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Balancing Player Input and Developer Vision?
Chris_Jefferson writes "I work on a simple iPhone puzzle game called Combination. Probably the most frequent request I get from users is for an in-game hint system, to help them out on the harder problems. However, when I tried beta testing such a system, almost every user would just hammer the hint button as soon as they got stuck for longer than 30 seconds, spoiling (I believe) their enjoyment of the game. Should games programmers decide they know what's best for users, and not give them features they are crying out for? Has anyone ever seen a good middle-ground, where users are helped, but can't just skip their way through the entire game?"
This question can be generalized for just about any game that's being continually developed — where should the game's designer draw the line between responding to feedback and maintaining what they feel is is the greater source of entertainment?
How about "just about any product". No one ever got rich ignoring their customers' requests.
Except Apple, I suppose. But they usually tell their customers what to want anyway, so it all works out.
How about puting a timer or trigger to reset the hint button. 1 hint per minute/several minutes or 1-3 hints per level. Give the user what they want not what they asked for.
I don't find ultra "realistic" or difficult games fun to play. As a casual gamer, I want to play a game to pass the time and enjoy a sense of accomplishment. If I can't make any progress in what I feel to be a reasonable time, I drop the game and move to something else.
Easy/Normal/Hard mode.
You can compromise Easy mode challenge and much as possible, up to including auto-solve button.
Then, you can throw your most sadistic version of game on users in hard mode.
-- Technology for the sake of technology is as pathetic as eschewing technology because it's technology.
Three things come to my mind:
First, if your game awards some score or something then getting a hint must cost them.
And/or you only give a set amount of hints throughout their session. Maybe allow for an additional hint every x levels.
And/or make them aware that they have not succeeded themselves. I remember a good Solitair back in the MS-DOS days which also gave you a hint if you asked it to. When the game was finished it displayed ''You won (with my help)''. The ''with my help'' was what encouraged me not to press the button.
analyse the stats. Do a version with hints and one without. if more people buy the full copy of the hint one, the it obviously added value to the game. if not, then your fears are right and the hints ruin the fun.
Nothing beats hard data, even when it comes to game design.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
If your goal is to make the most fun game for you, then do whatever you want. If your goal is to make money, put in the features that will sell the game. Why are you even asking this question? Do we really have to ask slashdot for common sense now? I thought it was for questions that smart people can't answer for themselves with two seconds of thought?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would suggest hint tokens. Completing a level quickly or in a certain way will earn a user hint tokens. Later, if they get stuck, they can spend a token to get a hint.
You don't need to make the tokens very scarce. The simple fact that they are not unlimited will likely cause most players to conserve them for when they really need them. If they know the system exists and they know they might need it on level 99, they'll be more inclined to save tokens.
If you have a multi-level hint tree, the token system can work even better. A player might only pay for the simple hint knowing that if they become really stuck, the answer is there, but they better have kept enough tokens around to buy the more descriptive hint.
Among other games, the Professor Layton DS game used a similar system. I think they erred too far on the side of giving many hint tokens, though. I didn't need to use them for any but the hardest (or, sometimes, poorly defined/written) puzzles and by the end of the game I had a mighty stash of them. Of course, you could also figure out some method to reward the player for having many unspent tokens: more points, extra levels, bonuses, etc.
Elrond, Duke of URL
"This is the most fun I've had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"-Sam&Max
So, you're saying that your game can only be enjoyed by the user if they are constantly frustrated with it?
Maybe the problem has nothing to do with the hint button at all, but rather the game itself. It's apparently not what your test group wants. (What gamers in general want is probably different yet.)
Also, don't forget that the iPhone is for gamers on the go. They don't -want- to spend more than 30 seconds staring at the screen and doing nothing. They'll also probably be quite a bit more distracted than if they were at home on their PC/console.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Getting stuck is irritating. Getting a total solution is unsatisfying. There must be an in-between option. Could you just tell them how many pieces are in the right place, or just that they have some in the wrong place?
Make a number of versions and divide your beta-testers into groups. A control group playing the current version, perhaps one where hints are unlimited and have no penalty, one where there are limited numbers of hints, or some penalty is associated with using them. After they've played ask them to fill out a questionaire rating their enjoyment of the game overall, and in specific areas.
That way you'll have useful, qualitative data about the overall "enjoyment factor" of your game, as apposed to using guesswork and the (possibly biased) opinions of others to decide which features you need. This masters dissertation contains some relevant points, and seems to have some references which may be useful to you.
On a more personal note, I find games that provide hints can be more satisfying than games that leave it entirely to the user, especially in cases where the puzzles require a certain way of thinking, or a certain intrisic understanding of a system that I perhaps do not possess. Limited hints allow me to continue past a puzzle or area that I might otherwise have been stuck on, and in some cases might have caused me to ragequit. It's a fine line though, as some games provide hints too freely, and I find it too tempting to click the hint button whenever my progress is delayed more than a few minutes or seconds. In these situations I might have discovered the answer on my own in time and felt elated by my own cleverness, probably enhancing my perceived enjoyment of the game. There are probably those that only derive enjoyment from a game through its completion, or through using every possible hint, guide or even cheat to be the "best".
Basically I think you need some empirical testing to determine what system is right for your game, and what your target users will find to be the most fun.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
What's the purpose of the game? If the developer is making it to amuse themselves then player input can be zero. If the developer is making it for a target audience, assuming they have a target audience in mind, then player input should supercede all other considerations. There's plenty of room to compromise somewhere in the middle.
Most failed games that aren't the fault of pushy investors seem to be the case of developers missing or not defining a target audience or else not catering to that audience. I don't have hard facts to back this up, just observations of recent failures - SC:S (didn't cater to audience), Spore (poorly defined audience), HGL (didn't cater to audience), TR (didn't cater to audience).
mmmm...forbidden donut
So you're telling me that almost every single user would reach several points in your puzzles where, for a whole 30 seconds they have no bloody clue what to do, and essentially have to surrender and use that button? And you think they should enjoy the frustration instead?
I'm sorry, but that's not a case of mindlessly hammering away at the "help" button. If they hit it each second, ok, I could see it that way. But if they first did try 30 seconds, that's really an "ok, I give up" gesture. It's reaching a point where it's either that button or they uninstall the stupid game.
But, at any rate, if almost every user gets stuck repeatedly in your game, I'd say that's bad design. The help button may be a band-aid fix for the symptoms, but the underlying problem remains. And forcing the players to stay stuck there, is only going to build up frustration, not fun.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Easy:
Don't show the button until after half an hour have passed.
The people that ask for the button is probably the ones that have invested that much time trying to solve a problem.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
There's nothing worse than a developer who refuses to listen to his users. It annoys me, greatly. You don't have to concede everything (otherwise you'd end up with the Turbo-Hyper-Fighting edition where they can play multiplayer across the Internet with Mario, based on real-time data sucked from their personal Facebook account, etc.) but you do have to listen.
If *several* users are saying that the hint button would be valuable, then to those users, it *would* be valuable. You can make it optional (i.e. a "Hard" difficulty where you can't use the hint button) and so not alienate established users who don't *want* to use it. You can make it so they have to "earn" a hint powerup. You can make it so that they can't submit their scores online if they have used hints, and so on.
I tend to find that "make it optional" is a cure-all for the vast majority of problems like this.
Additionally, this is the problem I have with 99% of computer game sequels - the players say for years how good it would be to finally do X in the game and the sequel totally ignores the possibility. Often, you then find people patching the original to do X in place of buying the sequel. The GTA series is a big example of this - MultiTheftAuto would have been infinitely popular if it was tied into the games that it was available for, but nobody ever bothered (despite even the original GTA having integrated multiplayer). Suddenly, with GTA 4 - Hmm, let's put some multiplayer back in.
The users are your BEST source of ideas... you will dry up for ideas after a while. You won't play the games anywhere near as much as they do (honestly!). Their collective testing power vastly outweighs anything even the biggest company can afford to do. This is how the best stuff appears - this is how Valve works, for example - release a game that's easily moddable, let people mod it, buy the mods, sell them back to the users. It happened with Quake, too. Quake multiplayer gets dull quickly but being able to load up new user-created content from *their* ideas, even if it's thing that you never wanted implemented, are what keeps the game fresh, interesting and popular.
Listen to your users. Yeah, it's a pain to filter out the crap. Yeah, it's disheartening that people get more excited over a hint button and anti-aliased fonts than your super-duper complicated solve system. But at the end of the day, these are the people that make programming worthwhile - would you have carried on making the game if your websites/distributors said that nobody had downloaded it?
Wars with the users about which features of Pidgin to implement, and why certain features have been dropped or changed have been waged repeatedly. If I may be so bold, I think I can summarize the Pidgin devs' attitude: "We're writing Pidgin for our own enjoyment and not for the purpose of attempting to gain as much IM client market share as possible. Nobody's forcing you to use it." They also use the "patches welcome" approach: "If you want a feature, write it, and we'll consider it." I have probably mis-stated/-paraphrased/-summarized at least some of their opinion, so have a look at the Pidgin mailing lists and trac tickets for some animated discussions.
and what they actually want are two entirely different things.
you could limit the number of hints per game.
1) Easy Level gets 10 hints
2) Medium Level get 5 hints
3) Advanced Level gets 3 hints
4) Champion Level get 0 hints
provide a forum(s) that users can post walkthroughs and guides to.
Just as well that you don't design games, eh? Because the point isn't even what _I_ think of that, but what his players (and thus potential customers) think. By his own experimentation, after 30 seconds they give up. _That_ is the data that actually matters.
Game design isn't some kind of "let's create some reasons to sneer at the customers" contest. Your job there is basically to entertain them. That's why they pay you for.
Silly willy-waving about who should go back to ritalin is already a loser's game as it is. As a philosophy for game design, it's outright idiotic.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How arrogant is this? Once the game is in the user's hands, it is up to them to decide what entertains them. If you get any kind of score, you can certainly refuse to list it if they use the hint system, but if it is just about solving the puzzle, let them be. Some people cheat at solitaire and still claim to be entertaining themselves. Is this any different? Vision is great, but you can't cram it down people's throats "for their own good".
I love this game because it is so difficult and does not offer any help. You get a real sense of achievement when you complete a level. Which is a really good early morning boost on the daily commute. It also really brings out my competitive side, I want to do better than my peers who also have a copy of the game. We have started emailing each other to tell which of the super hard levels we have completed. It is just like sudoku you often stare at that for 30secs not knowing what to do, but when you work it out you get a real sense of achievement.
Hide some hint coins throughout the game and make them tap endlessly to find them. You could make your puzzles worth so many picara...
If I'm stuck, I'm not having fun. The end. There's more than one kind of gamer. Many play for the challenge, to be sure. Some play for diversion from frustration, and frustration with the game does not help. I play to "see stuff" as Penny Arcade once put it. If I'm stuck, screw that; I want to see what comes next. Granted, the last doesn't apply to puzzle games, but the developer needs to realize that he may have a significant number of players who aren't playing to be challenged.
I'm saying: it depends.
1. If we're talking about inventing cold fusion, yes, it's worth spending more than 30 seconds on it. But then I'd presumably be paid for that, one way or another.
If it's a game I play to relax, then no, it's not worth it.
2. A well designed game would split that in several steps that take less than 30 seconds each.
A trivial example is Mahjongg or Shisen-sho: a whole game takes much longer than 30 seconds, but spotting a pair of tiles that match takes a couple of seconds. You can make a game arbitrarily long by just having more tiles, without each individual step being longer than that. And in fact if I reached a point where for 30 seconds I can't see a matching pair, I'd probably conclude that there aren't any more and hit the "new game" button.
If a game routinely hits points for most players where they try for 30 seconds and conclude "I have no fucking clue", then that's a badly designed game in my book.
3. The fact is, it's trivial to make any game arbitrarily hard.
I'm not even going to go into FPS or RTS (making the enemies 100% accurate is actually the easiest maths there), but even for puzzle games see the XKCD strip about NP-Complete problems. There's a whole class of problems that are NP-Complete, and (thus) you can raise the difficulty exponentially by just adding more nodes. It's trivial to add a couple more apetizers to the XKCD list, for example. Or double them, and get something that will make even Mensa members go cross-eyed.
There you go. Just make each step (or the whole puzzle) such a NP-complete problem that the user must solve in his head, and it's trivially easy raise the difficulty to whatever insane levels you wish.
The hard part is making it _easy_ but still interesting. That's really what separates the good designers from the wannabes. Not how hard can you make it, but really how easy can you make it. That's the challenge. The good ones can make an immersing game that actually could be played by a drunk epileptic.
4. It's worth noting that the shortest term memory buffer in humans is only 8 seconds long. So any problem which needs more thinking, is going to require more swapping information around and/or going back and forth to seeing what the problem was again. So difficulty and effort rise disproportionately. Just as a design principle to keep in mind.
5. But that's all a bit moot. As I've said before, it doesn't matter what _I_ think, it matters what his players think. Because they're the ones paying for the damned thing.
His own market research shows that most of them give up after 30 seconds. That's his market research data. He can factor it in the design and get their money, or he can stick to his vision and lose their business. It's really that simple.
You can choose to complain about how they're all idiots and stuff, but that's really not the point. It's those idiots who are willing to pay to be entertained. And they're not paying to be educated about how they should use their head more, but to be entertained. If you want their money, you have to match their tastes. If not, not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Designers have creative license to do what they want to do. If a gamer doesn't like something, they can move on to another game or learn to create a game themselves.
As a designer, you have an obligation to your process and your field not to pay any attention to the people playing the game.
Unless of course, you are doing it for the money -- then you better listen to them or you'll be broke soon! :)
You can't please everyone. You can please some, but not all of them. If you please them all you please nobody, least of all yourself.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
My answer to these customers would be:
"Yes, to experience my full game, you are required to develop some playing and / or problem-solving skills. Practice makes perfect. Bye now!"
If you click the hint button... why are you playing? Too see all the pretty colors and go "ooh ahh" when it beeps? Then why don't you just watch a cartoon, since you seek entertainment that doesn't require you to participate?
To answer your question and to quote Malcolm Gladwell, that users/consumers do not know what they want.
i fail to see the same way.
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Give them one new hint credit per level.let them bank the credits. Now they still have what they want and won't slack their way to success. You can also change the difficulty level by increasing the number of turns between credits.
Seriously, why is this on the front page of /.?
At the start of a game or gaming session, Give them a chance to opt-in to hints, defaulting on No hints. Explain why they should try without, if they are looking for a good challenge and all that good stuff.
You could also add a level based timer before a hint will show up, to at least give them time to really have thought it out.
Divide the modes out from Easy, Normal and/or Hard.