So I have a design desicion to make on Gus the Gray.

When Gus dies I have two options.

1. I can restore the entire level from the Start (or some save checkpoint). Restoring the entire state of the level.

or

2. I can send Gus back to the beginning of the level (or checkpoint) but leave all of the other entities as they are.

What do you think?

With 1 I'd be restoring baddies, which means I would have to consider restoring the players ammo. Otherwise Gus has wasted shots kiling baddies that have come back. On the other hand If there are extra life pickups then restoring the level means that they would come back (unless they were a special case). I have played games where you can collect 2 extra lives, die, then repeat. Games that do that really bug me.

With option 2, The downpoint is that the player may have to run past a entire area of rather dull already completed level to get to where they were up to.

Any other brilliant ideas?

Don't let the player die. Award bonuses and other coolness for survival without being hit. Or black marks when hurt.

The more I think about not killing the player the more I like it. It requires a fundamental rethink about gameplay values though. What's to stop you playing forever? How do you impart any sense of urgency without the threat of death (make the bonuses very cool!)? And so on. I might try this approach in my next game.

Cas :)

If you don't restore the state of things, be careful because you may accidentally leave the level in an unsolvable state. For example, let's say there's a bridge that breaks when you walk over it - if you just put the character before the bridge after he dies, he has no way of crossing the bridge.

NOOOO! Kill the player! I hate the modern game design philosophy where completing the game just means having sufficient patience to wade through all the content. Makes the games bloated too. True, there is the odd game that pulls it off, but the game structure is usually pretty radical in these cases. Frankie Goes to Hollywood (the game) springs to mind.

Okay... if you reset everything, just make sure you don't reset the extra lives. I hate that too. Sonic the Hedgehog comes to mind (where the player is actually rewarded for dying repeatedly).

But, I reckon it would be better to not reset the level; if you have to wade through lots of empty stuff it means the checkpoints aren't set up right. In fact, you could just take the player back to the last totally safe piece of ground he was standing on (of course this means you'll have to flag which bits of ground are safe).

Oh yes, and what Gabriel said - if you have stuff like this, you better restore it... (unless your level design means this won't be a problem).

So... a partial restore then. Case by case depending on the type of thing it is.

Well, here's food for thought: when you used to play games with your friends when you were a kid, did you not ever feel that the kinds of games where you were "out" after cocking up in some way were the least interesting, overall? Because if you got "out" early on you knew you never had a chance, and what's more, you weren't even allowed to play any more!

Why, for example, does snakes and ladders not end until someone wins?

Now, I know that these are "multiplayer" games, but consider a single player game to be a degenerate form of multiplayer game where you are only competing with yourself. How can you adjust the gameplay so that you are not stopped from seeing all the game if you want to? Death makes less and less sense in so many games. Quicksave has made a mockery of dying. Save-scout-die-load-waste em! What's the point of dying if you can have a point to save the game at? The whole mechanism seems broken.

There has to be a better way.

I notice that the Japanese really don't like the concept of "dying" in games. They merely inflict "punishments", and they're hot on bonuses for good play. Insipiration perhaps?

Cas :)

The lack of the opportunity to fail cheapens victory to the point of worthlessness. But failure doesn't necessarily mean death.

But back to the question at hand... the usual preferred option is to restore the state of the level to whatever it was at the player's last save point. So anything he accomplished between the savepoint and dying is lost.

Like you said - the downside is that the player loses any progress he made after the savepoint. BUT - if you don't want to do that, why are you bothering with savepoints and the player "dying" and going back to the save point in the first place? AND what's going to happen when the player quits the game & comes back to that savepoint? You are going to have an inconsistency there.

Well, let me frame the discussion for you: What would be the most fun option?

Traipsing through the entire level just to get back to where you started doesn't sound like fun to me. Neither does having to start over from the beginning. So honestly I suggest you do something else.

Other game solve this in a myriad of ways: Save points sprinkled through the level, and any progress made since the save point is undone by dying.
Your new life starts exactly where the old life died, and you are momentarily invincible and maybe can pass through bad guys. That way if you get started in a bad place, you can cruise to safety before your new life begins in earnest.In regards to the esteemed Mr. Flack's comments: I can't quite bring myself to disagree with him. But let me point out: Mike Boeh said (somewhere on these fora) that every time he makes his games easier, sales go up.

Yes, a game is most enjoyable when it is so difficult as to be just barely completable. That "I won by the skin of my teeth" feeling is the greatest! But if you won by the skin of your teeth, that means anyone who isn't quite as good as you won't ever win, and not winning == not fun in the videogamer's mind.

I rather suspect Mr. Flack is a good deal better at videogames than I am. I finally got past the first level on Platypus, and that was on "Easy" mode, and with mouse control, and after Mr. Boeh apparently made the game easier to boot! And yet I still felt a small sense of accomplishment. If it had been harder, I might have felt more of an accomplishment... much later on, if I finally did beat it, assuming I stuck with it and didn't just give up entirely. Perhaps having beaten it on "Easy", I'll try my hand at "Normal" next. I'm glad I have the option.

So, let me suggest that the difficulty in the game be selectable by the user, and that it not be set in stone by the game design, as with how the game handles respawning after death.

Super Mario World (and Super Mario Bros) had you restored at some midpoint, if you made it that far.

I believe in Super Mario World, everything was restored, but then again, I thought the number of 1-UPs was gratuitous in that game. Of course, it meant that dying wasn't a chance at losing, it was just a failure in that specific level, so you can try again. Or at least that was how it was effectively played by me.

Naturally if you are looking for an increase in challenge, you need to balance it better. I hate when I died right before a boss in Contra, because that meant I would be going in with a pea shooter when I had the Spread gun before. I didn't have the opportunity to upgrade.

Restoration points are something to think about. If you do decide to follow the SMB method and provide a midpoint to restore the player at, make sure it makes sense on each level. You want the player to be able to pick up and keep going from there, and having a giant gap to jump, without a running start available, has effectively killed the player unfairly. I can't think of any game offhand but I remember this happening sometimes and frustrating me to no end.


When Gus dies I have two options.

1. I can restore the entire level from the Start (or some save checkpoint). Restoring the entire state of the level.

or

2. I can send Gus back to the beginning of the level (or checkpoint) but leave all of the other entities as they are.

What do you think?

Well, I prefer 1 to 2. With 2, imagine having gone through a level, only to die, be brought back to the beginning arbitrarily, and then have to maneuver your way to the point you died at just to see the first enemy that you didn't kill. It would be boring. And if I died again because it was a particularly tough enemy, that would be really boring to have to do it again and again.

At the same time, you don't necessarily want the player to start over. So save points seem necessary (are they implicit like in the first SMB or does the player have to specifically save or hit a marker, like in SMW?), and I prefer 1 to 2. You can control what is near any save point, so you can make sure that the player, having been restored, doesn't find himself in the middle of a giant fight right off the bat.

Hey, I'm esteemed! :)

Yeah, I am totally sold on difficulty levels now. It means that I can set up the game for maximum fun and excitement (to my mind) - even though this will be too hard for many people - and then go through and cripple it to make the easy skill levels, without feeling like I'm spoiling the nice, exciting harder original. In this way I can make the game ridiculously easy without any regrets.

I still believe that the player should be rewarded for doing well though. I plan to make the easiest level on my new game so ridiculously easy that just about anyone should be able to make their way through all the main game levels and see the ending without too much effort. But I still want people to have incentives to play through on hard (and subsequently, the extra-nasty skill level I plan to have unlockable after completing it on hard). To this end, I'm planning to have loads of extra bonus games, extra features, etc, that the player can unlock, as rewards for doing especially well. An unskilled player, playing on easy, will get to enjoy the main game more or less complete. But only the very best will get to see all the crazy extras.

Hamsterball is a bit like this too; you can play on pipsqueak mode and it's really easy... but many of the traps and nasties are removed - and since they are some of the most entertaining parts of the game, the incentive is still there to want to play on harder skill levels once you've come to grips with pipsqueak. I like this!

Oh, and I recently heard from someone who has finally completed Platypus after battling it for many months. I was really pleased to hear this; it's exactly what I wanted to achieve, originally... he stayed interested in the game long enough to play it for months and months, and finally got good enough to beat it... I hope that final battle was seat-of-the-pants exciting! But I now realise that these days, to expect that level of commitment from the average player is not realistic.