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Infernax, not bad. It looks and sounds like something from the 8 to 16 bit era, unlike say, Dead Cells or Hyper Light Drifter, which look very modern despite being pixelated. It’s well designed, the gameplay works, although of course it’s overly hard. Gotta give the mouth breathers something to feel superior about.

Even though it’s technically well executed, I don’t love the art style, and that extends to music and dialogue. It’s closer to Shovel Knight than to something like say, Axiom Verge or Cave Story. Much more infantile and gamer-culture-y.

Gotta give the mouth breathers something to feel superior about.

I feel like I have to push back against this, as a game designer. I prefer hard games, and I know a lot of people don't, but for me it's because I want to get to the point where I am at risk of losing as quickly as possible. Because THAT is where games are at for me, the inflection point is the interesting part. Some people like to chug along through long games with few true inflection points and take in the mise-en-scene but I make games for a living so I'm bored already. But if a game can beat me fairly in two minutes straight, then great! So many people hate to lose. I love to lose, so long as I wasn't cheated. I want something to push against that isn't going to yield like a sack of pudding, and I don't want to have to walk a long way to get there.

Practicing something difficult until you get it right is something that most musicians must feel an affinity for on some level I guess. Maybe it was because I grew up playing arcade machines, not console games, and I just want that quick fix.

Checking the screenies, Infernax does look a little infantile. There's something about the art, it looks like it was drawn by talented middle school boys.

Anthony Flack wrote: Sat Jan 21, 2023 3:08 pm

Gotta give the mouth breathers something to feel superior about.

I feel like I have to push back against this, as a game designer. I prefer hard games, and I know a lot of people don't, but for me it's because I want to get to the point where I am at risk of losing as quickly as possible. Because THAT is where games are at for me, the inflection point is the interesting part. Some people like to chug along through long games with few true inflection points and take in the mise-en-scene but I make games for a living so I'm bored already. But if a game can beat me fairly in two minutes straight, then great! So many people hate to lose. I love to lose, so long as I wasn't cheated. I want something to push against that isn't going to yield like a sack of pudding, and I don't want to have to walk a long way to get there.

Practicing something difficult until you get it right is something that most musicians must feel an affinity for on some level I guess. Maybe it was because I grew up playing arcade machines, not console games, and I just want that quick fix.

Checking the screenies, Infernax does look a little infantile. There's something about the art, it looks like it was drawn by talented middle school boys.

My objection isn’t to there being the option of difficulty. I get that people want different things. What I hate is that the hardcore crowd insists that cig games have to be “punishing” and nothing else. Infernax has a “casual” setting that adds a couple save points but is still insane, for example.

It’s not hard to offer real difficulty scaling. If the game has achievements for your profile or whatever, then it can mark those achievements with what the difficulty was set at when you got them.

I don’t think the answer is something like Axiom Verge 2, where the amount of damage taken is completely user defined. But if you had something like the easy/normal/hard choices in Cave Story* for every game like that, I think it would be fair to everyone.

Edit: it turns out Infernax actually has a similar thing to Axiom Verge 2. You can turn on invincibility and infinite jumps. At that point you might as well watch a video of someone playing it, though.

biscuitdough wrote: Sat Jan 21, 2023 3:29 pm It’s not hard to offer real difficulty scaling.

Ever tried it?

For some games, handicapping is easy. For others, a massive can of worms and a testing nightmare. Most of the time it's a minor PITA and requires careful consideration. I'm going to have that question at the back of my mind going into any project, now. How is difficulty scaling going to work in a way that doesn't require us to do a million bespoke adjustments and quadruple the testing and bug-fixing time? And not turn into a game that sucks at either end of the scale? You have to think about the different difficulty levels together, not assume you can tack some adjusted values on at the end of the project and call it good enough.

Oftentimes, it just doesn't really work, like your examples where the easy version feels pointless. Professional designers don't keep screwing this up over and over because it's easy.

Then there's the question of who's going to buy your game and how much effort you ought to put into any given feature. Given the overwhelming number of games being released these days, small developers may be better off finding a niche and using all their resources to focus on their core audience. Plenty of developers have taken the trouble to offer multiple difficulty levels, only to learn from analytics that 95% of their audience play on "Normal".

The recent M2 compilations of old arcade shooters (they released a bunch of them, old Toaplan games, one on the Aleste series, etc.) contain loads of extras, and one neat thing they all include is a "super easy" mode for all games, where they have made all kinds of subtle changes to the game mechanics to make them, you know, super easy. And it works great! I mean it helps that they didn't have much else design work to do on these pre-existing games, so they could focus on that. They still feel like the same game, but that you have somehow become really good at it without practice. You'll beat it on the first go probably, but still get a kick out of it.

Games that do difficulty scaling particularly well will get attention among designers.

I tried Quake 1 and 2 RTX and they both work fine (60 fps's) after playing with the settings which surprised me as I thought it will be too much for my GPU (rx6600) and just as I remember from the 90's, I prefer Q1 way more and it's still very much enjoyable, RTX lighting does transform it a lot.
Here's a video

Been goofing around with speedrunning Bloodstained : ROTN in randomizer mode. I enjoy the dual play styles, searching for seeds, then optimizing a route and trying to execute it. And then switching between the two based on how any given day is feeling.

Trying to get speedrun.com to add a category for randomizer runs for this game (it’s built into the game, not a mod or anything) and apparently none of the moderators for this game respond to messages there. Heh. Yeah.

My current PB would not be a world record, as I’ve already found a run on YouTube that’s faster, but I could shave *so much* time off this simply by not playing so poorly.

Adam P wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 8:22 am

biscuitdough wrote: Tue Nov 08, 2022 7:23 am I found the hollow knight was like most other bosses and just took a couple attempts to get the rhythm down. I would say that I straight up can’t do the traitor lord, at least with Cloth’s “help”. That fight and the dream version of Zote are impossible for me.

It seems counterintuitive but staying close to the Traitor Lord is the way to go. Slash and hurdle repeatedly.

I just completed the 3rd Pantheon last night and made it to the end of the 4th today. Now I have to figure out how to defeat the Pure Vessel.

Achieved 112% Steel Soul last weekend

Been replaying Breath of the Wild to get myself hyped for Tears of the Kingdom in a couple of weeks because apparently i'm that kind of nerd now....

Dr Tony Balls wrote: Thu Apr 27, 2023 9:08 am Been replaying Breath of the Wild to get myself hyped for Tears of the Kingdom in a couple of weeks because apparently i'm that kind of nerd now....

My brother has been doing the same. It’s mildly disappointing. He’s a huge Zelda fan and likes the game but finds the combat and enemy variety repetitive. The world map is impressive as a whole and early on hunting and scavenging was fun but there’s not enough variation. I agree. It’s like they built the world but hardly populated it. The shrine puzzles are really disappointing and just feel like a boring mini game that interrupts things instead of something integral to a dungeon or world.

Sooo we started playing Zelda 2 on the switch console. That game has problems but it is a blast revisiting it with more info than being utterly obliterated by it as a kid.

In anticipation of Stalker 2 finally, mercifully releasing later this year, I installed Stalker Anomaly, a sort of pseudo-sequel to the first game. It's got its own layer of jank added to the already jank X-ray engine, but running surprisingly smooth. Hard as shit, spooky as hell.