Well we are discussing it. Sorry if my last statement seemed like it was trying to shut down discussion. I probably shouldn't have said it that way. I've had good conversations and bad, but here it's been mostly good.Sumez wrote:I can get behind the idea that learning how the entire world is connected is the "true" progress of the game, and it is my favourite aspect of it. I am kind of confused however, why you'd even have the password system then. I guess this is not the place, or at least it is definitely not the time, to discuss that, but it seems to me that it serves little other purpose than confusing and misguiding the player.
The un-collectability of the coins is antagonistic, for sure. They are designed to look like other coins at first, but eventually realizing that you can't keep them changes that a lot, right? That's what I meant about what I said about the passwords applying to coins as well. They do a thing that is partly familiar and partly not, and realization the latter part is a bit disturbing for most people. I was very interested in how someone recovers from that. You make a choice at that point about how to proceed (or even to stop).Sumez wrote:None of that really has anything to do with my core issue, though, which is the coins. I'm sorry if it sounds like I'm coming hard down on it, but it just seems like a schizophrenic implementation of a collectible system.
Giving up on collecting all the coins is a perfectly valid choice. Giving up on collecting any at all is just as valid. Depends on what part of getting them is good for you. Similar to the way that the "final" part of the game is something some players won't find naturally, it's okay to me if they experience an "incomplete" version of Lizard. This is also why I made the ending stats give you a coin count but not a collected percent; I didn't want it to be insisting that the player is missing something. On the other end of it, some people have found all the coins, and some people think they've found them all but haven't. I wanted the best way to find out to be by comparing notes with other people.
So, it does create problems for the person who wants to collect them all. It's hard to remember what you've collected. It's hard to find them all. It takes some endurance to even get them all. There are ways to overcome it, though. If you can't remember, you can take notes. If you can't do it in one sitting, you can leave your NES on overnight. Some people have done these things. Some people have done it with no aids at all. Some people have decided not to do it. Some people have cheated to do it. Some people are waiting for a YouTube video to appear that shows them someone else doing what they want to see.
That's actually wonderful to me. You've had a real reaction to the coins, and you're sharing it with others. I appreciate hearing about it.Sumez wrote:I ordered copies for a bunch of other guys over here so that we would save money on the shipping and custom fees, and whenever I hand out a copy for each of them, I've been warning them not to spend time going for the coins on their first playthrough, and it just makes me a little sad that I have to tell them that. I guess that's the gist of my issue. Everything else is really great.
The only "incomplete" Lizard playthroughs that are disappointing to me is that occasionally someone goes in totally blind, finds and beats one boss, and thinks this was the entire game. A few more people have done this than I expected. I can casually drop hints about the scope of the game in the form of clips in the trailer or screenshots or vague description (or just hope someone is there to tell them), but every once in a while I've seen someone do this. It was an expected consequence of how I wanted the game not to tell you where to go. Like to everyone who has asked me for an automap, to tell you where you've been, to tell you where to go-- that's the complete opposite of what I wanted this game to be.
Especially interesting when I see people discussing the game and deciding an automap doesn't exist because it'd be technically hard to do on the NES. It's not really that hard to accomplish, and I sketched and implemented various forms of one over the course of development to try it out, but I decided that it was much more valuable to not have the game tell you where to go. In many ways this also leans together with the passwords and coins and ephemeral state of the world-- if I implemented an automap it'd be a completely different game for which I would absolutely have wanted to include a battery save, and coins that save. Everything would be different. All of these choices have consequences, and many of those consequences are a net negative for some players, but I couldn't really have it both ways. :S
That's another reason I'm worried about explaining my own intentions. I think for some people it might be better for them to believe I did something a certain way because it was "too hard to do it on the NES" than for them to think that I did something with purpose, because without that crutch to lean on they might think I'm a very mean person. :S I'm not sadistic, and I don't want people to suffer, but many of the ways I intended for one kind of person to enjoy the game will be painful for someone else. If I'm honest I can't say this isn't a deliberate choice that I made, but I don't really want to go out of my way to tell someone who is having a bad time with my game "yes, I wanted this to happen." Maybe that does seem mean? If someone comes to me with a question, though, I usually want to try and answer.