Jump to content

Photo

Concequences of death


  • Please log in to reply
3 replies to this topic

#1 cavthena

cavthena

    Apprentice

  • Members
  • Real Name:Clayton
  • Location:I wish I knew

Posted 10 July 2020 - 12:45 PM

In my quest I'm using a death system that when the player dies the game will reset to the last point saved. Unlike normal no-continue quests, however, my system will reset health, magic, keys, doors, etc. to the state they were in when the player saved the game. In otherwords any progress between the last save and the point of death is lost. In terms of design I feel like this can give the player a bigger challenge as death itself would carry consequences but at the same time can cause frustration on having to do something over again. Which can be compounded if the area is particularity challenging for a player and multiple deaths are to be expected. For this reason I also gave the player the ability to save anywhere, with a cost via a meter (like magic), and added points at which the game is saved automatically, such as after the player wins a dungeon. While I feel this helps relieve the stress of building up a large amount of progress and possibly lose it. It does ultimately comes down to how people feel about death reset.

 

Although it's much to late to change my quest. I wanted to get a feeling for the position the community feels about death and reset in quests and the different types, such as traditional, semi rouge like or rouge like. If you wanted to make death have meaning and consequences, how would you go about doing it?



#2 Russ

Russ

    Caelan, the Encouraging

  • Administrators
  • Location:Washington

Posted 10 July 2020 - 01:38 PM

In general, I think a death system like the one you have is a good way to increase tension and keep the player from growing lax and disinterested. Really, my biggest word of advice has to do with puzzles. Puzzles, generally speaking, aren't super fun to do multiple times. If it's a puzzle that takes only a few seconds once you know the solution then sure, that's fine. But large, elaborate puzzles, such as the block pushing puzzles of yesteryear, especially when combined with room hazards, grow very obnoxious to redo constantly.

 

Another element to consider is how much the player is expected to redo and each time and the availability of save points prior to particular challenging events. As an example of how this could go poorly, let's say you have a long stretch of a dungeon. The majority of this is rather simple, made a tiny puzzle here, a kill all enemies there, but it's not particular challenging. At the end, you have a very rough gauntlet. The player is likely to die in this gauntlet a lot. This then requires them to trek back through the easier but time consuming section repeatedly. This will only serve to make them frustrated with the game design and increase the likelihood of them putting the game down.

 

Of course, that's not to say this approach can never be employed. Kirby games, actually, have this down to an art. Most modern Kirby titles feature a True Arena mode, where you fight several challenging bosses back to back with only limited healing. At the end of the gauntlet, there's a new boss the player has never seen before. The new boss fights are usually not that hard (as an example, here is the surprise final phase from Robobot), but they present a unique challenge in that you're having to learn all the boss's patterns on the fly, with limited health, and the threat of losing 30+ minutes of hard work if you die. I think this design trick is very effective, but it's also very easy to mess up. The difficulty tuning has to be perfect so that the challenge at the end is difficulty enough that your adrenaline is pumping and heart is racing, but not so difficulty that the player had to fight through the gauntlet 10-20 times before they can be reasonable expected to win.

 

This ended up more of a long and rambling post than I intended, but I think the basic takeaways are these: Save points need to be spaced far enough apart to feel meaningful, but not so far that the player loses interest at the thought of redoing large segments of the game. The player shouldn't be forced to redo mindless, tedious segments. In general, save points should be provided before exceptionally challenging content (such as bosses), though exceptions can be made very carefully if part of the challenge is figuring out a battle on the fly, knowing the consequences for losing.



#3 Mani Kanina

Mani Kanina

    Rabbits!

  • Members

Posted 10 July 2020 - 03:04 PM

Your death system for a game should be chosen, as with other design elements, very carefully based on what kind of player experience you want to achieve with it.

Lot's of games goes the route you have done, it's not a novel concept. As Russ touched on, one of the main benefits over a more forgiving system is the added tension to affairs. If failure has consequences, then the players will naturally have to care more about avoiding failure. It's important to note that while this will generally make players be more attentive and care about the obstacles in front of them, it does not magically make less skillful players more skillful.

For a game that kinda missed the mark in regards to realizing that, you need to look no further than my favourite Zelda title: Majora's Mask. Which put a huge consequences on failure to be efficient and manage your time; Two skills Zelda games never tested players on before nor have since. This was coupled with some of the most complex puzzle centric dungeons in the series and you can sorta see why a lot of people just bounced off the game (It certainly wasn't my favourite in the series as a kid).

The more punishing your system are in regards to failure, the more important it is that your design is solid (that it's the players fault for failing), and the more important it is that your difficulty is properly tuned. MM is a pretty big outlier when it comes to the dungeons meta puzzles for the series, despite having combat that in many aspects is the same or easier than Ocarina of Time (You can have an absurd about of bottles and such). So while that game is good on it's own, the audience who would like it is probably not exactly the same player set as the ones who liked Ocarina of Time. :P


As for myself, I already made a quest that had you go back to the previous savepoint on death (Lana Gaiden), and I can't really say how well received it was, very few have bothered to touch it. I did think that design choice was critical to the experience I wanted to deliver though, the entire quest is a weird love letter to Etrian Odyssey, a series of punishing dungeon crawlers. And I kinda wanted to replicate that experience that when you're battered and bruised you really should consider going back to town. Where figuring out the challenges ahead of you (information) so you know how to deal with them is as important as taking challenges on on the fly. I don't think I rightly succeeded too well with the quest, mind, the mechanics for the RPG system is barely held together with duct tape, the story is kinda shit cause I suck at that, but I haven't seen any other quest like it, so.

I think my best recommendation is this: properly consider your challenges and do extensive playtesting to ensure that they are actually aligning with your difficulty curve, that's the best way to make sure your experience is fun (or whatever you're going for), rather than a frustrating mess.


Edited by Mani Kanina, 10 July 2020 - 03:08 PM.


#4 Moosh

Moosh

    Tiny Little Questmaker

  • ZC Developers

Posted 10 July 2020 - 06:31 PM

I have less of an issue with this kind of save system and more with how ZC handles it. Most games with this system have some sort of progressive loading system, loading stuff as is needed, making for faster loading times spread out over a longer period. ZC loads the entire quest every time you get booted back to file select, making for extraneous loading on every death. On slower hardware or larger quests (map count is a real killer here) it can get quite frustrating. There's unfortunately little that can be done here, we just deal with it the best we can. 
 
Generally questmakers using this rule have had real difficulty choosing where to place save points, so this limited save system does sound interesting, though comes with its own share of challenges. You're putting how to distribute saves in the hands of the player, but this also means they have to understand how to pace themselves. The first dungeon will be a very important teaching experience laying out how many saves the player will be allotted and what kind of length they can expect. Expecting that you'll be way better at your quest than your players, I'd say you should be giving twice as many save points as you feel you'll need for a dungeon, unless it's an especially linear one.
 
My only experience with designing around save points and losing progress on death was Hollow Forest, which coincidentally also had one time use save points. I thought I handled it pretty well, though the save points themselves were pretty inconsequential and were just used to elevate a feeling of stress in an otherwise pretty linear quest. It didn't seem to go over very well and I had to go back and add an easy mode option after testers complained, but I think that's because like NJF said, it's a survival horror element and those can be controversial. I can't blame anyone, because I don't play survival horror games either. :slycool:




1 user(s) are reading this topic

0 members, 1 guests, 0 anonymous users