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al-azad
May 28, 2009



Anyone have any experience with the major adventure game engines Wintermute, Visionaire, and Adventure Game Studio? AGS is a bit long in the tooth at this point, the last release of Wintermute was in 2010, and Visionaire is used for all of Daedalic's games but documentation in English is practically nonexistent!

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al-azad
May 28, 2009



To put things in perspective, Kentucky Route Zero made $8500 entirely on a promise and I'm still surprised it made it that high. A 2D Metroidvania from a group of relative no-names is not going to make 100k unless there are ingame screenshots, a kickass video, a complete breakdown on where the money is going in development, and the 8th son of an 8th son is born on the same day.

This isn't an attack on your character, this is reality. Your kickstarter will fail.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



ToxicSlurpee posted:

Well, no. You can only become a wizard as a seventh son of a seventh son. Sourcerers, who are sources of magic rather than practitioners of it, are seventh sons of seventh sons of seventh sons. They're like wizards squared. It's why wizards are required to be celibate. Bad poo poo tends to happen when you get a sourcerer on Discworld. Granted insane poo poo happens constantly on Discworld but y'know.

Though Pratchett also had some fun with that by having a wizard who was about to die mistakenly transfer his powers to a seventh daughter of a seventh son.

It's definitely 8. 8 is the magic number in Discworld.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



7 is the normal number but Pratchett likes 8 and so do I.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I was curious, out of the thousands of dollars I've dumped into Kickstarter and Shadowrun Returns is probably the most sparse description for anything I've ever backed. But that proposed by Jordan Weisman, the creator of Shadowrun himself so the pedigree sold the game.

The Valdis Story Kickstarter was the most impressive from a team of literally 2 people. They had a demo-able product, finished art, and a solidified concept. This is what a Kickstarter should look like from unknowns and I backed it immediately. If you're not at that stage then don't bother, you're wasting your time.

Count Uvula posted:

If I kickstart a game, should I start the kickstarter in October or wait until after the holidays?

I don't know any correlation between Kickstarter success and the date. I would say you should do things in the Fall or Spring because that's when video game news and interest is at its highest. You might get more visible coverage in the Summer but most people don't care about video game news in December or the middle of Summer.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Jul 25, 2014

al-azad
May 28, 2009



The Armikrog guys said they regretted having their Kickstarter run through E3. And the last minute push is huge (I think Armikrog got like 40% of its funding in the last 3 days) so you definitely want it to end in the first week of the month when people have money in their pockets.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



retro sexual posted:

Plenty of useful KS advice here. The goal amount is a funny one, because it seems if you are in any way realistic people back away from the 'crazy high' goal. I guess KS is a means to finish off a game (funding wise) rather than a way to fully fund your idea - unless you are really lucky.

It appears kickstarter will be coming to Ireland at some point (no official confirmation or timings yet), so I'll certainly have to think about it for Guild of Dungeoneering (or possibly next-game)

If by "fully fund your idea" you mean "go from literally nothing to something" then no, no one is going to give you money unless you're a video game celebrity.

Here's another example of a good Kickstarter: Jenny LeClue. I don't know who any of these people are but that pitch video is amazing and the art gives me the impression that they have more than just mockups and conceptual ideas on their plate.


Coldrice posted:

My kickstarter ended in December. This was a big mistake as I wasn't able to make many/any tax deductible purchases before the year was over. Taxes were not fun.


Moving on though, here are some gifs for fun. I'll probably post more tomorrow:

a few new ships





What was your Kickstarter and where can I see more Star Trek Squids?

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I'm pretty sure Gunpoint is also GM. Pretty much all of Cactus' games and Derek Yu's non commercial games are GM.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Nition posted:

The Game Script Wars of the 00's™ are all about VB-like syntax. I remember getting DarkBasic on a PC Gamer demo CD.

Man, I had a summer camp at a college where we learned DarkBasic and VisualBasic. Don't remember a single thing about it except playing Baldur's Gate 2 and Starcraft all loving day, it was pretty awesome.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



SystemLogoff posted:

Your reaction sprite could pop a little more. It looks a little too close to the walking animation.

(Can't wait to see more!)

Yeah, I'd reference Final Fantasy 4-6 for emotes. Whoever did the sprite work for those games was a master.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Doesn't RPG Maker VX let you export to XNA? I think that's what that Lisa game did.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



dizzywhip posted:

I find it hard to believe that anyone would stop playing a game because of such a tiny amount of screenshake. Outside of a few recent posts in this forum, I can't recall ever hearing anyone say that they dislike screenshake in general, and I think the real reason people hate on it here is because basically every 2D indie game uses it, not because it's a bad effect. It can be annoying and distracting if it's too exaggerated, which, to be fair, is the case in a fair number of indie games, but when it's done tastefully it adds a lot.

I also never understood why people hate head bob but I've read enough posts on the internet to know that it gives some people motion sickness. The strength of PC games is in the options and I think people would appreciate the option to turn off unnecessary visual features just like I immediately turn off screen blur in 3D games.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:

Ain't nothing to see here folks. Nothing suspicious about that cactus at all.



This should have been the final stage in Desert Golf. Just a giant phallus-cactus covering the hole.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Omi no Kami posted:

Has anyone done the planning for an adventure game before? I thought I'd write something fast and silly for fun, but even managing a planned 30-minute game with 4-5 decision nodes is becoming a nightmare to manage. I should probably be using visio, but I've resorted to index cards with colored string and meeple to track characters and decision points.

Point and click or text based? I love looking at Maniac Mansion's design notes which are penciled scrawls of each room, the items in the room, and how they fit with the rest of the map. You can also look up the original Zelda's design documents which were pixel-by-pixel hand drawn on graph paper.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



dupersaurus posted:

It's maybe third or fourth on the list of "games I would sit down and make if I ever had the time." Although I might pitch it to the boss.

Unrelated: are there any turn-based fighting games out there? Fighting like Street Fighter or Smash Bros, but where you take turns doing your moves?

The problem with what you're suggesting is that taking away the real time nature of a fighting game leaves you with an entirely different genre? There's no need for complex button inputs or frame counting because every decision happens on your time.

Are you asking for a game where players enter moves in secret and they're executed simultaneously? Probably the closest thing I can think of is Dragon Seeds. It's a turn based game with simultaneous actions. You can move forward and back or attack with a variety of specials. Each special has a range and is strong/weak against another type of attack. So you can move out of range of your opponent as they're attacking you or predict their move and counter it with another. It's probably the closest you'll get to a "Street Fighter but turn based."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjO1ff5a9PM

Also take a look at Yomi. It's a turn based board game that attempts to distill the fighting game genre into card based battling. Some people think it works remarkably well, others don't.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



There's a game series called Combat Mission which is a turn based strategy game but your orders are carried out in 60 second real time increments. So you're getting a Football style plan-and-execute game. I think that could work as a fighting game if you slowed down the clock to something like 5-10 seconds.

Again, making it turn based seems to defeat the point of fighting games. Input accuracy is superfluous if I'm under no pressure fron my opponent. I'm not the biggest fan of fighting games but they at least need a way to predict and counter your opponent. Take away the guessing game from a fighter and you may as well just have a menu driven input.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



you can at least say you have the coolest sandbox for a game you'll never finish.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



There is a little swoosh but it's not very prominent. I think it would visually look better if the swoosh was the same color as the shield. I think in animation it's called a smear.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Good luck with that. I love interactive fiction but there are so few people doing anything with it.

You might want to check out Inform 7 which was designed to handle issues like that. You can tell the program that any kind of interactivity, like touching/activating/using/turning on the lamp all perform the same intended action.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Jo posted:

Truth be told I've played Inform7 games a good bit, but even the ones which were supposed to be open always felt overly restricted. *cough*Galatea*cough*

It's something the creator has to be conscious about. Inform 7 includes a bunch of generic responses for interacting with objects outside of you explicit instructions but you can write scripts that cover synonyms that people might use.

It's always easier to just give the player a list of approved verbs that apply to everything. If I "use" the door I obviously want to open it just like "use" the lamp means turn it on.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



That sounds great in theory and I wish you the best of luck. There was that one game (can't remember the name, someone should fill me in) that was about talking to a couple in the middle of a break up. The text parser and characters were designed to recognize naturally language. It was very rough stuff but if you haven't played it (again, apologize for forgetting the name) you should.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Pi Mu Rho posted:

I upgraded Dreadnaughts to use Unity 5, no major dramas aside from it not liking some older materials.
Added the basis for beam weapons - not working 100% yet, they're supposed to visibly charge up while you're in range and then fire after x seconds. I also wrote some very rudimentary code for the enemy fighter AI - it tracks you down and avoids crashing into you.
I'm determined to get this finished, it's actually fun.

Is Dreadnaughts a working title because there's Dreadnought coming out and Deadnaut both on Steam.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Pi Mu Rho posted:

It's been called Dreadnaughts since I first started on it in 2011 or so. I'm not changing it.

Just letting you know you're going to have to do a lot to distinguish it from these other titles, especially Dreadnought which is coming from the Spec Ops developer and is a pretty popular title right now.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



JossiRossi posted:

To add, if the game were better known it would be more important to keep the name, in a way it is fortunate that it's been kind of slow burn because you can still pick a new name without it being a big hit to your profile. It sucks, because it IS a good name, but unfortunately others thought so too and you don't want to enter the fray as 2 other games with almost identical names which will already be released by the time yours is.

There's also the chance someone hits you with a trademark dispute as happened to Double Fine's Trenched. The developers of Matador had to change the name and it ended up working in their favor because Brigador was more unique than Matador which made their game easily searchable.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Personally I think it says a lot about the advertising for their game when I didn't hear about it and retro pixel games are kind of my jam. Like I follow a dozen pixel/video game art blogs that do nothing but showcase that stuff and I track the pixel graphics tag and this is the first time I'm hearing about the game. I might even purchase it.

Paniolo posted:

I think there are two ways to be successful as an indie developer.

The first is to find an underserved niche with a fanatic audience, find a pace where you can regularly churn out releases, and build a reliable customer base.

The second is to innovate - but it's not enough to be new, you also have to be good. Being the first to market with an idea doesn't make you breakout, being the first to execute it correct and with a reasonable amount of polish does. So if you don't have a killer idea, you could try to find a relatively unknown game that has a great concept but executes it poorly and be the first to do it well.

Third, network like hell with people who can get your product in front of your audience. Five Nights at Freddies probably would have gone completely ignored if it weren't for every single youtube personality rushing to play it. The third game wasn't even commercially available and all the big youtube names were rushing to post videos of the demo. Shovel Knight had a pretty detailed post mortem filled with doom and gloom leading up to their commercial release but the composer of the game is friends with Egoraptor who did a Game Grumps video a couple days before their kickstarter ended.

So yeah, make friends with people. Let more popular people sell your work. Don't be jerks like those Paranautical Activity guys.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Pi Mu Rho posted:

I changed it. I'm not happy about it, but I changed it.

I was considering <Something>: Dreadnaughts, as if it were one in a potential series of games (if I live that long).

But then, while thinking of alternate names (during which I cleverly put 'Astro' and 'naught' together before realising how stupid I am) I came up with: Leviathans
So now I have to remake the logo etc. Sigh.

Well...



And there's a popular board game with the exact same name.

You don't have a major space combat game to compete over with that name but in terms of brand recognition it's not exactly fresh.

Pi Mu Rho posted:

Yes. It was very different from Dreadnought as well. There comes a point where I have to say 'gently caress it' and plant my flag.

That's fine, you do you, but an iconic name means better visibility. You've got Leviathans the board game, Leviathans the Supernatural TV show monsters, and Leviathan the biblical creature to compete over in searching demographics.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 10, 2015

al-azad
May 28, 2009



ErIog posted:

Did you, by any chance, consult a nautical dictionary? I bet there's some real obscure crazy word that would be perfect for your title buried somewhere in here:
http://www.seatalk.info/

You can always add a subtitle if you think it'll be too crazy for people to understand what kind of game it is.

Some of my favorite nautical terms that would make great game names: Run Afoul, Heave Out, Broadside, and Abyssal Plain.

Here's a free name for you: Antares Watch. A spin on anchor watch (people watching the ship at anchor) and Antares, the bright red star of Scorpio also called the heart of the scorpion which is loving metal in itself.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Shalinor posted:

If you make it possible to totally screw the case up, you'll get players that aren't frustrated with the gameplay, but get angry at you for stumbling into a bad ending they had no idea was coming.

If you make it impossible to totally screw the case up but it involves anything resembling detective work (ie. they really have to pay attention to context), you'll get players annoyed at that too.

The "easy" way out involves heavily tutorializing it and making it heavily linear, to the point where it's impossible to miss anything. LA Noire did things that way for a reason. The further you stray from that, the more you'll end up in "niche cool game with vocal confused people" territory.

My target would be to try and make screwing the cases up fun. Make it both not a bad ending, and something that players feel ok with / don't make players immediately assume that's the bad ending and avoid it. Turn the "good" ending into a completionist goal. I think somewhere in there is a niche-but-still-fun sweet spot that'll make you distinct. But I don't think we personally found it, so I don't know the odds of you finding it either.

I thought the best scene in L.A. Noire is when you have to choose between two suspects in a murder case. Both characters have alibis that are equally shaky. It doesn't matter which one you pick and the game doesn't confirm if you made the right choice or not. It's a completely linear choice in that you have to make it to continue the game but the choice is entirely the players. This is something Telltale excelled at with The Walking Dead. Some people criticized it for your choices not meaning anything but it wasn't a story driven game like Alpha Protocol, it was a character driven game. Your choices influenced your perception of the characters, not the order of events.

So I think there's some importance in making every choice the player makes a "right" choice in the end. L.A. Noire was really clumsy in its script and execution but the actual case work was its strongest element. Getting all the right answers felt great. Getting all the wrong answers but still fumbling through the case was hilarious. Whether the player succeeded or failed they enjoyed themselves (and failing at L.A. Noire produces the funniest interrogations).


Omi no Kami posted:

but that opens up the possibly to completely skip the central mechanic of the game if you don't feel like doing it.

I think it's important to give the player that choice. Look at Murdered: Soul Suspect if you want an example of a game that poorly handles investigations. It's a game that tells you exactly how much evidence there is and what you need to find before being able to move on. The actual investigative work is unsatisfyiing as a result.

Again, let every choice be a "right" one but feel free to pull at the player's heartstrings. Did they hastily put away an innocent person out of pressure to close the case? Drive that point home. But don't invalidate the player's choice and don't invalidate the effort (or lack thereof) they put in to get that far. If they care they'll give it a second shot. If not they'll push on ahead.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



dupersaurus posted:

So if you have a bunch of stats, and you need an algorithm to get yes/no answers with them, how do you go about starting to figure it out? I know tabletop has a number of canonical systems that people use and riff all over... should I pretty much learn how D&D (or <insert your favorite system>) works at a systems level and work from there, or is there a more generic approach to start from?

What are you trying to figure out exactly? Most tabletop RPG systems are about rolling dice (usually d6, d10, or d20) and trying to achieve a target number. Modifiers can raise/lower this target number.

I don't know why you would need a yes/no value unless you were checking for a threshold.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



dupersaurus posted:

Messing with a sports idea, so you've got one guy going for a ball, and an optional opponent either going for the ball or going for the guy. The ball is either caught or not (or caught by one guy or the other); the calculation deals with stuff like a catching skill, degree of difficulty of the catch, defender skill, etc. The only systems experience I have like this is from a MUSH awhile back that used FUDGE, which did a lot of yes-or-no actions, but really, screw FUDGE. So some basic reading might be the way to go.

Figuring out the scale of stats is probably another question entirely, but right now I'm assuming 0-100.

Hmm, I don't know what version of FUDGE you guys were running as FUDGE is very straightforward. It uses four 6-sided dice that generate either +1, -1, or 0 resulting in a roll between -4 to +4. You would need to beat a target number to succeed. There's a spinoff called FATE that relies on hand-written attributes called "aspects" which are far more free form and narrative than would fit cleanly into a video game role-playing engine.

But to answer your question, that type of scenario would be called an "opposed contest" in most RPGs. The difficulty of the catch is the target number (TN) that the two characters are trying to beat with their catching skill. There's usually a "degree of success" (DoS) to determine how well you succeed so even if both characters beat the TN the one with the higher DoS would catch the ball. If they both fail they drop the ball. If they both have an equal score then you could have another opposed contest like "grappling" or something to see who snatches the ball.

Dungeons & Dragons is a very static game. In most scenarios you're dealing with an unchanging number, like the difficulty to hit an opponent is the same every time unless modified somehow. D&D uses a d20 which results in an even bell curve distribution and every +1 bonus is basically 5% chance of success.

Other games based on large dice pools like World of Darkness are about constant opposition. For example you roll to attack and your defender rolls to dodge/defend. In these games you're counting "hits" so 5-6 on a d6 is a hit. A TN 2 would require 2 or more hits. As a result there's more of a sharp increase in failures as a result of higher TNs. So in D&D each increase in the TN is a 5% difficulty bump. But having 1 d6 against a TN of 1 would be a 2/6 chance of success but having 2d6 against a TN of 2 is less than half of that.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Mar 13, 2015

al-azad
May 28, 2009



On the subject of RPGs and probability, keep in mind that people hate random seeds and really obvious back and forth number juggling. Knowing you have a 90% chance to hit and missing twice in a row is possible and nothing will piss off gamers more. If you're going with a heavy tabletop system you need to either make everything opaque to the point where the player knows 100% of the information or totally transparent.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



Somfin posted:

Players have a visceral gut-hatred of outright missing a target, particularly in single-player games. Which is fair, because outright missing a target combines three things all players hate.

1) The player's action has no impact on the gameworld, and may have been a waste of something precious.

2) The player's action failed and it was their own fault- if they'd done something else, it might have worked.

3) The player's failure was not something they could prevent through better play.

Torchlight 2 did a great job by turning 'miss' into 'fumble' and making the launched attack still do one quarter of its damage and apply all status effects as normal- and that fumble chance could be mitigated through stat investment. You still slam the attack button because no matter what, you're going to do something, even if the attack is the 'failure' version.

For their Star Wars game Fantasy Flight implemented a similar system with their advantage dice. You can fail but achieve some level of success (like missing an attack but the enemy drops their guard dodging it) or succeed miserably (you open the locked door but you tools blow up). Having played tabletop games for 20+ years I'm with you there, I-roll-you-roll binary combat is frustrating as hell. Compound that in a video game since you don't have a human player to fudge the numbers or scale combat.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



The original XCOM is worth dissecting as it used this simulated ballistics system. Instead of a binary hit/miss it would gauge your character's skill and modify the trajectory of the projectile based on it. So even if your dude sucked rear end at shooting it was basically impossible to miss point blank and larger targets were easier to hit than smaller ones.

And of course this leads to hilarious blunders like your bullet passing over the enemy's shoulder to strike your ally in the head or something.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



And then you have bullshit Warhammer 40K rules where you roll to see if your attack hits, roll to see if your weapon pierces the enemy's armor, then your opponent rolls to see if they shrug off the damage.

Don't study Warhammer rules if you're designing a game, thanks.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



ToxicSlurpee posted:

Or a single Thin Man plinks the rookie for one point of damage who promptly panics and guns down your severely injured star sniper which causes the heavy to panic which then causes the rest of the squad to panic. One of them runs two squares into cover but this activates a pod of mutons who proceed to stomp your squad into paste.

...

Not that I've had that exact scenario happen more than once.

This is fine. It's improbable but possible and when it happens you just deal with it. The real issue with Enemy Unknown is...


TooMuchAbstraction posted:

How do you mean made-up? The game will happily give you a breakdown of exactly how your chance-to-hit is determined (there's a little icon you can click on when aiming at a target). You get bonuses for flanking, or penalties if the unit is in half or full cover, and some units are just naturally harder to hit (e.g. floaters) which manifests as a blanket aim penalty. And there's stuff like scopes, combat drugs, aim penalties on the sniper's snapshot, the Sectoid's psychic buff spell, etc.; all that will appear on the sheet if you look.

Enemy Unknown's RNG is based on a seed dynamically generated by your actions and it doesn't reset when you reload. Basically you can repeat the same action and get the same result every single time but if you reload and change a single thing, even if it's reloading before moving instead of after, you'll get a different result. Because your actions are predetermined your attributes end up feeling like an illusion. You can fail multiple times despite high probability and it's like a kick in the dick.

I'm pretty sure they implemented this in order to cut back on save scumming but that's what iron man mode is for. The game gives the option to eliminate save scumming but subsequently punishes save scumming. People hated the RNG so much that the Second Wave patch/DLC unlocks "save scumming" mode which resets the seed on a reload.

Zaphod42 posted:

Why is it infuriating? It just means that the game is more based on strategy than repetition. Some things are still random so they're slightly unpredictable, but if a certain strategy fails, doing the same thing over again and just hoping the RNG works for you this time is weaksauce. You should actually try doing something different.

Although I guess that doesn't really work if you savescum every turn, but... don't do that? XCOM is about losing some mans here and there :cheeky:

Anything on a computer isn't truly random anyways :colbert:

It's not actually encouraging you to make a different strategy, though. You can literally move 2 steps instead of 3 and result in a seed package that obliterates the enemy in one shot and results in your entire team not getting hit. Or you could move 4 steps, miss, and everyone dies in a horrific scenario. Your attributes and equipment mean nothing when the seed is based on your actions.

On the hilarious side, you could basically relive Edge of Tomorrow/Groundhog Day by reloading your saves every time. A team of naked rookies could take down an enemy base or something. That shouldn't happen under any circumstances but it does because the seed package only cares about your actions.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Mar 13, 2015

al-azad
May 28, 2009



TooMuchAbstraction posted:

Um, you have a fundamental misunderstanding somewhere in there. I think the problem is that you're expecting a deterministic state machine (i.e. a computer) to come up with different results given the same inputs, which is only going to happen if a cosmic ray strikes your computer in the midst of computations (or some similar external factor interferes). So the RNG depends on past events. So what?

Yes? Other games do it. The whole point of random probability is to generate different results using the same actions. I know computers can't actually be random but other strategy games have worked just fine simulating random probability without generating seed packages from player input. The developers realized this and patched in new options to make the game feel more randomized.

But there are several reasons beyond the RNG why EU is a poorly designed game. A large part of the strategy is understanding how the engine handles vision and movement because enemies always have an advantage over you. The other reason is that there are no mitigating factors to its mechanics. We just discussed how the original XCOM has a two-step process to determining hits but EU is very binary in its results. The most popular mod Long War adds in damage reduction which actually gives a tangible benefit to using cover.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 00:56 on Mar 14, 2015

al-azad
May 28, 2009



RoboCicero posted:

But...the game is still randomized :confused:. You have a 75% of landing that hit when the game makes that calculation, it's just that you 'reroll' by taking forcing the game to recalculate rather than when you take the shot. In either case you're just choosing at which point the game makes the roll.

e: Like I see what the designers were trying to do in that they were trying to discourage savescumming because if the seed reset every time you reloaded the game you might as well just make that 75% of landing a hit a 100% chance 'when it counts' because players would just reload if they needed that shot to land. It's not a solution that worked (and Ironman mode is the better solution to 'stop savescumming') but I don't personally see how it changes how random the result was.

Because you can reload to force your opponent to gently caress up instead. Their anti-scumming method is ironically more exploitable in your favor.

I don't know if it was there from day 1 or if it was patched in but EU does have a streak breaker. So the more you miss the greater the chance your next attack hits to the point where you'll hit with 100% accuracy after 3-4 misses even if the game says you have 1% chance to hit.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Mar 14, 2015

al-azad
May 28, 2009



I think people are fine with math and fine with probability it's just that these things have a psychological effect. A surprise factor I guess, I don't know if there's a legitimate term for it. You tell me I have a 99% chance to succeed and I fail 3 times in a row it hurts. If we made that test a million times I wouldn't feel bad about it but instead I fail when it counts and it hurts more as a result.

I never understood why roleplaying groups would suggest harsher critical hit/fumble rules because those things punish the players more than their opponents. Because maybe you get that auto-kill against an enemy but they're only relevant for 1 battle while you're relevant for 100. You're only compounding the chances of things going bad for your character, not your opponents.

al-azad
May 28, 2009



TooMuchAbstraction posted:

So what's the takeaway here, aside from that some of us hate XCOM? :v:

Be as transparent as possible and don't waste the player's time.

And throw them a bone once in a while because their failure is personal. Talking about FTL, it's essentially a series of die rolls made over an extended period of time. Eventually you're going to fail when it really counts and that sucks whether it's "fair" or not.

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al-azad
May 28, 2009



the wildest turkey posted:

Legitimately curious: what, in your opinion, is the alternative? I just feel like if you're playing a game where your chance to succeed is based on a die roll, then you can't complain when the die doesn't roll your way.

Predictable patterns. One of the best strategies against non-drones involves setting fires with lasers or bombs because the AI prioritizes certain systems over others.

The best non-skill based roguelikes revolve around enemy recognition and understanding AI routines. You can't predict the RNG but you can predict how the game will react to you.

Vermain posted:

Having methods to mitigate bad rolls (preferably tied to a resource) is one of the better options, especially if you've got very all-or-nothing outcomes for certain rolls. 4E D&D, for example, has numerous once-per-fight (and sometimes once-per-day) powers that give you rerolls or provide boosts to a specific roll if you happen to fail it, which makes the relatively binary nature of combat and skill checks less aggravating (since you have ways, limited though they are, to overcome bad rolls at critical times).

The greatest thing to happen to D&D in the 40 something year history of the game is give you a second chance at save-or-die rolls. There is nothing worse than your level 15 character being disintegrated in the first round because you rolled a 1 on your save.

al-azad fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Mar 14, 2015

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