Sometimes the "What" isn't satisfying. In Game of Thrones, a show I mostly refuse to watch, I'm not sure what kind of administration anyone would ruling that world of backstabbers and scheming ... jerks would even do. Usually, people who seek power have some kind of platform they are running on: end slavery, end pain and suffering, be free, etc. I never got into Game of Thrones enough, but it seems like everyone just wants to be king because they like the big chair? What will the GoT leader do with their power? I never knew.

There is in fact a very major character in GoT who is seeking power to, at least in part, end slavery and the other brutal customs of the cultures she conquers. But in trying to oppose brutality she becomes brutal herself--a fascinating take on power imo. (not handled particularly well in the show's final seasons, but we can presume the books if they are ever completed would do this character arc more justice)

"Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" might not be a new idea but I think GoT illustrates the danger of unchecked power wonderfully.

[original]

How does a successful game look like? Well Flappy Bird was bringing in $50,000 a day, so I'd say that was quite a successful game. The most mindless game to ever be called a game, but it was successful.

Not everyone wants to make a game like Flappy Bird. Some devs are more interested in making something that is original, or something unique, or something complex, or something with interesting mechanics, something they can be proud of. That is a very different thing from making a successful game.

I'm having an RE boom myself. Usually playing one of these: RE4, RE5, RE Revelations. Need to get around to doing the 2nd mission of RE2R one of these days. RE4 and RE5 are as fun today as they were back then. These games can stand the test of time and don't need remakes.

Pretty interesting. The narrative is intriguing but I don't think I grasped the game system. Am I reading it correctly when the minutes say "New Mandate: Treasurer -10 Power"? Does that mean the advisor's power is diminishing because of a mandate I enacted?

What might be useful is a simple diagram showing the game flow.

Those thinking of making public games that use generative AI tools whose training data was scraped from the internet copyrighted data and all, I wouldn't. I mean, it's a legal gray area at present; you could get away with it the same way you could get away with using Napster when file-sharing technology was new. But look at the lawsuits against Midjourney and Stability AI. Such tools are arguably unethical (that goes for anything that scrapes its training data from the internet. ChatGPT, etc) and though I don't know how things will play out when the law catches up with the tech, if you want to stay ahead of the curve, I would be shunning such tools.
Adobe Firefly, which is in beta, promises to be an ethical alternative to Midjourney and Stable Diffusion so I'm waiting for that.

Yes, that is what I meant about short replies followed by scripted lines.

Sounds good.

Back to the original topic...
A strategy I started employing on reddit is to offer testing exchanges to people requesting testing help for games similar (at least a little bit) to mine. So far nobody has taken me up but somebody might....

When you're not sure what to say you can just submit empty input and she'll say something (usually); either continuing with the current topic or launching a new one. The very first help screen explains this but it seems many players are spending too much time at the keyboard fretting about what to say when they don't need to say anything. So I decided today that in the next update she will talk on her own (thereby advancing the story) after a period of time of the player being idle. Maybe after a point she could say "Are you still there?" Which might also help her seem slightly more human. (not that I know of a game character in the history of games who wasn't obviously not human)

Michael, it wasn't the too flirty mood btw, it was the too many questions mood. I don't think you asked too many questions, so I'll make the meters more lenient. (perhaps re-evaluate whether to keep them at all)
Thanks. I knew you weren't the target audience for this, but your feedback gave me things to think about.

Okay. I agree and I favor the same approach to conversation. I think you would be good at writing a chat AI, Michael, not that it's something you should necessarily want to do.

I'll keep improving the small talk, but really where the conversation failed is that it never got to the main story, or even to the first location. (when you were talking about dance and she said "I may not have a body any more, but I can show you what it looked like" she meant I can show you what my dance looked like; that misunderstanding must have been why you quit)

Because I realize that open-ended small talk is a losing battle--as it is no player will ever see even 1% of all the dialogue that's in the game and necessarily a lot of it is short and/or bland. I'm trying to think of strategies to get the player into the main story faster while at the same time not ignoring direct questions and small talk if the player wants to continue it. Sometimes she fields an input with a short reply followed by a scripted line that leads into the story. Maybe it needs more of that. She has a lot more to say later about her brother and father and other family members, too.

I played for a bit, she told me she loved Pride and Prejudice, I asked her what it was about and she got confused.

Thanks for trying. Your chatting style seems normal. Tthe inputs she didn't have a good reply to are inputs she really SHOULD have a good reply to (especially Pride and Prejudice) so I can already make a few quick and easy improvements from that.

She doesn't ever get naked.

I don't play on phone at all. (also until recently my phone's been Nokia 3310)

A Nokia 3310??    Wow, you're even more old-fashioned than Cheree.

Nah, I'm not offended. All feedback is valuable, even first impressions.

Making your fans your testers is wonderful if you can achieve it, which I actually have achieved in the past with past projects. Lately, finding those fans hasn't happened. Where do all the people who like unconventional indie visual novels hang out anyway? I haven't figured it out.

@DarkGran

Even though she's been on the Earth for over 100 years? 

Srsly, as I said, I don't expect that particular game to be up the alley of any given person. One thing you can do tho is play on your phone. However, if you do that, 1. the 3D model will be even grainier than it already is (wish I knew how to give it anti-aliasing), and 2. texting on a phone is slow and painful (for me at least).

Yeah, I presume everyone else is having the same problem. Not just here, but on reddit etc I don't see a lot of replies to everyone's playtesting requests. I wonder if offering 1 or 2 USD for a casual playtest makes sense.

Oh, thanks Michael. Though I expect only a certain type of audience to like it.

I posted a game in the Playtesting forum here a few weeks ago which only one person tried. (thank god for jbarrios)
The nature of the games I make is that they require LOTS playtesting; more than a typical game. But I don't know where to look. Last year I received good help by posting in various subreddits, but this year not so much. (perhaps because the pandemic ended? I don't know)

Or do you have to pay for playtesting these days? Kind of reluctant to do that, having given up on trying to make my games commercial. My games are for niche audiences so I always get stuck trying to find people who will try them. Where do you all look when you need testers?

Also, I do not think that option selects make a fighting game better. An option select means you do less thinking about what your opponent will do. It diminishes the mind games, makes everything more mechanical. So I can't imagine Capcom intends for option selects to be in their games.

Common game design myth suggests that a key fighting game staple, the combo, was originally a bug, caught before launch, but left in the design of Street Fighter 2 as a courtesy, and soon became a key mechanic as the genre advanced.

Even to this day, many modern games fighting have so many exploits, it's difficult to tell whether they were intentional. And more often than not, these glitches separate common players, from the professionals. 'Korean Backdashes' in Tekken 7, 'Kara throws' in Third Strike, and 'Option Selects' which can be in many fighting games.

My question then, especially if there are any pro/experienced designers around (and not just fighting game devs), is whether it's a common practice for designers to leave such exploits in their games, or are they really all just bugs?

I can't imagine that kara throws or option selects were intentional; Capcom has been trying to remove kara throws in Street Fighter 5, which suggests that that one is unintentional and not deemed to be beneficial to the game. But Capcom historically has been very smart about deliberately adding unintended mechanics that have proven in the past to make gameplay deeper. After Street Fighter 2, move cancels started appearing in all their beat-em-up games (Devil May Cry, God Hand) as a deliberate mechanic. In Resident Evil 5, exploiting invincibility frames separated the best players from the rest. (if you pick up an item or climb a ladder at the exact moment a rocket from someone's rocket launcher is shot at you, it will pass harmlessly through your character)

As I play Elden Ring I think about the way the dodge roll evolved from its beginnings in Demons Souls to the point now where boss fights are deliberately designed so that players *must* use invincibility frames that (I presume) were originally merely a bonus. Nobody knew then that it would become the primary mechanic for testing a player's skill.

On the other hand, certain mechanics from early Souls games have since been removed in newer games. Strict input processing which causes a move input at the same time an enemy is hitting you to be executed *after* you take the hit, for example; I do not know whether that one was intentional or not, but it served to punish you twice for a single mistake--which is too cruel--and From wisely axed it.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a wise developer like Capcom or From evaluates all mechanics intended or not, removes the ones that don't improve the style of games they're developing, and embraces the ones that do.

jbarrios, thank you for your playtesting and feedback! Just when I thought nobody was going to.

Hmm, I wonder what more could be done to encourage the sort of balance I want between leading the conversation and letting her lead the conversation. Ideally I want players to do some of both. On the one hand, letting her lead does allow the story to progress along. On the other hand, the player must steer the conversation at times in order to arrive at certain clues. (the clue you missed requires you to probe further about the museum) Relationship level is one incentive to pose comments and questions, as empty inputs don't do anything to increase your level, and too many empty inputs cause her to feel neglected.

[Cheree doesn't know how she died. She doesn't even know why she doesn't know. By "traveling" to dozens of different locations and chatting with her about any topic that comes to mind, the two of you will gradually discover clues that lead to the answers she has been seeking for over 100 years.]

Cheree doesn't know how she died. She doesn't even know why she doesn't know. By "traveling" to dozens of different locations and chatting with her about any topic that comes to mind, the two of you will gradually discover clues that lead to the answers she has been seeking for over 100 years.

The game is something in between interactive fiction, a visual novel, and a chatbot. Well none of those communities show a whole lot of interest in a project like this. Perhaps because it isn't a "proper" VN, etc. It's a hybrid that to me at least is fascinating.

People have been trying to make something like it--a story-driven game with natural language parser--since as far back as Douglas Adams, with limited success. My goal is nothing less than to have the smartest AI in a game with set narrative that yet exists. (it might already be, notwithstanding it frequently misunderstands player input) It will never be remotely close to perfect at understanding natural language, because that is impossible, but it can be "good enough" for its purpose.

An experiment such as this does need a large number of people to use it before the AI, which is handcrafted, reaches that level. I can test it until my fingers fall off but I'll never anticipate all the inputs another player might possibly type, because every person's mind works in different ways. However, by reading play logs and seeing where her responses were bad, I can swiftly and easily make improvements. If you don't get a good response to something you type (within reason) I'll make sure the next player who types it does.

- The game is 99% complete. (can't decide on a title I like)
- Involves historical figures and events from the Victorian era.
- Includes elements of the supernatural and a touch of horror.
- There is a clue deciphering mini-game.
- Also sort of intended, optionally, to be a girlfriend simulator (though this has been at the bottom of my list of priorities to be honest)

If you would like to give me feedback, the area I could most use feedback on is the story.

I have a feeling my histogram is going to be the inverse of most people's histogram, because the only movies I remember are extremely good or extremely bad movies, so most of my reviews will either be 5 stars or 0 stars.

Many a time I have sat down to watch a movie recommended to me...only to realize around 40 minutes in that I had seen it before. Mediocre movies just don't get remembered by me, to the point where they need to be watched again in order for me to remember that I've seen them before and thought they were mediocre.

Cool! I had an idea to build a mobile app like this a couple years back, but I guess it's fine that somebody "beat me to it".

As for histograms, don't they all end up looking about the same? The highest point as well as the mean is always at around 7, or three stars.

There was a site called Flickster that once existed and was much like this. I used it back in the day...until I realized I wasn't making any friends on it, and rating movies with star ratings is kind of pointless to do on your own.

It has a nice dreamlike atmosphere. I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to do. There's a red door that he won't go in, some mini-games(?) that can't be effectively played (unless blue cat teaches how to play without a controller?), and other mysteries.