YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

[mrblack]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

As a side note (we are hard at work at this, having hired a programmer to take over my duties, relegating me to writer/PR/etc.):

Can anyone here translate English to Japanese fluently, for the Japanese DLSite?

There's that guy over in the hounds thread. He was working on some mods for it and made some posts in english. He admitted he wasn't very fluent but did a fine job replying to my question.

http://www.ulmf.org/bbs/showpost.php?p=428206&postcount=709

http://www.ulmf.org/bbs/member.php?u=51313

 

[MetalDemon]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

How about some suggestions from someone who has made a video game before?

Making an H-platformer would be very art and design intensive to get right. In my opinion none of the ones I’ve ever seen have managed to do it correctly. Here are the main places that they fall short:

Spoiler

1) Have a constant stream of porn available to the player without killing the pace of the game. This means no still pictures once an actual level gets going, so the majority of your h-content will need to be animations.
2) High resolution animations of the main character. It’s a porn game, the players came to look at titties, so having pixelated ones in view for the game part of the game is going to lead to limp dicks. Yes, this is going to take an insane amount of work.
3) Don’t skimp on the number of animations either. If you want fun gameplay, the player character is going to have to do a lot of different things, and all of these things will need to be fully animated. Walking, running, jumping, wall sliding, crouching, climbing, sneaking, attacking, the list goes on. These are all the things you will need to animate without cutting corners.
4) Find the balance between the size of the player character and the screen space. If the PC is too small, then players can’t ogle them well enough. If the PC is too big, then players can’t see what they’re trying to do in the game.
5) Craft gameplay that’s deep enough to be interesting, but can conceivably be played with one hand while slightly distracted. I think you know why this is important. The thing here is to avoid precise maneuvering or reactions, so try to achieve content that is interesting to think through and requires only some small amount of skill to execute. Look at Portal for a good example of this.

Taking all this into consideration, you have a fuckton of work ahead of you and I advise against it. Personally I would recommend and RPG for reasons that are too numerous to properly describe right now. If you like I can tell you why in another post.

Now that the platformer-specific suggestions are out of the way, here are some general ones:

Spoiler

1) Test early and often. The fucking second you have a half decent prototype with shitty MS-paint art, put it in front of as many people as you can find and get their feedback. Much of the feedback will be useless, but some of it can absolutely save your ass like the fact that your brilliant game concept isn’t fun.
2) Pin down your controls down before even trying to make content that will be in the final game. If your controls change, it probably will break all of the levels in your game.
3) Spend a lot of time tuning the controls at the very beginning of development. Remember Super Mario 64? Remember how good the controls felt and how much it made the entire game way better? Miyamoto spent weeks in test levels tweaking the controls to get them just right.
4) The first 10-20 levels you create will be shit. You won’t want to think that, but it is the truth and you need to accept it. Early levels are important for figuring out what’s fun and how well your controls work, but they are absolute shit from a player’s perspective. They should be cannibalized for any good ideas they contain and then thrown out.
5) The point of a video game is to entertain the player while they beat it. There are a few exceptions, but your porn game will not be one of them. A small minority of players will cry that it is too easy. If you oblige them, then they will be the only ones happy. Make sure everyone can beat your game.
6) Use your levels to teach your player how to play the game. I don’t mean that you should stick a blatant tutorial level at the start; every level should be a tutorial level. Again, see Portal. Always be thinking about how to teach your player how to approach a puzzle.
7) Make short levels. It’s super easy to re-arrange and remake levels if you get the pacing wrong, or are teaching skills in the wrong order. You can combine levels to make larger ones once you’re sure everything works.
8) As far as a porn game goes, stick to fairly mainstream fetishes. Yes, I will close your game and never return the second you have scat porn in it and I am far from alone. You will lose far more people than you please by going for extreme fetishes. Even for the more common ones, tone it down or it gives a really creepy vibe. I mean, you can do whatever you want and make the game for just you, but you are going to reach a much wider audience if you don’t include shitting dicknipples, piss, 12-foot cocks on a midget, etc. You could have the option to turn some fetishes off, but how do you design around some levels not having certain enemies/features and why are you making content that some people won’t see?
9) Don’t have customizable characters. Just… don’t. It requires so much work for such a small payoff and your game is already going to be vastly over-scoped. Spend your effort elsewhere. I’d rather have one flavor of good than customizable shit.
10) Unless you have really good music and voice acting, don’t have voice acting in your game. 95% of the time I turn audio for indie games off because it actively detracts from the experience due to its low quality. That, and audio files are huge and will bloat the fuck out of your game making it much less desirable in a downloadable marketplace.

tl;dr: Read the post. Test your game all the fucking time. Re-read the previous sentence out-loud three times.

 

[helhansen84]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

5) The point of a video game is to entertain the player while they beat it. There are a few exceptions, but your porn game will not be one of them. A small minority of players will cry that it is too easy. If you oblige them, then they will be the only ones happy. Make sure everyone can beat your game.

that would apply to a rpg maker game imo. but playing a platformer should be some kind of a struggle. if there is ingame rape, it only happens when you fail. so for a lot of players its just like they're forced to stop playing to actually see something like this happen or keep doing suicide becuz enemies are poorly designed and constantly fail to knock you down.
i agree to the point, that a game should be beatable, but progress comes with practice.
so there should be at least an easy mode. but if its just running through until "oh, there is a new enemy, i better stop playing now and get beat up" ... then its a mood killer.

i recommend 3 or 4 difficulty levels. meaning that enemies have to get "better" ... not by raising hp or dmg, but by making them move faster, extending their moves range probably, giving them mean combo attacks or stuff like that. this way, even more experienced player would have fun playing it and have the chance to experience h-content the same way, because one h-attack would not instakill the player when there are other mechanics raising difficulty than more dmg and more hp.

 

[MetalDemon]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

that would apply to a rpg maker game imo. but playing a platformer should be some kind of a struggle. if there is ingame rape, it only happens when you fail. so for a lot of players its just like they're forced to stop playing to actually see something like this happen or keep doing suicide becuz enemies are poorly designed and constantly fail to knock you down.
i agree to the point, that a game should be beatable, but progress comes with practice.
so there should be at least an easy mode. but if its just running through until "oh, there is a new enemy, i better stop playing now and get beat up" ... then its a mood killer.

i recommend 3 or 4 difficulty levels. meaning that enemies have to get "better" ... not by raising hp or dmg, but by making them move faster, extending their moves range probably, giving them mean combo attacks or stuff like that. this way, even more experienced player would have fun playing it and have the chance to experience h-content the same way, because one h-attack would not instakill the player when there are other mechanics raising difficulty than more dmg and more hp.

I don't mean make it so easy that players will never die. I mean make it easy enough so that you don't get players who rage quit before they see all of the content.

Having 3 or 4 difficulty levels is double the amount of content creation time and testing, if you're smart about it. I'll be clear, this project is already so big it will never get fully completed. It comes down to this question: would you rather have a good game with 1 slightly easy difficulty level or a mediocre one with 3 or 4? I'll go back to Portal again: 1 difficulty level, everyone I know who has played it has beaten it and it's considered to be one of the best games of all time. Worry about more difficulties, or New Game+ or whatever other gameplay extending devices you want after there is a good, finished game.

If you plan out a simple fun game with all of the core it needs in order to function and be fun first, then adding new features is fun and exciting. If you plan a huge game and have to cut a bunch of extraneous features in order to finish it, then that is just depressing and the game is *far* less likely to be completed out of this. I'm slapping down ideas not to be a killjoy, but because I want to actually see something come out of this, because these guys seem to be pretty talented.

 

[Sithri]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

The discussion going on in the forums is why game design is so freaking hard lol

opinions on how video games should work vary from person to person and none of them are generally wrong. And if they are wrong its because they don't understand a few key elements.

I'm sure you guys are already developing the game at the moment right?

difficulty should not be an issue till you designing the levels themselves

story is NEVER the most important point to the game, it should only be a good asset, that being said, whenever i see platformers with extensive dialogue, its generally really bad because it takes me out of the experience.

a good way to work it in is if you only have it pop up at the will of the user (like a sign or monitor or something)

another good way of doing it is applying the story in the background, (instead of writing it, make it happen, or show it in small details within the game)

the less cut scenes the better, the more that happens within gameplay the more engaging it is, not to say ALL cutscenes are bad, sometimes you just have to show the player a few things

 

[lolcats]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

So we took everyone's opinions into account, and we are indeed hard at work on the game: It has a name now, and you can check the new thread for the game AND a blog post for the game on its official blog over at:

http://www.ulmf.org/bbs/showthread.php?t=21935

This will also be my last post on this board under this name, as I'll now be going under my name for the actual project over there.

If possible, could a moderator lock this topic? Thanks

 

[golwas]

Re: YOU design a platformer RoR game: need opinions!

dang, I wrote my post before finishing the thread. Well here it is anyways.

_______

With all these promising new developers popping up it feels like we're entering an H-game renaissance.

So I wanted to ask everyone: if I were to write a story or dialogue for this that would mindfuck everyone (think the ending to The Witch's House, if you've played it, or for a more mainstream example, the ending to The Sixth Sense or anything else with a massive gamechanger ending), would it take away from your enjoyment of the game?

I like stuff like this personally but a lot of untranslated English might deter Japanese buyers. Or maybe it wouldn't, who knows.

I love hentai games but I find a lot of the Player Characters in them have no personality. Why should I care if a faceless marionette is getting raped? I hope you guys really give thought to what kind of person your PC is, and then convey that through how she moves, stands, reacts to situations, and how she chooses to dress. It bugs me when a character is dressed promiscuously but nothing she does reflects this. It bugs me when a character dresses modestly but nothing she does reflects this.

In Splatter School the PC's entire personality is conveyed through her basic animations. She stands scared and unsure of herself, but moves tenuously forward with determination. Her basic attack is desperate but when she's attacking with a shotgun she's confidant and even playful. The sex in this game is sparse and really isn't that great but because the PC has such strong characterizations they matter more.

In Kurovadis the ways the PC dresses is not particularly sexual (at least not in sprite form) and she moves with a lot of athleticism and confidence. She's really an empowering character, that's why it's so juicy when she's rendered defenseless and taken advantage of.

To throw out a quick hentai fetish of mine; I love mind control scenarios. Also I prefer non-humanoid enemies, I think they offers more creative hentai.

Anyways that's my input, I really hope this works out for you guys.