gregboet
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 46
Registered: 07-12-2015
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Just completed The Second Sky, got to the good ending.

Really well designed game, love the story and how it was so successful at culminating the idea just barely hinted at in the end of The City Beneath. Who knew this is where the story would end up?

I have a few thoughts and a few questions. Some of these questions might have answers elsewhere in the forum, so feel free to provide a link.

New gameplay mechanics

The main thing that struck me about The Second Sky is that there were so many all-new gameplay mechanics, and some of them were critical to advancing the story. When I played The City Beneath, I never expected that its successor would gradually turn into a semi-open-world environment, and then eventually a completely open world environment. I wonder if there were members of the design team who hesitated at the thought of adding this design feature, which is so different from previous games. I like the fact the world opened up gradually, and managed not to devolve into head-scratching frustration about "where do I go now." (Actually I guess this did happen once, but not too much.)

I could go on about the new design features: 5 new weapons, inventory items, nanogram puzzles, etc., etc., but enough said.

Following the game's release, was there ever any discussion on the forum about the design process? Early on in the process, were there meetings where people said, we can't do that because it would involve implementing a whole new gameplay mechanic! And then someone replied and said, no problem, we'll just spend the next few months implementing this whole new gameplay mechanic!

Difficulty of KDD, JTRH, TCB, and TSS

The size of TSS was really astonishing, to the point where it almost became too much of a good thing for me, and for me the level of difficulty was beyond where I wanted it, but I was determined to see my way through to the story's conclusion.

I may have a somewhat unique experience in that I bought played KDD, JTRH, and TCB a few years ago, but didn't play TSS when it initially came out. Then when I started playing TSS, I was disappointed that I was not remembering the backstory as well as I wanted to, so I found my installer files for the previous games and replayed them all (over the course of a few months!). I bet it isn't common to play all four games back-to-back.

Since I have played all four games back-to-back, I wanted to comment on their difficulty:

KDD: A good hold. When I replayed it, I found it pretty easy, didn't need many hints at all until the final few levels. I was surprised by this, as the first played it, I found it infuriatingly hard. (It makes a big difference knowing how to deal with tar and not trying to clear out more than you have to.)

JTRH: This game hit the sweet spot for me in terms of difficulty. Starts out easy, then gradually becomes challenging enough for anybody, but most of the hard puzzles are adequately clued by previous puzzles with similar mechanics.

TCB: Both times I played this game, I noticed how immediately it becomes very challenging as soon as you go from the city into puzzle rooms you have to solve. No gradual increase, no starting out easy. It wasn't so bad, though. The first time I played through, I found it harder than I wanted. The second time I played through, it didn't seem quite so bad, though I certainly did have to look for hints multiple times.

TSS: Again with the levels that are more or less uncompromisingly difficult right from the start. The more I played, the more frequently I found I didn't like this aspect of the game. The problem with having most of the rooms near the top end of the difficulty scale is that the player frequently run into rooms whose gameplay mechanic isn't adequately clued by previous, easier rooms. Anybody else have this experience? In my personal opinion, it also didn't help that there were whole gameplay mechanics that I didn't enjoy. I didn't like that I had to worry about creature movement order to get through Mother of All Roaches. (When before have there been puzzles that are essentially unsolvable without right-clicking, and where was the hint that I should be doing this?) Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed a lot of the puzzles too. And the story was so good that it kept me going through parts that I found less satisfying.

Not trying to sound negative with that last part. I was just curious whether other people had a similar experience, and I was wondering whether others agree that a slow build of difficulty leads to a better gameplay experience.

That's all, just wanted to say thanks for a great game. I also have some questions about what I should be doing next, but I'll turn that into another thread.

Greg

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5065
Registered: 02-04-2003
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Hi, Greg!

Thanks for taking the time to write up your experiences about TSS and other DROD titles. Thanks for the kind words of praise.

I can give you some insight into the new gameplay mechanics and difficulty curve.

I had written up a concept with developer-level details for world map support some years back -- somewhere during the development of GatEB. When we started work on TSS, it was one of the first new features I implemented. It took 2-4 weeks to code up, which was just what I was expecting.

I'm glad we have this feature. After seeing how the semi-open world design played out in GatEB, which was cool in principle and mostly in practice, the entire dev team was on board adding support for "travel by map" (a la "The Muppets"). The RCS came about as a result of making such travel plausible.

You're right about time investment -- we had a whole slew of potential features that might have been included in TSS, and we had to prioritize. We implemented the features that "the most team members liked the most" (tallied via a simple ad-hoc scoring mechanism). There were some really great-sounding features that didn't make the cut. As you mention, there's really a lot of new stuff in TSS. When I said that we already had plenty, the rest of the team said, "Nah! Look at everything that was introduced in TCB. We need moar features!" And so fluff/puffs/vents made the cut before there was consensus we had enough. I'm glad we have everything that got included. I can understand that some mechanics might not be to everyone's liking. I'd be interested to hear specifically what you liked or didn't like, if you're amenable to sharing.

As I'm sure Skell can attest to after fixing up a pile of game element interaction logic bugs for the 5.1 release, there's a deceptive amount of work that needs to go into implementing new game elements. Over the years, whenever a team member really wanted to add a promising game element into the engine that I wasn't ready to work on myself, I invited them to implement it. If they did, we typically included it in that release. More often, the feature didn't ever get fully implemented, possibly because it was more work than they bargained for.

Difficulty curve:
Wow, yes, TSS is hard. TCB was hard. I kept telling the level architects to make things easier early on, and they didn't always want to. (Whenever Erik or I designed levels, we tried to err on the easy side of difficulty unless at the very end of the game, and I think our work in JtRH shows a good overall difficulty curve, like you said above.) Playing through TSS was pretty hard for me much of the time. Whenever there was a discussion, I regularly voted for making levels easier rather than harder. For better or worse, the vote didn't always go my way. I was okay with that, because I was thrilled to have so much creative clout going into our labor of love, and I respect the creative vision that our architects have. The puzzles in TSS are beautiful.

We had similar discussions over the amount of content. You'll see on Danforth's sell screen that we acknowledge that TSS could have been very well split into two separate full titles based on the amount of content. There's so much in there! We trimmed and edited the best we could, and this is what we ended up with. Collectively, we didn't feel we could properly tell the grand finale of Beethro's adventures while leaving anything out that was included in the final release. We all acknowledge the game is leaning toward "one of the larger titles of our day". For players who can't get enough DROD, I guess that's a good thing. But anyway, that's why so much content ended up as optional or after the first ending. I think the map expansion into new areas -- topology might be a good word to intuitively describe what I'm thinking of -- is pretty solid. I think the placement of optional and bonus content is well done. I give kudos to the team for how this all turned out.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.

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[Last edited by mrimer at 02-01-2016 07:10 PM]

gregboet
Level: Delver
Rank Points: 46
Registered: 07-12-2015
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mrimer wrote:
I can understand that some mechanics might not be to everyone's liking. I'd be interested to hear specifically what you liked or didn't like, if you're amenable to sharing.

Okay, why not...

Funny how I didn't mention this in my original post, but of all the new gameplay mechanics, the one that really stands out for me is time travel in TSS, specifically temporal split tokens. When I played my first room with this feature, I ended up solving the room without realizing how I did so, and I was worried that it would become a difficult complication to an already complicated game. Instead, the more I used temporal split tokens, the more enjoyment I got out of them. And they also succeeded on another level by enhancing the time-travel aspects of the story, as did the rooms with the temporal tuning fork.

Gameplay mechanics I liked the most:
- temporal split tokens
- temporal tuning fork
- 5 new weapons - wow! Really liked that a lot! (It was a nice touch to introduce the pickaxe in a suitably mine-themed environment.)
- Lemmings, constructs, and fluff/puffs/vents were nice additions for sure

Gameplay mechanics I didn't like:
- As I mentioned before, creature movement order puzzles were probably my least favorite.
- Also in Mother of All Roaches, I didn't enjoy the puzzles based on abuse of the fact that roach queens don't spawn on the tile they were on the turn before. To me this type of abuse is best reserved for secret rooms, but maybe that's just me.
- I wasn't always a big fan of having to figure out weird interactions of gameplay elements. The fact that constructs avoid oremites kind of makes sense if you think about it, so that's not so bad. Not sure why tar/mud can survive hot tiles, but at least I saw enough examples that it was hammered into my head, and so I got used to the idea. If there were any interactions that were more obscure than this, they probably gave me a headache and I probably ended up going to Hints & Solutions for the answer.
- Mainly I didn't like puzzles that felt inadequately clued, but I guess this is kind of subjective.

I didn't know the level design of TCB TSS was led by a democracy! I wonder if a democracy could handle assignments like, "We have all the fiendishly difficult rooms we can handle, but we could use 4-5 easier levels to prepare for these other 4-5 harder levels down the road." Maybe not, but I can wish for that.

If there's a project in the future and you'd like a tester to represent the humble players out there who don't crave punishingly difficult puzzles, let me know and I'll see if I can help.

Xindaris
Level: Smitemaster

Rank Points: 1533
Registered: 06-13-2015
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I'd like to chime in while this discussion is still relevant, even though I haven't entirely good-ending'ed TSS yet (I've yet to finish More Fluff, and...I think that's it?).

What I found was a strange phenomenon with the majority of new elements introduced in TSS, where I would absolutely hate a element the first time it was introduced, and then after a while I would get to liking it a lot better, especially when I started experimenting with the element in building some of my own rooms. I think this might mean that I really just hated the way the element was being used, or that I was angry that I didn't understand it even though I was in the process of learning it? I don't remember this happening with disabled force arrows, and there were probably some other things that didn't bother me as much, but I know it happened with constructs and fluff as concrete examples. In fact, even coming back after several months' break to try and really finish the game after getting the bad ending I felt like Construct Warehouse was designed specifically to remind me of why I used to hate constructs.

I have an idea in my head that a really good puzzle game (or at least one I can enjoy a lot) should allow the player to solve every puzzle in it "intuitively"; that is, if the player understands the point behind the puzzle, then the exact steps should work themselves out quite easily. What this means for me and DROD is that I tend to hate rooms that expect me to think about every single move individually or plan too many moves ahead. So I don't really like playing rooms where I'm expected to understand in a deep, conscious manner the finer points of movement order, or think about the precise position of every single monster in the room some 60+ turns ahead (i.e., much of Construct Warehouse). Like, I can understand that I need to line up the roach queens in a way that makes them not spawn roaches or stay in a neat line so they push the pressure plates, but it's annoying to me when the way to actually do said lining up isn't obvious (or isn't "obvious enough", ambiguous as that is). I prefer things that can be thought of from a big picture perspective, such as a monsterless trapdoor puzzle, which can be challenging but can still be thought of as an entire path all at once, if that makes sense; or a roach horde where I can think "go over here, kill these roaches" and figure out the details very quickly with probably a few undos along the way. Even puzzles that ask the player to do a single specific thing ("linchpin" types) can be fun to me as long as understanding that thing I need to do is more or less enough to be able to accomplish it.

I can remember being angry at JtRH and TCB in the same way I was at new elements in TSS, but it was a brief phase in those cases while here I actually still hate the way some things are used (again, Construct Warehouse). Maybe there's a threshold of difficulty beyond which a puzzle can't be intuitive the way I described above, or it might just be a matter of an individual's style in making levels and their own preference in what they think is fun. Either way, I don't want to give the impression that I've disliked TSS, though. I love the story and the majority of the game, it's just that sometimes I got so frustrated I had to quit and come back after a few days to a week (only after running into a wall post-bad ending did my hiatus from playing TSS last longer than that).

____________________________
109th Skywatcher

Here are some links to Things!

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[Last edited by Xindaris at 02-02-2016 11:51 PM]

Banjooie
Level: Smitemaster

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I too was super angry at Mother of All Roaches. It is in fact the reason I have never actually seen the good ending of TSS, despite having been in the beta.

(The other reason is my save file exploded and I've never fixed it, but.)

However, to be fair, it is sitting at the end of the game.

mrimer
Level: Legendary Smitemaster

Rank Points: 5065
Registered: 02-04-2003
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Thanks for the feedback. Yep, I agree with pretty much everything here.

____________________________
Gandalf? Yes... That's what they used to call me.
Gandalf the Grey. That was my name.
I am Gandalf the White.
And I come back to you now at the turn of the tide.