Quote:Original post by Wavinator
Either, but like you I'm especially interested in indie titles.
I've even been thinking about this for games with high production values. Years behind the curve (and on the cheap :>) I've finished Half-Life 2 awhile back, and I thought about how appropriate the ending was given all that had come before, even Half-Life 1. (It was as ambiguous as I expected, given Gordon's lot, and had a giant machine puzzle at the very end.)
The dilemma is the indie games by necessity do not have high production costs, so they generally can only get high production value by with extremely deft development. It's hard to compete on both polish and quantity of content; most indies have to go for the former at the expense of the latter.
Quote:I'm trying lots of strategy and RPG games at the moment. I take your point about the plot (funny how many casual indie puzzler's have one!). A friend suggested that only games with a plot can have a thematic closure that's similar to what we find so satisfying in other media, but I'm not sure I agree.
I'm not sure how you can get thematic closure without some kind of plot. The way I see it, once you introduce a theme and closure a plot will be implicitly introduced. Do you have a counter example that could show me what you mean by a plotless game with thematic closure?
Quote:Pacing's a good one. Out of curiosity, did you just find it too easy or did you have a series of expectations based on the premise of the game?
That might be referring to two questions: poor pacing in games in question, and Crayon Physics Deluxe specifically.
In general, poor pacing is when the difficulty and/or excitement curves are misaligned. It's a problem in freeform RPGs and poorly balanced action games in particular. In freeform RPGs, there can be long periods of grinding extra experience or travelling between points A and B. In both RPGs and action games, there can be points where the difficulty curve was not properly considered. Steep spikes of an extreme difficulty jump will present frustration and loss of enjoyment. Too long a plateau of lower difficulty leads to stagnation and boredom.
In Crayon Physics Deluxe, the gimmick was fine: drawing shapes that turn into physical objects in the world is a great concept. However the puzzles in the demo were really, really easy. I don't think I spent more than a minute solving each one, much less with most, and my first idea always worked. Hence there wasn't any challenge, and that's what is needed in a puzzler. I also felt it didn't quite have the personality spark of other indie puzzlers, like World of Goo, Deadly Rooms of Death or Professor Fizzwizzle.
(Note: I don't particularly want to pick on Crayon Physics Deluxe too much; I'm mainly using it as an example as I only tried out the demo yesterday. Unfortunately for it, I played it just after trialling the freeware somewhat rogue-like Spelunky which is packed full of fun personality).
