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It's funny to see some rando taking this patronizing tone to give game design advice to DAN COOK, a man who could design a twee trifle like A Short Hike in his

It's funny to see some rando taking this patronizing tone to give game design advice to DAN COOK, a man who could design a twee trifle like A Short Hike in his sleep if it wasn't too far beneath him to bother

ItsMonkk 4y ago
Nice appeal to authority. And I'm not the one going "you think you do, but you don't" - the playtesters told him his core gameplay loop wasn't fun, and he ignored them. 'A Short Hike' has a meta-critic score of 88 while 'Cozy Grove' has a 72, and while game reviews are generally fairly bad, that's a large margin. I'm not sure how beneath him Hike is.
danctheduck 4y ago
Just to be clear, I have immense respect for A Short Hike. It is one of my favorite games. :-) A Short Hike also has source->sink value chains in it! If you look at how they are built, the lack of exploration and feather sinks in the late game is one of the reason it is a short hike vs a long hike. It was a smart decision to cut it off where he did. And to the following comment, metacritic has sadly become a poor method of rating games these days. The whole game industry seems to have shifted to regular updates and metacritic remains stuck in the previous era of one-time boxed releases. Cozy Grove, for example started out around a 77% and after a year of updates is at about 94% on Steam right now. Still room to improve!
- ItsMonkk 4y ago
  And just to be clear to you, the rest of the article was great. I think there was three or four points that I was going 'but ...' and then the next sentence you explicitly mentioned exactly that. Very well put together. > Issue: Multiple undifferentiated inputs to node Under this segment you say 'and it never is' implies that it's just really difficult, you can be even more forceful here - it's impossible. Sirlin's article on Viable Options[0] goes into depth here - while he's talking about best move to attack in a fighting game, and while your case is simpler in that the enemies don't have options for themselves, the mapping between the two arguments is there. For any given use-case there can only ever be two choices, the best choice, and the counter to the best choice. The counter to the counter just ends up being the best again so you can't have any more depth without creating a new use-case. [0]: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-2-viable-options https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-...

ItsMonkk 4y ago

Nice appeal to authority. And I'm not the one going "you think you do, but you don't" - the playtesters told him his core gameplay loop wasn't fun, and he ignored them. 'A Short Hike' has a meta-critic score of 88 while 'Cozy Grove' has a 72, and while game reviews are generally fairly bad, that's a large margin. I'm not sure how beneath him Hike is.

danctheduck 4y ago

Just to be clear, I have immense respect for A Short Hike. It is one of my favorite games. :-) A Short Hike also has source->sink value chains in it! If you look at how they are built, the lack of exploration and feather sinks in the late game is one of the reason it is a short hike vs a long hike. It was a smart decision to cut it off where he did. And to the following comment, metacritic has sadly become a poor method of rating games these days. The whole game industry seems to have shifted to regular updates and metacritic remains stuck in the previous era of one-time boxed releases. Cozy Grove, for example started out around a 77% and after a year of updates is at about 94% on Steam right now. Still room to improve!

ItsMonkk 4y ago
And just to be clear to you, the rest of the article was great. I think there was three or four points that I was going 'but ...' and then the next sentence you explicitly mentioned exactly that. Very well put together. > Issue: Multiple undifferentiated inputs to node Under this segment you say 'and it never is' implies that it's just really difficult, you can be even more forceful here - it's impossible. Sirlin's article on Viable Options[0] goes into depth here - while he's talking about best move to attack in a fighting game, and while your case is simpler in that the enemies don't have options for themselves, the mapping between the two arguments is there. For any given use-case there can only ever be two choices, the best choice, and the counter to the best choice. The counter to the counter just ends up being the best again so you can't have any more depth without creating a new use-case. [0]: https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-part-2-viable-options https://www.sirlin.net/articles/balancing-multiplayer-games-...