Castle Paradox

Rya.Reisender · **Snippy** Joined: 18 Jan 2008 Posts: 821

Okay, so the SB community had an "Let's all play Phantasy Star II" week and talking about this game and especially about how complex the dungeons are made me realize that I miss these kinds of dungeons as they were in Phantasy Star II.

Dungeons these days are often way too simple. They are basically like "Choose one out of 3 paths: One is a dead-end, one leads to a treasure chest, one leads to the next fork or the boss / exit".

In Phantasy Star II this is not the case. There are hundreds of different paths you can go. The dungeons itself are hard to overview because the ceiling obstructs the walls sometimes. Even if you look at a walkthrough it's still extremely hard to find the correct path unless you invest several minutes into it. Yet all the dungeons made perfect sense. If you go on a 'up' teleporter, you'll be one floor higher but at the exactly same coordinates. If you go on a 'down' teleporter or fall down, you'll be one floor lower, but at the exactly same coordinates again. The dungeons have a really 'clever' design which is hard to explain (you have to see it to understand it basically). Phantasy Star II accomplishes that with only very few maptiles as well!

I wish there were more games with dungeon design like that.

So...

Invest more time into your dungeon design! Take a piece of paper and think of a clever design first before even starting to create the dungeon. It doesn't help if you make hundreds of maptiles to let the dungeon loot 'individual' and non-repeating if that only allows you to make very little possibly paths to walk.

These days most dungeons are so simple that they could be removed completely and you just fight the battles (like "To complete this gave you need to fight 10 battles, wanna proceed? Yes / No"). Finding the correct path in a dungeon is no challenge at all anymore.

But on the bright side, I think that some of the OHRRPGCE games still get closest to the Phantasy Star feeling. Wingedmene for example reminded me a lot of it, though the dungeons were still a bit more simple.
_________________
Snippy:
"curt or sharp, esp. in a condescending way" (Oxford American Dictionary)
"fault-finding, snappish, sharp" (Concise Oxford Dictionary, UK)
1. short-tempered, snappish, 2. unduly brief or curt (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

The problem I noticed in Phantasy Star II is that its camera system causes artificial unnecessary exploring a lot of time. The camera doesn't move until characters move towards a side of the screen, so you will end up trying to explore parts of the map you would never bother walking to had the camera just shown it ahead of time. That is a problem with the camera itself rather than the map. It also makes it harder to figure out if an area you just teleported to looks different.

I don't mind that it has maze like maps and that you should draw maps to help you, which it does, it's just that Phantasy Star II's camera system sucks all kinds of butt. I guarantee you that if you make maps just like PS2's in the OHR, it will be easier to explore just because of the less annoying camera.

I agree that dungeons need to be bigger and more in-depth, but Phantasy Star II probably isn't the best example due to the monotony the maps have. FF3j or the Dragon Warrior games might be better examples, though.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

Bob the Hamster · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 7:58 am Post subject:

I haven't played Phantasy Star II, but I remember how much I hated most of the dungeons on Phantasy Star III. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The dungeon map design in that game often seemed to be designed only to maximize the distance that you needed to travel to get from the entrance to the exit.

But speaking of difficult-yet-fun maps, did anybody else play 7th Saga? That game had very maze-like maps, but they were still (usually) interesting and fun to explore.

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

I'm not going to lie, Phantasy Star II maps are probably not very interesting either, and rely a lot on teleporters as well, but they would be a bit more manageable if it didn't have a camera system designed to hide a lot of the map while you are walking.

I need to get back to Phantasy Star II. I haven't played it awhile because I screwed up while drawing one of my maps (teleporter confusion), so I'll have to redraw it again.

The point should be that people need to make their map design more interesting to explore with some maze-likeness, it's just that PS2 is a pretty controversial example to use, IMO.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

msw188 · Joined: 02 Jul 2003 Posts: 1041

As always, it's a balance thing. How hard is too hard? Should players be expected to have to think carefully about how to move forward? Should players face the real possibility of actually getting lost? Should drawing a map be practically necessary to finding a way? Most importantly (in my opinion), should the player's survival be at stake?

I'm not sure yet. But I thought I'd post those questions for further consideration. After I've thought about this for awhile, I'll try to give my thoughts.

However, some specifics did occur to me after reading the first post. I always assumed that any game with stairs of any sort would automatically set itself up so that going up a floor would put the player in the 'same coordinates' on the other floor. I stuck to this very carefully in Tales I, and am continuing to do so in Tales II.

One thing that I've found contributes heavily to maziness is having large loops, especially where the full circuit involves changing floors. This can cause serious confusion for a player who does not map out the area.
_________________
My first completed OHR game, Tales of the New World:
http://castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=161

This website link is for my funk/rock band, Euphonic Brew:
www.euphonicbrew.com

Moogle1 · Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 10:27 am Post subject:

I wasn't going to jump into this discussion, but James said the magic words. 7th Saga is my all-time favorite annoying-hard RPG.

Dungeon design is not just about making mazes. As some game designer said back in the text adventure days, the only one who likes mazes is the designer. You're changing the process from this:

START --> END

to either this

START --> find a walkthrough --> END

or this

START --> frustration and annoyance --> END

Of course, all dungeons are mazes of sorts and that's fine, since walking a straight line would be really boring. But making really complex, ultrabranching mazes is a quick and easy way to frustrate your player. As one of the few people who played and enjoyed Fatal Maze, let me just say that the maze was the worst part of the game.

BUT LO AND BEHOLD! Deliverance from the skies, as mazes are not the only way to make your dungeon interesting! The key is interactivity. What is your favorite dungeon in any game, thinking of just the map design and not the battles? It's probably something with tricks, traps, puzzles, or switches. The Valkyrie Profile games have great dungeons that combine platforming and puzzles. (They also have 3-D mazes, but they remove the frustration by automatically mapping as you go.)

Back to the 7th Saga example: the dungeons in that game had fairly simple mazes. There was a little branching, but not much. That was perfect for that game, since the bottom line is for much of the game, if you encounter too many enemies, you die. (If you get really unlucky, you die in one bad encounter, but that's neither here nor there.) The "crystal ball" encounter system is a large part of what made the dungeons interesting. You might want to go left... but there's an enemy there, so you maneuver a little to the south first, run back to the right...
_________________

Slime Salad :: Independent Game Design

Onlyoneinall · **Bug finder** Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Posts: 746

You don't have to necessarily take the maze approach to your dungeon. Your dungeon could be a building where most of the rooms are accessible, but you have to do certain tasks to get through it or reach your goal. This would make it more a puzzle and about exploring as opposed to find the right path.

But like Moog said, interactivity is what's more important, or at least making it interesting enough.
_________________
http://www.castleparadox.com/gamelist-display.php?game=750 Bloodlust Demo 1.00

Rya.Reisender · **Snippy** Joined: 18 Jan 2008 Posts: 821

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Onlyoneinall · **Bug finder** Joined: 16 Jul 2005 Posts: 746

Rya.Reisender · **Snippy** Joined: 18 Jan 2008 Posts: 821

@Newbie_Power
I can at least try to get people to make more complicated dungeons by displaying that there are people who would like to see them. There are many things I'd like to see in a game, I couldn't possibly implement them all myself...
Plus, if I made the dungeons myself there won't be any challenge for me to find the correct path so that's a big spoiler...

@Onlyoneinall
I consider it as cheating if the main challenge of the game is finding the correct path and for that remembering all the routes you went. Drawing a map nullifies this challenge. As I said it can be compared to with finding out a cheat code yourself. While getting the maps online can be compared with getting the cheat code online.
I think if the game doesn't add a mechanism to draw a map, you're not supposed to draw one by design.

An opposite example is Etrian's Odyssey. There the game offers a mechanism to manually draw an ingame map. So drawing the map there is not cheating but part of the game design.

Edit: But maybe the word 'cheating' is too harsh in English. It's more like "going over the borders of the intended gameplay design". I don't just find a better word for it~
_________________
Snippy:
"curt or sharp, esp. in a condescending way" (Oxford American Dictionary)
"fault-finding, snappish, sharp" (Concise Oxford Dictionary, UK)
1. short-tempered, snappish, 2. unduly brief or curt (Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Rya.Reisender · **Snippy** Joined: 18 Jan 2008 Posts: 821

The game also doesn't tell you not to use cheat codes, though~

Newbie_Power · Joined: 04 Sep 2006 Posts: 1762

Because you would have to purposely sacrifice some things to achieve the effect Phantasy Star 2 has, and not every game will want to do that. There's nothing wrong with a game that does try to bring back an old school map philosophy, don't get me wrong (I know Tales of the New World 2 pulls off a Dragon Warrior style world map and dungeon almost flawlessly), but I think most people will prefer more modern map design philosophies, but with more complex layouts thrown in to improve the gameplay and exploration.
_________________

TheGiz> Am I the only one who likes to imagine that Elijah Wood's character in Back to the Future 2, the kid at the Wild Gunman machine in the Cafe 80's, is some future descendant of the AVGN?

TwinHamster · Posted: Wed Jul 02, 2008 8:02 am Post subject:

Goodness, this is Phantasy Star II?

It seems like the Saffron city gym, except multiplied 100 times.
Such a thing is no longer a dungeon, but a test of the Player's sanity.

I agree that dungeons should be more complex, but this is not the way to accomplish that.
Instead, spend some time to think of an original puzzle or to add a twist to an old one, but please don't repeat a potentially simple headache over and over again.