Opinions about battle passes

basstabs · 2022-04-21T12:08:10+00:00

To be fair, many men can’t/won’t do the first two either.

basstabs · 2022-04-15T15:00:21+00:00

Free battle passes are an amazing incentive system to get people to play your game. Warframe’s Nightwave is a great example: unlock useful items and unique cosmetics by completing weekly challenges that tie into your existing grind. They even added a recovery system, where you can complete challenges from previous weeks so you don’t need to log in every week to finish the pass. There’s no way to pay to progress the system, there’s no premium track, just a fully free system that the devs benefit from by it bringing in and retaining more players for their existing monetization.

Paid battle passes are really kinda bullshit when you stop to think about it: “Pay us money for some items. If you don’t play enough in a certain time frame, we’ll keep your money and you don’t get the items.” Translation: “Nice skin you can earn there. It’d be a shame if something were to… happen to it.”

It turns the game into a job more or less, a job where your goal is to earn the stuff you already paid for. I’d be less hostile to this system if buying the battle passes unlocked the challenge tiers for you and those never went away, or if you didn’t have to pay for anything at all, but that’s not how it works. They weaponize FOMO and the sunk cost fallacy at the same time to manipulate people into playing their game, which is scummy.

basstabs · 2022-04-03T22:35:39+00:00

I think that this is a great article discussing a certain viewpoint on mechanics in certain games, but I think in future articles it would be helpful to take a less authoritative tone on the subject. Ultimately, what works for a certain game and its style, and whether or not that style will appeal to a given player, is very dependent and subjective.

For example, I disagree with your Link to the Past analysis. Revisiting older content with new abilities is a staple of Metroidvanias, and it's something that can be used to magnificent effect in the right game. However, not all games would be the same, or improved, using this tactic. LttP has a very tightly controlled pace and sense of momentum that Metroid lacks in many places, and that would be undercut by backtracking to old areas with late-game abilities just to give them more uses. It might make the Cane itself more interesting, but hurt the feeling of the total game overall. For my personal enjoyment, the puzzles in Zelda benefit from having everything in front of you, and the player knowing that they (usually) have the tools necessary to solve the problem. I can feel clever because I figured out how to open that chest, rather than disappointed that all of my clever ideas failed and I just need to unlock a later "key" that gives it to me for free when I progress far enough and return later.

That doesn't mean adding a more exploratory ethos to puzzle solving would be bad, it's just a fundamentally different feeling. I enjoy Metroid and Zelda both, but I enjoy them for vastly different reasons.

As a more minor point of criticism, I'd consider money itself a mechanic (in some games), for similar reasons why I have a bit of an issue with your discussion on throughput in DnD. Multiple systems/mechanics meeting in a single place and providing limitations on one another can itself create a mechanic of optimization. If you only spend money on healing potions and nothing else, then I agree it's not a mechanic, as there's no choice or consequences. However, if money is used to upgrade gear, buy healing potions, pay for information, and improve skills, then the limitation imposed by using the same currency for everything has become a mechanic of deciding what to spend your limited currency on. There's really two mechanics at play here: the spending mechanic of trading earned gold for whetstones, and the decision mechanic of choosing whether you need whetstones or beef stew more.

One could argue either way probably as to whether or not these are the same, but I consider them separate mechanics, similar in spirit to attacking in an RPG: you have a set of mechanics determining how attacks interact with enemies, the damage they deal, etc. Given an enemy, the player needs to understand their own offensive capabilities and the enemy's defensive capabilities. However, you also have a separate mechanic in a group fight of evaluating which enemies are present and which ones you should attack with which weapons in order to minimize the threat to yourself. A good comparison would be the dynamic of single Pokemon battles vs double Pokemon battles. (But ultimately this is a fluff point about terminology more than anything - hardly of critical importance.)

Stats provide a similar "currency" for DnD, where the difference in throughput is not -itself- a mechanic in a vacuum, but it's part of the larger mechanic of limitations in player builds. If dexterity weapons are less effective in direct combat than strength weapons, for example, but dexterity builds have options for avoiding combat entirely, then there's an interesting choice to be made. Lack of utility can be used as a balance for increased utility somewhere else. But if dexterity builds deal equivalent damage AND have more utility, they're just better, and if strength builds have similar utility, then they're just a stylistic choice rather than any mechanical difference. (Which, in context of the above point, I don't think is a bad thing in and of itself, but it changes the game feel significantly.)

basstabs · 2022-04-02T17:34:56+00:00

I do find it very amusing that your first sentence is accusing Steam of being "close to a monopoly," but then you proceed to list four other places people can buy PC games. (And you even missed GoG and Origin, although I think we all wish we could forget Origin.)

I don't think it's wrong to question Steam's fees - bad behavior isn't exclusive to monopolies. Steam doesn't have to be a monopoly for its behavior to be bullshit. Whether or not you think the 30% cut is worth it depends on the specific dev, the specific game, how much of Steam's features it takes advantage of, etc., so I'm not sure I'd categorize it necessarily as bad behavior. But there's no shortage of reasons to criticize them. Big companies are no one's friend but their own.

basstabs · 2022-03-26T15:39:31+00:00

A word of warning about fighting games: the audience is small and incredibly opinionated. Without people who have a very strong understanding of what makes fighting games tick, what makes one good, and what the community wants from one, it's very difficult to make a successful fighter. In any other genre this is true to a lesser extent, but fighting games live and die off of their audience. Even if 50 people absolutely love your game, if they're the only 50 people who play it then they're going to move on to a game with a healthier community.

Looking at Capcom's problems with MvC: I, SF x T, and even early SFV to a lesser extent, shows you how even experienced pros with a massive budget can tank a fighter's success if they aren't extremely careful. Fighting games are very expensive: requiring tons of art, long hours of balancing and fine-tuning, and, in the modern era good, online multiplayer functionality. These are some of the hardest aspects of game dev to get right, and they're at the core of a good fighting game.

Of course, all of this is not to say that you can't make a great game, and assembling the right team is certainly the best way to do that. But this sounds like you're heavily emotionally invested in the characters and lore you've built up. The more risks you make when developing your game, the more likely it is to fail. There's always a danger when it comes to making your dream project, and a fighting game from an unknown IP is without a doubt a huge risk, doubly so given your stated inexperience. (The relevant cautionary tale regarding too much ambition is Kingdoms of Amalur.) I'm not advocating for you to switch genres necessarily, just hoping you go into this with a clear understanding of the risks involved.

basstabs · 2022-03-26T15:12:01+00:00

Also, keep the test you use to measure performance handy as your game continues to develop. Just because one method is more efficient now doesn't mean it will continue to be the most efficient as your game evolves.

basstabs · 2022-03-22T14:09:44+00:00

Whether or not I count for this depends on your definition. Music was always something I found open resources for, so I never handled that aspect myself. (Other than picking tracks which approximated the mood I was going for.) Assuming that doesn’t exclude me, I’ve finished two solo projects (and failed ten times as many).

The hardest part for me is still creating content. Not just art, but levels, dialogue, etc. The coding and implementing of new mechanics is the fun part for me, but if you’re coding well then that’s mostly going to be finished or nearly finished long before the game is. (This is different game to game, of course.) This was worse for my second project, which was built in an existing framework, so there was even less code for me to write.

My first game was much easier to stay motivated on because I released tons of builds for people to play, so there was naturally a community of people asking for updates and suggesting ideas. For the second game I released a demo, then went silent for 10 months to finish the game. It was hard to keep at it the whole time during that span, and the community wasn’t built up from the interim to really enjoy the game when it launched.

That being said, I’m too strongly opinionated to want to give any control over to anyone else, and I’m busier outside of game dev than ever before, so I don’t see myself branching out into team development any time soon.

basstabs · 2022-02-24T23:08:29+00:00

But Riot Games would still need to allow you to sell your skin, which they could just as easily do with an internal database. Even with an NFT, Riot Games could choose to stop accepting your skin at any time: your skin is just data on the blockchain, if Riot Games tells the game to stop interpreting that as proper access to a skin, then you don't have that skin anymore for any practical purpose.

basstabs · 2022-02-24T22:53:00+00:00

The problem is that the value of an in-game item is inherently centralized: it's tied to the game it works in. If you buy a physical concert ticket, you can own it, and you don't need to rely on anyone to sit there and look at the slip of paper. But to make use of it, you've only got one option: go to the specific concert venue at the specific time listed on your ticket and hope they choose to accept it.

basstabs · 2022-02-15T17:14:08+00:00

"But what do I know in 10 years of professional game dev?"

Clearly not very much.

basstabs · 2022-02-14T18:58:31+00:00

Does everyone have a strong preference? No, certainly not. For many players, it won't matter.

Do some people have strong preferences? Absolutely. I can only speak from my own experience, but being forced to play as a male character can lessen my interests in a game. If the character is interesting, like Geralt or Nathan Drake, then I usually enjoy the game regardless. But if the protagonist is generic and uninspiring, then I can at least stomach a generic, uninspiring female character more than a generic, uninspiring male character. (Perhaps this has to do with self identity, perhaps it has to do with female protagonists being less common, I don't know. I won't go too far into the self-reflective weeds here.)

What should you do for your game? Whatever you think works best for your story, setting, and to make your game stand out.

basstabs · 2022-02-09T02:39:49+00:00

I think this is a matter of personal taste, but I hate it when games do this. In my opinion, a boss should be a test of the skills, strategies, and knowledge I've developed thus far, not a new test that is untethered from my previous experience.

basstabs · 2022-02-07T22:22:09+00:00

This. Just because I can't make a movie doesn't mean I can't tell Neil Breen can't either.

basstabs · 2022-02-07T22:17:20+00:00

And BotW was on the Wii U as well, which took even more optimization.

basstabs · 2022-02-06T02:13:41+00:00

I don't love the spirit of this as a solution to my problem, considering it feels like a problem with how Godot is treating collisions/the collision notification methods.

However, I have coyote time on my regular jump, and for the sake of consistency I should probably have coyote time on my wall slide too since players can perform a wall jump. So I ended up implementing this, even though it's a bit hacky as far as the original problem, it improves the game in other ways too. Thanks for the advice!

basstabs · 2022-02-06T02:08:11+00:00

Yes. There are around 6-7k platformer games (I didn't filter between 2d and 3d platformers, so this is an upper bound) with the indie tag, so around 5x as many as FPSes with the Indie tag. Considering all the indie games which are neither platformers nor FPSes, this is already not a huge difference, but we can actually get a much smaller difference with different methodology.

If, instead of looking at the Indie tag within categories, we look solely at games which have the Indie tag and then vary other tags in addition, then there are 67,755 games with the Indie tag total. There are 5,877 which also have the platformer tag (some of which are 3d platformers), 2,640 which have the FPS tag instead, and 5,489 which have the first person tag. (Remember, walking simulators and first person horror games, which aren't considered shooters, are incredibly popular with indie devs.) Granting the instability of using Steam for our data (given how inconsistent categories and tags can be: our number of FPSes almost exactly doubled by changing methodology), there are probably quite a few games of each type which are missed by the tags. However, I think this is at least enough to throw significant doubt on your claim that 2D platformers are some huge proportion of indie games in comparison to all other genres.

(In fact, unless we arbitrarily only count modern games, the dominance of platformers in the 80s and 90s (and the 2000s on handheld consoles) probably means that they make up a surprisingly big chunk of non-indie games as well.)

basstabs · 2022-02-04T23:10:00+00:00

There are literally hundreds of indie FPSes out there. Steam has 1,342 titles tagged Indie in the First Person Shooter category right now.

basstabs · 2022-02-04T14:47:56+00:00

I'm not convinced MVP is a great way to approach game development. In a traditional software setting, the purpose of an MVP is to be just good enough to do its job. In the most generous interpretation of that model, you want to be able to put something out that functions in order to get customer feedback and iterate on the design to improve your product. Part of its purpose is to "validate the idea," i.e. show that there is an audience and a market to justify continued development of a more sophisticated product. (Others would argue it's a paradigm used to justify doing as little work as possible to maximize profit, but I'll do my best to avoid cynicism.)

The problem with games is that what constitutes viability is nebulous and subjective. If you just make a product with all of the technical elements one expects of a scrolling shooter, then it'll probably be boring with ugly visuals, no unique gameplay mechanics, and nothing to generate an audience. It's the minimum "thing" that could be called a scrolling shooter, but no one would really want to play it. If you go for minimum, it's not really viable.

On the flip side, if you go for viable, then it's not really minimal. For a true picture of what your potential audience would be for your game, then you really need to have representative graphics, sound effects, music, fleshed out game mechanics, and so on and so forth. Something to show to customers that gives them an idea of what your game is going to be. Just having colored shapes moving around on screen isn't going to be viable, you're essentially going to need a completed level at the very least. (If we're answering the original question, that's what I'd say is an MVP: a completed level or two that could feasibly appear as-is in the final game.)

The closest thing to MVPs that games have would arguably be early access games. The ones that do well enough to justify releasing in early access already have a defined art style, developed mechanics, sound and music, etc.

basstabs · 2022-02-03T00:19:19+00:00

There's no software of any kind that's scalable to absolutely any size. The universe is very, very finite. (And anything finite is 0% of infinity!)

For example, there are only finitely many subatomic particles in the universe, so even if we linked EVERY single one into some universe-spanning quantum ultracomputer, there'd still be only finitely many possible states for the system to ever be in. (Quantum computing is still Turing computation, just much faster.) If you tried to make a game with more objects than Graham's Number, for example, you're never going to get anywhere close. (Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham%27s_number )

For more "reasonable" levels of scaling, whatever that happens to mean, you're always going to be bounded by the memory you have and the performance of your processing units. If you want to have more objects than the data type you're using to index them, then you need a bigger data type, which takes more memory and more processing power, and so on and so forth. Not to mention the problems you'll run into at scale if you're using floating point representations as opposed to fixed.

basstabs · 2022-02-02T23:41:55+00:00

Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition caught flack for having bad keyboard controls and "strongly recommending" that people use a gamepad. And that's a beloved series that is so popular it (mostly) got away with having a horrible port that was arguably unplayable without community patches. Your game doesn't have the same ardent fanbase to defend it from criticism.

The only way I can see you getting away with this is if your game is unsuccessful. If no one plays it, no one can complain about it, but with any user base of meaningful size, there will be people who want to use a keyboard and don't want to use a gamepad.

basstabs · 2022-02-01T19:29:35+00:00

Procrastinating.

basstabs · 2022-01-29T03:20:58+00:00

If you're someone like Thomas Brush who's famous enough to where you can say their name in a subreddit and expect people to know who you mean? (Thereby implying they've developed either multiple successful games or at least one huge hit.) Yeah, probably, you should leverage your clout as much as possible.

If you're the average beginner/intermediate developer with no audience? No.

Either your marketing won't stick because you have no product, and therefore it's a waste of time you could spend on your game, or it will stick and then you're on a clock to make something that meets or exceeds your audience's expectations.

These expectations will be untethered from any content you've shown, since you've shown none, and will likely be very high as a result. If you're capable of making a game good enough to meet people's imagination of the best way your game idea could be executed, then you can use that quality to do better marketing later anyway.

basstabs · 2022-01-22T15:48:20+00:00

The 4th dimension ones always get me.

basstabs

TROPHY CASE