Lessons From Adventures of Kyle
Last night I randomly started playing one of my really old Games Factory creations - the Adventures of Kyle, a weird hybrid of Diablo and Zelda. I spent a lot of effort on this game, but the results aren’t all that entertaining, so I thought I would record “lessons learned” so to speak - things not to try again, not counting the inadvisability of writing a game based entirely on the personalities of your own group of friends.
1. Isometric view is not drawn at a 45 degree angle.
One of the more frustating elements of this game visually is the wacky perspective. Isometric is the perspective used by Diablo, Starcraft, and Mario RPG to simulate a 3D perspective entirely in two dimensions. It occasionally looks wacky as objects do not diminish in size as they get farther away, but this wackiness could be hidden or reduced with appropriate graphics tricks. Needless to say, I did not use any of them in Adventures of Kyle, in which I also drew everything at a 45 degree angle - more effort then drawing things head on, while at the same time appearing highly distorted and amateurish. The actual angle is something else that I’m too lazy to look up right now.
2. Games aren’t fun when you can’t kill a single enemy without getting hurt.
This may be less true of RPGs where combat is abstracted and healing mechanisms are plentiful and expected, but for games with any action component, there’s really nothing more frustrating than finding that no amount of skill can save you from getting hit by a monster at least once. Stocking up on health potions merely to survive long enough to beat the next level is un-fun. Having the option of potions to help mitigate an avoidable disaster is fun. Good enemy design, therefore, means no random, jerky enemy movements, no unblockable or undodgable projectiles, and no enemies that chase you inexorably that can kill you instantly.
3. Challenge should not derive from poor play control.
One of the decisions I made early on with Adventures of Kyle was that I would imitate the mouse-driven control style of Diablo. I also thought, evidently, it would be a good idea to extend that control with a variety of obscure keyboard commands. Mouse driven control requires a lot of finagling to get right. Although a simple left mouse click tells Kyle where to walk to, he has no pathfinding capabilities whatsoever. Many of the enemies move too fast to right-click (indicating a desire to attack), and the range of Kyle’s sword swing is so low that you have to be practically hugging the enemy to get a hit in. Naturally, all this is overcome-able with some ingenuity and practice, but who WANTS to? The more satisfying video games give you a significant element of responsiveness and control - the challenges are external, not internal. Zelda aficionados know that it can be great fun to mow grass in “Link to the Past” - the grass is no challenge, but it represents a crisp exertion of power in the video game world. Games can’t be too easy, of course, but no one minds levels that start simply or build in challenge. Super Mario Galaxy had an excellent challenge curve. The challenge should not be in just walking around.
4. You really ought to be able to walk behind trees.
Of course, at this point in my Games Factory career (9th grade, maybe?), I didn’t have the slightest idea how to create objects that you could go both in front of and behind. Legends of Kyle had me trying to be a little too clever by shifting trees around the Z-axis (depth level) slowly but visibly during gameplay. By later games (never finished and probably lost to a disabled hard drive), I had found plug-ins for Multimedia Fusion that did the trick, but simply punting on the issue and forcing Kyle to walk all the way around the tops of trees as though they were flat instead of standing up was just bizarre. Some more clever level design might have corrected the problem. Maybe the lesson here is, if there’s something important you can’t do, redesign the game so no one notices!
5. Make the game accessible to people who don’t know you and your friends.
Although the point of a lot of these games that I made WAS to build fantasy worlds for and involving people I knew, there are likely ways to mitigate that that I wasn’t really interested in doing. Jokes instead of in-jokes, ample introductory material to present folks to people who don’t know them, etc. etc. I’m sure that there are limits even then, but I figure they ought to TRY to be broached, rather than simply run away from.