Chaos Tomb: Visualizing Gameplay with D3 and SQL | Hacker News Reader

Chaos Tomb: Visualizing Gameplay with D3 and SQL

moria.us

15 pointsdietrichepp6 comments

The most obvious design mistake is to make essential weapons and items (double jump) hard to find and easy to miss. This punishes a player for playing "as intended", i.e. finishing level. Items that are hard to find and has possibility of not being found at all should offer just slight benefit, so without it player can still complete game without feeling that he missed out.

My goal when making the game was actually to make players feel like they missed out, but let them complete the game anyway. If I remade the game, however, I think I'd create another category of item to collect (trophies / coins / stars / whatever) which have no gameplay value but allow you to keep score, and then I could put the hearts and weapons farther out in front, where they're easier to get.

But were players even aware that there were essential weapons and abilities to be collected? If no, then it would be another design mistake. Hiding essential information from player. With endless stream of games it's not a time to rely on player curiosity and let them explore - you would have to build a reputation of someone who makes games worth of exploring. When just taking random game almost nobody will spend any significant time trying to find secrets.

If you've played the game and have feedback to offer, I'd welcome it.

Exploring the game to collect weapons and other resources is explicitly the goal of the game, it's in the game's description, you're graded on it at the end of the game, and there's literally nothing else to do. There's only one "secret" in the entire game, and I wasn't expecting anybody to find it.

And, screw "building reputation". I'm not doing this to get rich or famous. If the game is compelling, people will explore it. This is a game jam game anyway—roughly 50 man-hours of development, barely a prototype. Making prototypes lets me collect analytics and get gameplay feedback, which is the best way out there for developing applied game design skills. But, to be honest, I only do it because the community is so awesome.

Some of these graphs REALLY are in need of labels on their axes. Number of deaths? Which is the count of users?

Sorry! Almost every graph has "player count" on the Y axis, and then the X axis is the title of the graph. This was my first experience with D3, and if I had a bit more experience, I probably would have given better axis labels.

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