Resonance - Now on Steam!

Started by Vince Twelve, Tue 19/06/2012 04:24:39

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Crimson Wizard

Alright, alright, I am probably just nitpicking. :P

It was just little strange, you'd expect paranoid scientist to use something more difficult.

Igor Hardy

Quote from: Crimson Wizard on Tue 17/07/2012 11:00:06
Alright, alright, I am probably just nitpicking. :P

It was just little strange, you'd expect paranoid scientist to use something more difficult.

Yeah, that's just what I thought as well.

But let's face it - Dr Morales didn't seem particularly bright. Probably found the new particle in a dinner making accident.

Snarky

Well, if he's writing by hand, it has to be something he can encode in his head. I don't think most of us can do SHA1-level encryption mentally on the go. (Of course, this could argue that he'd be better off just using an encrypted file on his computer, but on the other hand a physical, analog artifact can more easily be protected against surreptitious cracking.)

Igor Hardy

#123
There are many fun and relatively easy to use encryption methods. With multiple substitution alphabets and keywords for example (like for the journals in the movie Prestige, or in the recent Sherlock Holmes sequel):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen%C3%A8re_cipher#Description

Of course nowadays even a somewhat modified, unique variant would be easily cracked by a computer, but for an adventure game puzzle it would be great.

Vince Twelve

The reason I went with a substitution cypher is because it would have been solvable by the average player.  I could have gone harder, but that would risk it being too hard for most players plus very hard to implement a good way of solving the puzzle in-game without requiring the player to transcribe symbols onto their own notebook for translating.  The pigpen cypher let me have an easy-to-use interface for solving.

It also works in the story despite the fact that a brilliant physicist would surely know some better cyphers:

Spoiler
It's the same pigpen cypher he taught Anna to use when she was a child!  If you complete the maze fully by finding all three hidden memories and then jumping down the last chute, Anna gets a bonus LTM of her uncle teaching her the cypher.  This LTM also gives you half the code.
[close]

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

#125
While I don't agree with dumbing down games, we would have received far more complaints if the puzzles had been punishingly difficult or required massive deduction.  If you make puzzles too difficult nowadays people just intrinsically turn to the internet for a solution.  It's unfortunate but the patience and perserverance our childhood games demanded of us just isn't very realistic with the technology available to subvert those challenges easily.

Basically I'm saying there's just too much temptation to cheat for most people to really stick it out and solve something extremely challenging.  The ones that do so are usually stubborn and refuse to use walkthroughs on principle, even preferring to stop playing the game altogether to cheating.  There are a few optional challenging puzzles for the real die hards but you can easily miss some if you're not careful.

Igor Hardy

#126
Now I feel bad about getting the designers in defense mode over this small issue. Especially, since I have yet to talk about the entirety of the game properly.

You are of course both right that a more challenging puzzle would limit the number of players that get to read the diary's contents. I had no doubt you considered more complex versions.

Nevertheless, how much were you risking in case of this particular puzzle? It was one of those optional "master puzzles" - not an obstacle that could block players from finishing the game. And the diary ended up being - by far - the easiest of the extra achievement puzzles - you can simply brute force it, any in-game character could. The opposite of a certain made-just-for-fun puzzle box lying around in another location, or the electric panel wires challenge. :) You get the feeling that, if the diary had fallen in the wrong hands, the code would be cracked in a matter of minutes. Which makes Morales encrypting it seem kind of pointless. Well, maybe he was simply afraid someone would be looking over his shoulder while he was writing. Could be that.

Another thing that bothers me about not having a more complex cipher is that basic substitution ciphers have by now become such a cliche in the genre. Just recently we had one at the beginning of Broken Sword: Director's Cut, and it generally shows up in every other adventure game. I'm not always opposing easy to solve puzzles, I'm more against putting the same puzzles in every title. And that's something of a trend lately. We seem to be building a canon of reusable adventure game puzzles considered as "logical" and solvable by the average player.

Crimson Wizard

Difficulty setting?  (roll)
Pros: a reason to replay the game facing higher challenges.
Cons: more scripting.

By the way, I was wondering, what took most of the time in the production of "Resonance"? Was it scripting, or art, or maybe voice recording?

Vince Twelve

Oh, no worries, Ascovel!  I'm not in defense mode.  Just explaining my motivations!

The bottom line is that the game is supposed to be fun and I think solving a substitution cypher is a fun brain excercise.  Like Sudoku.  If it was a more complex cypher that required pencil and paper or, going the other direction, some cypher that just requires the player to type in a password, I'd be worried that it wouldn't be as fun.  That's all.

Crimzon: All of it.  Shane's herculean accomplishment of making all the fiddly animations I asked for in the game definitely took him a while!  But the real bottleneck was scripting. 

I can't even begin to estimate how many man hours it took.  The first six months of the game were spent putting all the game systems and main GUIs together.  The game does not use AGS's built in inventory or speech system.  All of it was custom coded.  After that, implementing each room would take a month or more because of all the different ways you can examine/interact/combine objects with all the different characters.  I designed the game to be more complex than I ever should have.

Add on to that all the writing!  Four different lines for examining each object in the game... (though we cheated sometimes) plus all the STMs.  I was a fool to think this STM + 4 player characters was a good idea!

The best part of coding was doing all the little interactive or tactile sequences, like the maze or key/magnet or puzzle box.  I loved programming those, they were so much fun.  But they still took time.  A week or two for each.  So, when Janet was working on all that other boring stuff, I worked on these! :)

Finally,  my personal life was responsible for significant slow downs.  When I was the only programmer, I was working only after getting the wife and kids in bed.  I'd stay up as late as I could function and then have to get up three or four hours later for work.  That's why the game may have never gotten done without getting Janet on board!

Stupot

The cypher was very easy, but I'm glad it was there.  Most adventure games these days have diaries or letters that consist of pages and pages of exposition. I don't really mind that so much, but it can be a bit boring. At least Resonance makes you use your brain a little bit in order to be able to read it.

Babar

Talking about puzzles where you have to take out your pen, I actually did that for the journal for about two pages before realising "I can't do this for 34 pages" and leaving it.


Much later I found out that I can click on the letters and the replacement letter shows up underneath  :X
The ultimate Professional Amateur

Now, with his very own game: Alien Time Zone

Lorenzo Gasperoni

#131
I bought this adventure (box edition) and finished it in a week (playing the night). This is one of the best adventures i ever played. And i played every kind of adventures.
The thing that i appreciated the most is that i never stop too long to understand what i had to do. The path was always perceptible and i never had to do the tipical "use all with all other elese" that kill the gamer pleasure.

Great work Vince and Co. Thanks for the  experience! :D

Shane 'ProgZmax' Stevens

#132
I'm glad you enjoyed it Lorenzo, and for the record, I wasn't being defensive (I'm not sure how one could interpret that from what I wrote above, anyway) but merely making a salient point about the realistic expectations of puzzle challenges in games nowadays.  I'm sure you have friends who have used walkthroughs the instant they hit a snag and for most people the temptation to overcome an obstacle easily in order to keep the game moving smoothly is huge.  For people who grew up solving tough puzzles with only the help of a parent or sibling (if they were lucky), they will tend to stick it out and keep trying approaches until they either solve it or give up altogether and I'm not sure that either spells great success for the game.  I think Vince and Dave created a more or less happy medium between difficult and logical/direct puzzles so that there's something for everyone, but at the same time that sort of approach is never going to please everyone and that's something we understood from the beginning.

Ali

I think the game struck that balance really well.

It was more of a challenge than a Telltale game, and that's appropriate for the straight sci-fi subject matter. But it was nothing like the tedious rendered-realism adventures like Art of Murder or Journey to the Centre of the Earth. They always have me reaching for a walkthrough because the puzzles are so illogical I have no patience.

I grew up without walkthroughs too, but I just never finished ANY game until someone invented the internet. I spent 6 months trying to get George Stobbart past that goat.

Ghost

Just in, German magazine GameStar has reviewed Resonance and gave it a well-deserved 83 percent, highlighting it's "near-perfect retro-charme combined with compelling, mature  story-telling and great pacing". Pretty much the most negative thing they mentioned was the lack of German voice-over.
Congrats; does me good to see AGS games popping up in them magazines!

Vince Twelve

#135
Ooh, thanks Ghost!  Any chance of a scan? :D

And for anyone who was waiting, Resonance is now available via the Steam Store!  No more excuses!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/212050/

steptoe

Unfortunately my PC won't let me play this game  :(
It's not over until the fat lady sings..

Vince Twelve

Why?  What is your PC?  It should run on pretty much any Windows machine made in that last several years.

Nikolas

Vince, if you're looking for foreign language scans, I can do a scan of the 4 page review from PC Master magazine, in Greek.

And it's the same magazine that will feature some interviews in a couple of months, as far as I know.

OH! And Resonance is on Steam, with a discount of 10% off!

Ghost

Quote from: Vince Twelve on Wed 25/07/2012 17:57:50
Ooh, thanks Ghost!  Any chance of a scan? :D

*reserved for scan*

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