Re: Audio Game Conventions (what do lots of audio games do?)
To my thinking, that is exactly the problem. Since the inception of audio games, particularly action ones, developers have relied on the same designs and conventions from the very beginning. How many side scrolling actions games have left and right for movement, jumping with the up arrow, space bar for the weapons, number row for inventory and h for health? The answer is pretty much all of them... whereas even the beat em ups from the 80s had slightly varying mechanics and controls, so none of them played exactly alike.
Area-based menus, as Kai said, are not designed to have things done quickly and have it be that. They are designed that way to help introduce the player to the game world, as well as to possibly aquaint you with npcs in the game. Shadow Rine has implemented this idea in the merchant system where you have to actually locate someone in the game world to enter a shop menu, whereas other games, in a less fun approach in my opinion, have a shop menu you can access from any time, anywhere. While it is convenient, it certainly doesn't teach me much about the world or immerse me in it.
Personally, I think if there is a how to document written for potential indie developers, it should focus more on relaying audio information and making information available to the player, while still having enough freedom for the developers to do what they want in the area of base game design and controls. For example, if a developer is considering making a final fight type game, aka a 2d beat em up, I don't want it to be another move left and right, hammer space as much as possible, press the number 2 to cycle to a different weapon, hammer space, then jump a pit, rince and repeat. And the one key thing I would stres is ramping up the difficulty does not mean piling on more health for enemies or damage dealt by such, but more complexity in how enemies behave, or an increase in reaction speed from the player's part being required to fi nish something.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
