Messages

1

General / GDC Finalist

« on: February 22, 2008, 05:14:18 pm »

Congratulations for making it as far as you did. Although Crackdown won in the end, given your resources you did put up one amazing fight.

2

Gameplay / Re: Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 10:34:27 pm »

Cool. Maybe your monocle will pop even further next time.

You know Alec, I don't think I've done anything that deserves ridicule.

We obviously don't agree on what makes a good game, and I don't expect us to reach an agreement on that. But you have repeatedly (via your website, when exiting the game, in the readme etc.) given me your sales pitch for the game, and asked me to pay $30 in order to play more of it. Since I took the time to evaluate your sales pitch, and to try out the product you were pitching, you can at least hear my reply and reasons without responding in such rude a way as you have done.

I've written to other game developers, and while, for example, Valve, only gave a one-line response back and I don't know if they even read what I wrote (for all I know, "Realm Lovejoy" is the name of an auto responder), none have edited what I wrote to make it seem silly and generally acted like a bully.

I might swing by and check any replies to this, but otherwise, as you put it, "bye bye". Wishing you all the best in your game development and business endeavors.

3

Gameplay / Re: Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 06:32:24 pm »

The game making isn't just supposed to be on a tight schedule of "we will make the game  of everything people will like". It's more like "We will make a game of our own idea/concept and people will have to decide, if they like it or not".

But even so there is a tradeoff involved in including something in the game. Another indie game that I enjoyed very much, Darwinia, is an RTS and originally had a gesture system in place where you had to use mouse gestures to build units. After many complaints and a couple of patches, hotkeys were added so you didn't have to use the gesture system.

So what is that? Should they have left the hotkeys out and stayed true to the original ideas, or was it correct to smooth over this part of the game?

Personally, I had no problems with the gesture system, but some people did, and I understand if you just want to let people get on with playing the rest of the game instead of trying to get the gesture right for the tenth time.

A blog post about usability from Introversion, makers of Darwinia: http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1028

4

Gameplay / Re: Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 05:22:42 pm »

Skippin' the monotonous moments? Your words doesn't make any sense now. Sense of accomplishment varies due to different kinds of users (players). It's the way how do you react to a certain game and how do you understand it, which is important.  Some will say that Aquaria was just a "nice game" and nothing else, others will say the final ending had bring something that they haven't felt from the games in whole bunch of years of gaming on various platforms.

And some will say that they couldn't understand it because of a game design decision. Like I said to Alec, what it boils down to is that Bit-Blot have to decide whether the elements that scare people away are important enough. If they are unwilling to change those parts of the game, then they also have to accept that some people will not buy or play the game.

5

Gameplay / Re: Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 05:12:03 pm »

And, yeah, I'm not sure what you're trying to accomplish. You made your point, that's fine, but why did you post again?

I posted again because I don't want to do a hit and run posting. I am really willing to engage in constructive criticism.

Like I said, lots of people enjoyed the game the first time around, I'm not sure why you'd want him to change it next time and piss off all his current fans?

No matter what the sequel end up being, some people will either consider it changed too much, or not enough. I am saying that I think a lot more fans can be gained if just a few bad design decisions were fixed, because the game has just about everything.

None of the game was too difficult, and none of it was monotonous. There, I gave just as much of an opinion as you, so I guess yours is nulled now.

Back to what I said about objectivity - there is none. You love the game, I don't. One opinion doesn't cancel another out.

6

Gameplay / Re: Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 04:24:54 pm »

waves goodbye

Come on Alec...

I won't pretend to belong to your core audience (which I suspect are fans of JRPGs), and so I understand if the game isn't going to be changed just because it'd suit me better. But I am a random sample of the people you're trying to sell the game to. As such, I make no claim to be objective, but if you ever find yourself wondering why you sold X copies of Aquaria and not 2*X, well, people like me sit with the answers. We're the ones who gave Aquaria a fair shot and decided that it wasn't for us.

I can't prove it, but I suspect that when you assemble all the criticism into a picture of what caused people not to buy the game the "slow movement" and "lack of saves" will be front and center. Even gamer-girl, which gave you a 9/10 complains about it, and that's coming from the hard core of the hardcore gamers.

Ultimately you have to decide if what you gain from lack of saves and the slow movement is worth the amount of people you scare away. Especially since, in my case at least, you had me impressed, excited and with my credit card out at the beginning but then made me reconsider.

Anyway, I wanted to give you some feedback, and now I have done so.


To respond to some other replies about the game length: I know you can go through the game much much faster if you know where to go. My reply to that is: I don't know where to go, and I don't want to have to wait until the second playthrough before a game becomes fun.


Regarding what I expected the game to be: Well, here's the big one, I suppose. Everyone who has stated that this game probably isn't for me are correct. It isn't. Aquaria is similar to a JRPG and my attitude to JRPGs is much like Yahtzee's: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/zeropunctuation/2563-Zero-Punctuation-Super-Paper-Mario.

I understand perfectly that that is not the general attitude of people on this forum - after all, if you didn't like the game, you wouldn't have bought it and played it and be here talking about it.

everyone is spoiled by today's games where they are much easier and do all the work for you.

I guess we differ here. I would say that today's games allow you to choose your difficulty level and allow you to skip the monotonous parts. I've been in this discussion before on the Steam forums and what it boils down to is that I get no sense of accomplishment from games. None. Zero. Doesn't matter which game. It's just not real enough. To understand my attitude, just think about something really boring. Something you really would like to edit right out of your life. Ok, now ask yourself this - if someone walked up to you and said "I just love (BORING THING), because when it is over, I get such a sense of accomplishment - you kids today have it so easy", what would you tell them?

7

Gameplay / Not Buying and Here's Why

« on: December 30, 2007, 02:16:24 am »

I downloaded the Aquaria demo and played through it. Sadly, I wont be buying the full game. Sadly for me, because I really wanted to like it - I liked the main character, the graphics were gorgeous, the music was fantastic, and the game play mechanics were nice.

It did have one major fault though - the game world is simply too spread out. I spent the vast majority of the time just going from point A to point B. Perhaps that is the "exploration" part of the game, but it just gives me flashbacks to the "find key to open door" mechanic I thought had died with the 90's. And what distances you'll cover looking for that key! When I think of what to do next in a game, I don't want to contemplate options that include minutes of just moving. Add the archaic save-point system and the result is a game that is quite diluted - Portal showed that great games need not be long; it is intensity and quality of writing that matters and not how much of your life the game sucks up. The demo is about two hours of playtime. I think there's a 45-minute game in there trying to get out. Extrapolating to the 16-18 hours of game play the full version has, I suspect there's a solid 7 hour game embedded.

                 /