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The elegance of movement in Silksong

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Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#241

Post by diggan »

ashleyn wrote: post #238
zimpenfish wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you just have to get lucky. You can definitely learn and not have to rely on luck - watch a video of someone good playing a bullet hell shooter[0] and getting a perfect score with no hits. There is not a world that exists in which you could accomplish that with luck. [0] Touhou is probably the definitive example here. Something like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AY7QEEnSGVU

I'm sure it isn't luck but at the same time I watch these things and genuinely don't understand how they do it. Particularly the whole thing of seeing and reacting that quick. It reminds me of how bad I am with rhythm games. I can't even get through Easy on DDR because the arrows move too fast. It's like I can't read them and react quick enough. Typically I do much better with games where the point isn't to see, proc…

I think you can train it, at least that's what I did with Stepmania in the early 2000s. I was watching in awe how people could manage to get perfect scores when I could hardly see the steps before they were at the bottom of the screen.

Eventually I learned to stop looking at the individual entities, and just "stare in the middle" kind of, and you stop "looking" and start sensing in a way, without looking directly at them. They might just flash by, but it's enough for your brain to be able to at least figure out what right finger to use.

Then it's just a bunch of training :) I think it's fairly established that "reaction time" is something you can train, you just need to always be at the limit and slowly make it faster and faster. Same with speed-reading/listening I think.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#242

Post by zahlman »

jiggawatts wrote: post #135
fishtoaster wrote: post #4

> Selling to businesses is very easy. You go to a business and you say "hey, you like making money?" And the business will say "why yes, I do like making money" and you will say "great, I can help you make more money. This is so wrong it hurts. You'd be amazed at how often "I will save you $X, guaranteed, or your money back" is a non-starter when selling to companies. I've spent a career very slowly gaining respect f…

I've been watching this process with a keen eye as a technical consultant, and one thing I've learnt is that naive models of large organisations as Profit=Revenue-Costs is totally inadequate for enterprise sales. Yes, it is true that saving money anywhere will improve profits, but you can only sell that to an individual who's personal KPI needles move because of this! If the cost is in dept X but the profit is record…

... Couldn't companies gain a competitive edge by fixing their internal structures and aligning the KPI needles?

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#243

Post by diggan »

spacebuffer wrote: post #236
echelon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc. The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere. What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises. How did…

8 Years ago an indie studio released Hollow Knight, and it became a critically acclaimed game. ~ a year later the team announced a DLC called silksong but silksong grew so much that they decided to turn it to a full sequel. The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme

> The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme

Tiny correction (AFAIK): It was never really "delays" as there was no release date until ~3 weeks ago, when they announced it'd be released in a month. But yeah, development time was long.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#244

Post by rkomorn »

boppo1 wrote: post #181
rkomorn wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older I get the more I find boss fights off putting. I get literally zero satisfaction out of learning whatever pattern you have to learn to perform whatever correct action, at the correct time, you need to defeat a particular boss. It's just a time consuming chore. Edit: the "boss" escape sequences in the Ori games were also entirely frustrating and and unsatisfying to me.

I felt this way two days & 2 hours of playtime ago. Now I'm a bit better with the controls, beat lace & am using hunter's march to farm rosaries. I think I'd be bored if it were easier. I don't want to 'press A to win'.

> I don't want to 'press A to win'.

I get that! (Edit: I mean this enthusiastically, like, I relate :) )

I think the point is, for me (and it looks like some others in the thread), beating bosses doesn't feel like "winning", it feels like completing a chore.

For me, for example, the part that feels like winning (in games in general) is stuff like investing the time to travel through all the areas of a game, completing many if not all the side quests, grinding to get to max level and/or earning all the best equipment, etc.

But learning the specific way to beat this one boss (often in a way that doesn't matter for the rest of the game because it's based on some timing or animation specific to that boss)? Yeah, that's a chore.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#245

Post by slightwinder »

eviks wrote: post #224
slightwinder wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative for what exactly?

which game has the most elegant movement system (as a better alternative)?

First Hollow Knight is already better in that aspect, even though animation is less smooth IIRC. Personally, I prefer the Ori-Games in terms of movements, especially the second game.

But gaming is big, and inside as also outside the genre there are many games with great movement and controls. It depends on how much of an alternative you really want, just the movement, or the whole game..

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#246

Post by zahlman »

kevinwang wrote: post #34

I remember reading an essay (probably from here?) about how a great way to build a game is to build it around a "toy" -- something that is pleasurable to simply interact with, even without objectives. I can't find it anymore -- the closest I can find is https://medium.com/@keerthiko/toys-to-games-25d35b40425d but I don't think it was that, although it's based on the book "The Art Of Game Design" which may have been a…

This is interesting to me because I separately came up with the "toy" idea in trying to figure out for myself exactly what a "game" is, anyway. Many popular things marketed as "games" really are toys by this standard, in the sense that you have to build your own win conditions around them. I'm thinking here of pretty much the entire simulation genre, as well as even very niche and complex things like Dwarf Fortress.

I'm sure many others have separately come up with this idea, too.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#247

Post by OskarS »

mjr00 wrote: post #237
echelon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea what this game is, and I'm pretty insulated from gaming news, culture, etc. The amount that this name, franchise, or whatever it is has been showing up on my feed is absurd. Reddit, YouTube, Google news, Hacker News. It's everywhere. What the heck is Silksong and why is it saturating the attention sphere? It's on my feed more than Trump and Ukraine and geopolitics and the latest AI fundraises. How did…

It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It had a long seven-year development cycle, with "Silksong release announcement at (upcoming event)" becoming a meme, leaving people wondering if it would ever come out. Last month the developers randomly dropped a release trailer with "by the way it's coming out in 3 weeks". It came out and has been a hot topic because…

> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time.

I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.

Also, and this is just my personal opinion, but I'm about a dozen hours into it, and so far I haven't found it THAT much harder than the original. Maybe it's because I've played Hollow Knight and gotten used to the controls by now, but I remember struggling a lot with lots of parts of Hollow Knight, about as much as I'm struggling with Silksong. Enough people have been saying it so I suspect I might just be misremembering.

Excellent game in general, by the way, really enjoying Silksong so far.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#249

Post by Groxx »

diggan wrote: post #243
spacebuffer wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

8 Years ago an indie studio released Hollow Knight, and it became a critically acclaimed game. ~ a year later the team announced a DLC called silksong but silksong grew so much that they decided to turn it to a full sequel. The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme

> The game went through so much delays that it's release became sort of a meme Tiny correction (AFAIK): It was never really "delays" as there was no release date until ~3 weeks ago, when they announced it'd be released in a month. But yeah, development time was long.

it has been a rockier history than that - it was playable at E3 in 2019, and there have been multiple teased (but not specific) release dates along the way. e.g. the Wikipedia has some of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollow_Knight:_Silksong

to be clear: I'm not complaining at all, I'd much rather have a good very-delayed sequel than a bad one. but the "it's releasing again" -> "it's delayed again" memes do have reasonable origins.

Re: The elegance of movement in Silksong

#250

Post by mjr00 »

OskarS wrote: post #247
mjr00 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. It had a long seven-year development cycle, with "Silksong release announcement at (upcoming event)" becoming a meme, leaving people wondering if it would ever come out. Last month the developers randomly dropped a release trailer with "by the way it's coming out in 3 weeks". It came out and has been a hot topic because…

> It's the sequel to a game (Hollow Knight) which is widely regarded as one of the best of all time. I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in its genre (the awkwardly named group of "metroidvanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Su…

> I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World.

You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered...

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