sad because of what happens in it, vs because the book uses a fontsize they can't read. A reader has an absolute right to complain about this, and claims about the validity of the writer's choice and why they can't use the word "should" is just tedious. Most person would happily agree that the book has failed as an artwork for that reader.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:16
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I don't buy this generally speaking. Yeah, there are some real extreme cases where *a lot* is being asked, but very frequently it's just a function of effort in. Reread "literally physically incapable" again. There are people who only have one hand, and sure, in some games they can do quite well, but there are still inputs they simply cannot do. Some people play games using mouth controllers, or with their feet, or with eye trackers. And some people just fundamentally do not have the right kinds of mental capacity to reach the required level of performance, whether that's due to not being neurotypical, suffering from some relevant trauma, having essential tremors or other relevant disorders, or simply being too fatigued when they have time to game. Maybe this is what you're discounting with "real extreme cases", but I don't think that these cases are as uncommon as you think they are.
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Jul 31, 2022 02:19
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:
On master mode, the delay between a block dropping and it locking in place is 6 frames. For a game locked to 60 fps that's 0.1 seconds. If you react based on seeing the preview that gives 0.2 seconds. Average reaction time to visual stimuli, which corresponds to the limit of what you achieve if you train and eliminate all thinking time, is 0.25 seconds. This means at least half of people will never be able to complete Master Mode. Double the speed of the game and that number drops further. There's meanwhile many people with reaction times of over 0.4 seconds. These factors are governed by the fundamental biochemistry of how your nerves are set up. Beyond a certain limit (around 10-20%), you just cannot git gud. Fangz fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 02:34
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:I don't buy this generally speaking. Yeah, there are some real extreme cases where *a lot* is being asked, but very frequently it's just a function of effort in. Again, I really want to stress that I don't fault anyone for not wanting to engage with that kind of stuff - no one is lesser because they look at something super hard and say, 'na fam'. In the same way, I think that most people can learn an instrument to high competency on average. In both cases, that might mean thousands of hours of investment and that's a really tough mountain to climb. You sound like someone that is generally Good At Video Games. Honestly, I think when you play most games you're getting less challenge than the designer "intends" to give the average player, and that's giving you a huge blind spot as to what level of difficulty is appropriate.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:00
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I think it's kinda asking too much to say that every game should be designed so that the entire spectrum of human ability can beat it. I think it's weird to be opposed to difficulty settings in principle, and it's 100% a good thing for people to be thinking about accessibility while developing their games, but every project is going to have different goals and limitations. I'd love to add translations of my game into every language, but I don't have the resources for that and that means there are a lot of people who can't properly play my game. It's unfortunate, but it's the result of many decisions along the way including just putting a lot of text in my game over time. Edit: Just getting a game finished is a monstrous undertaking at whatever scale we're talking about, and while the bar for accessibility is certainly higher for bigger productions, they still have to make countless decisions about where to direct their effort. Elden Ring might appeal to more players with difficulty options, but the developers decided to go all-in on one difficulty for better or worse. It's totally fair to criticize the lack of difficulty options, but it's not fair to act like it's some kind of moral or ethical failing to decide to make the game that way. Lucid Dream fucked around with this message at 03:23 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 03:02
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I still think Elden Ring is the snowflake because more accessibility would actually sell a lot more copies and expand it's market. For most accessibility the work doesn't expand the market by much, though it can also get a lot of the existing market to enjoy their product more (recall that people don't complete most games that they play, but that can go up with better accessibility). Again, the cost/benefit is a lot tougher for most titles, and the upside is that either the players who need the settings are underserved (more likely to buy titles that have key settings they need), it boosts enjoyment for typical players who would not seek accessibility settings but will discover they appreciate them (subtitles is a big obvious standout here), or that the devs feel there is a reason to provide it beyond profit and design intention. Hey maybe they could figure out how to package and sell accessibility DLC. But you couldn't call it that, because obviously that's not going to fly. Maybe you sell it as boosts or power ups! Yeah! That's the ticket.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:37
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Games should just go back to having cheat codes. Nobody minds having cheat codes, you don't have to put in a lot of effort to balance them, and if people can't beat the game without infinite health then bam, what an easy fix.
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Jul 31, 2022 03:42
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edit: wrong thread
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Jul 31, 2022 04:00
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It might make sense to split off the difficulty discussion into its own thread (in no way is this a pretext for me to be justified in posting my big 'ol thesis on conceptualization of difficulty).
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Jul 31, 2022 04:58
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Fangz posted:On master mode, the delay between a block dropping and it locking in place is 6 frames. For a game locked to 60 fps that's 0.1 seconds. If you react based on seeing the preview that gives 0.2 seconds. My goals here are not to get into the ultra specifics of a given game, but I kinda wanna take a second here because this is important I think to the perception that these challenges are just unapproachably difficult. Lock Delay on M30 is 8 frames IIRC, but the math generally works out to be roughly what you posted - it's a spicy one. On the surface level, it really does look like you need super high reaction times to complete this, but that's a bit of an illusion. Most players who play these kinds of challenges are playing about 3 or 4 blocks ahead. This is so important actually that playing with just 1 block visible in the Next pipeline is a nontrivial difficulty increase. It really does look like there is a strong reaction time element to completing something like this, but your reaction time really just needs to be better then roughly 500ms to have a shot at this. The actual hard thing here is not reaction time, but having such competency with piece movement, planning, and patterns that you are dropping pieces without any hesitation in a correct spot every time.
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Jul 31, 2022 06:43
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OneEightHundred posted:I don't like the "git gud" snobbishness generally, but I think there is a legit problem where players will under-challenge themselves and get bored, given the opportunity, and would have more fun if the game pushed them a bit more, so there is a tradeoff. Guilty as charged. When I start a new game, I will set the middle difficulty, unless I am replaying a game where I know better. If it turns out too easy, I will remember your game as being oddly easy, because if I am 4 hours in, I am not restarting on a higher difficulty. (Unless it is a looping game)
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Jul 31, 2022 07:11
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Canine Blues Arooo posted:My goals here are not to get into the ultra specifics of a given game, but I kinda wanna take a second here because this is important I think to the perception that these challenges are just unapproachably difficult. Lock Delay on M30 is 8 frames IIRC, but the math generally works out to be roughly what you posted - it's a spicy one. On the surface level, it really does look like you need super high reaction times to complete this, but that's a bit of an illusion. Most players who play these kinds of challenges are playing about 3 or 4 blocks ahead. This is so important actually that playing with just 1 block visible in the Next pipeline is a nontrivial difficulty increase. It really does look like there is a strong reaction time element to completing something like this, but your reaction time really just needs to be better then roughly 500ms to have a shot at this. The actual hard thing here is not reaction time, but having such competency with piece movement, planning, and patterns that you are dropping pieces without any hesitation in a correct spot every time. It's 6 because I looked it up. If you are playing at 4 moves ahead and you have a reaction time of 200ms that gives you 200 ms of thinking time. If your reaction time is 350ms like about a quarter of people you have only 50ms of time to think. The game is 4x as difficult for those people. And I raised the initial possibility of making the game 2 or four or ten times faster. Do you still think you can git gud achieve that with effort and time? What about playing with just one block visible? Fangz fucked around with this message at 10:24 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 10:15
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Fangz posted:It's 6 because I looked it up. If you are playing at 4 moves ahead and you have a reaction time of 200ms that gives you 200 ms of thinking time. If your reaction time is 350ms like about a quarter of people you have only 50ms of time to think. The game is 4x as difficult for those people. And I raised the initial possibility of making the game 2 or four or ten times faster. Do you still think you can git gud achieve that with effort and time? What about playing with just one block visible? How does 400ms break down to 200ms of thinking and 200ms of action? You can plan the next moves during the action you're currently taking. Studies of expert players at competitive puzzle games (yes, these exist) show that players not only do this for their board, they simultaneously do this for their opponents board while spending most of their attention on the opponent's next piece window to know when their opponent makes an action. After recognizing the piece, there's almost no time spent _thinking_. Players pattern match to where the piece should go based on their continuously updated mental model of the board. 1/60 * 6 = 100ms of action time in each move, that's just rote movement doing what must have been planned. During this time, players will think through the rest of their set. That leaves 300ms lead time. If your reaction time to visual stimuli is over 300ms, you can not perform as well as people faster. In practice, reaction time is something that can be trained. Athletes do this all the time. So in the barest sense, yes people literally can get good.
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Jul 31, 2022 14:39
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Xarn posted:Guilty as charged. When I start a new game, I will set the middle difficulty, unless I am replaying a game where I know better. In my experience, this is the most typical play behavior. You're very normal! (In this one particular way, at least). leper khan posted:
MLB players have to hit a fastball that, based on napkin math, would be impossible. https://www.popsci.com/story/science/why-is-hitting-a-baseball-so-hard/ And yet they do. I don't think this overrides their point, which is that you could theoretically scale the problem to any % of people and find the same cut off. MJBuddy fucked around with this message at 15:23 on Jul 31, 2022 |
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Jul 31, 2022 15:19
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leper khan posted:How does 400ms break down to 200ms of thinking and 200ms of action? You're reading it wrong. You have 400ms between the first photons showing you what the fourth-from-now piece is going to be hitting your eyes, and that piece locking in place wherever you've dropped it. If it takes you 200ms to recognize that those photons are from a new piece (as distinct from the afterimage of the previous piece that was displayed in that location), you have 200ms for both the "thinking" and the "acting" combined. If it takes you 350ms to identify the piece, you have 50ms to do that. If it takes you 400ms to identify the piece, it is literally locked in place before you can even think about what to do with it. MJBuddy posted:MLB players have to hit a fastball that, based on napkin math, would be impossible. Doing this reliably (or at least as reliably as it gets against other teams of similar skill) is based on reading the pitcher before the ball even leaves the hand.
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Jul 31, 2022 15:59
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Jabor posted:
That's how games work too!
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Jul 31, 2022 17:02
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MJBuddy posted:That's how games work too! In the Tetris scenario, we are literally talking about the earliest you can possibly start reading that information from the game. Unless you're supposing that part of "gitting gud" involves having a TAS memory monitor open to give you information earlier than the game itself will provide it.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:07
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"Getting Good", "Like a Skill", "Just Practice" mean nothing when it's impossible for that person to improve the limits imposed by their bodies. Ideally every game should have difficulty options, full stop. However indie studios sometimes don't have that option, I can understand that. Triple A studios at the very least should build in accessibility from the start. Honestly it feels like half the complaining about difficulty is based on the idea that you are "forced" to use it if it's an option. This totally ignores the real case study that is Celeste.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:17
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Jabor posted:In the Tetris scenario, we are literally talking about the earliest you can possibly start reading that information from the game. Unless you're supposing that part of "gitting gud" involves having a TAS memory monitor open to give you information earlier than the game itself will provide it. Does Tetris change board state or possible draws from a finite pool within a scenario? No? So it's not structurally different than baseball where you sit fastball and react offspeed. You could just "assume" a scenario set in Tetris and react to deviations. I'm not a top Tetris player, but that's how chess and baseball and virtually every competitive game is played so why would this be unique? It's still a question of degrees, not structure. Play enough Tetris and every board state has a plan for every piece. And then, yeah if you don't get the one you anticipate, you lose.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:21
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Nobody is denying that you can practice at a game and get better at it. What we're denying is that this means that everyone can achieve the level of competence that the game demands in order for them to succeed, or that the amount of effort required to achieve that level of competence is the same for everyone. In an ideal world, everyone would have the same experience from playing a game like Tetris, in that the game would adapt to their capabilities and present the same journey from "unskilled" to "master". Even if that means that your "master" requires reactions five times faster than my "master", the point is that we've both reached the limits of our respective skills. Actually creating that degree of adaptability is, thus far, not something that anyone has really tried in a large scale, so far as I'm aware. When it comes to competitive sports, there's already substantial winnowing of the population to find the people who have the right combination of genetics, environment, upbringing, and inclination to excel.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:21
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SystemLogoff posted:Honestly it feels like half the complaining about difficulty is based on the idea that you are "forced" to use it if it's an option. This totally ignores the real case study that is Celeste. some of this is a question of framing, i think. framing something specifically as "accessibility" or "assist" sort of inherently places it outside the realm of the "standard" design of the game (and in the same realm as color-blind modes, and/or subtitles) in a way that explicit difficulty settings don't. why this is the case is weird, but the point is that the same thing can be framed in completely different ways for different connotations. "the player is invulnerable" is going to be interpreted in completely different ways if you call it "assist mode", "Very Easy", or "Cheat code".
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Jul 31, 2022 17:31
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also it's not really clear what constitutes the "same experience" take two players playing a really difficult game. one of them finds it difficult, but also finds the experience of gradual improvement of their skills engaging enough to keep going, and ends up really enjoying the game. the other player finds it difficult, slams their head against the first boss for a few hours, and quits It's not clear that these *are* different experiences. the literal experience both players have are obviously different, but in that case everyone will have a different "experience" with any game. but another way you could say it is that both players are experiencing the same thing, and the main difference is that the second player hates the experience.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:39
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And the second player in an ideal world should have options available to them to remove or mitigate whatever barrier it is they’re banging their head on. That doesn’t stop the first player or any other player from enjoying the ‘git gud’ experience, while letting the second player actually enjoy the game they paid for.
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Jul 31, 2022 17:44
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Nobody is denying that you can practice at a game and get better at it. What we're denying is that this means that everyone can achieve the level of competence that the game demands in order for them to succeed, or that the amount of effort required to achieve that level of competence is the same for everyone. In an ideal world, everyone would have the same experience from playing a game like Tetris, in that the game would adapt to their capabilities and present the same journey from "unskilled" to "master". Even if that means that your "master" requires reactions five times faster than my "master", the point is that we've both reached the limits of our respective skills. I didn't disagree on this. I said that no one was addressing the underlying point, but was also not addressing it to talk about cool baseball stuff. But everyone having the same experience isn't the ideal. I pointed out earlier that players don't align themselves to "even" experiences. Some wanted power fantasies and some wanted difficult growth experiences and they probably all wanted some amount of both. And this is before looking at a game like an MMO where the game itself is up to dozens of systems or mini games. I also don't think you can build all accessibility in from the start. That sentiment is overestimating how much of the game even exists from the start, and how much effort would be wasted building accessibility into systems that aren't even going to make it to an Alpha build. Some, though, like colorblind, high contrast fonts, etc, make perfect sense. Some can even be done easily at the end of the game (no deaths).
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Jul 31, 2022 17:57
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History Comes Inside! posted:And the second player in an ideal world should have options available to them to remove or mitigate whatever barrier it is they’re banging their head on. the contention is whether mechanical aspects like difficulty are considered aesthetic and creative aspects of a game, or if they're, idk - functional aspects like language settings/subtitles/etc. i think the current trend in criticism is to consider those things to be the former - that's definitely my view, anyway - and if mechanical difficulty is an aesthetic choice, i don't think not liking, or even not being physically able to engage with it is any different than being unable to engage with other aesthetic choices like sound design, visual storytelling or the complexity of text
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Jul 31, 2022 18:00
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I'm increasingly starting to think that there's actually like six different conversations being had here, and everyone's (unintentionally) talking past each other. Regardless this has been going on for pages and I for one have run out of new content to contribute, so I'mma bow out.
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Jul 31, 2022 18:23
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I wasn't sure what M30's rules are - I don't really play at that pace yet, so I measured here: This is the first frame the square appears, and the last frame before the next piece appears. The total time you have to position a piece is 17 frames (or as shown here, 320ms - dunno why that timer math is a bit off). So, if you are playing 3 - 4 pieces ahead, you are given about a full second to make decisions. This is probably among the hardest non-pvp challenges in the world - 24 people have finished this mode at the time of this writing. It's very hard, but this is absolutely physically possible for the vast, vast majority of people - it just takes a lot of practice.
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Jul 31, 2022 20:53
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Vast majority of people 24 people in the whole world have done it Ok then!
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Jul 31, 2022 21:50
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Any of those 24 over the age of 45?
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Jul 31, 2022 22:24
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History Comes Inside! posted:Vast majority of people I think that's a pretty uncharitable reading of their argument - its pretty clearly about potential. To go back to an earlier example, it's like how most people could become extremely skilled in playing an instrument given enough time and effort. It's not saying that everyone is already really good, but the potential is there
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Jul 31, 2022 23:08
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hi hello how do i learn to make video game I’m wanting to eventually make an rts game like command and conquer or StarCraft as a learning experience (so not really for selling), but other than hearing that something unity is a good place to start, I have no experience or knowledge on where to begin. What’s a good place to look and learn?
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Jul 31, 2022 23:36
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drkeiscool posted:hi hello how do i learn to make video game This was recommended to me I think in this thread, and it's been great. It's frequently discounted like it is now I think.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:43
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drkeiscool posted:hi hello how do i learn to make video game VelociBacon's link is a decent starting point. Rule 1 though is that you should practice, and that means picking projects that will keep you motivated to keep practicing. You know you better than we can, so what shape exactly those projects will take is up to you, but I'd recommend starting with the smallest thing you can think of that's actually interesting. Game development is hard, and it's very easy to bite off more than you can chew, get discouraged, and quit. So for example, I wouldn't recommend starting with an RTS, but something you could try doing is some kind of RTS-like autobattler: the computer picks some units, you place down some other units, they move up to their opponents, everyone fights until one side is dead. You can do it in 2D with colored circles as your unit indicators, but it has elements that are like what you find in an RTS, and you can imagine layering more complexity on until you have an actual RTS working.
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Jul 31, 2022 23:52
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MJBuddy posted:Does Tetris change board state or possible draws from a finite pool within a scenario? No? So it's not structurally different than baseball where you sit fastball and react offspeed. You could just "assume" a scenario set in Tetris and react to deviations. I'm not a top Tetris player, but that's how chess and baseball and virtually every competitive game is played so why would this be unique? Wait, you don't know that Tetris uses a RNG?
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Aug 1, 2022 10:00
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Fangz posted:Wait, you don't know that Tetris uses a RNG? Modern Tetris runs through the bag of available tetrominoes in randomized sequence before starting again. 7 tetrominoes, so the furthest the same piece can be from the next of that piece is 13 pieces. Tengen Tetris does not follow this, and can eat poo poo for never giving me the piece I want.
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Aug 1, 2022 14:18
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I think NES Tetris just uses a straight single-dice-roll PRNG and watch this to die instantly (Classic Score Attack in Tetris Effect is a modernized NEStris including its RNG system) https://twitter.com/zh_switch/status/1333852882714710016 e) the only weighting in NES tetris is that it'll attempt to reroll once if it rolls the same piece twice in a row, making it less likely to happen Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 14:57 on Aug 1, 2022 |
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Aug 1, 2022 14:51
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Jabor posted:It's also interesting that a roll of the dice vs. drawing a card might be the same initially, but becomes different when you're doing it repeatedly. And I think people's intuition for probability is more closely aligned to the drawing a card model. Meanwhile, the roll of a die model is far easier to implement in a computer, so tends to be what gets used unless there's an explicit choice otherwise. Yup, card draw or bag of tokens (fundamentally same idea) is often a much more "enjoyable" kind of random experience for a player over a play session. And of course since we have computers we don't have to rely on physical adaptations to change what randomness means. I honestly think a lot of the problems folks have with this has to do with a lack of thought on devs parts with respect to statistics. Random can mean a lot of different things, and being very specific about the experience you actually want is a critical part of a satisfying design. Like, again, if loot distribution is purely random, and you have enough players, you will absolutely have the player who plays the game for a month and gets no upgrades. Is that the experience that you actually want? I think in many cases developers actually want uncertainty or surprise, and settle for "an rng-based normal distribution of rolls against a single target number with no historical information", and the end result is some players have a pretty miserable experience.
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Aug 1, 2022 18:06
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re: the difficulty discussion, I think in general people are way too prescriptive about difficulty in general, because it implies a ton of value judgments both about players and developers that make people feel very intense things. I think something that gets missed a lot in these discussions is just "what is your game trying to be"? Also important to remember that a vanishingly small portion of players actually finish games, and yet still can enjoy the heck out of them (especially big open world games like R* and Bethesda games). You can approach this from a lot of different sides, but to me this says (at least): - someone playing and enjoying a game but not finishing because it's too hard is not necessarily a bad experience - making a game that tries to appeal to everyone by suggesting that you increase the difficulty (or even having adaptive difficulty) may be a fine experience - some folks (me) really really want to deeply understand gameplay mechanics and want to be provided a constant challenge to adapt to. that's also fine. To be honest, the only thing that, to me, seems as close to objectively bad as I can think of, is forcing players to pick a difficulty in the frontend of a game before they've literally interacted at all with the core gameplay, especially IF that difficulty is mostly a modifier on how hard the gameplay is and not a fundamental change (c.f. FF7R where the difficulty also changes whether the game is more "real time" and actioney vs. more turn-based feeling, that's a reasonable thing to ask up front). Basically asking players to make a choice about something that they have no experience with is an honestly super weird way to do it, and also literally opens the game with decision paralysis. seems bad to me. Also, for what it's worth, people will focus a lot on the assist mode in Celeste but actually I think something that Celeste learned from Mario, and to me is the more effective difficulty option, is just building in very clearly delineated optional content that gives challenge seekers what they want. The B-Sides in Celeste and the balls-hard mario levels they stick in their secret worlds are really my favorite kind of "difficulty slider". I know WoW is controversial, but that's one thing I felt like we did really well, especially as the game got older. You could have an experience literally from easy wins handed to you to literally thousands of attempts before killing a boss, all within the same game and without a single game-wide difficulty option. edit: Also just want to say that there's a lot to be said for crafting a "complete" experience at each difficulty level. When you play a good rhythm game on Easy, it still feels like you're "playing the song" to some extent, just with less notes. I think a lot of games don't really provide you an experience that feels either complete or well-tuned at every difficulty level, and that's something we could really stand to learn from the rhythm genre. djkillingspree fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Aug 1, 2022 |
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Aug 1, 2022 18:28
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djkillingspree posted:Yup, card draw or bag of tokens (fundamentally same idea) is often a much more "enjoyable" kind of random experience for a player over a play session. And of course since we have computers we don't have to rely on physical adaptations to change what randomness means. So, this is a design question I have for my game. Every time you sink an enemy ship, it has a chance to drop a crate, which can be a repair crate (instant healing), ammo crate, or tech crate (i.e. new ship/part unlock). Right now these are mostly random. I sometimes flag a few ships in each mission as always having repairs, and cargo ships always drop techs, but otherwise the game determines the drop at the time the ship is sunk. Now, I do have a system in place to say "oh, you're badly-damaged, okay, repair crates are more likely", and similarly if any of your weapons are low on ammo. For the most part it seems to work, but there's still the occasional mission where you gradually get whittled down and repairs just don't ever drop. So my question is: is there a way to do the bag-of-tokens generator (which functionally guarantees that there will be, at worst, a repair crate every N kills) while also being reactive to the player's current state?
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Aug 1, 2022 18:47
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:So, this is a design question I have for my game. Every time you sink an enemy ship, it has a chance to drop a crate, which can be a repair crate (instant healing), ammo crate, or tech crate (i.e. new ship/part unlock). Right now these are mostly random. I sometimes flag a few ships in each mission as always having repairs, and cargo ships always drop techs, but otherwise the game determines the drop at the time the ship is sunk. Now, I do have a system in place to say "oh, you're badly-damaged, okay, repair crates are more likely", and similarly if any of your weapons are low on ammo. For the most part it seems to work, but there's still the occasional mission where you gradually get whittled down and repairs just don't ever drop. Have some tokens be fixed, other tokens be dynamically resolved.
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Aug 1, 2022 18:51
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