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Every Dev Should Take 20 Mins Out Of Their Time To Watch This.

AxlYin

By AxlYin,
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AxlYin

AxlYin

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I am in NO WAY insulting any devs at DE. I just feel every game developer should take 20 minutes out of their time to watch this. It's very eye opening and can help devs in a tight spot.

 

 

P.S. I @(*()$ love Warframe and DE.

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Semshol

Semshol

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If they followed this type of design for teaching players the basics in warframe, that would kinda be fun. I like being thrown in to situations and just being taught through gameplay.

 

For example you find a weapons and OH MY GOD it can shoot! Kinda like that and you slowly learn about different things.

 

The current intro is decent though and what needs to be address is enemy scaling for newbies (for veterans it's like we already have Megaman X's Hadouken)

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The66Monkey

The66Monkey

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Well im no game developer but i have a hobby intrest in psychology and have watched a lot of Extra Punctuation and studied some strory telling tecniques.

 

I think the DE team has proven great understanding of game design especially in the early Devstreams when they discussed features and what their aim with the game was. A lot of the people there really know their stuff and we can see clear signs of this in the game and the stuff they keep implementing. Sure not everything is perfect but better than most games out there.

 

Still a good watch, maybe better if everyone in the community pitching ideas watched this instead of the DE team.

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(PSN)Folkeye

(PSN)Folkeye

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Yup, fun to watch and he nails the simple things that make learning a game fun.

 

Can that apply with a much more complicated controller, or keyboard for that matter?  The basics I think we can grasp, but what of when things become a little more complicated?

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Midas

Midas

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sound like lyle mcdou****ag. perfect commentator.

 

Btw I actually spent 20 minutes watching this, Nothing new I was introduced to "early" games when I was little. (I WAS BROUGHT UP RIGHT).

Edited by Lighter2017
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LostAlone

LostAlone

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If they followed this type of design for teaching players the basics in warframe, that would kinda be fun. I like being thrown in to situations and just being taught through gameplay.

 

For example you find a weapons and OH MY GOD it can shoot! Kinda like that and you slowly learn about different things.

 

The current intro is decent though and what needs to be address is enemy scaling for newbies (for veterans it's like we already have Megaman X's Hadouken)

 

What the video doesn't talk about though is that this kind of teaching only works well with easily simple mechanics, and breaks down extremely fast when you look at the two common control schemes available - Either mouse and keyboard, or a modern controller. In both those cases there's a whole lot more going on that just 'jump' and 'shoot' and so just poking buttons and hoping doesn't get the job done. 

 

On a basic level there are two kinds of challenges in a game - Execution challenges (jump at the right time, dodge in a brief window) and Exploration challenges (find the right way to do something), and the modern era leads strongly towards the latter because execution challenges aren't all that interesting from a gameplay perspective because you can't make them appeal to everyone at once. If the challenge is low enough for new players, experienced ones won't be challenged at all. If you make them too challenging then new players will be frustrated and not have fun. 

 

So, as a result of this devs generally make exploration challenges. Even fairly brainless FPS games do. They very seldom put you in a position where you just need to aim better. They put you in a building full of dudes and tell you to figure it out for yourself. And while it might seem that it's all the same, it's not. You died going left? Try going right. Or throw a grenade. Or take cover. When you die, even in a multiplayer competitive environment, it is much more likely that you were in a bad position rather than because you are just terrible at the game. As you get better you get 'twitchier' certainly, but much more importantly you learn the maps and the weapons and how to make the most out of what you have. 

 

And why is that important to teaching and learning and such?

 

Well, because if you are make a more exploration focused game, players need to understand all of the options that they have available to them. And while broadly similar games often do things in broadly similar ways, there are often important differences. Just keeping to the FPS genre, there are a bunch of important things that players absolutely have to know for them to be able to explore. Can I look down sites? How many weapons can I carry? Can I pick up any weapon off the ground, or just specifically placed ones? How do you throw grenades (is it G or mouse 3 or are grenades a separate weapon) ? Are there multiple kinds of grenades? Can I go prone? Can I sprint? Is there a button to stick to cover? Can I peek around corners? Can I press a button to operate things?

 

This is all stuff you need to know before you can set out into the world. You need to understand the tools you have before you can start to solve problems effectively. People learn very quickly, and once you've seen a couple of control schemes you feel fairly familiar, which gives rise to a vast amount of people saying 'Yeah I get it' when they get told something. Because, yeah... We get it. But that's not the point. All games do something slightly different to each other, and we need to know what those differences are. 

 

The best example I can think of for this (and that happened to me recently) was when I got my shiny new copy of Dark Souls 2, and because I was pretty good at the first one I didn't run the tutorial. But there are some important difference. In DS1 sliding quickly down a ladder is done by tapping B on the controller. In DS2, you do it by holding b. Tapping B makes you fall off the ladder, almost always to your death. 

 

But if what internet guy says is true, shouldn't I be ok to just figure that out for myself? Set myself up by a ladder and try different combinations of buttons over and over until I work it out? Well, I've got 14 buttons to press on my 360 pad, and it could be any combination of any of them. It's going to take a long time to figure that out. And holding buttons to do things is uncommon in the game (you do it for one other thing) so I could easily have believed that you simply weren't able to slide down ladders anymore before I worked it out. 

 

I'm all for elegance in teaching in video games. Absolutely. Developers shouldn't be so ham fisted with how they do it. Look at Portal - A game that teaches through simple, clean illustrations. Buuuuuuut it still gives you an on screen pop up telling you how to move, how to jump and how to use the portal gun. Because you need to know that stuff. Even if it's been done the same a thousand times before. 

 

To take a real life parallel... Why is there a list of ingredients on every food package? And why is there a big instructions leaflet with every pack of Tylenol? These are extremely common objects; surely everyone knows how to use them? Sure. Most people don't need the instructions. But some people do. And if some people do, then you have to place them very prominently, because if you don't know how to take a tablet (or play Call of Duty) then you might not know how to go and look up the instructions yourself. 

 

And there in lies the nub. Megaman and Megaman X came from the era of booklets. I remember every game I bought for the first decade or so of playing games came with one. They told you how to do everything. And mostly we ignored them, and figured it out ourselves. But the booklet was there. It told you how to jump, and run and shoot. There are LOTS of old games that if you lost the manual, you couldn't complete. Simply because you don't even know that you have the tool to solve the problem.

 

Imagine this for me, if you will... You get to a level in Super Mario 3 where you need to be able to fly with the racoon suit in order to proceed (I can't remember if there are levels like that or not, but let's say) and because you have never read the manual, you have no idea that you can fly, or what the P meter does. 

 

Explain to me how you would ever complete that just through trail and error. When you have never even had a reason to believe that you could fly, why would you ever think that you might be able to, just because the level expects you to?

 

Environmental teaching has it's limits, as does trial and error. The reason that most games have tutorials isn't because devs got stupid, or because they think players are. It's because they want you to be able to actually play it. More complex controllers mean that we can do so many more things while staying immersed in these wonderful fictional universes, but it also means we need to be taught how to play.

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Sonoka

Sonoka

Posted
Posted (edited)

I am in NO WAY insulting any devs at DE. I just feel every game developer should take 20 minutes out of their time to watch this. It's very eye opening and can help devs in a tight spot.

 

 

P.S. I @(*()$ love Warframe and DE.

Shoulda made them watch the Castlevania one, would have been better for Warframe.

Edit: I mean the Super Castevania 4 one.

Edited by Sonoka
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Xylia

Xylia

Posted
Posted (edited)

See...

 

The guy makes some good points, but unfortunately, that video was a severe pain in the arse to watch because of the constant F-bombs.

 

Every other word that came out of this guy's mouth was either F-bombs, or ridiculous exaggerations.

 

And he does to us what he says he hates game developers doing to him: He treats US like idiots, because he seems to think we can't understand him unless he rams the points down our throats, especially with the "Roll Navi Meme" he uses throughout the video. I chuckled the first time he used Roll with the Navi voice, I was 'eh, whatever...' the second time and then the third+ time I was like "Just.......stop already."

 

That said, he does make some good points, but Good God, someone teach this guy how to talk without swearing every other word. I swear myself IRL, but not every other word! Save the swears for when they would make an actual impact. When every other word out of your mouth is vulgar, then people will just roll their eyes, and you've nothing profane left to say (the listener has started to ignore the swear words by this point) when you want to strongly emphasize a point. That's why you shouldn't use profanity unless it is really necessary.

 

And the gross exaggeration, he needs to really lighten up on that.

 

Also, the repetitiveness. Way too much repetition. Yes, yes, I saw that charged shot in the menu. You don't have to bring it up (and show it!) 20 bloody times. The first 1-2 were plenty.

Edited by Xylia
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