Celtic Minstrel said:
I think it's good to have this sort of "tutorial as you go" available to you, but either make it optional or make it non-blatant.
You mean a
passive tutorial, wherein the player learns something important about the mechanics of their character (or an opponent) without being disrupted by either dialogue or a cutscene. However, if the latter two are used to perform a brief tutorial
and introduce a new element, then that's acceptable. An ability to skip events is fairly easy to rig up when you
have the source code. Here, though, the system [.TSC] Cave Story uses is very rudimentary and not exactly what I'd call
stable... so making good use of skip flags is a lot harder to integrate - especially with how flags don't necessarily reset properly if the player abruptly resets the game and reloads. This is compounded further when the event that's skipped involves many different flags, plus the limited number of skipflags available for use also puts a damper on this system.
DoubleThink said:
-Tons of HP =/= hard boss fight.
I disagree. HP is the primary means of gauging difficulty, and has been in game design for decades. When it gets to extremes, yes, it stops being effective as a delimiter and becomes an annoyance. What you're really trying to balance is the HP
MG ratios of the player and the boss. However,
forcing the player to take damage during a fight frequently is generally a no-no. It's acceptable to force the player to take damage if the boss also provides the player with a means of recovering their HP, such as pickups. Ideally, the damage the boss can do should increase with the planned difficulty of the fight, and the timing needed to avoid or counter the damage should decrease by the same rate. All boss fights should
generally have roughly the same time needed to defeat it- end game boss(es) and major boss(es) are an exception to this rule of thumb, and their fights are usually several times as long as your standard boss. The fact that bosses don't take longer and longer helps the illusion that the player is getting better - a rewarding feeling for them.
DoubleThink said:
e.g. doors that don't animate properly
As long as the door doesn't have a flag ID, it's more reliable to do either <DNP or <CNPxxxx:0000:0000. Neither of which rely on <KEY or <PRI to be sequentially effective. Though, you do need -one- of them unless you want Quote running and hopping around while the door opens.
cultr1 said:
•Make structures (sometimes useless, sometimes not) that make the player think "hmm maybe there's a secret up there" just to explore the map more. Give rewards for really out of place areas
Too much of this can be very confusing for the player. The placement of 'decorations' need to be relatively inert when looked at at a glance. (You'll understand this if you have a 'metroid sense' from playing any of the metroid games [other m excluded as it doesn't really follow these rules])
cultr1 said:
•pausing the music in a cutscene adds to the mood
Actually I disagree. Cave Story's music does not come to a stop gracefully, and that tends to be more disruptive than having music play during a cutscene. Plus that fade out function for the music seems impossible to reverse without loading a map (or reloading the same map).
Maybe I should try and fix that stupid function... Anyways, King stopping Toroko on her way out of the reservoir, for instance, is an example of where stopping the music ungracefully hurts more than it helps. Other cutscenes have their own music that plays, which adds much more than not having music. It's really dependent on what the mood calls for.
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