/ga/ - Games

Not a lot of Mega Man fans here eh…

>>12112
<they made that one good game and it was one of the best
<but then, they made this turd
<what where they thinking ?
kek, reads like a Angry Video Game Nerd episode.

>>12113
Is there an open source game with similar game-play, that one could try ?

>>12114
Sadly arcade and arcade-like game design is the probably single weakest area in the libre game scene. I'm not aware of a single libre run 'n' gun.

>>12115
These types of games that came out of the 80s and 90s game-console era, have inherited Japanese pain endurance test culture. They are brutally difficult and you have to play the levels over and over until the you beat the torture test complete the game.

The libre open source movement originated in the US and inherits a different culture that seeks to reach a state of mental flow.

So in order to make FOSS arcade happen, i think one would have to come up with a different level design, one that promotes mental flow. Maybe something proceduraly generated, something that adapts to your skill level and play style to keep you "in the zone".

>>12116
>They are brutally difficult and you have to play the levels over and over until the you complete the game.
Yes, that's good. Really good action games have level design depth that keeps the levels interesting even as you replay them in your quest to achieve mastery over the whole game. Western devs (especially Europeans) have spent decades not understanding this and always insist on "intellectualizing" arcade action genres to their detriment. You don't need randomized content to keep replaying content fun and interesting, you just have to apply a sufficient level of depth to it.

>something that adapts to your skill level
Japanese arcade games actually did a lot of pioneering in adaptive difficulty systems.

>>12116
I suspect it was a carry over of game design for arcades were you had to put coins into to play so making it insanely hard was a profit motive to keep people putting coins in the machine.

>>12117
From the perspective of making a free open source arcade game. I wouldn't even conceive of levels. But rather a treadmill. Game-play elements are placed onto the treadmill in the front. As the player moves forward the game-play elements are interacted with and when they reach the back of the treadmill they disappear. From that perspective it's natural to consider procedural generation with a element of randomness. Instead of perfecting level design, it's about tweaking the procedural generation. The treadmill principle also works with multiple dimensions of movement, just like canned levels.

>>12118
>I suspect it was a carry over of game design for arcades were you had to put coins into to play so making it insanely hard was a profit motive to keep people putting coins in the machine.
Seems about right. But there probably are players who see this as a feature, you know something to chew on.

>>12119
If you're describing a game that plays infinitely until the player concedes from exhaustion, there's a reason arcade games largely dropped endless play after the early '80s. Part of it surely had to do with players hogging machines for hours after paying only a quarter, but it's also grounded in a good design principle. Most arcade games after the early '80s targeted about 30-40 minutes, it's too much to stay focused on a tense self-contained action experience for much longer than that.

>>12120
>If you're describing a game that plays infinitely until the player concedes from exhaustion, there's a reason arcade games largely dropped endless play.
I had not considered that, since people don't run on a treadmill until they collapse from exhaustion either. But i can see your point.
>players hogging machines for hours after paying only a quarter
Ok but that doesn't apply to a Foss game you play on your computer.

>it's also grounded in a good design principle. Most arcade games after the early '80s targeted about 30-40 minutes
So how do you achieve that ? People replay levels over and over too, so that's not really sending a natural halting impulse. Treadmills have timers that beep. There has to be something better than making annoying sounds ?

>>12121
>So how do you achieve that ?
Just don't make your game too long, it's not that complicated.

Maybe I'm still not clear on what I meant though. It's not about total time played in a session, it's about restricting the overall time of a complete playthrough of the game. What happens in for example a single-credit clear, especially in an arcade game which can't be paused, is that you're challenging yourself to focus at a high level for the entirety of the game experience. As you get closer to the end, with more time passed, few mistakes made, and the challenge ever increasing, an experience of thrill and reward is created that doesn't happen in any other game genre. But it's also stressful. When your hardcore action challenge is too long, it starts to feel like a chore near the end because it's too hard to stay focused for that long.

It is a bit tangential that we're having this conversation in a Mega Man thread though. I include "arcade-like" in the discussion because Mega Man games don't really have the arcade endurance structure I'm describing. They have a lot of hard stops (Mega Man 7 has quite a few intermissions for dialogue), and the player themselves can take a break and come back at any time thanks to password or save systems.