Non-gaming studies have repeatedly shown (I have no references for this - sorry) that people are much more willing to do pretty much anything if they're surrounded by other people also doing it.  The effect even works if those other people are complete strangers that you're not interacting with.

My favorite version of this study is the one where you show cards with lines of obviously different lengths, but the planted aides all insist they're the same. When it comes to his turn, the test subject is likely to agree with them, despite the obvious nature of the problem.

-SirNiko

Am I the only one who thinks that Castle Crashers may actually not really be an indie game? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEti4fiJYFI

When does an indie game company stop being an indie game company and starts being something on the level of Valve?

Indie is about the way you think about games.

When you stop saying "This will be fun" and start saying "Studies show that x% of players will enjoy this activity" you've stopped being indie.

A resultant metric is that if you actually earn enough money to eat each month and live in something that resembles a house more than a shed, you are no longer indie.

-SirNiko

It just occurred to me that this is precisely the same logic that the Boy Scouts have used for ages. You complete tasks for badges. Earn enough badges, and you level up from Cub Scout to Eagle Scout. Then you earn more badges until you can start your own troop, and then your goal is to get those troopers as many badges as possible.

Somebody should make an official Boy Scouts MMO. It could be a force used for the good of humanity.

-SirNiko

One thing that bugs me in RPGs is having characters grow in a staggered fashion. In FFX, for example, I had to constantly cycle characters into combat to make sure they gained XP and gained levels. I hate that. Actually, I hate swapping heroes in general. I prefered FF4, where I just went with the party I was given, so I could focus on equipping them and picking the right spells for the upcoming fight.

I'm okay with leveling. Typically, gaining levels involves collecting new abilities. Increased repertoires result in easier combat, but you have to think more because you have more options available. It's a simple way of giving the game a learning curve, as every few fights you have one more option to consider. That, or it just works as a soft barrier to progress, as smart players can defeat foes at low levels when average players can punch through at middling levels and have an easier time. Either way seems clever to me.

-SirNiko

Regarding enjoying MMOs without being addicted: my buddy has an interesting philosophy behind his reasons for playing WoW. He posits that MMOs are fun because they tend to have massive game-worlds, which in turn are fun to explore. NPCs everywhere, thousands of quests to complete, thousands of weapons and items to find, each with a picture, model, stats, flavor text. It's an explorer's wet dream. He doesn't even like doing team stuff unless it's with friends, and when he nears level cap he just quits, because the repetitive raid stuff isn't much fun.

You don't need to be an addict to find that fun.

Regarding trophies and achievements, I like it when those things give you challenges to overcome that take some thought. I'd normally never play a Metroid game to go for a low item collection challenge, but in Metroid Zero Mission, you unlock a cool little ending cinematic if you manage to do so. It's an achievement, basically. Fighting bosses with super-low weapons and health is really thrilling, and I like that. In Megaman 10, the challenge mode dares you to defeat the bosses without taking damage or using special weapons (It's basically a list of achievements). That's fun too, because it drives you to learn the patterns and find the safe spots. And, someday, you'll have all those trophies and you can move on to the next game.

These things CAN be used for the forces of good, MMOs and achievements. I think game companies will HAVE to do this, even, given that with free games like Farmville sucking up those low-hanging addict fruit. You can only manufacture so much swill before the swill market is totally flooded.

-SirNiko

So, this is Kongregate on a CD?

I feel like this would be vastly improved by some sort of unifying theme tying the crapgames together. Kongregate gets about 2 "Maze" games a day, shitty mouse avoider things with absolutely no effort involved. A CD of those would be terrible. Not hilariously ironically terrible, but terribly terrible.

On the other hand, if it were a CD filled with 1 minute long games of low but consistent quality, that might actually be a cool product.

Anyway, I get the point is to just see what you get, and I'm curious what you'll find.

What will you do if something good is submitted? Will you reject it on the basis of being too high quality, or will you leave it in as a diamond in a septic tank?

-SirNiko

I think people have addictive personalities. The only way you're going to get rid of these addiction horror stories is to find the people who have these kinds of susceptible minds and make sure they're keeping their activities balanced and healthy. Trying to make "Addictive games" illegal is silly, quite frankly. All it does is take away those games from people who can enjoy them responsibly, and the addictive folks will just find a different vice with which to waste their lives.

That's not to say there aren't a few despicable folks out there that wouldn't care if their product harms its user. I just think it's a little harder than people think to differentiate "manipulation" from "market research to increase sales".

-SirNiko

The game was a lot of fun, but I wasn't compelled to play through to the end. The biggest problem, to me, was that the game really begs you to create these convoluted solutions involving whatever you can imagine, but then those solutions typically don't work, and soon you're back to the old Wings and Black Hole for every stage. I'm really not sure how you would fix that.

I don't regret buying the first game (it DOES make for a fun toy to share with non-gamers) but I'd be hesitant to drop money on a sequel that doesn't offer much improvement to the experience.

-SirNiko

America invented the internet, ergo, we get to decide which online spellcheckers to use.

If the UK manages to invent Internet 2: Turbo Edition then the UK can make The Queen's English the official online spellchecker language.

To the victor goes the spoils.

I use american English, and I've never had a spellchecker "freak me out". I'm also terribly anal about spelling everything correctly the first time. Perhaps you just have some niggling, virtually unimportant typos that just happen to rub the checker the wrong way.

-SirNiko

A simple way to make a successful RPG would be to pick an RPG you really liked, and then come up with a few original concepts for a battle system. There's nothing wrong with incremental changes to something that already is working.

Maybe players collect items from monsters and dungeons, and they slot those into skills to get bonuses (extra damage, accuracy, elements, auto-counter, etc.). As the game progresses, they get better stuff.

Perhaps it's pokemon, but instead of gaining skills by level-up, you collect them in caves and by defeating trainers. Sort of like having every skill taught by HMs. That satisfies the "Collector" urge too, since you can marvel at your heaps of skill machines and strategize about which ones are best for when.

Maybe you have Chrono Trigger, but position is really important in battle, as you lure enemies out to cliffs to knock them off, or move the party to avoid getting hit by area attacks (which is not really all that different than Chrono Trigger.).

Then just come up with an original cast of characters, include some decent graphics, add in some fun areas to explore with a few traps and surprises, and voila, you have a great RPG.

-SirNiko

What Lynx said. If you're working towards an ending you need to show the player progressing towards it, though I would go beyond visual changes and also progress the gameplay accordingly.

At the start of the game, it basically tells you Orochi is the bad guy but once you have defeated him you learn that he was just a pawn in a game you do not know the scope of, and for a huge part of the game you get no indication of how long it actually is. This made the game grow immensely for me in terms of design and immersion.

I actually hated that about Okami. I mean I still like the game a lot, but that was a major downside. The game has like five endings... constantly building up to some huge climax and then "Oh wait, no that wasn't it"... no sense of pacing whatsoever, plus way too much repetition.

This depends on the actual game content, though. My understanding (I could be wrong) is that the point is to make it seem like it IS the same level over and over, and he wants to string the player along just long enough to realize there's some subtle change going on that isn't immediately obvious.

Without knowing the nature of this subtle change, it's difficult to say whether significant differences between the levels would spoil that aspect of the game.

Hopefully we'll get some input from Nitram and he'll let us play his game.

-SirNiko

Coffee break doesn't seem too bad, since it seems like you continue to get it. The hardest part is just surviving the obligatory Fight the Robot Masters Again level.

Mr Perfect, even on easy, seems like it's more about luck than anything (Not to mention, restarting every time you get hit ONCE will get old really fast). I probably won't be doing that one. All the rest seem totally doable (I got no continues this morning on Easy). I like the challenge mode as well, since it makes for a bunch of 1-minute chunks of play, perfect for when you need a quick fix.

All in all, good stuff. Tomorrow I think I'll try to get through Hard Mode.

-SirNiko

The answer was "you can't".

-SirNiko

I could've sworn I read through you post to make sure I wasn't restating your point... well, my mistake.

No worries, amigo. I was posing that as a rhetorical question, but my post was long-winded enough to make that confusing.

-SirNiko

Game's already out on the Wii, and only the Wii. XBox and PS3 are going to hit before the end of the month.

Sorry dude. But hey! I'm playing it on my Wii and loving it, so take solice that at least not everyone is as miserable as you.

-SirNiko

Based on some of the press I've heard about Heavy Rain, they make some decisions more difficult to commit to by forcing you to contort your hand into complex button presses. Some Games media aren't a fan, but I was listening to Rebel FM, Anthony Gallegos explained it as if the difficulty of the button presses is a 'warning' that you don't want to go down that path. I was thinking, it might also be difficulty to make sure you truly want to commit to that decision.

This was the one thing that makes Heavy Rain sound clever and fun. It's a properly implemented risk/reward system (in theory, I haven't played it). My only concern is that the "risk" is minimized when you know what you're doing (you always succeed and therefore it's not actually risk) or that the reward is so great that you have no choice but to take the risk (the reward is the "Good ending", therefore, picking the low risk route is tantamount to selecting to fail the game).

I'm interested to hear more details about this, and how it actually works out in the game. Maybe I'll pay a visit to the GameFAQs page for it.

-SirNiko

In 2-d platformers, I like a fixed camera. More importantly, the camera should be panning ahead so you get to see more of what's coming and less of what's behind you and is unimportant. That relies on level design where the game knows where the player is going next, though.

For 3-d games, First Person and Third Person both work. I recently played Mario Sunshine on the Gamecube, and was wondering why I was having so much trouble with the camera, until I remembered I could adjust it with the c-stick, then I was happy again, since I could put the camera wherever I wanted whenever I wanted.

Metroid Prime was a platformer, but I found myself happy with the First person camera since the platforms were all nice and big. When it really mattered (like the space jump or wall jump or morph ball jumps) the game went to third person mode. Not to mention, the free look while moving was fantastic. Standard fare for PC shooters, of course, but for a console game it was top notch.

-SirNiko

How do you tell the difference between real fun and the fake fun that comes from a psychological trick?

 

Is there a difference? Fun isn't a tangible thing. You're basically asking, "How do I tell the difference between what I find fun and what other people find fun but I'm too pretentious to call fun?"

The answer was "you can't".

-SirNiko

This is totally dependent on the type of game I'm playing.

What's the goal here? Do you have a game that needs a camera and you want to know what sort of camera to implement?

-SirNiko

Number 1 should be "Maybe you're crazy!". But that's because I believe in the Third Grammatical Reich.

Then I pick number one.

-SirNiko

You want to improve upon EVE? Make it so that mining is actually fun. Fun to the point that players will join the game just to mine. They'll spend hours doing it, and actually enjoy doing it.

That, and make it so space isn't so boring and bleak. Seriously. They need more landmarks in space so you feel like you're exploring, not running around looking for randomly generated waypoints.

Needs more Super Mario Galaxy style planets.

-SirNiko