21–30 of 108 posts
"If I could have my way, I'd design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I'd just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players pat…
> enter building
It seems like such a guide would almost be an inversion of some of the principles in this guide: in troll games, you tend to learn only by dying; the puzzles always require things you forgot in the previous room, and you can’t go back, so you must commit in-game suicide to try again; etc.
And yet, given that these guidelines are for the sake of making an entertaining game, how does inverting them then also make for an entertaining game?
Can troll games even be entertaining without the context of having played good games that do follow these rules? It seems like having a mental model of these sorts of guidelines from previous gameplay, allows the player to predict a sort of meta for how things like puzzles should work; and only in that context would an inversion of good design principles carry a comedic punchline.
I guess it’s similar to the question: can you create satire that makes sense without knowing what it’s satirizing?
I recently played Milk Maid of the Milkyway. It's a super cute indie title and it's an adventure game. Despite the beautiful dialog and wonderful music, it still had a lot of the issues that Grumpy Gamer touches on that killed the original genre.
You end up clicking everything on everything, looking up hints for objects you didn't realize were even clickable, and have stupid puzzles like putting a frog in a random hole and poking it with a needle so a guy oils a gear.
By contrast, Red Strings Club is an indie adventure game that gets this totally right. It's story telling with game mechanics and you don't need any hints or need to solve any insanely stupid puzzles to get through it.
Night in the Woods is another great Indie adventure game that's more about story. It doesn't have the same level of puzzles as other adventure games, but the puzzles all make sense. The game has a lot of mechanics that keep it going forward so you don't get stuck.
Life is Strange is another one that's more story driven. I had trouble with it initially. It's slow and was difficult for me to get into, but I'm glad I stuck with it as the story is really interesting and does some very bold stuff for a game. I haven't tried the 2nd one yet.
Telltale got a lot of this gene right I think. People complained how you don't really affect the story in Telltale games and that is true, but it is also very difficult to create those types of games with true multiple outcomes (especially if you have sequels planned. You only want 2 ~ 3 maximum outputs at the end. Mass Effect was good about being more complex; they had to plan for certain characters simply not being in future games -- but Bioware too ultimately collapsed the story down into very few possibilities by the end anyway).
Finally, Quantic Dream does a super good job of this (Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, Detroit). They've been PS4/Sony exclusives for a while, but I heard some of these games are making their way to PC. They are slow games you can't run through, but they don't require insane puzzles and keep moving. Detroit does a really good job with totally different narrative paths and endings, and they don't skimp on the writing, even on endings people would rarely get to.
I used to like them as a teenager and whenever I pick up a game now (I'm in my early 40's) I am just completely bored. Part of it I think is because it requires some form of mental engagement after a day's hard work?
"If I could have my way, I'd design games that were meant to be played in four to five hours. The games would be of the same scope that I currently design, I'd just remove the silly time-wasting puzzles and take the player for an intense ride. The experience they would leave with would be much more entertaining and a lot less frustrating. The games would still be challenging, but not at the expense of the players pat…
Reminds me of Life is Strange, which is a really good "adventure game" btw.
Interesting and amusing read. Of course Ron Gilbert is a well-known authority on Adventure Games, but the original Old Man Murray article is even better (and funnier). In case anyone hasn't read it yet: "Who Killed Adventure Games?" http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html (As an amusing aside, point-and-click adventure games were considered to be for "clever" gamers in 90s Spain and Latin America; gamers who moc…
Tangential question, does anyone have any tips for someone who has lost all interest in video games? I used to like them as a teenager and whenever I pick up a game now (I'm in my early 40's) I am just completely bored. Part of it I think is because it requires some form of mental engagement after a day's hard work?
The only ones that caught me surprised were Factorio and dota2 both of which I then ended up playing far too much. The first singleplayer, and the second with a group of RL friends.
Tangential question, does anyone have any tips for someone who has lost all interest in video games? I used to like them as a teenager and whenever I pick up a game now (I'm in my early 40's) I am just completely bored. Part of it I think is because it requires some form of mental engagement after a day's hard work?
I did like Infocom games though I didn't finish most of them.
Tangential question, does anyone have any tips for someone who has lost all interest in video games? I used to like them as a teenager and whenever I pick up a game now (I'm in my early 40's) I am just completely bored. Part of it I think is because it requires some form of mental engagement after a day's hard work?