Ask: Making something Hard is Easy
August 27th, 2023
https://youtu.be/VkjTeRHV5vo?si=aFDkWimspLswywYD think you might be interested in this video. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts!
Yeah this is pretty good. I wanna build on a few things.
I think the general idea of "Hard is Easy and Easy is Hard" is like, totally a worthwhile, easy shorthand for a really real concept but I think I think a more important way to say it to fellow designers is fun is hard, and hard things trick people into thinking they have value.
Like yeah it's easy to make something accidentally hard, but it's not easy to get someone to play something hard, which "hard is easy" kinda accidentally applies.
Again this isn't really a criticism of the video this is like a whole subpoint/talk in and of itself that I just find myself gravitating from due to my history with IWBTG. I could go on a long thing about Happy Wheels levels (the OG Mario Maker) and why "easy levels" are not popular (the tl;dr though is that easy content requires context).
Secondly is another one close to home in but in a different way, but it was talking about stuff like hitshake and hitstop and stuff and nothing that got said was wrong but what I want to add is that while you should knowing this stuff, and use this stuff, it important to also know you don't have to.
"What do I want to communicate things and how do I want to communicate them?"
These are tools in the draws. They're good tools, all of them. But they effect the feel of the game. I felt this talking to other designers about Brave Earth. "Why isn't there hitstop you should add hitstop" and for me, my response was it's an (fake) NES game. But a lot of people take the "Fake" part pretty far, you see a lot of retro styled NES games that bounce around and shake like Vlambeer game and those games can be great but I always feel like it betrays the aesthetic. It feels out of place.
It doesn't have to be retro though. One my favorite examples in Guilty Gear is Johnny, especially X2 era Johnny.
Johnny doesn't have hit stop on most of his specials
... And this makes everything he does feel slick, and flowy. It feels good. The lack of something can give as much game feel as the presence of something. We tend to fixate on big, chunky "sell the hit" flashy sauce and, frankly, with good reason It works.
... But from my perspective making a fake NES game, the thought process was like "What modern game design principles can I bring to this old feeling game", it was like.,.. within the limitations of the style and era I am trying to portray, how do I make things feel good? What can I leverage? Sound effects? Good animations. Certain types of freezing and flashing that feels properly of the era? Good death animations? If the game is going to have a naturally slick feeling, perhaps the pacing of enemies should reflect that etc etc etc.
Again, absolutely nothing wrong said in that video. The level beyond "Here are things you can do" is "and here is why you might not want to do them."