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The Kins posted:Of potential interest: A professional Japanese-to-English translator has written a blog post about common issues and pitfalls with indie game localization. While it's focused specifically on Japanese, it does include some good points that are worth keeping in mind when preparing your game for an international audience. Oh wow, that's great. I was considering a Japanese translation so this is perfect. It seems so obvious when it's pointed out but I would have made every one of those mistakes.
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Jun 14, 2018 14:57
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The White Dragon posted:I highly recommend everyone in this thread play Breath of Fire 3. It's a master course in things you should never put in a video game ever Has there ever been an informative LP?
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Jun 14, 2018 15:28
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The White Dragon posted:I highly recommend everyone in this thread play Breath of Fire 3. It's a master course in things you should never put in a video game ever No Wave fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Jun 14, 2018 |
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Jun 14, 2018 16:19
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The White Dragon posted:I highly recommend everyone in this thread play Breath of Fire 3. It's a master course in things you should never put in a video game ever BoF3 is one of my favorite games. I could see why people don't like certain parts, but it's a pretty strong RPG in general. Also that loving soundtrack was unmatched.
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Jun 14, 2018 17:46
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Quick opinion poll: I want to have tons of monsters and mythological critters in my thing, but since our entire team is one of me and one artist I really don't want to let you see the monster. Since you're a detective to begin with, and not a fighter, would you guys feel ripped off if after investigating a case and conclusively determining who did it and what kind of monster they were, you'd hand the case file off to a bunch of thugs/enforcers from another branch, and have them make the arrest/monster hunt offscreen and send you a final report?
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Jun 14, 2018 23:40
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Omi no Kami posted:Quick opinion poll: I want to have tons of monsters and mythological critters in my thing, but since our entire team is one of me and one artist I really don't want to let you see the monster. Since you're a detective to begin with, and not a fighter, would you guys feel ripped off if after investigating a case and conclusively determining who did it and what kind of monster they were, you'd hand the case file off to a bunch of thugs/enforcers from another branch, and have them make the arrest/monster hunt offscreen and send you a final report? I dunno how helpful this is to you but when I read this I imagined a simplified, mouse-guided chase to close out the case just like when you raft down the Columbia River in Oregon Trail
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Jun 14, 2018 23:50
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CYBEReris posted:I dunno how helpful this is to you but when I read this I imagined a simplified, mouse-guided chase to close out the case just like when you raft down the Columbia River in Oregon Trail My initial idea (which I like less and less, since it takes agency away from the player) was for you to be less Buffy the vampire slayer, and more her grumpy British librarian advisor- you'd investigate the crime scenes, do all the footwork, get a complete picture of what you were dealing with, then hand it to a strong, capable group of troublemakers who come back covered in blood and ectoplasm and go 'Yeah, so your plan basically worked- in retrospect I wish you'd told us to set it on fire before we threw the tennis balls at it".
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Jun 14, 2018 23:56
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Omi no Kami posted:Quick opinion poll: I want to have tons of monsters and mythological critters in my thing, but since our entire team is one of me and one artist I really don't want to let you see the monster. Since you're a detective to begin with, and not a fighter, would you guys feel ripped off if after investigating a case and conclusively determining who did it and what kind of monster they were, you'd hand the case file off to a bunch of thugs/enforcers from another branch, and have them make the arrest/monster hunt offscreen and send you a final report? I feel like if you're going to include monsters/supernatural stuff, people are going to want some kind of payoff for uncovering it. But it doesn't necessarily have to be a super graphically intensive thing - a lot of games get a good amount of mileage from still images and narrative text. It depends on how well that fits in with the game overall - if your game is otherwise full 3D and so on, it will really have a "this had to be cut for budget reasons" feel. A great example of this is in Alice: Madness Returns where it's a heavily art-driven game, and at the end of every level there's like this buildup to a boss fight that then gets resolved in a series of narrative slideshow cutscenes. Even if it was planned that way (I don't know if it was or not), it REALLY feels like something was supposed to be there and just... wasn't. If you can't deliver on the payoff you should cut the buildup.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:04
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You might not do the monster in engine, but maybe you could have some 2d art to depict the confrontation, perhaps? Stories: The Path of Destinies does something like that.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:08
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Procedural mugshots paperclipped to the case folder. Draw up a bunch of pixel art body parts and mr. potatohead that poo poo.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:10
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Figured out where my brain was going with the connection to edutainment - Carmen Sandiego. The version I played as a kid had this little animation at the end where you had a police dog sniffing around and then barking at the crook's door that was always the same but that gave it a sort of weird ritual significance. I think it would be perfectly fine to have something like that that's essentially symbolic before displaying a specific mugshot of the creature or whatever.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:18
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I immediately think Pillars of Eternity CYOA stuff. You could have a couple screens that showed various outcomes with generic art but with customized text. Of course it'd work as reports too if that's more theme appropriate: Scooby gang assembled and combed through <environment> searching for <creature>... (successfulDetection ? tracked <creature> down to its lair : but found <creature> instead!)... (2d art of creature) (successfulDetection ? Prepared : Unprepared) they (PassFightCheck(successfulDetection) ? fought and captured <creature> (show creature art combined with generic jail) : managed to fight off Y but received <injuriest list> injuries (show generic wounded people screen)). Something like that would be plenty satisfying without needing a bunch of models. I just got to the end of PoE 2 and there is a big climactic event at sea that was still epic for just being some text, a few bits of art, and some reactive text and cost many orders of magnitude less than a big sprawling in engine scene.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:25
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No Wave posted:Which things? Are you referring to training that doofus? That desert? Or that you can lose one-of items in the fairy village? Or that late game save spot you can get stuck at? Or permanently missing out on the best spells because you didn't tell the snake lady she was cute? (despite its flaws, i think highly of the game) Because 80% of the plot during adulthood is doing absolutely horrendous minigames to progress. Ignoring training Beyd as a child, the segment where you have twenty-five seconds to pilot your tank controls boat through a maze, that godawful desert segment, pulling up junk from the ocean... these are all fantastic examples of things you should never put in a game. They ask you to execute finicky commands, and oftentimes don't even give you any visual indications. Drawing vinegar from the well is especially bad because you have to do everything blind, but it's all awful because if you screw up, you have to do it from the beginning all over again. You don't get rewarded for engaging in their lovely systems, but you get punished for making a mistake. Also, these minigames can't even be repeated to get some kind of prize, so the "skill" you have to develop to complete them is just an utter waste of your time and effort. Also, character-specific puzzles in a game where you only have two party members plus Ryu (whose skill is used exactly once as a puzzle solution in the desert) and you can only switch characters on the world map or at a diary. Incidentally, the Fairy Village and Fishing are like the TWO optional minigames, and they actually do have really good rewards. But that's the 1% of BoF3 that's The Carrot. 99% of it is just the game beating you with The Stick. e: oh and invincible bosses. unwinnable boss fights are another cardinal sin, because it's just sadistically rubbing the player's face in their helplessness against a system YOU DESIGNED Fur20 fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Jun 15, 2018 |
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Jun 15, 2018 00:36
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FuzzySlippers posted:I immediately think Pillars of Eternity CYOA stuff. You could have a couple screens that showed various outcomes with generic art but with customized text. Of course it'd work as reports too if that's more theme appropriate: Hmm, that could work... another alternative, which I think would be less satisfying but also less jarring, would be to go the Fables route and assume that every single monster is using an illusion to look human. Then we could explicitly show you busting into their lair, dousing them with a handful of liquid/powder/aerosol/whatever delivery methods that contain the anti-monster measures you cooked up, and just explicitly perp-walking the still-illusioned person into a holding cell while they growl or scream in an infernal language.
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Jun 15, 2018 00:40
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xzzy posted:Procedural mugshots paperclipped to the case folder. Draw up a bunch of pixel art body parts and mr. potatohead that poo poo. Seconding this - procedural mugshots would be awesome but if that requires more art than you can muster, one mugshot per monster type would also be fine. And it wouldn't take a lot of intensive art since mugshots only show heads and shoulders.
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Jun 15, 2018 04:13
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Omi no Kami posted:My initial idea (which I like less and less, since it takes agency away from the player) was for you to be less Buffy the vampire slayer, and more her grumpy British librarian advisor- you'd investigate the crime scenes, do all the footwork, get a complete picture of what you were dealing with, then hand it to a strong, capable group of troublemakers who come back covered in blood and ectoplasm and go 'Yeah, so your plan basically worked- in retrospect I wish you'd told us to set it on fire before we threw the tennis balls at it". hopefully if you do this you include a way to fail and all your dudes are dead instead, also make sure you have more interaction with the team than just "here go kill monster" at the end of each investigation
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Jun 15, 2018 04:18
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Reiley posted:Art is a learnable skill and you're never too old to start! Learn the basics of human anatomy and physiology, or how the body works and moves, and you can build abstraction from there. 
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Jun 15, 2018 04:21
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I won an honorable mention today for my team's project in a game jam that I managed and did the programming for: https://jfaw-love.itch.io/firesaurus-rex Here's the clip of them announcing it: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/273232598?t=40m58s
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Jun 15, 2018 04:28
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Doorknob Slobber posted:hopefully if you do this you include a way to fail and all your dudes are dead instead, also make sure you have more interaction with the team than just "here go kill monster" at the end of each investigation Hmm yeah, the idea of sending someone else to actually do the arrest is probably going to be a last resort, since kicking down the door of some monster's lair and handcuffing 'em is the obvious beat to end a case on, but if we do go that route I'll probably write the Monster SWAT team into the story and give you some grumpy buddies who spend the day kicking doors for your squad. I think the mugshots will probably do the trick though; if we make it beautiful hand-painted illustrations instead of 3d renders, I don't think it'd be at all unreasonable to make one per critter; thank you for the suggestion!
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Jun 15, 2018 05:21
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Omi no Kami posted:a strong, capable group of troublemakers who come back covered in blood and ectoplasm and go 'Yeah, so your plan basically worked- in retrospect I wish you'd told us to set it on fire before we threw the tennis balls at it".  We seem to be working on the same game but from opposite ends
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Jun 15, 2018 15:08
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Poniard posted:
Aww man, I hope we end up having focused on different things- I'd feel like a dummy if working on a game for this long ended up at the same place someone else had gotten to.
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Jun 15, 2018 18:31
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I just jokingly brought it up because I remember a while ago in the thread you mentioned you wanted to build a robust combat system but you seemed to have shifted focus on to the detective work. What I'm working on had a similar premise to your game but it heavily shifted focus to the combat systems and features the "group of troublemakers who come back covered in blood and ectoplasm". And by heavily shifted focus I mean the game went from having 3 buttons for attacks to pretty much everything on the controller except start, select, and clicking in the joysticks being used in combat.
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Jun 15, 2018 18:48
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Ruzihm posted:Has anyone posted this yet ? https://giant.gfycat.com/PastKeyAmericankestrel.webm
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Jun 15, 2018 19:26
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Poniard posted:I just jokingly brought it up because I remember a while ago in the thread you mentioned you wanted to build a robust combat system but you seemed to have shifted focus on to the detective work. What I'm working on had a similar premise to your game but it heavily shifted focus to the combat systems and features the "group of troublemakers who come back covered in blood and ectoplasm". And by heavily shifted focus I mean the game went from having 3 buttons for attacks to pretty much everything on the controller except start, select, and clicking in the joysticks being used in combat. Yeah, I was always slightly on the fence about combat because of how tough it is to get right, but what pushed me completely off of the fence and into the no-combat camp was playing Vampyr, which came out recently and had a decent story, genuinely neat social dynamics, and a terrible combat system that at least for me ruined the rest of the game. I don't trust myself to do a better job on third-person melee than an entire studio, so I figured de-emphasizing the heck out of it was the safe move. 
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Jun 15, 2018 20:34
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Discendo Vox posted:Has there ever been an informative LP? In which sense? I like to think mine are informative. As far as LPs go my current one is literally about throwing game-dev information at you.
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Jun 17, 2018 05:55
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Elentor posted:In which sense? I like to think mine are informative. As far as LPs go my current one is literally about throwing game-dev information at you.
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Jun 17, 2018 06:08
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I've got two covering Megaman X7, which for a megaman game is pretty drat close to unplayable
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Jun 17, 2018 07:39
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I watched an LP of Detroit recently, the group had three members so they each played one character exclusively. It ended up highlighting something interesting- like Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy the sections are set up so that you're often switching between two people who are at odds with each other in some way. The thing is, when each player only has an emotional attachment to their character, and makes decisions explicitly from the context of what's in that character's best interest, a lot of the overall story beats stopped gelling. (Well, stops gelling even more than quantic dream games usually do.)
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Jun 18, 2018 11:48
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I watched someone force themselves to complete Detroit after thinking it would be mostly hostage negotiation like in the very first part. He didn't care about what happened to anyone after that part and was basically pressing buttons (or putting the controller down) to try to get every character except Connor killed. It created a completely bungled narrative and there were no interesting points to be taken away from the game itself during that playthrough.
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Jun 18, 2018 15:29
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Detroit is one of those games where I'm really curious to know what happened behind the scenes. Parts of it are genuinely great (pretty much any time Connor and Hank are onscreen), and other bits are just as cringeworthy as prior QD games. I often wonder if the Connor stuff wasn't intended as a B-plot and assigned to a second writing team, because his bits are generally much more variable, pretty decently written, and feel like they almost could've come from a different game.
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Jun 18, 2018 16:01
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I think early on in the career of any game designer or dev you need to learn that more isn't always better. It's a lesson that QD is unable or unwilling to follow. Detroit would be a better game if it focused entirely on Connor and police investigations. Indigo Prophecy would be better if not for all that weird poo poo. And Heavy Rain would be way better if it went through a "Star Wars original trilogy" editing process
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Jun 19, 2018 04:15
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Heavy Rain has always been a subject of morbid fascination for me, because it is so close to being a legitimately great experience. This is probably personal taste, but I actually think it's the easiest of the QD games to improve: what you do is remove Madison as a character (because all of her scenes are sleazy and uncomfortable and don't advance the plot), explicitly start the game by going "Hi, you're about to experience a murder mystery from the perspective of three people- one of them is the killer", and move the Shelby reveal to hit around the 50% mark. He gets maybe 2-3 scenes where you think he's a legit private dick, then you realize he has to be the killer and the rest of his "investigation" makes you worried for Laura and kinda paranoid. That leaves a lot of problems, like the terrifying French gremlin children and the way Shelby turns into the punisher and murders a bunch of criminals in the end, but I think just those two changes (and associated edits to fix the fact that cage didn't understand how the unreliable narrator works) would instantly elevate it from a 6.5/10 to a 7.5 or even 8/10 for me.
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Jun 19, 2018 05:28
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shaaaawn also that entire thing he wrote about ellen page is creepy as gently caress, gently caress the guy
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Jun 19, 2018 05:32
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Zereth posted:I think Discendo Vox meant of Breath of Fire 3 specifically. Yeah, this. Sorry for the confusion! MithosKuu posted:I've got two covering Megaman X7, which for a megaman game is pretty drat close to unplayable OK, I'd love to see those. I have a sick fascination with the development and design of terrible, corporate, professionally developed games. Link?
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Jun 19, 2018 05:39
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Synthbuttrange posted:shaaaawn Beyond Two Souls is probably the fastest I've ever given up on one of those games; I think it was the... second or third scene, the one where she and willem dafoe go to the world's worst birthday party? I was really holding out hope, because Ellen Page is great and no matter how many times I get burned, every time they announce a new game it looks neat and I find myself going "Maybe this time they hired a good writing team and kept david cage under control". So I got a few scenes in, then the instant they turned the birthday party into a Madison-style creepy victimization scene I knew we were in for a dumpster fire.
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Jun 19, 2018 05:57
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Omi no Kami posted:"Maybe this time they hired a good writing team and kept david cage under control".
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Jun 19, 2018 06:06
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Zereth posted:Isn't David Cage the person who would be making those decisions in the first place at Quantic Dream? yeah. any decision. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNwceiRODRY
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Jun 19, 2018 06:11
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Zereth posted:Isn't David Cage the person who would be making those decisions in the first place at Quantic Dream? Apparently it's always been something of a tug-of-war. Like, I saw an interview with some executive producer after Beyond came out, the interviewer basically went "David Cage is great at coming up with captivating ideas, but there's never any substance behind them; why can't you guys hire a bunch of professional screenwriters to take his rough concept and clean up the crazy poo poo?", and the producer effectively replied "...we did that, what you saw of Beyond is what was left after we fought tooth and nail and got as much weird bullshit out of the project as possible." Speaking of which, you know how the Connor and Hank buddy cop bits were by far the best? Apparently the vast majority of Connor's best moments, like all the awkward winks and buddy cop banter, was improvised on set and got him yelled at.
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Jun 19, 2018 06:13
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Seems like it's a very "Star Wars Prequels" situation. A big ideas guy who gets successful and through his success takes over complete editorial control, even though the only reason he was even successful in the first place was because of how much work was done by other people to mine the gold out of the crap.
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Jun 19, 2018 06:19
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The Cheshire Cat posted:Seems like it's a very "Star Wars Prequels" situation. A big ideas guy who gets successful and through his success takes over complete editorial control, even though the only reason he was even successful in the first place was because of how much work was done by other people to mine the gold out of the crap. Except in this case there was no original Star Wars. The games were always bad.
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