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[PureQuestion]

Many great games have unique mechanics. Some of them are more associated with the game than others. Everyone associates Kirby with his copy ability, for example. This topic is about the discussion of these interesting mechanics, whether they're from a game you enjoy, from a game you made, from a game you're making, or simply something you've been thinking about.

One particular thing I've been thinking about was an intriguing twist on time manipulation I've thought of: What if you could alter the speed at which time moves, but not be affected? What if every slowed down but you? Could an interesting game be build around such a mechanic? I've been thinking about it, certainly. There could be interesting takes upon it, like enemies that are also unaffected, or perhaps that become faster the slower everything else is. Aside from this, being moving at full speed while other things aren't can be dangerous, if, for example, an attack that is normally easy to avoid becomes significantly harder because of how much longer it lasts.

That's my interesting mechanics. Does anyone else have any? Ill probably post more if I cna think of them.

[moi]

Bullet-time, 1998.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

every mechanic is unique, and yet connected

[Shade Jackrabbit]

If you're talking about indie games, difficulty selectors.

Otherwise, lack of death is a good one. (See PREY)

[Kegluneq]

I had an idea recently involving a controllable source of light and fighting with your own character's shadow.

[Angelo]

Banging your keyboard makes your character do more damage.

Whenever you lose a life, you get a time window wherein the more buttons you press simultaneously and the faster you press them (aka banging your keyboard), the better the chance to get your life awarded back.

[team_q]

There was an xbox game where for the first 2/3rds it was a pretty generic 3d shooter, then at the 2/3rd mark you find out that it had been a simulation, bullets now cause you immediate death, and you no longer have a hud.

[Shade Jackrabbit]

There was an xbox game where for the first 2/3rds it was a pretty generic 3d shooter, then at the 2/3rd mark you find out that it had been a simulation, bullets now cause you immediate death, and you no longer have a hud.

I don't have an xbox, but I want this game.

[Bree]

That does sound awesome- what was it called?

[PureQuestion]

If you're talking about indie games, difficulty selectors.

Otherwise, lack of death is a good one. (See PREY)

Removing death can be tricky, as it often removes difficulty.

It worked pretty well in, say, Braid, but Braid was a puzzle game, not skill based. That's the major thing there, I think. If a game is skill based and you want it to be challenging, making death have no effect probably isn't the best plan.

Also, I've never seen a topic end up quite like this did.

[Shade Jackrabbit]

The idea that you have to die to fail at a skill test is a common one, hence why death is so prevalent. There are a few games where they (although not completely removed) managed to decrease how often death happens or how it jars the narrative to a halt.

In PREY, which allowed you a brief minigame in the spirt world in which you'd try to regain whatever health and spirit power you could before you were sent back (by shooting stuff with a bow). If you totally suck at this minigame, you'll come back with little-to-no health, and will die swiftly again. Still challenging, still skill-based. Narrative flow doesn't break.

Assassin's Creed tried to base it on the fact that you're reliving genetic memory, so they did a "memory reset" when you died/failed a mission. Still, the loading times were way too long, and the reset often put you a fair distance away from the mission's start. This was jarring and so it often broke the narrative flow.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, gave you the ability to "unwind" death. You had to have enough sand to do so though. The story was told from the perspective of the prince telling the story, so if you died you would go back to a checkpoint with him saying "no wait, that's not right... let me start again." Narrative flow didn't break (as much).

That's all I've played, though. I would love to see some more developers get off their asses and figure out a way to stop interrupting the narrative flow with silly deaths. Oh wait, that would require them to even care about narrative flow. Doh.

Oooh, this may be a good time to also "bring up" my point on difficulty selectors. For god's sake, some of us are really crappy at video games yet we still like playing them. What's so hard about building a game so that the core variables (damage modifiers and so forth) are easily modified/changed if the player wants an easier play-through? It's just lazy and unnecessary to not include them in some form, nowadays.

[Angelo]

Oooh, this may be a good time to also "bring up" my point on difficulty selectors. For god's sake, some of us are really crappy at video games yet we still like playing them. What's so hard about building a game so that the core variables (damage modifiers and so forth) are easily modified/changed if the player wants an easier play-through? It's just lazy and unnecessary to not include them in some form, nowadays.

What do you think is better, a difficulty selector or a togglable automatic difficulty adjustment setting? I mean the thing where when you fail often enough the game reduces the difficulty to suit your skill, and the opposite. Popular games that have this... umm... damn I can't remember names.

[AaronAardvark]

There was an xbox game where for the first 2/3rds it was a pretty generic 3d shooter, then at the 2/3rd mark you find out that it had been a simulation, bullets now cause you immediate death, and you no longer have a hud.

I'm also interested to know as what this is.

[Angelo]

There was an xbox game where for the first 2/3rds it was a pretty generic 3d shooter, then at the 2/3rd mark you find out that it had been a simulation, bullets now cause you immediate death, and you no longer have a hud.

I'm also interested to know as what this is.

Yeah but it sounds like you've been unintentionally spoiled now

[Sam]

"Physical" interaction with the keyboard.

I don't even know if it's been done.  I thought it was done when I was young and playing Test Drive on an ancient PC.  We couldn't work out how to get the car that you control moving, until we tried running a finger along the bottom row of the keyboard.

TKTKTKTKTKTKTK

We were just typing \zxcvbnm,./ and presumably one of those was the "start the car" button.  But we always started the game with the same painful clattering of keys.  Much better than a Wiimote.

I guess it's unusual input rather than gameplay mechanic.  I'm going to use it for something, one day.  Then people with freaky keyboard layouts will complain.

[Shade Jackrabbit]

Oooh, this may be a good time to also "bring up" my point on difficulty selectors. For god's sake, some of us are really crappy at video games yet we still like playing them. What's so hard about building a game so that the core variables (damage modifiers and so forth) are easily modified/changed if the player wants an easier play-through? It's just lazy and unnecessary to not include them in some form, nowadays.

What do you think is better, a difficulty selector or a togglable automatic difficulty adjustment setting? I mean the thing where when you fail often enough the game reduces the difficulty to suit your skill, and the opposite. Popular games that have this... umm... damn I can't remember names.

Although I like automatic difficulty adjustment, it always fails and there is a certain point at which it should just stop trying. i.e. Lego Star Wars 2 had adaptive difficulty, which will basically force your allies to stand around like twats while all enemies focus on you. Plus enemy counts like, tripled.

What's most annoying is when developers force it upon you, like in Max Payne. I couldn't beat the game because the adaptive difficulty made something literally impossible.

So I guess... seeing as how adaptive difficulty is really hard to do correctly, I like just being able to change the difficulty myself.

But an even better system would be threshold adaptive difficulty, where you choose a range in which you'd like the game to adapt to. (i.e. 4-7 on a 1-10 scale). You could also choose a constant difficulty at this point, if you'd like to. (2,6,7,etc.)

[team_q]

Game

I'm also interested to know as what this is.

Yeah but it sounds like you've been unintentionally spoiled now

That's the problem, I don't remember, but I think that this is one of the instances where the idea from the game is more interesting then the game its self, that's why I wasn't afraid to spoil it.

[Noyb]

There was an xbox game where for the first 2/3rds it was a pretty generic 3d shooter, then at the 2/3rd mark you find out that it had been a simulation, bullets now cause you immediate death, and you no longer have a hud.

SPOILER was sort of like this, except without the immediate death thing (Coca Cola heals all wounds. ALL wounds). PLOT SPOILERZ. It sounds great in theory, but in practice it just devolves to checking your health in the pause screen. The developers pretty much balanced every interesting and unique design decision with an absolutely horrible one. Might be worth picking up cheap, but it's hard to fully recommend.