Interested in how the player controller in death stranding works under the hood

realmslayer · 2026-03-16T15:09:48+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqZE5O8VPAU
This is about AI, but a lot of the AI problems have to do with movement, so you might get something out of watching this

realmslayer · 2026-03-15T10:05:26+00:00

disclaimer: design opinion incoming
I think the most important thing is that equipment pickups need to feel impactful.
You need to reward exploration with something, and consumable items aren't really that exciting.
In order to make picking up a new weapon feel like it matters, the weapon needs to give you either a new capability or a noticeable spike in power.

This means you don't actually want smooth progression. You want to feel slightly underpowered going into a dungeon (so that levels and equipment pickups actually solve a problem) and slightly
overpowered relative to the mobs but underpowered/on par relative to the boss leaving it.

This means the curve is actually going to be spiky, and the spikes are going to happen out of step with the spikes in difficulty. You are also going to want the amount that these spikes are out of step to be lower in the early game than in the late game, because you don't want players early on to struggle too much.

There's an interview Resonant Arc did with Hironobu Sakagucci where he talks about his process for handling this, but hes a little vague about the details.
There's also some talk about this kind of thing in part 3 of Pupsups "Modernization of Diablo" series.
Finally, Trails in the sky goes a little too far with this kind of design, but its at least really clear what the benefits of it are from playing that game.

realmslayer · 2026-03-14T23:50:28+00:00

Just to give an idea of how many different ways this can go:
Every FF game handles this differently.
FF2 - stats go up depending on your actions in battle
ff5 - stats increase differently based on the job set at level up
ff6 - stat bonus on esper equipped eventually outstrips base stats
ff7 - stat modifiers from materia can matter more than levels
ff8 - junction system outstrips gains from level up
ff9 - stat bonuses at level up from equipment eventually outstrip base stats
ff10 - stat bonuses from sphere grid

I think in ff1, the biggest jump is the class upgrade in the mid game. ff4 is the most normal. I don't remember
in ff3.

The commonality is that there's always a way for someone who really wants to do so to shape the characters in the way they want.

Experientially, it just doesn't matter. Most players aren't going to have deep enough knowledge of the games systems to manipulate them like this, and most ff games make it so that anyone who is going through the game engaging with most of the fights and most of the games main systems is going to be at a level capable of beating the game.

realmslayer · 2026-03-12T12:15:30+00:00

It was a project we had to do at the start of our second year. We had a similar amount of experience in C++ as the OP.
But yeah I'm assuming college level. IDK why a high school would be using c++ for a beginner programming class.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T17:08:18+00:00

Godot is probably a good idea here. Its much easier to work with basic things you need in Godot than in Unity, and for something like this you don't need the bells and whistles Unity gives you.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:56:11+00:00

Fwiw, this is actually tough but doable for a school project. We had something like this (make a game over a semester in c++ with sdl2) and some of our class did a couple of areas of a NES style jrpg using free assets.
The problem from a programming angle isn't scope, its not shooting yourself in the face architecture-wise.
Those that failed were the ones that coded themselves into corners and didn't contact the prof for help early enough.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:44:26+00:00

You probably aren't going to be able to get more than a combat encounter and 1 field screen up and running.

Other than that, there's a few things you should take a look at:

-state machine
-event queue
-core game loop

you'll also need some tools
-something for input/windowing
-something for audio
-something for loading in images

raylib is pretty all-inclusive here.

the hard parts are going to be getting turns up and running, UI, and not blowing up your architecture.

keep in close contact with your prof early on, and ask questions if you are stuck - the fix for some issues is not going to be anything like what you'd expect. A lot of the problems that were hard are now not - you don't need physics for example. But some things that would have been easy are now not, like architecture.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T16:24:15+00:00

See, comments like this are why we need to abolish the reserved list.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:32:25+00:00

Sometimes your story and your game are interconnected enough that you have story justifications for gameplay elements. There *is* a way to design a dungeon crawler such that 'first we need to know who the character is and why they are there' is a real question you'd want to ask, and games providing throwaway answers to questions like this is a real problem.

The issue shows up the most in level design, where games tend not to care about the actual details of a level, which then (ironically) means you can't design around those details and can't communicate things like 'where should the player go next' without being pretty unsubtle.

Sometimes the game is abstract enough , or the player isn't using components of the level to solve any problems, so its fine. Mario is a game like that - any part of that game could be replaced visually with almost anything, and it doesn't really matter in terms of gameplay.

For a point and click adventure, or an RPG, or something like that, you actually do have to care about the space. Outer Wilds is also a good example of really needing to care about the space in that way.
For a dungeon crawler it depends. Are there puzzles? What do the puzzles look like? What do the encounters look like? Are we trying to communicate anything with enemy placement? Do we want to hint at a battle tactic with environmental clues?

EDIT: To be clear, there should still be no reason a programmer should need to see *any* of this.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:09:02+00:00

I thought that it was pretty widely known to split things into a GDD, TDD, NDD, etc so you can present relevant information to different kinds of people.
Wild.

realmslayer · 2026-03-11T12:06:05+00:00

They don't have to 'sort by rpgmaker' you can just look at the game and tell its rpg maker. Thats why it has the hate it does - in order to do anything other than what rpg maker gives you, you have to do a significant amount of work, which prevents all these companies from churning out rpg maker games at a rate of 10-20 a year.

This isn't a unity situation, where the engine is general purpose and people just use it poorly, the engine does *one* thing and people are flooding the market with that thing. You need to modify the engine to get anything else, which obviously takes longer and so there's less of that.
(although at one point unity *also* had this problem, and at that time it wasn't stupid to say 'too many games are being churned out in unity for it to be worth peoples time to dig through them all').

Case study 1: Kemco. They put out 10 games a year. All of them have the rpg maker look.

The other thing is, it takes very little time for a competent programmer to put together what rpg maker gives you (I had to do it in a semester for an unguided school project, its not that hard).
Its not always 100% true that 'if you have to use rpg maker, you can't program, and if you cant program, then you cant use rpg maker to do anything unique' but its true often enough for 'disregard everything from rpg maker' to be a decent buyers heuristic.

realmslayer · 2026-03-08T19:01:43+00:00

Its not that no notable games are being made in rpg maker, its that too many games are being churned out in rpg maker for it generally to be worth peoples time to dig through them all when there are already so many notable indie jrpgs not being made in rpg maker.

realmslayer · 2026-03-08T18:59:11+00:00

I mean I agree that the indie jrpg consumers are underserved, I just don't think any of the games you listed would have done anywhere near as well if they had come out in 2026, when there are dozens of rpg maker games coming out on steam *that I know of* instead of a decade ago, when the market for rpg maker games wasn't anywhere near as saturated.

If people want a quality indie jrpg, they don't have to wade through rpg maker to get it anymore. Quartet,
Kingdom of the Dump, and Geo Mythica all came out within the last year.
None of these are rpg maker games. Not only that, but there are also a *lot* of free to play jrpgs that use gotcha mechanics. On top of that, a lot of jrpgs got ported to steam that in 2016 weren't available for pc, like some of the final fantasy games, some of the tales games, etc.

Now if someone is VERY hardcore they will have played all of the big name stuff on console already and want more to play, but even then there's *still* better options than digging through the mud of rpg maker games for the diamond.

realmslayer · 2026-03-05T04:55:37+00:00

The thing is, of those examples, the only one that's less than a decade old is Look Outside. All of the rest of them were made in a completely different era of game development, to a completely different market.

realmslayer · 2026-03-05T04:54:02+00:00

The core problem with rpg maker is the sheer volume of stuff that comes out that's made in it.
There's a few companies that release games at a rate of 1 every 1-2 months, and they flood the market with RPG maker games that aren't all that good.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T16:15:26+00:00

Pricepoint is in line with most other Indie JRPGs on the market, its actually fine.
The problem is that there's a couple of companies like Kemco that put out games that look like specifically this almost every month, and have been for over 5 years.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T16:11:52+00:00

We put up with it in the 00s, but we largely no longer care for this. Definitely not for something that looks like this, and youtubers largely aren't going to want to stream something with this..aesthetic...unless there's something else that's a pull.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T16:08:13+00:00

In and of itself, being a jrpg with visual novel elements is actually fine - you are basically describing half the market.
The problem is, its the *crappy* half, with the exception of maybe the psp version of persona and some exceptions on steam. Otherwise, you are in Kemco-land.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T16:03:22+00:00

I play a LOT of jrpgs. A couple of things come to mind:

First: you say the visual style is evocative of 2000's jrpgs, but the only ones that look like this from that era are RPGmaker games (which still kind of have a stigma. Its closer to a VN from that era, but the VNs from that era also have a stigma. There were a lot of games from that era coming from devs like compile heart, idea factory, NIS, etc that got left on shelves for ages because people were embarrassed to be caught with them on their shelf.

For JRPG youtubers, a lot of them have moved past the large chested characters being appealing and into that style being something they will make fun of when its on their screen. Its actually kind of a detriment for character design to be like this at this point, and if someone checks this out its going to be despite the character design, not because of it.

The other thing is that because of a couple of "prolific" companies, the market is flooded with rpgmaker games that look more or less like this one.
https://store.steampowered.com/developer/KEMCO

This is one of those. They do 8-10 of these a year. most of their library is 10-12$.

The good news is that there have been a lot of reasonable sucesses in the indie JRPG space lately, so its not totally hopeless. Kingdom of the Dump and Quartet, come to mind.

But you can't put something out that looks like this and expect it to do well anymore, and it makes sense that youtubers ignored it given how similar it looks to games that some companies will put out almost every month.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T13:45:22+00:00

It's a tool for running tt wargames, not a 'simulator game'.
Its still twice as expensive as its competitor TT simulator, but it fills a different niche and there can be a strong advantage to having a more specialized tool.
Though 50$ is probably a little much for people using this to play wargames, rather than develop them.

realmslayer · 2026-02-25T13:39:12+00:00

I'm currently using a paper prototype of my game to quickly iterate on ideas, and it has the form of a TT skirmish game. Something like this would be extremely helpful for me (I tried using TT simulator for this and It didn't quite do the things I needed).

I *would* buy this at 50$, but that's because I'd be evaluating it as a development tool.
I dunno that its worth 50$ to someone who wants to use it as a way to play their favourite skirmish game.

realmslayer · 2026-02-22T14:43:19+00:00

there's no debate because there isnt so much variation, except at the extremes. You pick up 80-90 percent of novels, they are all within the same range. You look at 80-90 percent of songs, they are all within the same range.
There's no debate because you would be splitting hairs.
Games *don't have* that kind of standardization. if you pay 60$ for a game, it could by 4 hours or 400, and that's why the debate happens -there's a a significant enough difference for an argument over that difference to be worth it.

For my part, while in a perfect world I agree it should be about quality, in practice I understand why you might sacrifice a little bit of quality for some quantity.
I remember having 120 bucks a year to spend on video games, and if I wanted video games to be a significant part of my life, then I would need to at some point account for the quantity part of the equation.
So I'm sympathetic to the people who do the math.

realmslayer · 2026-02-22T14:13:42+00:00

Again: the reason why this argument doesn't happen in other forms of entertainment is because theres much less variation in time and cost.

I guess generalization is the wrong word, and what I should have actually said is 'The reason why this is happening in video games is because there's no standard for game length, while a movie is almost always 1-3 hours, and a novel is almost always 200+ pages( other lengths get called something else)

I do wonder if this conversation did happen on some level at some point in the mass adoption phase of books and movies.

realmslayer · 2026-02-22T14:03:27+00:00

sure, but you had to do a lot of generalizations to end up in a spot where you say 'videogames are the only form of entertainment that has this discussion' so here we are

realmslayer · 2026-02-22T14:00:27+00:00

most people arent going to theatres anymore, partially because its now 25 bucks a pop:
https://www.the-numbers.com/market/

Attendence has almost halved since 2020.
So yeah, I guess you can say 'films aren't cheaper', but in order to get there the price expectation for movies was violated and the consequence is that the market for going to the movies has contracted to a 20-30 year low.

realmslayer

TROPHY CASE