Replayability is cancer in my eyes. If you're making a game for the purpose of having it be the game that everyone is sinking hours into 24/7 then you're not creating a memorable experience. It only works for games that are good in nature like TF2, which I don't think was designed to be replayable, its just that multiplayer games in general are always replayable and TF2 is just a good game.
I like replayability from combinatorics. Making things fresh because of all the ways things get switched up. I kind of get your point though like even when spore or no mans sky seemed like mind blowing woah dude there could be so many creatures and planets and then they all either look like shit or identical.
I think these make a lot of sense, for example, having an obstacle or a puzzle with mutliple ways to solve instead of just one allows for creative thinking.
I think a big thing for me is that the puzzle has to communicate a problem in a way where I can seize on, I can perceive, in multiple ways. I don't see the point to playing a game where I consult a wiki for the optimal build or path through the game, or choose the best number from doing some rote calculator punching. To be able to synthesize one of those unique solutions just by visually suggestion and some pondering.
I think puzzles are cool, but if they're too complex, they might lock out a lot of players because how do you expect someone to dehash a string into base64 to image to scan a qr code that says nigger, nobody is doing that, apart from like redditors or something.
That stuff just sucks because there is no energy to it. Woah dude it's a le hacker capture the flag alternate reality game with a dark sinister slowburn a25 story... but the way you win is you guess the right stenography method from the however many different ones listed on a github "how to solve ctfs" page. Woops, time to make another guess. And again, again, until... I did it! So heckin' smart! There's no hack value to it. The coolest puzzle game would be one where emergent properties of the game world (culture, magic, biology, whatever) create fresh unique vulnerabilities to exploit if you perceive them in the right way.
I suppose that is kind of what makes Terraria fun in a way, there is no class system, you can kill a boss any way that you want, and even then, they're not an obstacle, more like an optional challenge.
But I've always hated Terraria boss fights, they feel more like a checklist really, like a runescape quest you have to complete just to get to the next one, doesn't really feel impactful to me,
Seems related to the psychology of the game design principle "never give the player an opportunity to turn fun into a slog, because they will" People aren't good at seeing the fun in doing things well for their own sake, they need "my computer systems recognize you did do the thing, here is a trophy on a screen with no relation to the rest of the game" You want something else on the other side of the boss to make it worth it. I think the coolest thing is to reward with aesthetic stuff that fits the rest of the game like if you beat a terraria boss and getting a new type of shiny plant to grow or something.
Well, In cry of fears case it's both the gameplay and story/atmosphere as to why it's good. But what makes it "Fun", which was your original question, is the actual risk of losing. You can't save whenever you want and healing + ammo are very limited, all of the enemies are fricking scary, you have no idea where they might come out and rush you from. So it gets very tense, but is fun.
But that likely might not be a good approach for your game, since there are a lot of people who don't want to redo the same 40 minutes over just because they died once.
I get the value of tension, but I think is absolutely the worst for puzzle type games which are the games I talk about right now for some reason. I hate it when a game starts to feel like I'm playing a rhythm game or basic spacebar to hop over the barrels game like "if I just hit the right sequence like I did last time I can be back where I was when I screwed up... in 10 minutes. Or, I could quit because this sucks" Like your type of game is completely aiming for a different experience. I am just seeing a maze in 4 dimensions, you are seeing a battlefield.
Yeah and I guess I would also like to say that terrarium type games are underrated. Like an ant farm or something but cooler. Simulators. That's a cool sensation, the impression of physical reality but it's exotic and weird.
Okay that's the good parts of hte post
I'm personally looking to create a project that is as stripped down as possible, free from the garbage that modern videogames contains, like complex inventory systems and obnoxious character dialogue, overcomplicated combat systems and obnoxious HUD and UI designs with like a thousand different settings to choose from.
I'm not enough of a gamer to know what you are yapping about but yeah design a fun gameplay loop first thing that sounds good
I'm personally wondering if the best way to make a game is to focus on aesthetic and story and actually forgo gameplay completely in favour of exploration, but perhaps unique puzzles involved with that, like sections of the world that require a certain item, or areas that require critical thinking to accomplish, like moving ladders around in Reisdent Evil 2 to get to different places.
never palyed RE2 but I this sounds liek the way exploration is really good
You may say that, but I feel like we need a simple game these days, something you can just pick up and play, maybe even play in the browser so you don't have to download a random exe file off of the internet that you might not trust.
Yeah with wasm and stuff I don't see why I shouldn't make games for kids on the internet just like 2000s flash games
So bland, basic and boring. "THis is muh prized item it attacks le faster than others" Very cookie cutter.
Prized items, if anything, should be unique in what they can do, for example, a rocket launcher fires rockets whereas a pistol fires bullets, a sword is a melee weapon.
I'm not a believer in ideas like "THis is a MAGIC SWORD its like a regular sword but with flames and it does 5 damage inside of 4" like thats just gay
Horizontal progression o algo
I heard a great phrasing of this from "cohh carnage" professional twitcher oh algorithm, something like if you just progress the stats and your enemies progress their stats to match you never change in how you play the game just because of the "boost". You might have parts where you are ahead or behind for hte power fantasy or challenge but the gameplay doesn't change. Seems like this is kind of the point of RPG games with stats, that you can choose to let some parts of difficulty curve progress faster.
People rarely play singleplayer anymore these days.
I deeply relate to the desire to find a girlfriend and bros in a mmorpg because I have no phone and my mom won't want me signing up for websites so I don't get raped by a boy friend free girl my own age or something. It is a weird feeling- I would kind of think it would be mitigated by streaming and gamer chat things, where you can play together even if you're not playing in the same game. I guess you aren't really playing just by watching the stream.
Enjoys playing 500 gigabyte hard drive space required games with highly unoptimized 10 billion polygons that simulate real shit coming from a hyper realistic virtual anus and spent 10 jewgillion dollars on the graphics card required to run it award
meds and pillaged sabine titty you can just use a sarashi compression program on the computer files or however the pooner checksums are heckin' validated
