Yes! It is a work in progress, but I would say establishing a design language that players can understand how to interact with seems quite foundational.
Absolutely agreed. This is why a director of a game is so important. Like in animation, a director is the person in charge of keeping/maintaining the feel/style/etc. of a game. If the director's vision is vague, the work will turn out vague, even with the same footage, etc.
Especially about how they set and communicate boundaries: setting up players for goals they cannot achieve will understandably lead to frustration. They give you a list of goals but put you in the sandbox, forgetting, a little bit, that you will start to generate your own goals in this situation, some of which are easy to anticipate (especially in porn game). I think this is what RLE is doing so well: Oni seems to anticipate your goals, and put enough of a journey on the micro-plots, that you to a degree feel like you are making your own story. Magic of sandbox. Well, you can of course postpone gratification, make it adventure, encourage experimentation and discovery, but it needs a decent feedback loop (information).
Agreed. I also subscribe to Yahztee's idea of establishing a primary gameplay loop. And I think that's the difference. TNH has an idea and a plot, but not a good primary gameplay loop. This is how Oni "anticipates" your goals. He doesn't. He established a good/fun primary gameplay loop and then built things up from it and around it. You want to fuck the girl. You do things to get to that goal. All the other stuff around it is giving you a variation on that and/or helping with that.
Hmm, focus. Tell me what you think about this: story itself, with the help of quest-log, that to a degree gives focus and even built-in walkthrough for sandbox itself. It is even in a sense in conflict with it (pure sandbox), limiting your free-play and self-expression.
I could be wrong, but I feel like there's so little player interaction at that point that it's not really a game. If there's something telling you every answer or guiding you every step of the way, what's the player doing besides clicking the thing the game tell you to click? (Not a rhetorical question. Honestly asking to see if I missed something or to develop the idea further.)
Buuuut... Should we focus on the story? Can we? Is there enough of it?
You might have misunderstood what I meant when I said focus. I didn't mean what should the player focus on, but rather where the effort of the dev team was focused on. As we both have said before, games should have a good primary gameplay loop. I feel like the game is focusing developing on story and gui and art and locations and choices, etc. etc. and gameplay loop. But in doing all of those at once, it's not doing any of it well. That's what I mean by it lacks focus. It's doing all the other stuff kinda good, but not one thing about it is done well. Their effort is not focused on doing one thing well. Their focus is spread across several ideas and making it look appealing, but not play well.
The real meat and potatoes of the game, the main gameplay loop, is still purely relationship/sex focused. So it is an interesting question what exactly is/are the functions of the story here? Is it only here to give a little bit of background and flavour? Let you use power in very limited circumstances? One thing it was doing so far is measuring/progressing passage of time and by extension advancing you to new stages of your relationships. So contextualization and framing?
That's a good question. Because if this was a visual novel, all those would be good things. Very good things. But, to my knowledge, none of those contribute to it as a game. If they were to contextualize it to the game, it should progress/be brought up/be given with game progress. i.e. during the primary gameplay loop of relationship/sex. Again, I'm not saying these are bad things. But they don't contribute to the game as a game. They contribute to the story that gameplay happens to be in. Which is why they seem so antagonistic to gameplay.
Interestingly enough, none of the girls so far was introduced in story events. There were no big changes in circumstances, major changing of status quo so far either. Mostly bridging iterative, progressively more open sandbox sections.
Agreed. As we discuss this, I'm beginning to think TNH is better as a visual novel than as a game. Or at least take the Being A DIK approach where you have story accented with mini games and free roam sections.
To a degree, it is like that already. One of the conditions (quests) to progress from one season to another is a total number of relationship points, IIRC.
Correct. The caveat being that there's a cap on max relationship points per season. So season 1 might require like 1000 total relationship points and season 2 might be like 3000. But season one, even if you're able to get more, it won't let you get more than 1500 total relationship points or something like that. Which, again, if the gameplay loop is about the relationships, why is are the relationship points based off of the story and not the other way around? This tells me that the primary gameplay loop is the story, not the relationship.
What I have seen in TNH thread so far looks like they are really open to feedback. I think they have some good ideas. I'm hopeful, they will be able to build something compelling. Games on this forum have unusual development, by mostly inexperienced but passionate people. If Bioware, Blizzard or Arcane can really go completely off the rails... As we've seen... It is a small miracle we have so many interesting games in this genre.
This is a motto I've had since I became 18. I've said this at my first job and when I played FFXI and FFXIV and when I was in college and at my jobs as a programmer.
We all start out somewhere. ^^b
Not a programmer myself, but understanding of stories - of narrative arts - is kinda passion of mine. I can do a lot of philosophizing and psychologizing about it given opportunity, and conversation with you so far put me in very analytical mood
Alright, I'm gonna tell on myself a little here. I grew up reading scripts and storyboards for cartoons. In fact, if you're American (or even not) there's a good chance some of the scripts I've read as the cartoon was in development, you've seen. So much so that my first job was at an animation studio. During my teenager years, it's possible I've read more storyboards and scripts than I have actual books. So this is why I'm so experienced in this. I have A LOT of experience and have talked about this type of stuff A LOT with, often seasoned professionals, since I was very young.
Even thinking about making my own game makes me often appreciate people that make these games a lot. In my opinion, there is a lot of quite unfair criticism and accusations. In large part because money is involved.
Honestly, give it a shot. I recommend starting small, especially if you have no coding background. I can't tell you how many interviews or commentary I hear from seasoned game developers that will say things like "I didn't know about making primitive classes or the factory pattern. It makes the world of difference in making my game!" and I'm like "Yeah... they teach that in your second year of computer science." Basically, a lot of game makers eventually learn the programming chops it takes to code a good game, but it takes time, experience and trial and error. So start small. Like a sugarcube html game or even ren'py if you feel like diving head first into python. Chances are, your first games will suck or you'll make a lot of mistakes, but you'll learn important lessons from it. And then you'll be able to make better games. The line I was given when I was young is "You have 5000 (or some large number) bad drawings inside you. It's better to get them out as fast as you can so you can get to the good drawings." I'll give you a similar line (not that I'm a game dev. But saying this as motivation.) "You have 3 bad games inside of you. It's better to get them out as fast as you can so get to making the good games."
And, when in doubt, remember that
1) FNAF came from a bad Christian game
2) Untitled Goose Game was made by a bunch of friends.
Oh, if you decide to get into game dev, I recommend watching (if you don't know about these already):
side note: Python is a popular language, but I have to say that python, despite popular opinion, don't breed the best programmers. The language often acts too much as a crutch for the people using it to expand into really good programming. If you want to learn to be a good programmer, I'd recommend another language. If you want to learn to make games, it's an alright language. (as for which language to learn to be a game dev... I'm not the person to ask.)
//I think I'll double post it in TNH thread, since they seem to appreciate feedback.
Good luck.
