Comments on: How I Celebrated the IGF Nomination

By: checker

checker — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:21:24 +0000

A bit. Cheating on the Sniper side is actually going to be a bigger problem. But, I’m not going to worry about it for the invite beta, and hope it’s not an issue. For release and the wider open beta, I’ll have to figure something out.

By: Sven

Sven — Wed, 11 May 2011 00:10:15 +0000

Have you thought about how to deal with or detect a hacked client that always produces an “awesome” result?

By: Victor

Victor — Sat, 07 May 2011 09:51:45 +0000

I might be late to this ‘party’ but I cannot understand peoples reservations to this. I think this is probably one of the fewest addition of adverbs to the gaming world. Just like the analog stick it is a measurement of intensity and could infer intent: “He reloaded ‘nervously’ while hiding behind cover”, “He walk ‘directly’ to the statue ignoring the waitress to his side”.

This was one of the reason i questioned Sony’s removal of analog buttons from the Sixaxis controller as sports games used them to great effect and was more immersive that powering up digitally. I think the use of random placement would work great especially if you know a player is quite robotic in his precision just to make things fair to the beginner.

By: jordy

jordy — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 19:01:01 +0000

I think this will be more a case of skill level. At lower levels it may definitely hurt the gameplay, but once people become better this might just be a balancing act that is actually fun. It would help it if wasn’t the end of the game, but the sniper just gets a small penalty or something, then this could be part of the “interaction” between sniper and spy.

By: Ron

Ron — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:24:36 +0000

That is something that I totally agree with. I just finished up AC:B, (getting every achievement), I you never really have a full observation mode. They came really close with the “Manhunt” mode. Within this mode, the game became asymmetrical, but never really gave the opportunity to just observe. On defense (where you couldn’t kill), you waited until your pursuers closed in on you, and then tried to guess who they were. This was extremely easy most of the time. Most times they approached you directly. You could argue that the killers had to observe your movements to figure out who you were, but often skills were just used to flush out who was really the human.

I definitely agree that even though it is an interesting concept to have the sniper have to “watch his back”, it would actually hurt the gameplay.

By: checker

checker — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 20:37:37 +0000

I think “absolutely certain” is the wrong thing for the game, though, since a perfect reload is essentially no risk in Gears, it’s just a rote rhythm thing once you’re used to it. The aesthetic I’m going for is still one of calculating ROI, and you can just bias it in your favor by being better at the action test. You can always play it conservative and either opt-out by not hitting the button, or by hitting it so you err on the “inside” of the perfect bar, so you can get a normal as the worst case (assuming you don’t screw up), so this makes the risk calculation interesting. In theory, at least. Although, two playtests in, and it’s working perfectly, so I’m pretty happy so far! :)

By: Hamish Todd

Hamish Todd — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 13:32:02 +0000

It’s fun when a game has a little bite of isolated personal improvement like this. God Hand’s gameplay is basically made out of a hundred of these working in tandem, which allows you to improve yourself really well, really quickly. I do worry though that, well, though they are *fun*, challenges like this aren’t particularly *interesting*. Your randomisation thing seems like a thoughtful advancement of the active reload idea, but only when we examine active reload in itself. Similar to some other commentators, it seems like this challenge is about reaction time, which strikes me as orthogonal to the themes of the gameplay being the subtle differences in human and mechanical behaviour.

I can see how it has a positive impact on the rest of the game: An unskilled(not confident of ability to action test) spy will have to be thinking of ways to hide the animation, while a skilled one (able to action test) can be thinking about more complex, more interesting things. This is good, because the unskilled spy’s game is still interesting, and it lasts until they graduate, as it were. But if we are to see this distinction as being the purpose of action testing, then I would have thought it would be better to leave the randomisation thing out, so that the skilled player can be *absolutely certain* of their ability to action test?

By: checker

checker — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 05:50:23 +0000

I don’t see any way to set that with the plugin I’m using (“Subscribe to Comments”), sorry!

I haven’t checked out the portfolio yet, I’m heads down until GDC! Ping me again then (my email is on the About page on my personal site).

By: ♣TadMod♣

♣TadMod♣ — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 05:44:30 +0000

Hey Chris,

I was just wondering whether there is any way by which I can only get email messages for replies to my comments?
Right now I get an email per comment made on the article, regardless of its place in the article (i.e. as a reply to my own).
If not, it’s okay, I just wanted to slow the amount of emails coming to my address.

Also, did you check out the link? If you don’t want me as an artist, I’m fine with it and will continue supporting spy party either way. Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. I’m a big boy :)

Tad

By: checker

checker — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 05:37:07 +0000

It doesn’t seem to distract from the playtests so far (did another one at Valve yesterday), so I’m still cautiously optimistic!