frustration

The place to discuss all things Lugaru.
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kehaar
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Re: frustration

Post by kehaar » Tue Feb 02, 2010 5:52 pm

You put that spork down this instant, young man!!

I can't believe those are still legal. Who even knows what they are, anyway?

Of course your post was brilliant, they always are. And Excellent writing on the guest blog, too.

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Wilbefast
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Re: frustration

Post by Wilbefast » Thu Feb 04, 2010 5:46 am

Cheers kehaar - was hoping it would be a nice surprise, or at least not an unpleasant one: I got lots of hits on my blog too so hopefully that'll bootstrap it to a degree :)

Back on topic though - one of the great dangers when you're designing a game is making the difficulty cater to you. I'm not going to pretend that I'm wonderfully experienced but I did spend about 3 years working on Supersoldat on and off, so I was REALLY good at it. People were always telling me it was too hard but I didn't listen because to me it was easy - I kept wanting to make it more challenging!

The question is: how do you ease the player in? Tutorials are all very well but I think Portal and World of Goo do a better job by simply introducing mechanics slowly: in other words, by carefully managing the difficulty curve. I'd like to think Abomination was an improvement on Supersoldat because although it did away with tutorial messages entirely, players found it a lot less frustrating!

I think I'll write a post about this - probably for my blog and copy an Overgrowth-specific version to the SPF. People like loonylion would certainly appreciate this sort of things being discussed. What do you guys think?

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tokage
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Re: frustration

Post by tokage » Thu Feb 04, 2010 10:42 am

Wilbefast wrote: The question is: how do you ease the player in? Tutorials are all very well but I think Portal and World of Goo do a better job by simply introducing mechanics slowly: in other words, by carefully managing the difficulty curve. I'd like to think Abomination was an improvement on Supersoldat because although it did away with tutorial messages entirely, players found it a lot less frustrating!
You are right, that Portal and World of Goo do it right. There are a lot more I could name out of my head, Lemmings, for example, or The Incredible Machine. But all of those are puzzle games. Portal is an FPS, but especially in the beginning the mechanics are purely a puzzle game. Clear objective, limited environment and quasi deterministic solution. I don't think it is fair to compare games of this type to games were the story and the mechanics don't really allow this easing in as smoothly and convincingly. After all, you couldn't design a Lugaru level, where only wall kicks will kill the enemy, let alone fit it in the story in a convincing way.

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Wilbefast
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Re: frustration

Post by Wilbefast » Thu Feb 04, 2010 11:01 am

Very good point Tokage! I hadn't thought of that, and even Portal is a puzzle game when it comes down to it :?

Still, surely it should be possible to set up certain levels so that player is invited to practice a given skill. That level with the sleeping raiders for example - the implicit suggestion is that you use stealth. Hitman 2 for example: the earlier levels force you to do things a certain way - in one of them you pretty much HAVE to snipe the two targets from a given position (it's a different story when you come back to the level with all the weapons you've collected).

In a way all games can be seen as puzzles :? still, it's tricky for something like overgrowth.

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