Posts by Human Doctor

  • Feedback Level Puzzle Game

    I think it would be good, when you are presenting a gameplay video, to also explain with words what the elements are and what you personally are most excited about. This is to help introduce people to the way you think about your designs (which will help them give you better feedback) and also to help you practice talking about your work.

    • What kind of game is this? What is the purpose of the puzzles? Are they meant to be challenging in the way a math problem is challenging? Or are they meant to draw the player's attention to certain narrative elements (eg, the sacrifice)?
    • Why is the lever next to the statue turned to the other side, instead of facing forward? Is it supposed to be hidden? Is finding this lever an interesting challenge or related to the narrative in some way?
    • You can maybe strengthen the effect of the sacrifice element by allowing the player to drop their limbs anywhere they like, instead of only at the pre-determined spot. This would require them to focus more of their attention towards reading the environment and figuring out the exact place to do it, and then you can apply your environmental storytelling skills to guide them however you choose.
    • To what degree can the level be solved by the strategy "walk around the level, look for things to click on that you haven't clicked on"? How much of this kind of thing do you want in your level?
    • Is the text on the panels meant to be literal instructions on what to do, or is it meant to be like a riddle? For example, what if you wrote "gargoyles feed on human flesh" instead of "put a part of yourself in the gargoyle"? The less literal they are, the more opportunities open up for you to do environmental storytelling, and the more attention is required from the player.
    • I like how you've rotated the last lever so that the player is facing the statue when the cool opening moment happens. Maybe experiment doing more of that, see what interesting things you can show the player when they're standing somewhere and doing something.
    • Can the player die in this game? What if the invisible door killed you instead of just blocking you? Would that give more weight to the player's decisions?

  • No clue where to start...

    You have to make bad levels and not mind that they're bad and play the bad levels until you start to tell apart the good from the bad and the interesting from the boring. So don't expect to make a good level from the get-go. Reframe the problem from *making good levels for my game* to *finding the fun*. And don't do any decoration, that will only make it harder to do this soul-searching (it's like how having a girlfriend makes it harder to make drastic changes to your life and take risks because you have a life together). And if you're struggling to come up with ideas, and don't know where to begin, which is how I feel when I try to solve some problem in some domain where I have little to no experience in, maybe just copy levels from an existing game that you like and play it and see what works and what doesn't.

  • Somehow, Tribes returned

    I haven't played Tribes, but the movement system reminds me of a brilliant game that I played on Steam called Exo One. It has the same follow-the-tangent-of-the-terrain thing, and it has a really cool clouds shader on the last level.

    Can you really argue that Quake was more movement-focused than, say, Apex Legends or Fortnite? They all involve playing some kind of rhythm game to navigate the map effectively. And the movement in the Quake and Source engines was born from what? An unintended consequence of their physics system? I wouldn't be surprised if some new battle royale game with a fantasy aesthetic implemented air-strafing, but I can't imagine the Quake movement system making a comeback. It is just really weird and it doesn't make sense why you'd have it in your game unless you did it by accident or unless your game has "Quake" in the title. But hey, maybe the makers of the next fad FPS will decide to not use Unity or Unreal and will accidentally fuck up their movement code and make something weird but fun.

    I am not naturally drawn to the realistic military aesthetic (I find it kind of repulsive), so I'd go on steam and find something like Crab Champions or Dusk to play. And I can't say those are niche games that are behind the times.

    I think it matters a lot how a game is presented and marketed. Look at what Riot did with Valorant: they took a boomer shooter, in Counter-Strike, and they made it aesthetically appealing to younger people. Tribes 3 doesn't look like it's trying to do that. It looks like it's trying to capture the look of games that were cool in the past. Just look at the weapon models.

  • [CS:GO] San Juan

    I like the purple room and the fort. They have unique personality. Other areas feel a bit sterile. The buildings don't look like they're lived in. The balconies are empty and the opened windows look like they're boarded up (maybe use a brighter curtain texture). You've furnished the fort with grass where the walls meet the ground and you've done it in some places around the streets, but the 6-th shot in particular looks really bare in that regard. Also, it might be just me, but I wouldn't suggest using graffiti from Valve maps, especially loud ones like the OneUp. It's immediately recognizable. And when people see it, they might start looking for other assets you've borrowed from other maps.

  • [UE4] Hide'n'Seek action-shooter game [W.I.P]

    No amount of explaining will fix that. The last scene is just too unrealistic to fit with everything else. It's like something out of Doom. Unless it's literally a sci-fi movie set. There is too much "industrial" flavor in the architecture of the room, which compensates for the lack of anything that you'd actually find in an industrial setting. Perhaps if you filled with with manufacturing robots and machinery, it would look less fake.

    I give this an overall 2/10. It's unsalvagable. Better start from scratch.

  • Mental health / rant thread

    I've never sought out professional help towards mental health (in part because I don't trust doctors), but ever since I got really depressed at the start of COVID, I've been paying more attention to the things in my daily life that make me feel better. I've made drastic changes to my diet (after a lot of experimentation). I no longer eat ~80% of the things I used to eat back in high school. Cutting out all the junk food has helped with my ADHD symptoms and eating high fat meals tends to give me a lot of energy without taking away my ability to stay still and concentrate (sponsored by Keto™). Talking to people helps reduce my anxiety even if it's venting to strangers on the internet. I recently watched the second Joe Rogan podcast with Chuck Palahniuk where they ponder over why young people have a tendency to take do crazy things and Chuck gives this analogy of knocking down the idle. The premise is that there are certain things you can do (like exhaustive exercise) to put your mind in a state of tranquility so that you can have a long session of mapping or whatever. Also, don't feel pressured to finish all those maps you've started. Perhaps you don't have anything new to learn anymore in source mapping, perhaps you've found something more interesting to pursue, or perhaps your brain chemical balance just isn't right at the moment for some reason and you gotta go and fix that. The earlier you learn how to take care of your body and your mind, the better. When you get a hold of your mental health, you will feel more productive, everyday things will feel easier to do, and you'll be free from all those self-deprecating thoughts that creep into your mind when you're trying to justify your depression. And like someone else said, psychopharmaceuticals should be your last resort.

  • Metaverse

    Quote from Izuno

    2 hours ago, Izuno said: Yeah I had a similar experience. Then a couple weeks ago there was this facebook outage for less than a day. On my phone it said I needed to re-authenticate or whatever to log back in to use the app. Same in my primary browser that I had normally been using to access facebook from my computer. I never did log in to either again, only able to access facebook in a separate secure browser (i mean probably slightly more secure but whom are we kidding here?).

    tl;dr: I have cut my facebook time the past few weeks to an average of 2 minutes a day, if that.

    Life is so much better now.

    I had a similar experience with books. I used to read a lot of books back in the day, until I discovered the internet. Since then I stopped reading books. Life is so much better now. I'm glad I ended my addiction.

    Some addictions are good. Depends on what you get out of it. I personally find Instagram to be much more pleasant and less toxic than Facebook. They attract different kinds of people. Most of my friends have moved away from Facebook a long time ago. There are things a platform can do to incentivise quality content. Instagram does that pretty well.

  • Metaverse

    Quote from Pampers

    On 10/29/2021 at 11:37 PM, Pampers said: [Blocked Image: https://twitter.com/hmltn/status/1453885021371183104]

    I really like Carmack's take on this. Nothing can be done to stop Mark Zuckerberg from pursuing his ambition. What matters is that all this engineering labour goes towards something with real value, rather than being just an instrument for him to grow his empire.

    Just think of the enormous brain drain that the propaganda industry is responsible for.