For difficulty adjustments, im personally liking alot how few games like enshrouded modify how many enemies can attack you at same time while rest might circle you in the background.
I have ADHD as well. I have been diagnosed since I was a child and I really relate to this video. Specially when you mentioned the frequent introspection I also do that all the time. Anyways about game design. I dont know if it is a neurodivergent thing or not but I dont really ever get pissed off by a games difficulty, if its intentional by the maker its a challenge I need to overcome. But if a game doesnt work like intented like there are some bugs or badly coded mechanics that does piss me off greatly. So I kinda think its silly to get mad at a game for it being good at what its trying to be, in your case a challenging experience. Its like the saying "dont judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree". People who dont like challenge are never going to like your game but people who like it will absolutelly love it. Its those people who are in the middle, those who think challenge is okay that you need to win over by things other than gameplay. The style, music, story, presentation and such and those are absolutelly amazing with your game, I love how it looks. Try to think in reverse like you dont like story focused games with little to no difficulty so you wont be interested in one. Someone else is not interested in difficult arcade style games so they wont be interested in yours. Thats in my opinion is the greatest strength of indie games. That they dont have to reach the largest audience to make the most amounts of money. They just need to be fun for some people and who knows if those people really like the game and spread it around it could make people who wouldnt normally play those kind of games a reason to try it.
Hey, after this video I went ahead and downloaded your demo. I'm also making games and design my own variation of an RTS game. What I like about your game is that it's like a dance, it feels fun to succeed and dance between the enemies and slay them. It’s like following a music sheet, and everything that stops the music breaks the flow and lowers the excitement/fun. I’m not sure if you see your game that way or not, but that’s how I see it. It’s true that some parts of the game are hard, and not a necessarily the “fun” type of hard. While I do think your game is hard, the focus on difficulty is in my opinion the wrong approach. What’s more important is to nail the “dance”, and make the player enjoy dancing and also very importantly… you must make them enjoy getting better at “dancing”. They have to feel like it was really cool what they just did: “They managed to dance skillfully between all these enemies!” But right now the game doesn’t truly emphasize that successful dancing. The very clear thing is a negative loop on the getting hit/dying, “it feels bad”. Just to make it clear I understand the inspirations with Ghouls n Ghosts etc… But I think even in those games, it’s not fun at all to be hit. It doesn't feel fun when the dance stops. The fun is to achieve mastery, and to feel like you’ve moved in all the right ways. And that seems to align with your design goal. So if you can’t make players achieve mastery/proper dancing, then people are not really playing your game are they? That’s why I think you feel that disappointment when you’re lowering the game’s difficulty - it’s because you’re lowering the beats to the music and the game becomes more like a walk than a dance. So I agree that it sucks to just lower the difficulty. You must answer the question: what do I want my players to experience? And it seems you want to make them enjoy mastering your mechanics. When I played the game and I started to want to master it, here’s what I wanted: - Faster pacing: Super short revive duration (don’t make me click on “continue”, don’t make me see the ghost of my character going in the air for so long…) ⇒ just gogo I wanna try, I wanna dance again. This also surely means more frequent checkpoints. - If the dance stops or is interrupted, it sucks… So does it really make sense that the character has >1 HP? The character already dies as soon as it goes in poison pools. With the current 3HP, this is frustrating because while I have a lot of HP. So it’s doing these weird gameplay rewards where me going headfirst into an enemy hit is better to make extra sure I don’t fall in the poison. You could just do -1HP and put me on the previous ground before the poison pool. - I feel like a dance doesn’t require all this active thinking of resource management (orbs and activable spawn points). Why do I have to make a decision of future HP recuperation vs saving? If I’m struggling, I want both. And If I’m not, I want neither… or just the save point. And why do I have to go back to get my orbs? Now the dance I’m trying to learn is modified because I have to hit an orb several times. My point is I don’t think this game should have any type of active resource management. This game only needs to make me enjoy developing mastery of the move sets, level layout and enemy types. So I think removing the concept of HP and removing orbs (and getting the big orb back when you die) makes it much better. I think the character should die in 1 shot. I think you should have more checkpoints, and they should activate when you pass by them, players shouldn’t even have to click to activate them. (and for the advanced players doing a cool speed run, they can jump above the checkpoint to not activate them). Right now, for me, this game is in between an RPG-like and an execution game. And the RPG aspect is def detracting from the execution game. You could choose to improve the RPG aspect, but I don’t see how you’re truly going to get around “being hit sucks” in the execution part of the game. That’s why I would cut it away. But I know some games like Cuphead don’t feel as bad as yours when it comes to being hit. Yours feels more punishing. So you might wanna look at at that. And their resources felt like it made more sense too. But as I said, I’m not a huge fan of that myself - I prefer the hectic stylish dance approach. Cuphead and games of that genre also have a massive amount of player getting frustrated. So if you get close to these games you either need a solution to that problem or you need to be fine with it. I think the problem can be solved in a more elegant way than difficulties. In those games, most people can do most phases of a boss in Cuphead. And most people can actually get through your game’s phases. It’s just that when you sequence it all one after another, they will make mistakes, and have to redo content they’ve already passed through. Sure that could increase mastery, but it destroys pacing. And the fact that the player could go through the dance once, already means a certain amount of mastery. But why would players enjoy going through that content again unless it’s a fun dance, unless it’s beautiful to dodge these traps and kill these monsters again? So what I’m saying is really the safest is to increase pacing, which will increase the satisfaction of succeeding the dance, and then adding frequent checkpoints is reduces frustration. So increase the tempo, creatures, traps, movesets to do, and increase the frequency of checkpoints. Faster loop = more adhd. In my opinion, Cuphead is more of a dance than your game, it’s more hectic. That’s why in my opinion, it’s better. That being said, I think even Cuphead could have more checkpoints, and I think it would be better to die in 1 shot. I feel like in your game, (and I’m sure it’s partly because I suck but then again so will most of your player base) - I had to wait for a projectile to come down, instead of staying in movement, and I"m afraid to try to get past the enemy because if I fall down the poison pool then I have to wait even more, and also I have to respawn far away. You see what I'm saying here? I think you should try to keep the players in movement more, again.. with the idea of dancing. Don’t let the dance stop. I don’t know how much content you’ve created already, but I get the feeling that it may not be that hard to do it with what you currently have. Even if you have bosses and such. The execution: dance, die fast, respawn fast, is a better match for your fast-paced desire (ADHD). Because… right now the game is really not that fast paced. It’s slightly hectic sometimes when there’s more enemies but it has very slow moments (I’m waiting for a projectile to land before I can jump), I’m waiting for the text introducing us to the story to end… I’m waiting for the character’s death animation to end, etc… I enjoyed the nice graphics and music, Good luck! (This is just my opinion, it’s very important to create what YOU want, I may be off mark as to what you would like and it’s obviously mixed in with what I would like - so feel free to ignore it.)
hmm personally i think it usually has to do with all those aspects needing to have depth and unfamiliarity to give your brain a yarn to untwine like a cat fixated on its new toy. I did actually love playing through Final fantasy x back in the day when i was younger, i think it was because the story had so much depth but then also the sphere grid had so much to progress in so many ways and same with the world and all its secrets. Its like Dr.K said about balancing many spinning plates at the same time.
This reminded me I actually beat the demo in the summer of last year and wrote feedback, but never posted it. Maybe I'll remember one day to finish writing that and post it.
Its fine, if it gives you anxiety and you need a break. Curiosity always got the better of me, I've been watching horror movies since I was 6 years old, since my parents didn't know what age ratings were haha.
I heard there was some law that if it wasn't rated it wouldn't be available? I have to look into it. Once I get started on Localization that'll be something I'll look into. Solo-Dev = Hard
@@officialgrimwaregamesllc yeah i saw some of these headlines too. I know im actually learning the basics and its already frustrating for me to not being able to build the stuff i want. Even simple things like the Chrome Dino Game arent easy as i thought :D
Looking very forward to the game. My two cents: Stick to your guns, and make the game you want to play. Many like minded players will enjoy it, and if you implement difficulty systems similar to arcade and 16bit home classics I think it gives the best of both worlds.
Oh hey! You're the one making that awesome looking game. COOL! I think a lot of people have gone too crazy with accessibility. Not everything is made for everyone, nor should it be. I'm actually really upset with Motion Twin for betraying their initial beliefs and the spirit of Dead Cells. They decided to fundamentally change the game how it used to function all for the reasons of being inclusive...NO! If they wanted to make a new game and make that game more accessible, fine, but they changed core components to an already made game, with an already set community. Make the games you want to make and stop thinking about how everyone can play it. A game made for everybody is a game made for nobody. Stop thinking about profits when making things and just follow your passion. The way contra handled their difficulty is the way everyone should. Higher difficulty would be rewarding for those willing to master the game. I believe Viewtiful Joe did something like this in their game as well. If a person doesn't get to experience all the things in the game because they played easy, that's on them. How much effort you put in is how much effort you should get out. I'm so tired of all these entitled people walking around expecting to having everything just because they think they deserve it. NO! Play the game and earn it! If you can't do that, than go watch a video, but don't tell any developer that you deserve accessibility, because you don't. If you suck at a game, and aren't willing to improve, that's you're decision, but you shouldn't be able to just bypass any of this stuff with options available. Careful with watching streamers. They're playing games for completely different reasons than regular players, but then again, I think due to the floodgates opening for casual gamers, the community as a whole has gotten too soft. There are downsides to here to what I'm saying though, the more you exclude, the less chance at your potential profit, which is why some developers sacrifice their vision to reach a wider audience. Anywho, very good video.
I hate how a lot of arcade-y game nowadays have meta-progression which makes each run mechanically easier than the last, goes against everything that makes a game fun in my opinion.
That'd be up to your therapist/psychiatrist to assess, I was only diagnosed like 4 years ago. Feels way too late, but a lot of it is like struggles that I've dealt with my whole life, I can remember I started feeling the classic symptoms of ADHD around 5th - 6th grade.
ADHD and game dev don't mix well, theres so many things tedious things to do and a small bump in the road can easily derail your state of flow. I have to balance between a captivating idea and something small enough that I can finish the project quickly. If the game idea is too ambitious then I won't be able to complete it, but if the idea is too small then I'm not invested in it and will eventually get bored.
For difficulty adjustments, im personally liking alot how few games like enshrouded modify how many enemies can attack you at same time while rest might circle you in the background.
I have ADHD as well. I have been diagnosed since I was a child and I really relate to this video. Specially when you mentioned the frequent introspection I also do that all the time. Anyways about game design. I dont know if it is a neurodivergent thing or not but I dont really ever get pissed off by a games difficulty, if its intentional by the maker its a challenge I need to overcome. But if a game doesnt work like intented like there are some bugs or badly coded mechanics that does piss me off greatly.
So I kinda think its silly to get mad at a game for it being good at what its trying to be, in your case a challenging experience. Its like the saying "dont judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree".
People who dont like challenge are never going to like your game but people who like it will absolutelly love it. Its those people who are in the middle, those who think challenge is okay that you need to win over by things other than gameplay. The style, music, story, presentation and such and those are absolutelly amazing with your game, I love how it looks.
Try to think in reverse like you dont like story focused games with little to no difficulty so you wont be interested in one. Someone else is not interested in difficult arcade style games so they wont be interested in yours. Thats in my opinion is the greatest strength of indie games. That they dont have to reach the largest audience to make the most amounts of money. They just need to be fun for some people and who knows if those people really like the game and spread it around it could make people who wouldnt normally play those kind of games a reason to try it.
Yeah for sure, having finding that niche is always important. I'm sure there's a niche for everything.
Hey, after this video I went ahead and downloaded your demo.
I'm also making games and design my own variation of an RTS game.
What I like about your game is that it's like a dance, it feels fun to succeed and dance between the enemies and slay them.
It’s like following a music sheet, and everything that stops the music breaks the flow and lowers the excitement/fun.
I’m not sure if you see your game that way or not, but that’s how I see it.
It’s true that some parts of the game are hard, and not a necessarily the “fun” type of hard.
While I do think your game is hard, the focus on difficulty is in my opinion the wrong approach.
What’s more important is to nail the “dance”, and make the player enjoy dancing and also very importantly… you must make them enjoy getting better at “dancing”.
They have to feel like it was really cool what they just did: “They managed to dance skillfully between all these enemies!”
But right now the game doesn’t truly emphasize that successful dancing. The very clear thing is a negative loop on the getting hit/dying, “it feels bad”.
Just to make it clear I understand the inspirations with Ghouls n Ghosts etc…
But I think even in those games, it’s not fun at all to be hit.
It doesn't feel fun when the dance stops.
The fun is to achieve mastery, and to feel like you’ve moved in all the right ways.
And that seems to align with your design goal.
So if you can’t make players achieve mastery/proper dancing, then people are not really playing your game are they? That’s why I think you feel that disappointment when you’re lowering the game’s difficulty - it’s because you’re lowering the beats to the music and the game becomes more like a walk than a dance.
So I agree that it sucks to just lower the difficulty.
You must answer the question: what do I want my players to experience? And it seems you want to make them enjoy mastering your mechanics.
When I played the game and I started to want to master it, here’s what I wanted:
- Faster pacing: Super short revive duration (don’t make me click on “continue”, don’t make me see the ghost of my character going in the air for so long…) ⇒ just gogo I wanna try, I wanna dance again. This also surely means more frequent checkpoints.
- If the dance stops or is interrupted, it sucks… So does it really make sense that the character has >1 HP?
The character already dies as soon as it goes in poison pools. With the current 3HP, this is frustrating because while I have a lot of HP. So it’s doing these weird gameplay rewards where me going headfirst into an enemy hit is better to make extra sure I don’t fall in the poison.
You could just do -1HP and put me on the previous ground before the poison pool.
- I feel like a dance doesn’t require all this active thinking of resource management (orbs and activable spawn points). Why do I have to make a decision of future HP recuperation vs saving? If I’m struggling, I want both. And If I’m not, I want neither… or just the save point.
And why do I have to go back to get my orbs? Now the dance I’m trying to learn is modified because I have to hit an orb several times.
My point is I don’t think this game should have any type of active resource management. This game only needs to make me enjoy developing mastery of the move sets, level layout and enemy types.
So I think removing the concept of HP and removing orbs (and getting the big orb back when you die) makes it much better.
I think the character should die in 1 shot.
I think you should have more checkpoints, and they should activate when you pass by them, players shouldn’t even have to click to activate them. (and for the advanced players doing a cool speed run, they can jump above the checkpoint to not activate them).
Right now, for me, this game is in between an RPG-like and an execution game. And the RPG aspect is def detracting from the execution game.
You could choose to improve the RPG aspect, but I don’t see how you’re truly going to get around “being hit sucks” in the execution part of the game. That’s why I would cut it away.
But I know some games like Cuphead don’t feel as bad as yours when it comes to being hit. Yours feels more punishing. So you might wanna look at at that. And their resources felt like it made more sense too.
But as I said, I’m not a huge fan of that myself - I prefer the hectic stylish dance approach.
Cuphead and games of that genre also have a massive amount of player getting frustrated. So if you get close to these games you either need a solution to that problem or you need to be fine with it.
I think the problem can be solved in a more elegant way than difficulties. In those games, most people can do most phases of a boss in Cuphead. And most people can actually get through your game’s phases. It’s just that when you sequence it all one after another, they will make mistakes, and have to redo content they’ve already passed through. Sure that could increase mastery, but it destroys pacing. And the fact that the player could go through the dance once, already means a certain amount of mastery.
But why would players enjoy going through that content again unless it’s a fun dance, unless it’s beautiful to dodge these traps and kill these monsters again? So what I’m saying is really the safest is to increase pacing, which will increase the satisfaction of succeeding the dance, and then adding frequent checkpoints is reduces frustration.
So increase the tempo, creatures, traps, movesets to do, and increase the frequency of checkpoints. Faster loop = more adhd.
In my opinion, Cuphead is more of a dance than your game, it’s more hectic. That’s why in my opinion, it’s better. That being said, I think even Cuphead could have more checkpoints, and I think it would be better to die in 1 shot.
I feel like in your game, (and I’m sure it’s partly because I suck but then again so will most of your player base) - I had to wait for a projectile to come down, instead of staying in movement, and I"m afraid to try to get past the enemy because if I fall down the poison pool then I have to wait even more, and also I have to respawn far away. You see what I'm saying here?
I think you should try to keep the players in movement more, again.. with the idea of dancing. Don’t let the dance stop.
I don’t know how much content you’ve created already, but I get the feeling that it may not be that hard to do it with what you currently have. Even if you have bosses and such.
The execution: dance, die fast, respawn fast, is a better match for your fast-paced desire (ADHD).
Because… right now the game is really not that fast paced. It’s slightly hectic sometimes when there’s more enemies but it has very slow moments (I’m waiting for a projectile to land before I can jump), I’m waiting for the text introducing us to the story to end… I’m waiting for the character’s death animation to end, etc…
I enjoyed the nice graphics and music,
Good luck!
(This is just my opinion, it’s very important to create what YOU want, I may be off mark as to what you would like and it’s obviously mixed in with what I would like - so feel free to ignore it.)
hmm personally i think it usually has to do with all those aspects needing to have depth and unfamiliarity to give your brain a yarn to untwine like a cat fixated on its new toy.
I did actually love playing through Final fantasy x back in the day when i was younger, i think it was because the story had so much depth but then also the sphere grid had so much to progress in so many ways and same with the world and all its secrets.
Its like Dr.K said about balancing many spinning plates at the same time.
This reminded me I actually beat the demo in the summer of last year and wrote feedback, but never posted it. Maybe I'll remember one day to finish writing that and post it.
😁
I will admit i totally customise scary movies by looking away, choosing to watch them at home (not in a theatre) so I can pause if it's too much etc
Its fine, if it gives you anxiety and you need a break. Curiosity always got the better of me, I've been watching horror movies since I was 6 years old, since my parents didn't know what age ratings were haha.
This is a great video! I'll need to think like you as I work on my own 2D platformer / beat em up
man this explains a lot
Yeap
i really like the commentary!
- j'zargo
J'zargo likes
Bro your game looks sooooo good, reminds me of ghouls & goblin. Sadly the Demo is not available in Germany
I heard there was some law that if it wasn't rated it wouldn't be available? I have to look into it. Once I get started on Localization that'll be something I'll look into. Solo-Dev = Hard
@@officialgrimwaregamesllc yeah i saw some of these headlines too. I know im actually learning the basics and its already frustrating for me to not being able to build the stuff i want. Even simple things like the Chrome Dino Game arent easy as i thought :D
Looking very forward to the game. My two cents: Stick to your guns, and make the game you want to play. Many like minded players will enjoy it, and if you implement difficulty systems similar to arcade and 16bit home classics I think it gives the best of both worlds.
Oh hey! You're the one making that awesome looking game. COOL! I think a lot of people have gone too crazy with accessibility. Not everything is made for everyone, nor should it be. I'm actually really upset with Motion Twin for betraying their initial beliefs and the spirit of Dead Cells. They decided to fundamentally change the game how it used to function all for the reasons of being inclusive...NO! If they wanted to make a new game and make that game more accessible, fine, but they changed core components to an already made game, with an already set community. Make the games you want to make and stop thinking about how everyone can play it. A game made for everybody is a game made for nobody. Stop thinking about profits when making things and just follow your passion.
The way contra handled their difficulty is the way everyone should. Higher difficulty would be rewarding for those willing to master the game. I believe Viewtiful Joe did something like this in their game as well.
If a person doesn't get to experience all the things in the game because they played easy, that's on them. How much effort you put in is how much effort you should get out. I'm so tired of all these entitled people walking around expecting to having everything just because they think they deserve it. NO! Play the game and earn it! If you can't do that, than go watch a video, but don't tell any developer that you deserve accessibility, because you don't. If you suck at a game, and aren't willing to improve, that's you're decision, but you shouldn't be able to just bypass any of this stuff with options available.
Careful with watching streamers. They're playing games for completely different reasons than regular players, but then again, I think due to the floodgates opening for casual gamers, the community as a whole has gotten too soft.
There are downsides to here to what I'm saying though, the more you exclude, the less chance at your potential profit, which is why some developers sacrifice their vision to reach a wider audience.
Anywho, very good video.
Did i see Kmac at the end? lol
yes lol
I hate how a lot of arcade-y game nowadays have meta-progression which makes each run mechanically easier than the last, goes against everything that makes a game fun in my opinion.
Wait, what? So I do have ADHD?
That'd be up to your therapist/psychiatrist to assess, I was only diagnosed like 4 years ago. Feels way too late, but a lot of it is like struggles that I've dealt with my whole life, I can remember I started feeling the classic symptoms of ADHD around 5th - 6th grade.
ADHD and game dev don't mix well, theres so many things tedious things to do and a small bump in the road can easily derail your state of flow. I have to balance between a captivating idea and something small enough that I can finish the project quickly. If the game idea is too ambitious then I won't be able to complete it, but if the idea is too small then I'm not invested in it and will eventually get bored.
yeah its a hard thing to balance
I guess I have ADHD...