326 replies to this topic

[James24]

DarkFlameSheep, my home cooked meal is just lovely when I eat it thank you very much.  Now, if you want to tune it to your tastes then there's some salt and pepper. for you  You'll have to figure out how much to add so that its lovely when you eat it.  If you want me to do it for you, here's my business card with my restaurant's name and I'll hope to see you there sometime.  Don't expect it to be cheap, its VIP only.  If you're willing to pay more, I'll also ensure there's no cheese in the meal.

 

P-Tux, as Dimi said the enemies must drop rupees for that section to work as intended.  So even if it dropped one rupee then its theoretically possible that a player could get infinite rupees.  The big problem is that ZC simply remembers how many enemies are in the room when Link leaves.  And when he returns, it spawns enemies according to what comes first in the enemy list for that screen.  A player can manipulate that spawning so that they spawn the enemy which dropped the most rupees or work out a way to get infinite rupees.  So, I'd have to rewrite the whole enemy spawning engine just to eliminate this kind of manipulation. 

 

And what about a fire-gel?  You kill the initial form and it splits up two small gels.  If one small gel gets killed the player can collect rupees from it and then the other one reforms into a big gel.  You kill that big gel and it splits into two more small gels.  You kill one of those small gels and collect money and the other gel becomes big again.  Infinite money.  And I don't think I want to spend time trying to make a script that fixes this one.

 

And what about the pauses?  The player has to be able to pause the game so they can switch items.  If I could somehow ban this, then how will the game work?  I'd have to tell my game where a player can and can't use the pause the screen and this would take a lot of time.

 

Thanks for the offer Dimi, I'll keep that in mind.  If I ever ask others to make scripts for me it would be something that was very pressing and urgently needed for the quest and it also has to be reasonably doable in a short amount of time.  I don't think eliminating cheeses classifies as very pressing and urgently needed and I wouldn't ask any one who offers to make scripts for me to waste their time on that.

[Deedee]

You know, Liberation is a nice relaxing game to play. New Yuurand update just dropped, and I had to come back to liberation to take a break with an easier game. It's a great way to cool off after the hell a certain thing brought upon me, I get to just have a great easy time with liberation after that. 10/10, a nice way to cool off after work.

[Moosh]

You know, Liberation is a nice relaxing game to play. New Yuurand update just dropped, and I had to come back to liberation to take a break with an easier game. It's a great way to cool off after the hell a certain thing brought upon me, I get to just have a great easy time with liberation after that. 10/10, a nice way to cool off after work.

lmao

 

I'm sure James would enjoy the thing. That said, there's no chance in hell he'd make it through the great big fire gel room that is the entire rest of Yuurand to get to it. 

[P-Tux7]

lmao

 

I'm sure James would enjoy the thing. That said, there's no chance in hell he'd make it through the great big fire gel room that is the entire rest of Yuurand to get to it. 

It's great how you put in all those Zelda elements in your map on purpose to make James feel like he was playing a nostalgic old challenge quest - something like Umbral Cloud. You may go down in PureZC history as the person who turned Yuurand into the first quest that both Type A and Type B players can enjoy.

[Moosh]

It's great how you put in all those Zelda elements in your map on purpose to make James feel like he was playing a nostalgic old challenge quest - something like Umbral Cloud. You may go down in PureZC history as the person who turned Yuurand into the first quest that both Type A and Type B players can enjoy.

I genuinely have no idea what you're talking about here and I'm not sure you do either.

[Evan20000]

make James feel like he was playing a nostalgic old challenge quest - something like Umbral Cloud. You may go down in PureZC history as the person who turned Yuurand into the first quest that both Type A and Type B players can enjoy.

make James feel like he was playing a nostalgic old challenge quest - something like Umbral Cloud

challenge quest - Umbral Cloud.

Bruh.

I can feel whiplash from the bar of entry for being classified as a challenge quest dropping.

[P-Tux7]

You don't think it is at the harder difficulties? I've seen James compliment Link: Rank 9's hard mode, so I figure those can count as challenge quests even if they're not the only option.

[Evan20000]

Perhaps, but with that qualifier does that make any quest running Moosh's new portable difficulty mode script a challenge quest? I can't fathom James would approve of any questmaker just slapping triple damage on their quest and calling it a day?

[P-Tux7]

Perhaps, but with that qualifier does that make any quest running Moosh's new portable difficulty mode script a challenge quest? I can't fathom James would approve of any questmaker just slapping triple damage on their quest and calling it a day?

I don't think it was done via script, but the Link: Rank 9 quest page doesn't list anything different about the modes besides enemy damage... that might actually just be it.

[James24]

I remember trying Yuurand a long time ago and it became too easy so I stopped playing after a little while like I do with most quests.  If a quest is only difficult after completing most of it then there's no way to tell it apart from the 100's of other quests that start easy too.

 

Simply having a damage reduction ratio to make things easier or simply having triple damage to make things harder has been proven not to work in most cases.  It might work in one or two games like Link 9 but in general it doesn't work.  As I said previously there is no easy way for a game designer to balance difficulty for someone else's tastes other than their own.  The only way to get around this is to have a focus group that the game designer constantly playtests with to ensure the difficulty is balanced for their tastes.  Focus groups tend to cost money and its only really feasible if the game is eventually going to sell so that whoever is paying the focus group can recover their costs.

[Deedee]

I remember trying Yuurand a long time ago and it became too easy so I stopped playing after a little while like I do with most quests.  If a quest is only difficult after completing most of it then there's no way to tell it apart from the 100's of other quests that start easy too.

 

Simply having a damage reduction ratio to make things easier or simply having triple damage to make things harder has been proven not to work in most cases.  It might work in one or two games like Link 9 but in general it doesn't work.  As I said previously there is no easy way for a game designer to balance difficulty for someone else's tastes other than their own.  The only way to get around this is to have a focus group that the game designer constantly playtests with to ensure the difficulty is balanced for their tastes.  Focus groups tend to cost money and its only really feasible if the game is eventually going to sell so that whoever is paying the focus group can recover their costs.

You tried Yuurand before Sadistic mode got added. There's plenty of ways to "enjoy" Yuurand for Type B players now.

Also, Yuurand's fanbase is a very effective focus group.

[James24]

Russ is a type A player who I remember from way back in Light of the Heavens.  I get very suspicious of type A players suddenly making the jump to type B simply because no one has been able to give any credible explanation of how a game developer converts their game for other player's difficulty preferences.  There are plenty of type A quests in the database which have a "hard" mode that turns out to be very lackluster.

 

From what I've heard in the gaming industry, this conversion between tastes is done via a large focus group of players who are paid to constantly playtest the developers work.  Obviously, this isn't possible in ZC because no quest maker is going to pay for a large focus group

[Evan20000]

From what I've heard in the gaming industry, this conversion between tastes is done via a large focus group of players who are paid to constantly playtest the developers work.  Obviously, this isn't possible in ZC because no quest maker is going to pay for a large focus group

You place a lot of trust into a methodology that inherently encourages focus groups/testers to say what they think the funding party wants to hear to maximize their chances at future job opportunities. Maybe this isn't always the case, maybe it happens more than we think, but the possibility for data corruption exists because of the introduction of financial incentive; a concept you should be well familiar with. Similarly, while 30 some odd people in a discord isn't nearly as large of a sample size/test pool, there's far more incentive for them to speak their mind with the absence of financial incentive looming over them.

As for said 'Type B' content in question in Yuurand, I personally made quite a fair chunk of it (albeit not all of it). If it's up your alley, go for it. If you've written it off entirely after prior experiences with the title, then that's fine too; there's plenty of people suffering on said content right now.

[Moosh]

You place a lot of trust into a methodology that inherently encourages focus groups/testers to say what they think the funding party wants to hear to maximize their chances at future job opportunities. Maybe this isn't always the case, maybe it happens more than we think, but the possibility for data corruption exists because of the introduction of financial incentive; a concept you should be well familiar with. Similarly, while 30 some odd people in a discord isn't nearly as large of a sample size/test pool, there's far more incentive for them to speak their mind with the absence of financial incentive looming over them.

This is a real funny thing, much as focus groups are intended to be "focused" on one specific demographic, this can be very hard to pin down. They're always going to be pulled to some degree towards the average set by the lowest common denominator. In short, all roads lead to Dark Souls.

 

I can't imagine James would like Yuurand though going off what he's said. The difficulty is too variable, gameplay is not combat focused enough, and no amount of Evan boss kino would convince him to sit through a 2-4 hour run to get there. 

[Russ]

As I said previously there is no easy way for a game designer to balance difficulty for someone else's tastes other than their own.  The only way to get around this is to have a focus group that the game designer constantly playtests with to ensure the difficulty is balanced for their tastes.  Focus groups tend to cost money and its only really feasible if the game is eventually going to sell so that whoever is paying the focus group can recover their costs.

See, I disagree with this. Like Evan said, a focus group has a financial incentive to tell you what you want to hear, thus sabotaging itself. Having friends who you trust and who have different tastes seems like far better idea. Using Yuurand as an example, my co-author Aevin is about as Type A as it gets and likes to focus on polishing up story and presentation stuff, whereas there's very little doubt about where Evan's priorities lie when he hands us superbosses. Yuurand's dev team has a big enough spectrum of preferences that I really like think we've got the difficulties balanced well.
 
 

Russ is a type A player who I remember from way back in Light of the Heavens.  I get very suspicious of type A players suddenly making the jump to type B simply because no one has been able to give any credible explanation of how a game developer converts their game for other player's difficulty preferences.  There are plenty of type A quests in the database which have a "hard" mode that turns out to be very lackluster.

I find this kinda funny given that Yuurand players frequently complain that the areas I make are too difficult relative to others. Light of the Heavens is an easier quest, but it's easier because I chose to focus more on the puzzle aspects and dropped several things like potions for the player to ensure difficulty wouldn't be a limiting factor in experiencing the game. But I don't think that automatically peg me as a "Type A" player; it just reflects what my goals for that specific project were. While your Type A/B system can be useful for broadly classifying stuff at a glance, the way you view it as if it's an absolute hard and fast rule is... strange, to say the least. I've had people complain that I have cutscenes that go on for too long and puzzles that are too tricky (Type A, in your schema) but also people complain that boss fights are too hard or enemy gauntlets expect too much of the player (Type B). I get what you're saying about the difficulty of converting to somebody else's difficulty preferences, but you also have to keep in mind that it's not like I have only a single preference. I've loved some super easy, narrative or exploration driven games. I also love games like Furi that consist solely of super challenging fights. Basically what I'm saying is that the world isn't black and white, and your attempts to classify it as such, aside from just coming across as silly, are keeping you from enjoying stuff you might otherwise like.