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QCF Design Community • View topic - Suggestion - Warning


Suggestion - Warning

All things Desktop Dungeons

Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby dislekcia on Sat Feb 23, 2013 12:18 am

The ideal here would be to have everything be settable by the player. I have no idea if I can pull that off well enough to keep it stable... That said, I'm a big fan of left-mouse-only play being possible, right click is really only optional fast-cancels and the like. It's a lot easier to add a button into combat than it is to come up with some magical number on delay protection that works for everyone.

Funny story: Initial testing of a delayed click system meant people were more likely to kill themselves. They got frustrated with the delay meaning they couldn't attack faster (obviously this was done on fully working hardware that wasn't double-clicking, so their problem perception was different) and would just spam clicks, which meant that they'd often be spamming after they should have already stopped clicking altogether. I think you can still see the echoes of this test in the old DD alpha thread on the Game.Dev forums ;)
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby gjaustin on Mon Feb 25, 2013 5:12 pm

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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby keithburgun on Thu May 09, 2013 8:13 am

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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby dislekcia on Thu May 09, 2013 9:34 am

What's more boring, an easy run or a run that peters out into nothing as you slowly realise that you're not going to be able to win for whatever reason? Without death in-game, new players experience a hell of a lot of those drawn-out realisations of failure.

Right now our main focus is on helping new players get into the game, the number one complaint is always that the game is too hard. We're not toning down difficulty, we're bringing up the tacit information the game gives you to try and help new players learn faster. That said, nothing teaches like death.

Death as a reinforcement tool and death through misclicks are two completely different things.

P.S. I'm curious as to which runs are easy and thus boring for you? Maybe there's a bubble in difficulty that we haven't streamlined for better players properly.
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby squirrelnest on Thu May 09, 2013 9:50 am

This seems to be an ... "ongoing" topic, so I'll try to keep my input short.

I don't want death-click protection in the game. Theme is pretty important in games, and DD's theme is that its disguised as a dungeon crawl game. Giving up that most basic element of rogue-likes would be like taking the backdrop away from a play. If it does wind up in the game, I hope its default setting is off. (So that new players experience the setting without that 4th wall mechanic.)

On the mechanical side, IMHO the design flaw being talked about is not with DD- its with the mouse itself. Sometimes it can be hard to line up your clicks without slowing down. This has nothing to do with DD, and everything to to with the limits of technology. There is no computer command for "you know what I meant to do." The choice will always be between limiting user input (reducing miss-clicks at the cost of speed of use) and not limiting user input. (requiring more caution on the player's part.)
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby Lujo on Thu May 09, 2013 10:39 am

Dislekcia's P.S. question is actually really important and interesting, I hope there's an answer.

And squirrelnest is right about what DD's theme is - it's a puzzle disguised as a dungeon crawler. You can't win an argument about going full puzzle for several reasons:

1) It's a design decision. From my point of view a terrible, wrong, counterproductive and contemptible one, and I've said this in various tones and volumes before. But the game is great enough that you have to respect it's makers and take it for what it is in pretty much any issue which boils down to "what is all this roguelike crap doing in the best puzzler ever?". For you, or me, or in my assessment 99% humans in the world, it's an issue, for them it's their decision. Maybe they would never have been as motivated if they set out a puzzle game in the first place, or not be as motivated not to work on a roguelike? Maybe if they didn't believe they were making a roguelike this awesome puzzle game wouldn't exist at all? Who knows what motivates them as people? Who has right to inquire? But we all want them motivated because outside of personal genre/taste prefferences they're pretty incredible.

2) Death makes the game addictive. True, it's the worst sort of way to make it addictive, and the game is probably one of the rare ones which don't really need as much artificial difficulty, but as a hook you in tool it works well enough that you can't take the "death as learning/motivational tool" argument out of the discussion. It's only partly right, but since it isn't 100% wrong you can't bypass it.

3) Beneath everything it's a matter of taste, even if it's not clear. Sure, various viewpoints get rationalizations, justifications, expirience and booksmarts brought up, but in the end you're telling the guy who's making a game (or has made the game) that what he wants is, for the lack of a better word, unreasonable or counterproductive. I've been part of this discusion before this thread, and in several incarnations on different issues, and I've yet to see enough reasonable evidence to support such a firm stance as the dev's have. On the other hand, just about any reasonable reason I've seen people come up with on the other side boils down to "Guys do you realize just how good a puzzler you've got here?", and get progressively more annoyed with the dawning realization that they might not. And in the end all that's left is both sides being bitter and resentful at each other, and with no real malice on either side. Which is why you don't debate tastes in general.

4) Marketing. Who's gonna believe another puzzler in a sea of puzzlers is the holy grail? But if you can market it as a hybrid between an acessible genre (puzzlers) and a hip hardcore übergeekluk (balkaneeze) it stands out. Fortunately it's as good as it is and very much more a puzzler than a roguelike so puzzle fans get hooked like files on sugar, while unfortunately when roguelikeness rears it's ugly head they get righteously annoyed as you just did (or would if you pursue the pointless debate instead of contributing about your expirience with the game such as it is).

5) Compromises - you have to make them. The ones allready made on both sides get silently brought into this kind of argument so both sides tend to start them at least slightly pissed off. One who's annoyed at stuff like limited lockers or death as such piles up frustration for a long time by noticing them chafe every time he encounters them. And if the dev's really wanted to be roguelike developers, I can imagine they've made quite a few concessions up until now. Enough to be at least mildly annoyed at anyone asking for more...

Well, that's it, hope noone takes it the wrong way. Cheers.
I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby dislekcia on Thu May 09, 2013 11:38 am

Lujo tends to assume that the entire world sees things the way he does. Despite loads of evidence to the contrary ;)
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby Waterd103 on Thu May 09, 2013 11:40 am

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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby Lujo on Thu May 09, 2013 11:57 am

I almost got pwned by Shifty Brickwork!
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Re: Suggestion - Warning

Postby dislekcia on Thu May 09, 2013 12:45 pm

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