Let's have a game design thread, post any and all design ideas, questions, thoughts, takes etc
To start the thread off, I was thinking about should content ever be a reward for failure?
Some games hide quests or areas behind the player failing what's presented as a regular challenge, for example a secret level hidden in a pitfall that looks just like any you're meant to jump over, or a quest you can only get from a doctor character once you die, that you'll never see if you play well and never fail. Can rewarding failure be called good game design?
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There should be more games with kangaroos
Fake walls that look exactly like normal walls should be illegal
Rewarding failure should be encouraged even. I feel like darksoul 1 does it often by giving you access to area you wouldn't have explored when falling, or hitting random walls or random npc by accident.
I also think of Bloodborne, getting killed by the bagmen takes you to Yharghul early
when does falling help you?
How do you make open-world, or "directionless" games more engaging?
I hate overly-linear, story-heavy games, but on the other end of the scale, you just end up with boring free-roam games.
I was thinking have a bit at the start of the game that kickstarts the story for you, and gives you your main objective (e.g. "I need you to find the 9 Stones of Life to stop Grobolbort the Fifth from destroying the world, off you go."), and the game keeps track of it somehow, but the rest of the game plays exactly the same as any other open-world game. That way, the game doesn't feel so directionless and there is a clear motive to keep playing, but you don't have to follow a set path.
Any other ideas?
TL;DR: Make a world worth exploring.
Separate the world into sections and focus on filling out those sections.
Is it a lively city? Fill it with people and decorations, make it look lived-in. Is it a barren wasteland? Add ruins, very few NPCs or enemies alike, lots of corpses.
A ridiculously deep, huge lake? Tiny islands dotting it with a few wild passive creatures (carnivorous mobs can't survive in such small ecosystems), ruins poking out of the water, and so on.
Once each part of the world feels worth exploring, you gotta tape them together into a cohesive world. Effectively moving the game from something like Ratchet & Clank to Breath of the Wild, from enclosed medium-sized spaces to one huge interconnected world. This part can be a serious pain in the ass.
i was with you until you cited botw as an example of a good open world. that mpa is the opposite of "worth exploring". all it does is replace load screens as what you look at between dungeons
You are right in that regard. It's a secondary comparison rather than a direct one.
I just referenced two games that would be recognizable. There are so few good open worlds that I can't think of any off the top of my head, sorry.
im genuinely not sure theres been a game to do it well.
racing games, i guess. and if you count shit like minecraft.
but in terms of what people mean when they talk about open world, like "adventure" games, even the best ones have been flawed in some way.
outer wilds maybe? i still think that game sufferred from feeling too empty, but i dont think the freedom aspect would have worked otherwise, so its a tradeoff. if you put the DLC in a vacuum, does it count as open world? because it was fricking great
weirdly enough, as far as recent examples go, i actually liked pokemon's, for the initial playthrough. filling the world with pokemon was a decent way to not make it feel empty. but then as soon as youve caught those pokemon, that field is now just barren and pointless.
I think Outer Wilds had an excellent balance between it's open-ness and its goals. Leaning into "the vast emptiness of space" helped in that regard.
But yeah, I don't think there's an absolute master-class open world that works. It's either a bit weak in some regard or procedurally-generated, which is weak in that it has no consistency and is just randomly mashed together.
i think the space in outer wilds was fine, though i did get annoyed flying between planets towards the end
its the planets themselves where i really felt le open world meme. theyre 90% bempty, barrent surface, and a handful of points of interest that are the only things on the entire planet. it just felt like a botw map wrapped around a sphere, and then repeat that a few times to make a solar system. i know making 8 full-sized, fully populated planets would have been a lot, but even just some scenery or something would have helped
any and all bloat added to it would make parsing the actual relevant information annoying
Yeah, it's a rock and a hard place. I think just natural scenery could have been good though, like some nice views. Even just that would have made it feel like more of an actual place than just "all of this only exists for me to fly to the locations I need information from"
agreed, i think the issue is that most of the relevant shit has you go underground or deep into a planet and the aesthetics are more somber and less fantastical. the most interesting surface locations are the twins' sand dynamics and brittle hollow falling apart.
Yeah, and even those are utterly barren aside from the Designated Info Locations™. Even timber hearth, the one planet that sustains life, looks like a Minecraft superflat world outside of the one village and the two other POIs. I agree it makes sense they didn't want to muddy the waters, but making the planet surfaces anything other than literal flat barren nothingness would've gone a long way
Bully is the best open world game ever but it's a unique use case and not really something you can apply to just any open world game as a template
you are just describing breath of the wild.
>dur walking around this gigantic open world is super boring
thats because
>your map is too big
>your map has too much empty space
>you made traversal boring. (nobody wants to hold w on a horse for 5 minutes or glide for the 300th time)
>your map is too big
>your content is concentrated in "points of interest" instead of being more organic or sprawling into the overworld.
>your map IS TOO FRICKING BIG!!! CUT DOWN ON SOME OF THAT DEAD SPACE YOU IDIOT DEVS!!! NOBODY CARES IF ITS 10 SQUARE MILES OF COPYPASTED TRASH!!!!
I think the best solution is to have a linear story / sequence of events that takes places in open levels. I don’t mind linearity in the story, it’s restrictive linear levels that ruin games for me.
>How do you make open-world, or "directionless" games more engaging?
You don't have to. People eat that shit up
you could fill an open world just with endless shitty loot that doesn't even do anything but is crafting material and people will call it GOTY
if you have the money to make an open world game you don't have to make it engaging
The most hours I've put into a game like this would probably be mount and blade. That game does a great job of giving the player the illusion of an emergent story, even though every playthrough essentially boils down to a medieval madlib when you stop to think about it. Travelling the map is very boring on the surface, but theres a special harmony between the visceral combat and the monotony of moving across the world. Theres something satisfying about watching your horse crawl across the screen to your next battle or merchandise delivery and considering all the opportunities for conquest as you see different warbands pass by and fiefs fall to different factions in every corner of the map while the great soundtrack plays. Whereas with something like assassin's creed, I'll often finish a quest and wish the game would just take me to a level select screen instead of making me figure out which boring npc to report to. An open world should be part of the gameplay, not just fancy packaging for it.
Oh shit, you mean Grobolbort, the wall of gremalding?
That's basically Ultima 4. You know your objective from the start and can do things in any order you want. Literally a 40 year old boomer game shits all over modern open world shit.
Dead Rising accomplishes it very well
>Moving from Point A to B is consistently engaging, because finding a way to move through a horde of zombies is inherently interesting
>The generic overworld enemies are consistently changing, with nighttime leading to bigger and more aggresive hordes, day 2 introducing the cultists, and day 3 introducing the military
>The Courtyard provides an interesting dilemma, offering you a shortcut at the risk of having to evade/kill the Convicts
>The gunshop provides a similar dilemma if you want a consistent source of guns that doesn't require a minute of parkour
>There's no decision matrix of "buy shit or gather crafting materials to make shit" that always winds up insanely lopsided, there's only scrounging for what you can find, with a natural pattern such as going to the sports store if you want skateboards and baseball bats, or going to the food court or supermarket if you need healing
The ever-present clock synergizes well with all of these to create a feeling where a perfect run feels like you're repeatedly planning out tightly-routed shopping trips in between saves, but these are still just overall good ideas.
I can't believe nobody has mentioned this but consider this post a WARNING: Prolonged exposure to game design discussions may diminish or permanently alter your ability to enjoy games that utilize the discussed design elements. This is similar to losing the "magic" of a trick when a magician demonstrates the technical performance of it. Video games often rely on this similar performances of "prestiges" and good design tries to disguise itself to allow better immersion in most cases.
>1. Give the player the ability to circumvent the rules of the world.
This can be an ability that allows them to break walls, bypass barriers, climb over impediments, or simply rewarding technical expertise with earlier access to more remote locations. Similarly, the formalization of speedrunning has introduced "sequence breaking" as a desirable trait in games and design in games past this point should consider the possibility of deliberately placing items or "weaknesses" in locations that allow the players to do so. Players enjoy "discovering" these breaks and react negatively to the removal of them. The Reaver Shark nerf in Terraria is a clear example of this.
>2. Don't trivialize the player's progression in the world.
Design should build increasing levels of challenge and difficulties in a series of "rings" that radiate out from the beginning location of the game. This should be camouflaged by varying the topography of those rings and poking "paths" through distinct portions of the rings. (For example the primary story arc may follow a slightly easier path through the world than personally driven exploration outside of it). Blanket level scaling in loot and enemies throughout the open world trivializes everything and diminishes the value of any exploration. This is the cardinal sin of Bethesda games.
STOP IT WITH THE LONG PRESSES HOLY SHIT
I hate this one because it seems to be the """seamless""" solution to "are you sure you aren't being stupid" prompts and I feel that neither is needed for most of the shit they are used for.
Sometimes it's masking the game communicating with the server, and I am really not sure how you'd solve those specific cases.
I like it when the boss is in the actual "main" map and not just confined in a separate room, and can interact/attack you while you're exploring.
That's really cool.
I'm currently trying to decide whether I want to play the blobbers made by Experience like 円卓の生徒 or whether I want to emulate handhelds to play EO. Do you have experience with both? For the record, my favorites are Elminage Gothic and 武神0
I'd love to see something like this in a game.
Haven't seen that with a boss other than maybe Seath in Dark Souls 1 where you go to break the crystal and then the boss fight starts.
But this does happen a lot in boomer shooters where you go to get an item and then enemies spawn in behind you or a bunch of doors open with enemies coming out.
you should only reward behaviours you want to enforce in the player
making things that you want players to avoid have a special reward is nonsensical
this is why most porn games are shit btw. If you play well, you never see any fricking porn
Don't play those games then
>save point after the door that locks behind you instead of before it, completely fricking you if you can't beat the boss
Devilish level design, anon.
totally arbitrary and autistic question.
especially in an exploration-focused game. hiding bonus content is one of those things that draws people in.
But should a player's exploration entail randomly failing and dying at various points in order to check for secrets?
It's like the above mentioned fake walls that look identical to real ones, do you want the players to spend 80% of the playtime hitting every wall in order to check if it's real? Or should the secret be hidden behind recognizing a break in the pattern or recognizing environmental hints.
The single most important factor of adventure games is that it's OK if players never find something, never see something. That's what makes for triely brilliant secrets
A lot of players will miss contextual clues as well, it just feels like bad design to ask the players to go against their instincts over and over in order to potentially see content, I would want it to rely on their attentiveness and deduction skills 100% of the time.
You don't have to minimize missable content but you can choose which types of missable content to have in your game. If there's content you can only see by leaving the game on for 24 hours while the player character idles, that'd be unintuitive badly designed secret content as well. I believe it should be a reward for players who engage with the game on a higher level, rather than something bad players will randomly stumble upon while good player might never see, might as well make it a random encounter with a 0.1% occurrence rate.
Whats your point, what is your goal or idea? you seem pretty daft
Yeah, players should be rewarded for actively paying attention to their environment and making logical conclusions. Having secrets hidden behind things nobody would ever think to check is stupid. They should only be hidden from those who don't care to engage with the game.
>If there's content you can only see by leaving the game on for 24 hours while the player character idles, that'd be unintuitive badly designed secret content as well.
Reminder this actually happens in Braid. And a similar element happens AGAIN in The Witness.
Blow has argued that hostile mechanics like this are justified to punish players for holding completionist impulses that run contrary to his ideals.
>don't complete my game. some content is bad and you should skip it
>why?
>i made it bad on purpose to win this argument
kekW
no. you will stumble into that pitfall on your 3rd playthrough or you'll read about it on the wiki. or you will miss it.
minimizing missable content is something for autistic AAA suit minmaxxers. leave it to those soulless morons to never make anything cool.
I'm currently making a game that has purposefully shit game design as a way to openly mock terribly designed games. I want it to be as infuriating as possible, tons of shit fetch quests, lots of powerful items that are locked if you dont 180 when you get to some town and randomly go to the starting area again, etc. I'm going to market it as "the most difficult videogame ever" to bait the soulsgays and dupe dipshits into playing my terrible game.
Give me your worst experience with game design, and I'll see if I can put it in the game
not the most obnoxious shit ever, but use the map system from hollow knight. pay for the ability to see where you are, pay for the ability to update the map, only update the map at rests, pay for the ability to mark stuff on the map
have a 100% placebo stat system
like it just does nothing no matter what stats you change
Nothing pisses me off more in games than an RPG that takes away your skills for a section until you beat a boss or w/e
2 examples of this that will stay with me forever are Witcher 2, when you go into the fricking curse and if you tried to play with magic or alchemy only, you are fricked because sword skills is the only thing that carries
and Human Revolution, where I legit did side content for skills and the fricking thing not only undid all of it, it also returned less than I came in with
Menus within menus within menus
I realize you've internalized your fear of failure and that you desperately hope that if you make something dogshit on purpose you can't be accused of making it dogshit on accident, but that doesn't make it interesting as a thought exercise or engaging as an experiment. Get help.
People in every medium have done parodies that intentionally mock the state of art
in fact the well done parodies that do this the best have done good for every other medium
the idea that video games are beyond being criticized is stupid and I hate you for even suggesting this shouldn't be done.
except games are called out on their shit design all the time, and have evolved with time to remove a lot of bs and add QoL. what does making a game mocking old design choices that were done due to limitations or lack of experience have to offer?
>except games are called out on their shit design all the time,
Critique in any medium never matters as much as you would like it to
as much as games get called out they also get defended
Western for example were critiqued for years but Blazing Saddles effectively killed them.
>Western for example were critiqued for years but Blazing Saddles effectively killed them.
No, Star Wars killed them.
>pause menu has a chance of unpausing gameplay for every 0.1 sec that passes
>double jumps fail sometimes
>rare chance of loading screens containing devastating spoilers which never repeat instead of tips/lore fluff
>physics sometimes get tied to the flow of the music
>female NPCs and party members may or may not get a large bulge added to their model inbetween play sessions
>otherwise useless items like pebbles, dung and mops spawn at x3 the rate
>ultra high sensitivity for making selections during menus
>random NPCs spin around before talking to the player, even if you're facing them
>passive animals may start walking and acting in completely nonsense patterns only to stop abruptly, including shit like cows jumping at nearby characters
Have several waterfalls in various locations that have difficult paths to get to them, through enemies or having to traverse 90% of the level after you first spot them.
Only the first and last one have treasures
>physics sometimes get tied to the flow of the music
Are you by any chance talking about Gunner 3? The game would freeze when the music loop restarted, resetting the player character's momentum, so if you were jumping over some spikes you would fall straight down.
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Have a delay of a couple frames on the double jump. Not the regular jump, just when you go for the double jump already in the air
Missed link
>see waterfall
>cave behind it with a treasure chest
>chest is a mimic
>cave is a mimic
>waterfall is a water elemental
Worst game I experienced had no kill or reset plane if you failed the platforming, you'd just slip off the platform and fall into a ditch slightly too deep to get out of, and forced to reset the system if you wanted to try again. Also the collectables spoke to you constantly nagging you to pick them up, and had three voice lines to cycle through.
Hold down buttons to confirm anything in a menu. Every single decision in a menu you gotta hold X or A for like 2 or 3 seconds to confirm it or back out of it.
There's a boss you need to fight to progress the story, you know where it is and how to go there.
All the fodder is stronger than the boss and you have to run past them to beat the boss, but there's no indication, so the player thinks they're just underlevelled.
The player grinds on garbage for the next 20 hours and beats the mobs, then find out they outleveled the next 10 hours of content.
Long, unskippable cutscenes before a ball-bustingly hard boss is a classic.
Nobody how many bad designs you put in a game, Ganker will always be there to defend them, as long as they make the game harder and therefore makes them more hardcore for beating it.
That was his point about "duping dipshits", I think
>To start the thread off, I was thinking about should content ever be a reward for failure?
That question is answered by your target demographic
you did build a concept for your target demographic did you?
Great contribution
EXCELLENT thread idea that could add smarter discussions to Ganker if done right.
My opinion on this : failure needs to punish the player,yes, but also give a little push to make the experience bearable. Old SHMUPS would throw you a bunch of weapon upgrades after you continue, Metal Slug gives you the H (heavy machine gun) when you respawn,etc... You still got a challenge to overcome though, it doesn't take your hand like the Super Kong.
I think armoured core did it great with the human plus stuff, the game overs and subsequent power bonuses to smooth the difficulty curve were all in-universe, falling into debt and being sold as a test subject for experimental enhancements.
How does one solve this game design issue?
Don't lock the treasure route if you go fight the boss.
completionist pet peeve I guess
no just the feeling of bullshit when you're given a 50/50 chance of something being taken from you without your agency
>put the boss arena at the foot of a small cliff or down a hole or something to make it obvious you can't go back
>obvious boss door
>make a checkpoint closer to the treasure to encourage the player to check that room out first
Make the right path hidden by an invisible wall.
Lately I've been contemplating the connection between social evolution as it relates to emergent technology and the multiplayer experience. The accepted paradigm of how interaction should occur in a multiplayer environment shifts whenever new technology is introduced to the public. For example, some of the first online chat rooms existed in mmos before services like aol instant messenger released. The features, or lack thereof, in MMOs that encouraged interaction, like no group finder or auction house, were gradually phased out of the genre's formula as cell phones started to become standard. This has only gotten worse with smart phones. Now that social media has made the dopamine hit of online social interaction so accessible, players don't look for the same level of community interaction in multiplayer games. A lot of carefully designed worlds in mmos are now mostly barren as the overwhelming majority of players sit in hub cities queueing for late game content after they finish leveling. There could be similar trend found with shooters and the shift from peer to peer servers and dedicated servers. Whenever a new means of communication is fully adopted by the general public, the approach to designing multiplayer games shifts. What will this look like when new tech like chatGPT is as ubiquitous as smart phones?
Okay I understand smartphones replaced the dopamine hit of online interaction but which dopamine hit do you think chatGPT could replace?
facebook chat interaction
>picture
I vaguely recall actually playing a game that did exactly this, but I can't remember what game it is.
Daily reminder than Neil Cuckman directed an episode of the last of us tv show in which he confused game design decisions made for the video game with intentional creative direction decisions and did OPs image. A true hack will always out themselves
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