lily valeen

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#pixelart #ドット絵

わんわん。 #pixelart #ドット絵

i'm super excited, Angeline Era smells of secrets in a really good way ✨

manga panel from Wild & Horned Hermit. reimu from touhou, wearing a bandana and grinning evilly while making a fist. she says, "It's like we're grabbing the temple by the balls"

thank you reimu

oooo thank you!! i've been super curious to see more talks & stuff about this...

Ah! thou hast set me all on a Fire

pixel art screenshot from a game w/ an adventure exploration interface. shows two men sitting at a desk looking bored. one man, laying back in his chair with sunglasses on and half-asleep, says: "Look, it's december. Don't ask me to do shit at work until at least January 20th, at the earliest

how the hell do you make chainsaw man WITHOUT watching porn

yea, absolutely!! i fully agree with that... it's definitely risky & some players won't like it, but i do really think it's a cool feeling, not being able to see the size of the world... and sometimes completion percentage can be frustrating in its own way ("grr where the heck is that last item??")

but a game like Void Stranger or La-Mulana is okay with you not finding everything, and you would lose some of the charm by revealing the % complete...

how players will react really depends on what tone you've created for your game, but admittedly some players will always hate withheld information

it's a really tricky question, and i don't think there's a wrong answer!

i think it has a lot to do with setting the tone and player's expectations... Metroid really encourages players to find all the hidden upgrades, and the "secrets" aren't particularly complex, so a completion percent fits...

it's wild because i know this type of person must exist but i have only ever seen traces of them

ahh yea... i haven't played it but i can believe it. maps are such a tricky one, because some games are totally unnavigable without them, but it's not like every game needs them...

yea!! that makes a ton of sense, if you establish that feeling early & often then it changes the player's expectations... iirc (it's been a long time) Lufia II had lots of cool little mechanics around that too, like shooting an arrow to hit faraway switches? popular in zelda but a lot rarer in rpgs

discovery & surprise are at odds with gamification, and i adore those feelings. iirc, @brlka.com was the one who said "the best way to ruin a game’s secrets is to add a completion percentage"

a game that does not tell you everything is a game that you can be surprised by, and i love being surprised

digging deeper, i think i crave this feeling because it stands in contrast to Gamification. the feeling of surprise and discovery has been shaved out of games by things like quest logs & glowing highlights. i do not think these things are inherently bad, but i miss games that withhold information

as i've played more puzzleboxes, i realized that i really adore "hidden" or ""natural"" puzzles... the kind that are implied, but don't scream their existence

i think the reason i like these is because they often recontextualize earlier parts of the game, and make the world feel big & mysterious

something like a sokoban puzzle can be fun if that's why you're playing the game, but running into a really complex sokoban puzzle in the middle of a totally unrelated game is.......... well, it's not my favorite. possibly just a personal thing

these are.... *fine*. they're often used for denouement & pacing because they're less tense than battles, but because they totally lack context w/ the rest of the game, they usually feel more like interruptions, and thus if they're even remotely difficult they get frustrating quickly

finally, room puzzles are my throwaway category for a puzzle that is fully contained within a small designated area. It's the puzzle that fills up a lot of RPG dungeons... stuff like block pushing, playing "lights out" or "follow the correct path" or flipping switches in the right order

these can be really good!! it's super satisfying to solve a riddle, but i tend to like these a little less because it is very blatant about its own existence. Whereas spatial & rules puzzles can hide in plain sight, you will probably know a riddle when you see it. Sometimes that's totally fine, tho!

Riddles are riddles. Usually they involve deciphering a very indirect message, or uncovering the meaning of metaphors. This is a huge part of La-Mulana ("the woman shall be with child when within the man") and usually involves piecing together other clues & what you've found while exploring

these are honestly my absolute favorite... again, these are basically rooted in the breaking of assumptions. you're taught a mechanic, but not all the ways you can use that mechanic. it rewards discovery & play, and leads to a lot of incredible "oh shit, you can do that?" moments

(spoilers for void stranger, outer wilds, spec ops)

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"Rules puzzles" are anything that involves testing the limits of how the game works. This usually means "the game has explained the basics, but not the details of a mechanic"

you might know that you can use your sword to cut bushes, but you don't know it can cut the ropes tying up a prisoner

i kind of adore these! they operate on basic human logic like "why is there a weird dead-end here..." or "i know there's a room here but i don't see an entrance..."

i especially like that they don't need much text explanation. falling to a lower floor from a higher floor is just gravity!

Spatial puzzles involve navigating a larger area & deducing where to go based on knowledge & the shape of the area you've already seen. Zelda's trick of "falling to an inaccessible floor from the floor above", or how Dark Souls & Hollow Knight imply false walls thru room shape...

ok so i've been playing more & more "puzzlebox" games recently and i'm slowly whittling down my thoughts on Puzzles, what i like & what i don't like...

"spatial" and "rules" puzzles are my favorites, i think "riddles" are pretty fun but can be frustrating, and i think "room puzzles" are just okay

yea like... this sounds so miserable lol. forget personality or relatability, how in the hell are you even gonna make a game sound cohesive or consistent when you're randomly generating sentences

common advice for new game designers is "start with big changes to see what works & what doesn't, and then refine down with smaller and smaller tweaks" and i'm glad this works for gender too