True Gaming Pixel Art Animation: How much it costs? Where can I find artists (portfolios)? |
- Pixel Art Animation: How much it costs? Where can I find artists (portfolios)?
- Which stealth game does difficulty properly?
- Are subscription models obsolete or has the bar been raised?
- Hating MGS 5, the new fashion statement?
- I want to talk about David Cage (Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain, etc)
- The Mario games have a save problem (Difficulty design in platformers and the role of lives)
- Can video game escapism ever lead to something more productive?
| Pixel Art Animation: How much it costs? Where can I find artists (portfolios)? Posted: 03 Dec 2017 11:27 AM PST I love pixel art. I am designing a game and I want it to have pixel graphics. For that, I want to know how much I should be prepared to spend and where I can find artists for that. It would be simple repetitive animations (And not many of them at start). So, you guys know something to share with me? Here some examples of what I want: [link] [comments]  |
| Which stealth game does difficulty properly? Posted: 02 Dec 2017 11:16 PM PST I played a few stealth games in recent years and found that they are much more challenging to tweak difficulties for than straight shooters or action games. Many games, despite their strengths in other aspects, do not have a well-balanced or meaningful difficulty system. The biggest challenge is that the normal enemy HP : player HP ratio does not work if you play the game and intended, and simple number shuffling only works if you decide to go gunslinger mode which is usually discouraged in the first place. You cannot make enemies who can be stealthily taken down have more HP so you need to choke them out twice (??) cause that would completely change how the game is to be played. You have to actually increase the difficulty of stealth play, which requires more thought than simply making targets harder to kill. I find that many games with optional "Rambo" paths lacking in this aspect. Here are some games I've played: Assassin's Creed: Origins - not really a stealth game, although stealth is a very visible option and gives the most exp. Difficulty does nothing for stealth play, as enemy behaviors are completely the same and you one-shot everyone regardless. This is forgiveable for a game with action roots, but as an "assassin" game, this is a bit disappointing. Deus Ex: Human Revolution - great game, but again difficulty only affects brute-forcing. There is indeed an energy bar limit on hardest difficulty, which affects how often you can use abilities and how long a combo can you pull off, but there are plenty of energy items in game for most of the critical situation. Enemy AI does not seem to be affected. Dishonored - difficulty affects detection, enemy alertness and power use frequency. This seems to have the most meaningful difficulty settings so far. And lastly, just for fun. Skyrim - higher difficulty completely breaks stealth play until you get the 15x damage and higher tier weapons because the difficulty is not balanced around stealth at all. I'd like to know how other games handle stealth difficulty, and what your guys think of their approaches. Are there any truly brilliant solutions? [link] [comments]  |
| Are subscription models obsolete or has the bar been raised? Posted: 02 Dec 2017 09:51 PM PST Micro-transactions have become the hot-button debate, everyone is aware of this now. While I agree that some single-player games should sell more game instead of loot-boxes or mods, long-term multiplayer games are iffy. MMOs and competitive games need a more sustained source of income for upkeep and new content, but do they HAVE to use micro-transactions? WoW used the subscription model, as did plenty of other games before it. But lately, games like Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online have nearly flopped with this model, as did many others. But ESO is now doing better with the microtransaction model and GW2 is still a strong contender despite never having a sub. However, I expect there may be another explanation. FF14 is doing pretty well still with a sub model, but only after they overhauled the game. Perhaps the subscription model is still viable, but only if the games are vastly improved over their predecessors. Right now, you can purchase GW2 and get all kinds of content, or just play a large portion of it for free. It's a similar deal with ESO, Destiny 2, Overwatch, and plenty of F2P games (To varying degrees). There are good games out there that don't charge you per the month. So I'm curious. Are microtransactions really the only way to fund a persistent multiplayer game? Or can subscription games increase in quality enough to be a great value proposition? [link] [comments]  |
| Hating MGS 5, the new fashion statement? Posted: 03 Dec 2017 03:16 PM PST Lets talk MGS 5 TPP. This game is super polarizing. I see three main camps. -There are the story purists, who always thought of MGS as a story first series and dislike the game because it has very little narrative. I get that. -Next there are the advocates who think that MGS V takes the systematic possibilities hinted at by previous games and brings them to their logical conclusion--making you the tactical espionage operative the game always promised you could be. To them, MGS V is a flawed masterpiece. I fall in this camp. -Finally their are those who dislike the game because they think the gameplay doesn't achieve its goals in some sense. Writing on Game's just put out an hour long video about this, essentially arguing that game rewards the least interesting style of play (tranq + fulton + supply drop, repeat) rendering the experience of MGS the most restrictive in the series. What do you think? [link] [comments]  |
| I want to talk about David Cage (Beyond Two Souls, Heavy Rain, etc) Posted: 02 Dec 2017 10:19 PM PST Man. I need to talk about this. Never has one writer gone from something so insanely so-bad-its-good to actually improving over every game like David Cage. Seriously, every game has been better than the last. But, that's not saying much, because the first ones are basically video game's versions of The Room. I know I'll probably offend some Fahrenheit fans, but just know this is my opinion. And some might not agree on the order. In order. Both chronologically and from worst to best: Omikron: Just absolutely terrible, with its David Bowie original soundtrack and confusing everything. Worst game pretty easily. Just feels very campy and shallow. Unintentionally funny. Indigo Prophecy / Fahrenheit: I have never seen a game fall apart so spectacularly. What started with an interesting premise turned into the most amazing Matrix rip off I've ever seen. Bad, but I can see SOME interesting ideas. Watch this little bit of the game. Tell me it's not hilariously bad. From the Jesse Cox playthrough The action sequences are essentially Simon Says, and they happen during the most inconvenient times, like during plot points and the important dialogue. Heavy Rain: I like this game overall. This is the first one I'd consider interesting enough as a story, even though there's major flaws and plot holes. But there's enough interesting stuff there to understand why its so big. The art design is great, and it really probably had a big effect on big budget games in terms of what a story can be in a bigger game. Its popularity shows that a game can be just gestures and walking around and still sell well as a bigger title. Voice acting was a bit stiff and some usual writing issues, but it was still immersive enough to really enjoy. Beyond Two Souls: Again, major problems, but still an interesting and unique game. Ellen Page does well in it given the material, as does Willem Dafoe. IT really does some intersting things. The action controls are greatly improved. The voice acting is really great, the acting is great. I actually liked the broken up story out of order. It probably helped it feel more fluid over all. As usual, it sort of breaks down towards the end, but it still kept itself going better than the past games, in my opinion. Now his next project. Detroit: Become Human. Looks legitimately good and interesting, stellar art and graphics, and an interesting premise. I can see this being the first truly great game in his career. Here is a trailer I'm just so confused, It's like Tommy Wiseau kept making movies and slowly became a quality filmmaker. I see the same thing in all of his games though. They devolve into weird generic action films at the end, always starting pretty strong. The reason I bring this up is that I just watched Jesse Cox play Fahrenheit, and it has to be the absolute most hilarious thing I've seen in a long time. I'm really perplexed why people think its a classic. By the end, it becomes something a 12 year old wrote, even when starting so strong. It literally devolves into the character basically becoming Neo in every way. And the protagonist makes NO sense. If you want a good laugh, watch Cox's Lets Play. I'm watching Omikron now, and it's somehow worse, but not in the watch it to laugh way. So, I don't know. David Cage is fascinating to me now. To go from so unbelievably bad to Detroit: Become Human is nothing short of a miracle. I can't be the only one fascinated by this guy. [link] [comments]  |
| The Mario games have a save problem (Difficulty design in platformers and the role of lives) Posted: 03 Dec 2017 03:16 AM PST I recently took a trip back through three Mario games more or less at once, playing them on and off at intervals. For the first time ever, as a recent Wii U owner, I took a trip through New Super Luigi U (and bits of the base game Super Mario Bros. U alongside it), replayed all 96 exits of Super Mario World for the first time in ten-plus years, and took a night to do a no-warp run of Super Mario Bros. 2 JPN, undoubtedly my favorite in the series, and a game I'm at this point pretty familiar with. This is a post about Mario, but it's also a post about what the trajectory of Mario games means for difficulty design in platformers as a whole, and any discussion that flows from there. The thing that keeps me coming back to a game like Super Mario Bros. 2 JPN, and this stuck out in particular during this accidental comparison, is that it offers a consistent marathon challenge. That is, the game is structured like this: You get three lives per game, plus whatever 1-Ups you can earn, and progress is maintained every four levels. (If you get a game over, you go back to the beginning of the four-level world.) As far as I know, there are really two options in terms of designing difficulty in a Mario game: One is to design singular levels requiring so much precision or endurance they become difficult to simply complete once. The other is to limit player resources and demand consistency over a longer stretch. Super Mario Bros. 2 takes the latter approach, giving you three lives to get through four hard (but not insane) levels. There are a plenty of fan creations I can turn to go get difficulty in line with the former design. There are relatively few that embrace the latter. And I wonder why that is. I'd love to see more, either from the community or from Nintendo itself. What's really interesting to me, though, is that there don't seem to be a lot of modern platformers/sidescrollers that embrace that model even outside the series. More on that later. The that really struck me about my recent Mario playthroughs is that, opposite to what I expected, Nintendo is still plenty capable of working difficult level design into their post-NES titles. In both my Mario Bros. U and Mario World playthroughs, I encountered level design and even stretches of levels that risked sending me to multiple game overs. That is, if you ignore everything else the game hands you. The issue is that the games have a save problem. Beyond that, they also have a generosity problem, but I think the more fundamental issue is the save system. Let's look at one of the hardest two-level stretches in Mario World: "Way Cool" and "Awesome" in the Special World. These levels genuinely bare fangs; I was surprised to realize there were seeds of inspiration for some of T. Takamoto's Kaizo Mario levels here. Together, they make a fun challenge, and they're nominally structured to require the player to go through the two of them in a single continue before the next save prompt arrives. (I forced myself to play them this way and had a good time.) But you don't have to play that way, and frankly, you have to impose restrictions on yourself as a player to bring the challenge in line with what the game's save system seems to expect you to do. Because you can go to any earlier, easier save-point-enabled level in between each and pop a quick save. You can bring items in. You can farm 1-Ups. (Both levels also bafflingly hand the player an easy way out, almost like apologizing for daring to be challenging for a moment, but let's pretend they didn't back off from their own difficulty for the sake of argument.) The result is a game set up as something where stretches of consistency seem to be the way it wants to achieve its challenge—much like earlier titles, saves are only offered every four or so stages on the map—but the fact that you can move anywhere and retreat to earlier levels for saves and item-collecting means any semblance of challenge has to come, instead, from the hurdle of an individual level. None are remotely up to that task. Rather than scrapping for everything the game gives you, actually having to take risks for more resources, which the game still tries to present to you as if they have consequence, you have to actively impose self-limitations in order for the game to function as many of its aspects seem to imply it should. This issue is also present in all of the New Super Mario Bros. games. New Super Luigi U indeed offers challenging level design, but the fact that you can back off to earlier saves and the fact the game showers you in 1-Ups renders it all moot. You're never in danger of facing the threat of, or threat from, a game over, and the levels are only a challenge in stretches. (In the core NSMB games, the fact that the difficulty is also intended to be shifted onto optional coin collecting exacerbates these issues, as coin collecting also needn't be done in one stretch; after reaching the end with one coin, you can hop out and save at any previous level, grabbing them piecemeal and reducing any non-self-imposed danger. And again, infinite 1-Up showers.) The game is nominally designed to be played in four-or-so-level stretches exactly the way Super Mario World is, but since you can retreat to earlier saves, or save any time after beating the final boss, after which the player is likely to be continuing with the collection challenges intended to present an optional difficulty increase, all of it is inconsequential. It essentially pushes the game's difficulty model toward that single-level hurdle model, and none even come close to putting up that much resistance on their own. There actually are levels here you can sink your teeth into, but any real hurdles have to be player-imposed. The crazy thing, of course, is that the level design is there. All Nintendo would need to do to make a Mario game challenging for platformer-literate players again would be to actually stick to the restrictions imposed by a stricter save system, and reduce player resources a bit. Not everything needs to be as hard or gamer-oriented as SMB 2, which is in the upper echelons of NES-hard and absolutely sacrifices accessibility, but certainly that could be there as an option, or simply a way to bring the latter games' own design elements more in line with themselves. As it stands, they're a weird mass of contradictions. All this got me thinking about other modern platformers. So let's look at one infamous for being "hard" and see how it achieves its challenge: Super Meat Boy certainly opts for the model of single-level challenge rather than marathon-resource management, and I think that might be a weakness if not for some of its other design choices. Because, infamously "hard" as it is, completing its basic levels really isn't going to be a sweat for anyone literate in platformers (and I think that's an appropriate word to use here; non-beginners, which is its intended audience). With infinite tries, none of its basic, light-world levels present the level of precision-challenge such that most non-beginner players won't finish them with minimal hurdles. As a way of balancing this, and I'm thankful for this, the game does demand consistency similar to the lives-and-worlds models of older platformers by demanding par times be met for its better ending. That's a good compromise. (It also offers some Herculean challenges in both single-level difficulty and marathon difficulty in its special levels and achievements, but those are beyond the realm of normal play/challenge I want to get at here.) But the times I most enjoy it, and when it feels like it really offers resistance? Its optional "bandaid" missions, which spread the difficulty out over a series of three or so smaller "stages," and give the player a limited set of attempts, just like games of old. Why do we not have games fully embracing this then? I can't think of a modern platformer that actually really goes for a lives-per-world model and mines its challenge from it. Are we so afraid of making people replay stages for more consistency? Indie titles seem to have moved away from it, and the Mario games, while confusingly keeping its trappings, functionally have for twenty-five years. Granted, it takes some considerate level design to avoid tedium—SMB 2's near-perfect nailing of this balance is what ranks it so highly for me, and that's a whole separate post—but I'm not in love with the results of just giving up on it either. This moves everything over to single-level challenges, but—honestly, not only do I not find those as fun or satisfying—unless they're ramped up to a level of insanity most people will never touch, they remove any real challenge unless tempered well with other elements to demand consistency. How do you feel about difficulty design in platformers? Should it come from individual stages, or from resource management over a series of stages? Why have we so wholly moved away from the latter model, what games would benefit from it, and are there any modern gems that embrace it that I've missed? Any other thoughts spinning off from the topic are, of course, welcome. Feel free to disagree too. This all wound up being a little scattershot, but without taking the time to make it into a proper essay, hopefully some of the sentiment got through. [link] [comments]  |
| Can video game escapism ever lead to something more productive? Posted: 03 Dec 2017 04:43 AM PST I've been playing video games to escape my entire life: from my faulty childhood, lonely teens, and now my twenties. Also, I'm at the age where it's time to start a career, and through my research and exploration, I realized that I have wasted so much time playing video games when I could have doing something else more productive. Personally, there was no inherent goal in mind when gaming; it was just something that felt good and made everything easier rather like a psychedelic drug. So, whenever things stopped being pleasant, whether it be because of video game tolerance, anhedonia, team play, etc., I transitioned to something else usually something new and refreshing. This included activities that could have been somewhat productive such as making connections online or analyzing gameplay & producing content (severe social anxiety prohibited both). In retrospect, if I had the mindset of being productive with a future goal present in my head, then even if all I did was play video games, I could've made something out of it. E-sports is such a booming industry, and the game that really exponentiation its growth was League of Legends, a game which has its own independent multi-billion dollar industry with opportunities all over the place. if I had just tweaked my mindset, all the hours I dumped into this game could have amounted to something in the end. I had the skill, the aptitude, the advantage of being young, the lack of competition because of a brand new industry, etc. As I was writing this, I realized that I answered my own question, but I still feel inclined to post anyway and share. [link] [comments]  |
Post a Comment