Dev.log Orange

Regarding option 2b of our dev.log assignment:

   Today I've decided to reflect on my experience playing Noita, a 'magical action roguelite' set in a world full of procedurally generated liquids and solids and ruthless enemies. It is developed and published by Nolla games and is listed in Early Access on Steam. As the player, I take the role of a wizard/witch and descend underground into a vast network of randomly generated caverns connected by hub locales/ biomes. They look different each time but keep the same theme/ flora and fauna. I'm armed with only two magic wands, usually one that shoots a weak rapid projectile and another that throws some variant of explosive. I can fly for a short time and duck. I find randomly scattered wands and spells that i can pick up and rearrange the spells with different modifiers on to create deadly new and absurd magical weapons, as they all come with their own stats, like mana, regeneration rate, rate of fire, accuracy and more. It's absurdly difficult to deal with enemies who can mop the floor with you without a sweat, and my own magical weapons that can easily kill me if don't understand exactly what the modifiers I add to the wand and the order that I've placed them in do.

    I spend a  lot of time during gameplay re-arranging and altering these customizable wands, and this is by far the most fun part. It's striking to me, the complexity of coding behind the modular wand system, and it pales in comparison to the code governing coding realistic physics and properties assigned to the various liquids and substances found in game. I may drown in water, or electrocute myself if the wan i am holding discharges into the water. I can use heat to evaporate the water, turning it into vapor that can suffocate me, or freeze when it reaches high enough in the atmosphere. destroying nearby rock or dirt and the water will attempt to conform to it's new container, obeying gravity. all liquids in the game do this, even changing states of matter when they react to one another. Ice will melt, toxic sludge will weigh down whatever it touches. slime will become radioactive ice when frozen. Sand will bury whatever it blows across. 

    It strikes me how frustrating the game is, even after assembling a decent magic wand, a literal lightsaber that eats matter as I swing it, I can still be turned into a sheep and one-shot by a magic enemy. There are more than a hundred deadly enemies who fight one another when the player isn't around, picking up fallen gold, and magic wands to utilize against the player. I'm amazed that something this difficult is considered attractive to it's player base, and this seems to be their selling point. If not for the modular wand system (featuring 200+ dangerous spells and modifiers), I wouldn't play it at all. Without the games mod support I say the game would be impossible to complete legitimately. I doubt I would have even played it more than ten hours with them. There is no save system in the base game. You must start over each time, and the world and it's resources and enemy placement are always different. In future games I make, if something is going to be left up to random chance like this, i know it will leave players feeling cheated, like in chapter 3 of the book. There needs to be a save system, or dedicated mod support so that  people can enjoy the game in others ways besides absurd difficulty.  I hope that anything I work on has one, or testing will become a nuisance. How could I expect someone to play a game that I myself don't like after all?  

    The world of Noita itself is trying to work against the player. It feels very lived in, not just from the super civilization of Hissi (trolls) and how they've colonized various biomes and armed themselves against the deadly megaflora and megafauna in each level, but the magical hidden temples, enemies who are bizarre and disturbing, and the sheer amount of non essentially places to visit in game. It strongly implies what to do by placing each player in front of a cave to start, but the player can go anywhere. A city made of solid clouds, a never ending ocean, a snowy metallic vault, a pyramid filled with Lovecraftian nightmares, and a world that seems to hold many many secrets. The games backgrounds are comprised of multiple layers that can show entirely different factories and caves and industrial deathtraps, animated. As the player or enemies cause destruction, the seismic activity damages things in the background, walkways are shattered, caves collapse in the distance, troll built structures collapse. I also hope that I can make games feel as alive as this one. I can only hope  to adequately weigh the utility of including such complex and destructible world generation equally against giving the players the resources to actually make use of any of it. I see that these elements cannot work without one another.

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Regarding option 3 of our dev.log choices, this one comes from page 89 or Fullerton's Game Design:

Exercise 3.9: Resource Types 
For each of the resource types just described, create a list of your favorite games that use resources of that type. If you can’t think of any games that use a particular type of resource, research games that do and play several of them.

    When I think of Lives, it reminds me of Super Meat Boy, where the player can see all of their previous incarnations die again in a playback upon completing the level. It's more a resource for the game to show you your improvements as a resolution than it is for the player. I think of Demon Souls, where the player can find bloodstains left by other players, and witness how they died to learn from it.

   Thinking of Units, brings me to Age Of Mythology, an RTS where the players align themselves with various diving pantheons to aid the various military units they mobilize against other players. They may boost their performance and or yield new types of units for battle.

   When I think of Power Ups, I think of Tank Ball 2, a flash, browser-based, lobby vehicle shooter I played endlessly as a child. The player starts on a random island with other players, able to shoot balls form their tank and various powerups scattered. A cube shaped power up would raise their tanks movement speed, and a spiked ball powerup would raise their attack power for a few shots, one giving a clear advantage, and the other forcing the player to be accurate.

   When I think of a game that uses Time as a resource I think of Minecraft. The game doesn't have anything to do except build, demanding infinite time from the player to harness resources and repurpose them for our own creative goals. The player gains what they put into it. While playing in creative mode, that resource consumption is greatly reduced as the player has access to unlimited resources, but I always found myself lacking the creativity brought on by scarcity of resources that occurs in survival mode. With limitless blocks I had no time to think or reflect on how the world can bend though my effort. I also think of Devil May Cry 4 (2008), where in the Bloody Palace game mode, the player is on a downward timer, to reach the end efficiently and stylishly. 

   When I think of Special terrain,  I think of the lack of it in the 2002 FromSoftware title Otogi: Myth Of Demon. The player is a cursed warrior spirit who must stay on land, as water leads to the afterlife. One level in particular tasked the player with sailing a ghost ship across a sea of unruly souls. Touching the water would rapidly drain the players 'soul' or health, but the player could be knocked off by the restless spirits attempting to sink the ship. The lack of usable terrain, and the introduction of deadly terrain upped the challenge significantly. Age of Mythology with it's gold mines also come to mind.

   When I think of Inventory  as a resource I think of Dead Space (2008). The player has to manage their inventory. They'll have to drop ammunition or health packs to carry more valuable resources to the store to sell, leaving them vulnerable in combat and forcing them to conserve ammunition. Resident Evil, and Skyrim also come to mind for the same reason.

   When I think of Actions I think of Yu-Gi-Oh. I didn't understand at it as a kid, but you can use different actions; laying cards faced down, in defense position, in attack position, or discarding them to bluff your opponent as you would in poker. This becomes visibly stratified in competitive play where duelists may watch one another's behavior, because they can guess what cards are in their decks by what they've already played,  just like in Magic: The Gathering.

   When I think of Currency, gold is far too typical. I think of games like God of War and Devil May Cry where currency is the literal blood of your slain enemies, and you are rewarded more for performing better in game, using it to attain more power.

   When I think of Health I think of it's most unusual incarnations. I remember a game called El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (2011), where the players health bar is their clothing, losing more of it as they sustain injury, or Uncharted, where the players health is their 'luck' running out, indicated by the use of color on screen, sliding into greyscale as the players nears death.