Sep 22 2011

PLAGUE

I’ve been working pretty slowly this week. Maybe I need to disable Internet access while I’m working? It’d probably help… but I’d fall behind on Twitter… o_O

I’m just hitting some minor snags with this Newgrounds build which I’ll hopefully get cleaned up shortly. I’m also coming down with a cold (a pretty minor one so far, at least!). Good thing I didn’t book Eurogamer Expo tickets, eh 😀 I think that means that finishing off Vigilance is about all I’ll achieve this week, work wise, but I reckon I can live with that.

Non-dev aside: I had a play of Sengoku’s demo last night. It’s possibly the least accessible game I’ve seen in years! What I think happened is that I waged war on a minor island clan, and the ensuing loss of honour meant most of my clan lost all respect for me and started voting in some jerk as my successor until I could recover enough honour and marry off my daughters to some of them as bribes.

I still have no idea if the game is incredibly simple or horrifically complex. Either way, it’s a good reminder of how far tutorials and general player education approaches have come and how much they bring to gaming.

2 Comments on “PLAGUE”

  1. Hurray for Paradox games. I’ve not played Sengoku yet since I’m not entirely done with EUIII yet.

    I think tutorials for these kinds of games are actually really hard to make. Since the problem space is so big a lot of questions about when you should do something change massively depending on context. Like in EUIII how much inflation should you allow in your monthly budget, the easy answer is you want it to be a low as possible but sometimes you don’t. The context matters hugely and there are lots of interrelated systems that don’t provide easy solutions.

    You are going to need to read the manual for every one of these games. They actually make a decent effort to explain the mechanics and the various gamplay systems. Between those and the tool tips (and my god do Paradox do awesome tool tips), it becomes reasonable easy to figure out what is going on.

    Colm

  2. I dunno, the mechanics could still be introduced through staged scenarios or something. Not the nuances, just basic things like getting to see the different ways you can take over territory.

    I guess I’ll just have to try one of their games in full some time. The demo doesn’t come with a manual, so I can’t imagine it’s really representative 😀

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