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[Arturo]

One of the reasons I enjoy reading decline. Seeing how it's all made and all the behind-the-scene effort and decisions makes the final seamless cohesive project even more incredible

Game design is as much psychological as it is technical. Using lightning and color and camera angles and enemy placement and other elements to subtly guide players, prime their emotions and expectations, and all that

Pardon my ignorance but… what is decline?

 

[Grisby]

Like that Suikoden map one.

 

[zer0das]

Excellent post. I'm always really confused by people who think the RNG is stacked against them - what possible reason could a developer have for biasing results that way?

In the case of X-Com, it is due to really misguided ideas about save scumming ruining the game- the way they do the rolling is a hell of a lot more deterministic than actual RNG. Then they try to compensate for that by "helping" the player, when they could have just made it fair in the first place by using an actual RNG.

The amount of 90%+ shots I miss in X-Com while getting obliterated by what should be low probability shots makes the game feel completely unfair to me. Maybe I just pick the worst possible moves and the universe is out to screw me, but the simpler explanation is that the dev's micromanagement of the "randomness" of the game simply sucks the user out of the experience because it is so noticeable. It made X-Com less enjoyable for me than it probably would have been without any of the dev intervention, and it made the second game completely unplayable from my perspective.

 

[epmode]

In the case of X-Com, it is due to really misguided ideas about save scumming ruining the game- the way they do the rolling is a hell of a lot more deterministic than actual RNG. Then they try to compensate for that by "helping" the player, when they could have just made it fair in the first place by using an actual RNG.

The amount of 90%+ shots I miss in X-Com while getting obliterated by what should be low probability shots makes the game feel completely unfair to me. Maybe I just pick the worst possible moves and the universe is out to screw me, but the simpler explanation is that the dev's micromanagement of the "randomness" of the game simply sucks the user out of the experience because it is so noticeable. It made X-Com more less enjoyable for me than it probably would have been without any of the dev intervention, and it made the second game completely unplayable from my perspective.

I believe the XCOM reboots only cheat in the player's favor, and only if you choose something below the highest difficulty level.

 

[More_Badass]

Pardon my ignorance but… what is decline?

Typo. Meant devlogs. Was typing fast on my phone

 

[DiipuSurotu]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

 

[Mister_Bubbles]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

That looks ridiculous!

 

[DiipuSurotu]

That looks ridiculous!

Yup lol. It's usually not as noticeable as this however.

 

[Rodney McKay]

Son of a

Pretty sure I knew about boost not always being faster in Burnout 3.

SInce the game displays a speedometer, you can actually see how you're going nearly top speed without boosting, and then boosting gives you an extra 2-5 MPH, but the graphical effect makes it SEEM like you're going way faster.

 

[Lathentar]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

Are you sure it's not for the camera itself? Having ceilings to normal scale would create disaster for the most common camera setups.

 

[Diablohead]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

true or not, castlevania just did a poor job with it's worlds and scale more then trying to make things pop out.

 

[inpHilltr8r]

Super interesting but ruined many games Now I can't stop thinking about what's happening behind the scenes while playing!

the curse of game dev

 

[iidesuyo]

I swear that whenever I showed Wii Sports to people back in the day and created a Mii for them, half of them would score a Strike when playing Wii Bowling for the first time.

Of course everyone was delighted, "natural talent" and such.

 

[The Hermit]

Not sure why it's frustrating to fail at something with only a 20% chance, that's a pretty low chance.

To me it's the same as the "random" settings in the iPod adjustment.

When it launched it was actually random and it would even replay the same song or play the music that played before.

They had to adjust and avoid this kind of stuff happening, so people felt it was "more random" by making it less.

Ie: our brains suck at math and statistics.

 

[Haly]

I like Dota's pRNG in any case. Basically for a 15% chance, the actual percentage would be like 8.75% which increased linearly for every miss until it reached 100%. This discourages luck streaks but also miss streaks which feel awful either way and helps bring 15% to more of a fixed ratio than true 15%. Contrast with HoN which eschewed chance entirely for fixed ratios.

The double roll thing I think is common to make RNG feel better but I'm against obfuscating it. Path of Exile has a mechanic called "lucky" which no one figured out for the longest time and was underrated. Eventually theorycrafters figured it out to be the "double roll" and it became one of the strongest mechanics in the game for crit builds.

 

[Lork]

That's it. No mystery. It rarely happens, because, well, it's just statistically unlikely to get this specific combination, but there's nothing mysterious about it.

???

You're right that it's statistically unlikely, that's why the discrepancy between how often it should happen compared to how often it actually happens (fairly frequently) is eyebrow raising...

 

[sonicmj1]

This whole subject is fascinating.

What's thumbstick correction?

Mike Bithell‏ mentions it but also says it was already explained. I couldn't find the explanation.

He went into more detail in a Gamasutra blog post. Basically...

Load up the modern third person game of your choice, and run at a wall at 45 degrees. If it’s a decent game with reviews that say the controls are smooth, £10 says the character doesn’t blink, and starts running along the wall in the direction you were pointing at the analogue speed you specified.

It keeps you from getting caught on walls.

 

[Vigilant Gambit]

The last bit of health being worth more than displayed is commonly called the "magic pixel" in fighting games.

In Bayonetta, an attack that would kill you instead reduces you to 1 hp. So unless you have 1 hp, it always takes 2 hits to kill you.

Monster hunter does the opposite lol

The old Desire Sensor.

 

[Falk]

I mean lesson one is to not suck at making art
Lesson 2 is that your client gives you money
So lesson 3 and I agree

I'd posit that a more accurate Lesson 2 is to tell people asking you to do stuff "for exposure" what to do with themselves.

 

[Semajer]

One of my favourite episodes of Game Makers Toolkit covers the auto difficulty scaling from Resident Evil 4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFv6KAdQ5SE
Or more importantly, it covers how the game did it and didn't tell you.

I really enjoy Mark Browns stuff, give him a watch if you guys haven't already.

I'm fairly certain I've always known this about RE4, and I've definitely noticed it during playthroughs. I wish you could turn it off as I'd prefer to rise to the challenge rather than have the challenge dumbed down.

I seem to remember reading that the PS2 version of RE4 couldn't handle as many enemies on screen as the Gamecube release and I've often wondered if the difficulty or enemy distribution was changed to make up for it.

 

[Red]

I really dislike the use of dishonest percentages. I don't know who "feels" that 90% is like 98% or that 20% is like 5%, but I'd prefer honest numbers. Just recently I was playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and, in the hacking mini-game, got through maybe ten consecutive nodes where I had an 15% chance of being detected in each. I expected to be detected in one or two of those.

Similarly, to fail at things that supposedly have a 20% chance of success (like inviting enemy soldiers to your side in FF Tactics) is frustrating.

I've watched and played a lot of sports in real life, where the percentages don't lie. A .200 hitter is going to get a hit one time in five, and you have to be ready for it. A .980 fielder is going to bobble or overthrow one ball in twenty; it would be foolish to expect him to never make an error.




I remember being pleasantly surprised to see this in FF8, and Zelda II also did it many years ago.

A .2 hitter will almost certainly not get one hit per every five. Probability percentages don't lie (unless, as has been noted in this thread, true numbers are obfuscated), but they merely represent the possibility of an outcome. A 20% chance is not one per five in reality, it is an approximation of 1 in 5 over some period of tries.

 

[Arturo]

Typo. Meant devlogs. Was typing fast on my phone

Oh, ok. I thought you were talking about a blog or something

 

[HTupolev]

I thought the Y-axis thing was in Halo 1 as well.

In Halo 1, if you're playing single-player on easy or normal there's a tutorial where the game walks you through the setting, letting you try normal and inverted.

Halo 2 automatically selects the setting based on what you input when the game asks you to look up.

 

[HueyFreeman]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

This was always something I appreciated about Witcher 3 - everything in that game felt really proportional, to the extent that sometimes objects seemed quite small, but they felt completely proportionate to Geralt. The player/camera is just set far away and the game recognized that.

It's solution though is a reflex lens when you're indoors, stretching and distorting things at the image margins, which I don't appreciate.

 

[balohna]

Gears of War chainsaw battles in online matches are essentially a coin flip. The button mashes can't be compared quickly enough to find a "real" winner.

 

[XANDER CAGE]

In first person games you can make the player feel like they're moving faster just by expanding the FOV and not touching anything else.

A lot of games adjust the FOV in real time while sprinting to make the sprint feel even faster.


A lot of games have enemies shoot just past you or in front of you to make you feel like you're under fire but you're in less danger than you actually are to give the feel of being in a battle.

Long tunnels in video games will often have a hill either natural or made out of destroyed objects halfway through them to hide loading in the rest of the level on the other side. In fact, a lot of 'open' games, any hill or valley you see is often a load zone trigger, intentionally. In Halo 3, the tunnel between the Brute chopper battle and the Cruiser slipspacing over you in Tsavo Highway is an example of this technique, but it's damn near in every game.


This is also why you'll often see this hallway in damn near every 3D game with buildings of some sort:

because it makes the player feel like they were able to walk right into an area, but the developer is just making you walk around a forced loading hallway that appears like an open entrance. Seriously, pretty much any 3D game with transitions has this hallway in it on every console generation starting with PS/N64 up to and including current ones. I call it the vestibull (vestibule + bullshit) (in a loving way) . Even if it's not used to load an area, they still use it to separate visibility portals so that they can give the interior space more graphical density.

I came here to post about this in MMOs, heh. Great diagram. World of Warcraft, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot - nearly any MMO has doors and hallways set up like this to minimize how much needs to be visible at once.

 

[Willenium]

This was always something I appreciated about Witcher 3 - everything in that game felt really proportional, to the extent that sometimes objects seemed quite small, but they felt completely proportionate to Geralt. The player/camera is just set far away and the game recognized that.

It's solution though is a reflex lens when you're indoors, stretching and distorting things at the image margins, which I don't appreciate.

good lord. He could walk right into that fireplace!

 

[Dunan]

In football, the favourite would win something like 53% of the time. It's a much more unpredictable sport. Giants can be taken down by giant killers.

Baseball is like this, though with betting and oddsmakers not being as big of a thing, we don't really have the "favorite" concept. Almost every team wins between 35% and 65% of its games, and until the recent introduction of interleague games and the three-division setup, no team had ever won every game they played against an opponent in a season. Not once. (The 1945 Cubs won 21 of the 22 games they played against Cincinnati; finally in the 1990s the Braves under today's system won all 14 games they played against Colorado.)

So when playing a video game I don't expect to succeed at an 85%-chance thing twenty times in a row (only 4% of such runs should be successful), nor do I expect to fil at a 15% shot twenty straight times. If the devs want to change the real number for better gameplay, then show us the real number.

I like Dota's pRNG in any case. Basically for a 15% chance, the actual percentage would be like 8.75% which increased linearly for every miss until it reached 100%. This discourages luck streaks but also miss streaks which feel awful either way and helps bring 15% to more of a fixed ratio than true 15%.

This might be fun gameplay-wise, but why display a misleading percentage? Why not just display "8.75%" on your first try and then a higher number on the second try, etc.?

It even makes sense in the real world -- if you fail at something on your first try, you will have a higher chance of success on your next try, because you know what you've done wrong, and know not to do that again.

Also, unrelated, but while we're on the subject of sports -- it has always bothered me how '80s and '90s baseball game designers would handle pitchers' ability to bat and run the bases. They would usually give them the lowest possible stats in every category, including running. I can see not bothering to create detailed batting abilities for them, but why have the running speed stat be the minimum? Why not just choose something middling or slightly below average?

 

[BreezyLimbo]

I came here to post about this in MMOs, heh. Great diagram. World of Warcraft, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot - nearly any MMO has doors and hallways set up like this to minimize how much needs to be visible at once.

Off the top of my head, in WoW, I can think of Sunwell Plateau, Firelands, Black Temple, and Wailing Caverns have a part of the level designed like this.(IE In Plateau, various rooms have a room like the one pictures, in Firelands Ragnaros' throne has a room like this)

~~~

Doesn't Silent HIll, the original games, have dev cheats? I could've sworn they did.

 

[nynt9]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

That castlevania screenshot is mine and it's just absurd. That's not a trick, that's because half the tewm left the studio during development so the real world parts were unfinished.

 

[DrDerekDrs]

Son of a

Well, that one is specifically true of LEGO City Undercover because if the fastest cars went any faster, it would have broken the streaming.

 

[Falk]

Long tunnels in video games will often have a hill either natural or made out of destroyed objects halfway through them to hide loading in the rest of the level on the other side. In fact, a lot of 'open' games, any hill or valley you see is often a load zone trigger, intentionally. In Halo 3, the tunnel between the Brute chopper battle and the Cruiser slipspacing over you in Tsavo Highway is an example of this technique, but it's damn near in every game.


This is also why you'll often see this hallway in damn near every 3D game with buildings of some sort:

because it makes the player feel like they were able to walk right into an area, but the developer is just making you walk around a forced loading hallway that appears like an open entrance. Seriously, pretty much any 3D game with transitions has this hallway in it on every console generation starting with PS/N64 up to and including current ones. I call it the vestibull (vestibule + bullshit) (in a loving way) . Even if it's not used to load an area, they still use it to separate visibility portals so that they can give the interior space more graphical density.

I'm actually not sure if the latest iterations of ID Tech (and by extension, COD) still do this, but browsing the internet as a break while waiting for a map to compile and QVIS/QRAD when doing old-school Quake/Quake2 modding was a bit of a ritual.

edit: "this" referring to an actual routine run as part of compiling a map that calculates visibility from any given space in the map and bakes it in, not the concept of blocking off parts of the map. Obviously all games still do the latter for performance.

 

[Dvidus]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

Oh my god, I've never noticed.

 

[FyreWulff]

I'm actually not sure if the latest iterations of ID Tech (and by extension, COD) still do this, but browsing the internet as a break while waiting for a map to compile and QVIS/QRAD when doing old-school Quake/Quake2 modding was a bit of a ritual.

edit: "this" referring to an actual routine run as part of compiling a map that calculates visibility from any given space in the map and bakes it in, not the concept of blocking off parts of the map. Obviously all games still do the latter for performance.

Not sure about idtech but I do know a lot of recent games do a form of it with the Umbra middleware even if they don't do the per-room setup.

 

[bobnowhere]

I came here to post about this in MMOs, heh. Great diagram. World of Warcraft, Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot - nearly any MMO has doors and hallways set up like this to minimize how much needs to be visible at once.

SWTOR is full of them as well.

 

[Noisepurge]

That shit surrounding online multiplayer mechanics is astounding. I wonder how much of this crazy "under-the-hood" trickery is present in games like Destiny and Overwatch...

I think games like Paladins got around the first kill threshold by having the first several games be against bots. But named bots so its not instantly obvious

 

[Bishop89]

Racers : the illusion that you're catching up, or winning etc..

prime suspect NFS (2015).

 

[Jimnymebob]

This is wrong. They lose aggro by increasing the distance with the player, not by being off-camera. This isn't a "hidden under the hood" thing, it's an obvious thing you see right away.




It's adorable how wrong y'all are. xD

Sometimes, you will survive with 1 or 2hp left... by pure chance. You had 322hp left, the enemy hit for 320 damage.

That's it. No mystery. It rarely happens, because, well, it's just statistically unlikely to get this specific combination, but there's nothing mysterious about it.

And mobs do attack off camera in Souls games all the time and gank you constantly. I mean the games are kinda known for this. With funny gifs and all.

Yup.


That's probably just a result of the defense gains through levelling up not being a significant stat though. But I wonder, did you upgrade your armour?

The only Souls example that comes to mind is those Silver Knights at

Spoiler

Anor Londo

in DS3. The ones that sort of sail over your head when doing the charge move if you look away from them. But that's not really de-aggroing.

 

[Steiner84]

this is a speedrunners goldmine.

 

[lazygecko]

"first shot of every enemy misses on purpouse"

"last bit of your health is actually more health than it is displayed"

"last bullet of your gun does double damage"

"if being flanked by 2+ enemies only 2 of them will interact with you"

WAT

If the Souls series did ANY of this SHIT I am officially DONE with gaming.

I'm pretty sure most games with several enemies on screen "turn off" some of them beyond a certain threshold to ease up the CPU drain on AI. It's not just a gameplay thing so much as it is a performance optimization thing.

 

[saunderez]

Time to load up Surgeon Simulator

I called bullshit at that tweet but I thought what the heck, I got nothing better to do.

Took me a while to work up the dexterity to be able to dial the number and not flub all over the number pad but after a bit of practice I dialed it successfully. Relieved but still not convinced I pressed the call button.....

And almost completely lost it when my phone started ringing

....OMG....

Spoiler

A woman's voice....."SEQUENCE BEGIN" and then a long series of tones.
I have no idea what it means. I wish I recorded it but I'll just have to make do with a screenshot of my success

 

[ElFly]

I really dislike the use of dishonest percentages. I don't know who "feels" that 90% is like 98% or that 20% is like 5%, but I'd prefer honest numbers. Just recently I was playing Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and, in the hacking mini-game, got through maybe ten consecutive nodes where I had an 15% chance of being detected in each. I expected to be detected in one or two of those.

Similarly, to fail at things that supposedly have a 20% chance of success (like inviting enemy soldiers to your side in FF Tactics) is frustrating.

I've watched and played a lot of sports in real life, where the percentages don't lie. A .200 hitter is going to get a hit one time in five, and you have to be ready for it. A .980 fielder is going to bobble or overthrow one ball in twenty; it would be foolish to expect him to never make an error.

the problem is that people are really bad at dealing with statistics so giving them the real % of success will frustrate them, and fudging the numbers to seem more plausible for human standards will make the knowing players feel cheated

honestly in most of these games they would be served better by doing away with % of hitting, and just multiplying the % by the damage and thus have them do fixed damage. of course you'd have to give characters healths in the 1000s for this to be manageable, but still

 

[AllGamer]

Wow, lots of interesting stuff there. I had no idea.

 

[Lord Panda]

I called bullshit at that tweet but I thought what the heck, I got nothing better to do.

Took me a while to work up the dexterity to be able to dial the number and not flub all over the number pad but after a bit of practice I dialed it successfully. Relieved but still not convinced I pressed the call button.....

And almost completely lost it when my phone started ringing

....OMG....

Spoiler

A woman's voice....."SEQUENCE BEGIN" and then a long series of tones.
I have no idea what it means. I wish I recorded it but I'll just have to make do with a screenshot of my success

Freaking awesome. Thanks for taking the time to verify this 😊

 

[Falk]

the problem is that people are really bad at dealing with statistics so giving them the real % of success will frustrate them, and fudging the numbers to seem more plausible for human standards will make the knowing players feel cheated

Just because the average human is bad at things doesn't mean standards should slip. This is why we haven't degenerated into some abbreviation-spamming barely-literate social media environment where people can't figure out the difference between "have" and "of".

... wait

god

 

[Travo]

In modern 3D games with a third person camera, the scale of the environment is generally much bigger than the characters (especially indoors) to make things pop out more.

THis makes complete sense because I've always felt most objects weren't quite to scale.

 

[Widge]

There was a great thread on here that demonstrated how Blazblue (I think) really twisted the hell out of its 3D models to create stylised poses.

From the camera's perspective, it looks fine, the side on view looks all stretched and bendy!

 

[Moose Biscuits]

I recall seeing a video a while back which was talking about the aim assist in one of the later Halo games.

It showed how the crosshair had a couple of invisible circles around it, one big and one small (about the size of the crosshair itself). In the big circle, it did the normal auto aim thing of 'magnetising' your aim onto any target that went in the circle (so your aiming would become much slower, and if you moved it would pull your aim to the target to compensate).

But more importantly, if the target was within the smaller circle, your shots would hit even if the crosshair wasn't actually on the target.

It feels a bit silly to do it on the sly like that. I mean, if we're talking about a sci fi game like Halo then it's not exactly beyond the realm of possibility that you can have guns which do that (we're developing bullets that can correct course mid flight from what I've read). Why not just say so?

 

[PuppetSlave]

That one about FEAR's AI dialogue was interesting. I believe Half Life's Marines did stuff like that. Like they would yell "he's over there, flank him!" even though the AI couldn't actually do it. They said it to increase tension and keep the player on their toes.

I think I remember reading reviews at time that fell for that. PC gamer I think, had screens and everything showing the scenario...

 

[StanleyPalmtree]

There was a great thread on here that demonstrated how Blazblue (I think) really twisted the hell out of its 3D models to create stylised poses.

From the camera's perspective, it looks fine, the side on view looks all stretched and bendy!

its was probably Guilty Gear Xrd (i dont think there has been a 3D blazblue?), and it is far from the only place that does this. any time the animator can be certain that the scene is only going to be viewed from a specific angle, you can be sure that they will be warping the rig like that to get the best looking poses they can.
its hardly common in games due to free cameras being the thing everywhere, but its a constant in any kind of feature/TV animated production.

hell, heres one of my favourite examples, from one of the JJBA anime intros.