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Dilemma Over Presentation of a Game Mechanic

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Which approach should I take towards this gameplay mechanic?
Dumb it down; appeal to the lowest common denominator. 75%  75%  [ 3 ]
Have the player need to keep notes and make decisions for themselves. 25%  25%  [ 1 ]
Total votes : 4

Misery
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02 Dec 2013, 1:26 am

GregCav wrote:
It depends on many factors.

Who your target audience is. You say it's the puzzle people. That good; I assume you know your target audience because you are this type of person. Also understand that the market for this kind of game is fairly small. So if you’re trying to sell the product, your marketable audience will be small to start with. No doubt someone out there will love it.

Marketability. Myst was a beautifully rendered puzzle and visual extravaganza. If you're making something like that, than there is certainly a market out there that loves it.

Myself, I would try to implement some sort of difficulty slider. One that is adjustable during game play, plus a hint mode (maybe uses up lives or something). Allow the player to choose his game style if at all possible. This is the one feature I wish more games implemented on a broader sliding scale. The Easy, Standard and Hard modes are not sufficient resolution for my liking.


The market for this sort of game is a great deal bigger than you may think; adventure games.... which is what I'm calling this genre.... have become extremely common among indie developers. I've lost count of the damn things. Telltale's games in particular helped this happen.

Hell, these games now show up on Steam's front banner pretty frequently, and it's not easy to get a game to appear on there.



SabbraCadabra
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02 Dec 2013, 10:29 pm

Ladywoofwoof wrote:
I would say that considering how much information can fit into other games such as Great Greed or Zelda....


Well, Zelda games, until recently, have never really had that much text to begin with ;) But Nintendo have a much bigger localization team than Kemco, I'm sure, and most of their games are created with the intent of being released in different regions.

I haven't played the Sword of Hope games too extensively, but from what I've seen, they seem to be pretty heavily text based, like the Icom ports Kemco did on the NES.

BTW, play this game ASAP: http://www.romhacking.net/translations/1623/

staremaster wrote:
^^ The point of the handholding tutorial is to give people enough time to decide that they like the game, before dropping them into the nine hells :D


Handholding tutorials usually just give me enough time to hate the game. I don't want you to force me to press every button, if I wanted to know how to jump that bad, I'd read the manual. Just let me go and let me play the game already =|

Usually, by the time they finally let you play it, I'm already bored out of my mind, and I never touch the game again.

Better game design is to put the player into situations where they are subtly shown how to use and/or master a skill once it has become relevant, even if it's something the player has been able to do since the beginning of the game. Give the player a bomb, and let them see a wall with cracks in it, and they'll usually figure out that two plus two equals four.


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Ladywoofwoof
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02 Dec 2013, 11:16 pm

Quote:
I haven't played the Sword of Hope games too extensively, but from what I've seen, they seem to be pretty heavily text based


Sword of Hope 2 really isn't.
There are a number of Gameboy RPGs which have more text in them than it ever did.
It's evident that Kemco didn't make a lot of effort to ensure that the english version was well made, this is most obvious whenever you go to an inn.



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03 Dec 2013, 1:36 am

GregCav wrote:
Also understand that the market for this kind of game is fairly small. So if you’re trying to sell the product, your marketable audience will be small to start with.

I'm not trying to win any awards with it or anything; I just want to make a game I'd want to play. If other people out there happen to like it enough to hire me or whatever, then that's great- but it's not my top priority.


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