Mars After Midnight: Gameplay Loop
dukope.itch.io
dukope.itch.io
[0]: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/from-uncharted-to-obr...
"Great tools help make great games. Spend as much time on tools as possible" (c) J.Romero.[1]
Best, of course, is if you find ways to use off-the-shelf tooling (maybe with some exaltation) so you can spend more time on the thing you're supposed to be doing. Either way, you should have a toolmaker in the team.
founders: you want a toolmaker that can build fast iterable tools that effectively balance the needs of Eng/Product/Design when you grow past 10+.
I don't intend to get a Playdate (it's unavailable anyway, right?) but I do admire this guy and I enjoy reading his blog and updates.
He really is a genius. I don't say this lightly. A lot of people rave about games which are essentially either tech demos (impressive, but is the game really good?) or a bunch of cutscenes with a dodgy/cliché story by wannabe film directors.
Not Pope. He really focuses on engrossing gameplay and novel ideas. His art is always in service to the game. Where else would I get a game about an immigration office stamping entry permits -- an engrossing, fascinating game?
He seems to have a really good sense of what games can do that is actually unique to the medium of games.
Kinda wondering why Lua on the PlayDate seems to have performance issues in his game. Doesn't seem the game does very graphic intensive stuff.
And from my experience LÖVE [0] is quite fast as is LÖVR. I would think Lua should be able to handle much more, but perhaps the animations in the article don't tell the full story.
Perhaps the PlayDate doesn't make use of LuaJIT [1] as LÖVE does? Or perhaps the hardware of the PlayDate itself is just much slower than I would expect.
---
[0]: https://love2d.org
[1]: https://luajit.org
In such environment you'd best utilize Lua for configuration, implementing branching dialogs, scripting the story events and similar occasionally-triggered high level code that needs frequent tweaking. A more static project (turn-based, or a card game) could be done just in Lua. Using interpreted Lua in hot loops will not only drag the frame rate, it will also bring down the battery life.
Luckily even the plain Lua can easily be integrated with C, so it's not that difficult to take a chunk of Lua-prototyped code and push it down to C. For LuaJIT it's a non-issue for most part (and most algorithms can be reworked to be more efficient while staying in Lua).
Obra Dinn is a top five game for me. If you haven't spent a weekend binging it I can't recommend it enough.
Savour it though, you can only play it "for real" once.
The man is an artist. An artisan. He makes no two games the same, and he is not a copycat. He really explores the design space and comes up with something novel.
I think he is the best game designer of this age. Sorry if it sounds hyperbolic, and you'd be right to doubt it -- but he truly is.
Obra Dinn - You're an insurance adjuster filling out paperwork
Papers, Please - Dystopian document simulator, you're a low ranking customs agent in a soviet style country.
Obra Dinn was an incredible work of art, but it's not accessible by any definition of the word. I don't think anyone would enjoy it if they weren't already deeply in love with video games and puzzles.
The Outer Wilds (not worlds) is another one that I think rivals Obra Dinn, and is more accessible. It might be the best narrative-focused puzzle game ever made.
She got all the way through "The Case of the Golden Idol" though, which is a totally different experience but probably uses similar bits of the brain. I'll try her on Pentiment next, but I suspect she'll get bored quickly.
I think Outer Wilds is brilliant, but the ability required to precisely control that spaceship is way beyond any casual player.
The Outer Wilds ship controls are not too complicated, but the player needs motivation to get used to them initially.
In Flappy Bird you repeatedly press a single button to flap.
I don't think they're remotely comparable, but YMMV!
Outer Wilds is one of the few games with truly 3D movement as part of it’s blood. Not just a jump but a jetpack and ship that demand traversal of the third dimension. And I’ve taught enough people who are new to games over my life to know how hard they find using a controller in a game with more simple set ups initially. Outer Wilds…a casual gamer could probably learn it, but to someone who has rarely used a controller or mouse/keyboard movement in a gaming context it would be quite a bit more difficult.
Game is totally worth it though.
Then again, I'm the kind of person who plays DCS, has over 350 sends in Getting Over It (one left handed), and flies the VTOL VR AH-94 with SAS off, so I'm probably not a good baseline.
It looks right up my alley, thanks for the recommendation.
I get stuck on the puzzles and give up for a while (days, weeks, months), because I only can get through a single rebirth or maybe 2 per play session (due to my casualness, other commitments, etc). But every time I come back, I can fling the ship around the system no prob, just can't remember enough of what I did last time to progress.
On the other hand, my son smashes every vehicle in every game into every wall he can find. That boy needs some driving lessons, stat.
It’s definitely a game for people who love complex puzzles and have a lot of patience. I think someone who loves super complex puzzles who has barely touched a video game before could still like Obra Dinn. (Countered to Outer Wilds which, while a more generally accessible great puzzle game, has a control scheme that would he incredibly painful for people not already somewhat familiar with 3D game movement)
If only I could play it again for the first time. There's really nothing quite like it.
By the way, it's just Outer Wilds, no "The". Still easily confused with The Outer Worlds, though.
I almost wish for amnesia to be able to play it for the first time again.
I think the "intro" is designed to show the core gameplay loop quite explicitly – find a dead body, see the vision of the past, find another, see a clue, find a third, put 1/2/3 together and know what happened, and have that confirmed by the game.
This took me 15-20 mins while reading the tutorial and notebook content and at the end it was pretty clear to me what came next. I've seen similar experiences in reviews of the game.
If you quit before the end of that loop it would be pretty unclear, but it's fairly short so do try to push through. If you did complete that and aren't hooked, that's fine, maybe it's not your sort of thing. If you completed the loop and didn't understand what was going on then it might be worth playing through it again and taking more time to read the instructions as it's all fairly explicit.
The way the game sets up its clues is brilliant but ultimately that sort of game isn’t for everyone. You do have to figure out a lot from small bits of information.
And no, I’d rather people make extremely interesting games that will be 10/10s for the people who love them and 5/10s for everyone else. (And as a person who loves both paper puzzles and puzzle video games, I love Obra Dinn) Just wanted the person who made that comment to understand why it’s a game a lot of people will bounce off of.
Is it just me, or does that sounds like a really bad hardware decision regarding the accelerometer? With that limitation what could you still use it for other than digital variations of a marble maze?
From a technology perspective, 1bpp lends itself to some pretty hilarious optimizations relative to AAA ray-traced alternatives.