Do you think indie-devs are honing their gaming skills enough?

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Do you think indie-devs are honing their gaming skills enough? Are you serious about being good at your own game?

I don’t want to name examples, because I don’t want to make a thread about specific games (and also because I’m gonna be quite harsh), but I’ve had quite a few dissappointments in the recent months with a successor to a multiplayer first person shooter, that I have played for a long time and that I’m pretty good at. They’ve released a new entry in that series, and myself and a couple other players were baffled time and time again by the decisions the devs made and the kind of issues they seemed not to see. I don’t think I’ve ever played together with the devs or seen them play for long, so I asked the community if the devs are actually good at their own game. And the answer from people who have played with them was that they are definitely not among the top players of the game. And that would indeed explain a lot of the issues that I have with the game. Granted - a lot of it could be mitigated if they were better gamedesigners - which I also think they aren’t, but it would certainly help them see or anticipate issues better, if they were on the level of their competitive scene (which I think is yet a step above me in terms of skill, but not by a huge margin).

Another game that I played has a team where the main decision-maker is clearly one of the best players of his game. Maybe less than half a dozen people could beat him 1vs1. I tried - I’m definitely not among them. I think that gives him a unique edge to see some issues that us normies wouldn’t even be able to see or consider, but have meaningful effects on the game.

In the “even more indie” areas of development I often see issues in the implementation of basic things like movement controllers, that make me think “FFS, have you never played a ‘good’ game in your genre before?”. There are flaws that are glaringly obvious to gaming veterans, that as far as I can tell a majority of solo-indie devs neither see nor look for.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think “playtests will solve everything”, because the really good players are somewhat rare too and might not have interest in playing our half baked broken mess to tell us what’s wrong with it. I think there is no replacement for having the mindset of a hardcore play-to-win gamer when it comes to designing and testing your own systems and avoiding common design pitfalls like boring dominant strategies, unsatisfying, lagy or imprecise controls, impossible to beat or too easy “hard” difficulty modes etc.

If I recall correctly, bossfight designers on Dark Souls games have to demonstrate being able to beat their bosses without getting hit once, to get them into the game, and I think that’s an entirely reasonable requirement.

If you have any interesting examples, please share.

I’m hoping I can motivate at least one of you, to take a close look at the closest released game to the game that you are making, study high-level strategies of expert players of that game, “git gud” yourself, and come back to this thread in the future (lets say in 6 to 24 months) and report back how it affected the development of your own game and how it changed your opinion of your own and comparable games. Did it help or hinder you to sharpen your gaming skills? What happened that you expected and what surprised you? Or have you even gone through this process in the past and can already share your experience? That would be even better.

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Being extremely good at the game that the designer is designing may or may not be a good thing. For example, I am extremely good at both of the games I currently have available on Steam. But that has caused me to miss things that were obvious problems for new players. I missed some bugs that far less experienced players immediately found, because my play style prevented me from doing certain things the way less experienced players did them.

For example, one player showed me a bug that was easy to reproduce if you ram the space ship into a wall repeatedly. Usually, I completely avoid hitting structures while I am playing, so I had not seen that bug until a player showed me. The bug was easy enough to track down and fix, though. Anyway, it is good to try to remember that everybody plays differently, so designers need to test some really bad play styles when looking for bugs.

The other issue is difficulty in general during single player and/or bot modes. Some designers make the difficulty curve for themselves with little regard for the fact other people will likely rage quit very early on. Cuphead is a beautiful looking game that is far too difficult for most people to enjoy. I even let my niece and nephew try playing it for a while (ages 10 and 12), and they both quit during the tutorial. There is very little benefit to investing years into developing a game if most people will quit playing it long before they get too see any of the cool stuff.

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Good point! Though I would argue that it’s a lot easier to get playtesters on lower skill levels than on higher ones.

I don’t know the specifics of the bugs they found - would you say it would have been likely for you to find them yourself if you had looked for them more closely?

I hope you did the responsible thing and encouraged them to “git gud”! Just kidding…

Yeah, I agree. I’ve ragequit and given up on a couple of punishing games like Teleglitch. There’s certainly a place for games that are just “hard but fair” (Cuphead, Dark Souls, etc.), but it’s probably a lot easier to give players some difficulty settings and let them adjust their experience. As the developer of your game, you should probably be able to beat easy/normal difficulty with some severe self-imposed handicaps.

I just thought of a great example: Devil Daggers
I don’t know much about the main dev (at least I think it was mainly one person working on the gameplay), but I would think it’s impossible to make a game that is so hard with a well-paced steadily escalating difficulty curve, unless the dev is extremely good at that game themselves. Iirc around release I had seen him have 300 or so hours tracked in his game, and I assume he had many more before it even was hooked up to steam to track the time there. I’ve played it for 16 hours and didn’t ever come remotely close to his highscore. I think on that game, practicing the skill of playing that game must have been an integral part of the development. And playing that game is waaay more intense than most others. Not even sure I could do that for 2 hours in a row with the required amount of focus.

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Don’t be kidding!

This is how children should be learn gaming:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0RkapfBYIfc

It’s important to teach kids to not be scrubs.

Really though, I think that article should be required reading and wish it was updated for more modern audiences.

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On your main point, I agree with you that playtesting is not adequate to really understanding your game.

But its also important to understand the different kinds of games and how ‘skill’ interacts with them. The truth is, for the vast majority of games ‘skill’ isn’t actually important, so being a high skill player isn’t as relevant.

The type of game where involving very high skill level players in development (or being a high skill player) is most important is in competitive multiplayer games. In most single player games, there isn’t actually any skill needed. A classic example is 4x games, where by the time you actually learn the core mechanics for the game, the game loses almost all challenge.

Another point is that it varies very highly on a games replayability, the more linear the game play is, the less skill is involved. When gamers talk about a game as linear, it means they feel they aren’t making meaningful decisions. You can have a fairly rigid game structure, but if there are still meaningful decision points then fewer and fewer people will describe it as linear.

Linearity and nonlinearity are not as binary as most people think. Different kinds of playtesting and analysis need to go into games depending on how linear the game play is. Having robust playtesting is a deep subject, and the difference between a developer playtesting and others is huge.

Seeing people play Hell’s Crusade - watching video of them play - especially for the first time was a real lesson in how diverse people actually are. A hundred people can look at the same thing and all of them will see it differently and approach it differently.

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Interesting read, thanks!

Regarding singleplayer balancing I’ve heard an interesting thought in a talk recently: “The second to last level should be harder than the last one, because no one who makes it that far, should get stuck on the last level”. And I think I mostly agree with. There were a couple of games that left a sour taste for me because I had to give up on the final boss. Iirc among those were Arx Fatalis and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, plus surely some that I no longer remember. Dark Souls 1 came close, because I never had used parry, and the final boss is the easiest if you’re good at parrying.

Sure, but I’d imagine being a skilled / experienced player, both in your game and in general, would open your mind towards more possible playstyles that people might try?

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Of course, this is just one kind of testing. Different kinds of testing focus on different kinds of issues. “Playtesting” is about understanding how your players interact with your game. It’s for design problems, not software implementation problems. It’s for answering the question “is the user experience achieving what you want?” Identifying a bunch of other issues along the way is a useful side effect.

If people aren’t already familiar with them I strongly suggest looking up different types of software testing and making sure that you’re covering all of the things relevant to your project. Just throwing some players at your game doesn’t give you much control or repeatability.

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Well, one of the bugs would only occur if somebody intentionally ram into an obstacle, waited for their shield to charge back up, then rammed into the obstacle again, and repeated that several times. A skilled player will fly near structures without hitting any of them. Only a completely inexperienced player would intentionally ram the same obstacle repeatedly. Anyway, if a player repeatedly collided with an obstacle and let their shield recharge after each collision, there was a bug that would eventually occur that greatly reduced the player’s speed.

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This is not usually the case. In fact it’s kinda the opposite.

A noob looks at a game for the first time and every option is equal. The good moves the bad moves both jump out at him. An expert looks at the same position and only sees a couple options because…the others are bad.

Experts tend to have a narrower view on how to do something because they instinctively filter out the dumb options. That’s what makes them experts.

Watching guys do similarly bad stuff to @ShilohGames example of ramming an asteroid really opens your eyes.

You really need both kinds of playtesters the kinds that can break the game and the ones that are …bad. because once the game is out in the wild you’ll get both kinds of players.

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I definitely think young kids benefit from adults playing to win in games. I won’t let a kid win just to try to let them feel good. I will be very polite while explaining a game to a kid and helping them get better. But if they want to actually beat me in a game, they need to bring their A game.

I have had a lot fun teaching kids old favorites like Street Fighter II Turbo. But I would never show a kid any Mortal Kombat games, even though I played the original extensively when I was a teenager. The Mortal Kombat X game has an age rating of 18. Adults should not be playing Mortal Kombat X with an 8 year old kid.

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That’s a famous (in some circles) clip of a professional Fighting game player playing an 8 year old Streamer on the internet. Both were streaming it. Clip itself is whatever, but the kid yelling “that’s cheap” and the pro responding “you gotta learn” is part of the ethos of the competitive fighting game community (based in good part on that scrub article I linked).

@Martin_H - despite arguing the opposite point, I agree with you at core. I think a lot of people making games could benefit from being really good at the genre they’re working on.

With the game we just made, I personally struggled a bit with figuring out how hard to make it. My core instinct was to make things very, very hard. The problem I ran into is that the ‘meta game’ mechanics couldn’t support a very very hard game. Having no failure condition except to restart the mission meant that difficulty would be very frustrating for many players and it was too easy to land yourself in unwinnable situations (or unwinnable without some serious l337 gaming chops :smile:).

Adding difficulty sliders could help mitigate that, but ultimately in order to really make the content I built as punishing as I personally would have liked, it would need a different meta game flow. I’m not sure if being excellent at the genre would have helped that or not. I think leveling up my skill as a game designer would have helped more.

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I think it’s dangerous to assume that your game is of similar difficulty to others as it is to you. You know intimate details that others do not. You also know how things really are, which is often quite different to how they’re presented, which can make a huge difference to players.

I tend to agree. On a similar note, I suspect that it’s of more value to study top tier players than it is to be one.

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This is such a deep point. Seriously.

There is a huge gap between what a game really is and how players feel a game is. To some extent this also circles back to the Scrubs article.

The majority of players are actually engaging more in a made up experience in their head, more so than really understanding the game they’re playing. This is another point that separates ‘playing to win’ from ‘playing’. In order to play to win, you need to really understand the game itself, not the illusion.

On the flip side though, the very best games, really do understand the difference and are really balanced such that the real game is just as deeply engaging as the illusion of the game is.

As much as I personally love the Fraxis XCOM series, I think this is the perfect example of a game where the real game is deeply disjointed from the illusion of the game.

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I kick the ass of most of our players that are in the beta group. But i’m not sure it makes me a better game dev to be honest. Listening to feedback, take whats relevant and implement carefully and wisly are better attributes :smile:

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Well. compare the average video game to the average board game.

In the board game all of the rules are directly implemented by the players. They don’t necessarily have to understand why each rule exists, but they have to know what they are in detail. In other words, the mechanisms of the game are completely transparent.

In a video game the mechanisms are usually partially if not completely hidden. Even games that make a big deal of showing off stats to players don’t always clearly describe what those stats mean. (Deliberately, I assume - there’s a class of player who likes figuring that stuff out, which they can’t do if it’s made clear.)

Do you really think so? I’ve always seen that as more of an attitude thing than a knowledge thing.

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It’s actually a mixture of both, it’s a perception thing.

To use XCOM as an example, this game presents the player with a bunch of kinda special ops troops fighting aliens. The illusion of the game is that there’s some element of military tactics. The actual mechanics are a million miles away from the illusion.

You can see this by watching ‘high skill’ players playing compared to normal players. It’s not so much that they’re using different tactics, it’s that they’re literally playing different games. Higher skill players are not engaging in the narrative element at all, and are 100% engaging with the games core systems. This produces an entirely different style of play - one that, at a glance, you can tell is deeply different from how the vast, vast majority of players approach the game.

Another example, many players complained about shooting accuracy. It “felt cheap” that aliens could make shots from long range over all sorts of partial obstruction. That’s because XCOMs systems didn’t involve any modifiers for partial obstruction, and only minor range modifiers. Many players ‘felt’ a system should/did work one way, but the game itself worked in a different way.

A lot of people will feel that ‘flanking’ an enemy is really one of the core objectives in xcom, but truth is that the game’s true goal is managing visibility such that you never accidentally activate an enemy, flanking is often the cause of accidental activation, and is often actually bad to do. When managing visibility, its often smartest to use moves that ‘look dumb’ like clumping all your guys up in a long straight line out in the open without cover.

In board game days, this kind of thing was what players called “gamey” or “min-maxer” play and was often frowned upon, because enjoying the fantasy of what a game should be about is often more fun. With board games, people also invented ‘house rules’ that would modify the play rules to better suit their taste or prevent “gamey” abuse.

That ‘gamey’ play is the gap between the mechanics of the game and the fantasy of the game and is all about perception, not game knowledge.

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Ah, right, we’re talking about different things*.* I was referring to the difference between casual play vs. performance oriented play.

Yeah… what you describe actually sounds like pretty flawed game design to me. If it’s presented as a tactical game but the tactics basically aren’t implemented and attempting to use them actively hampers your performance… yuck? It’s not unusual for the fit between the fantasy and the mechanics to be a little askew, but they should at least be in the same ballpark.

That aside, you’re spot on that some people are in it for the role play, some are in it for beating the system, and some are in it for other reasons.

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It’s all subjective. What constitutes an exploit, what constitutes a strategy, and where’s the line?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CazVJ_tj5I

This is a guy beating divinity original sin 2 in 35 minutes. The gap between speedrun and regular playthrough can also show the gap between the games raw mechanics and the perception of the mechanics.

In terms of ‘playing to win’ there is no such thing as an exploit, there are only games that become degenerate when the best strategies are used.

Many many great single player games are degenerate if you play purely to win. Competitive games are usually much better in this regard - single player games aren’t usually designed to be played in the most efficient possible fashion, they’re usually designed to be played in a more casual sense. Competitive games with large online audiences need to be non degenerative in order to remain… competitive.

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There are plenty of very good developers who suck at playing games, even some who suck at playing their own games. Being able to play a certain game effectively is far less important than being able to appreciate the game, and being able to understand how other people want to appreciate the game. Spending time “mastering” the gameplay itself would be a bit of a waste for most developers. That’s what QA testers are for. For a small-time indie dev, that’s what friends and family and on-line beta-testers are for.

Being able to play your own game on a fundamental level is a good idea. Trying to “git gud” at your own game is frequently a mistake. Some developers do this, and it often ends up drastically skewing their approach to the difficulty curve. (which leads to far more issues later on) It’s honestly better to test your gameplay for feel and other fundamental elements, but not bother trying to become a master at it. This keeps your experience closer to the average player.

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