Feedback in vertical movement and the "off-screen void"

[capiVara]

This a repost from my comment on the blog, because feedback is supposed to be gather here on the Steam forums:

Shamus, after playing for a while out of idle curiosity I re-read a few of the blog posts from the early development, and was quite surprised to find a section that directly contradicts how it ends up happening in the final game. In this post[www.shamusyoung.com], you talk about vertical vs horizontal movement, and how the former is much less fun:

Originally posted by Shamus Young:

After some more testing I realize that the difficulty spikes are happening when the maze calls for vertical movement.

When I first envisioned this thing I was thinking about a game where you would fight your way down. I always liked that “deep underground” feel of Descent. I imagined the player would fight their way down most of the time, with little lateral shifts now and then just to keep things interesting. This gameplay concept would probably have worked fine in the day of 4:3 monitors, but now the world is filled with 16:9 (or in my case an oddball 16:10) screens. When I’m moving up and down, I can’t see nearly as far as when I move horizontally. I don’t have enough time to dodge projectiles and being shot by off-screen foes doesn’t feel nearly as exciting as fighting stuff you can see. It feels cheap. It feels like the game designer is exploiting my screen aspect ratio to gain an advantage over me.

You then mention that as a solution, you’re going to generate levels that mostly flow left/right and right/left, but in the game this layout does not seem to exist, and I have to fight “downhill” or “uphill” at least as often as sideways. In addition to the issues you mentioned, fighting uphill is also much more tricky than downhill not just because weapons with projectiles affected by gravity are much harder to aim that way (I assume they are meant to be more effective at bombing something below you), but also because debris and various particle effects from destroyed robots fall down all the way, so you have much more “stuff” moving your direction not all of which are projectiles to dodge. In other words: much, much more screen clutter when fighting uphill than downhill. Maybe it would be better to have debris and particles from destroyed robots to float and tumble and disintegrate or something like that, instead of falling down and out of the level?

Then right after that you wrote:

Originally posted by Shamus Young:

And it’s not just that it’s hard. It’s also driving me away from fun gameplay. Instead of dogfighting with foes all around, I find myself moving down and just spamming projectiles into the off-screen void. Instead of flying around fast, I’m creeping along, taking a few steps at a time and then hosing the place down with bullets to make sure it’s safe to take a few more. The game is less interesting when moving up and down. Then I hit a horizontal section and it turns fun again.

This is precisely what I experience. It begins right there with the exit from the starting room if that is going down or (even worse) up. Move too fast and suddenly a robot is in your face firing a salvo of bullets or a missile at you. So I move forward carefully while firing constantly “into the off-screen void”. Well, this is a thing I find myself doing very often regardless, it’s just vertically I feel like i have no other choice, whereas horizontally dogfighting is just as viable.

Now don’t take this as a complaint about shooting off-screen enemies. In the launch blog post comments I already mentioned it as a reply to another comment criticising this point, and I’d like to emphasize again that I do very much enjoy being able to shoot at enemys from afar, even beyond the screen edge. And I like kiting a group of enemys while backing away, continuously firing in their general direction. Weapons with high fire rate and some spread are ideal for this approach. In fact, I have loathed a few games in the past for actively preventing exactly that, by making projectiles simply disappear immediately when they hit the screen edge or by giving them all such a short lifetime that you can barely hit anything near the border of the screen. Mind you, in FPS I also tend to prefer long-range options, and would rarely pick a shotgun as my primary weapon, so shooting from a long distance is a thing I generally prefer.

P.S.: Listening to the awesome soundtrack as I type this. Love the use of e-guitar in “My Logic Is Bigger”. I don’t know why this is done so little in electronic music, a single e-guitar is such a good combination for it.

P.P.S.: Also love the titles of the individual pieces from the soundtrack. “Serve the Humans Lasers”, “We Come in Pieces”, “Version 2 Will Be Even Better”… 10/10 would grin again. And maybe I am in a minority here, but a well-chosen title can really enhance my appreciation for music, which is part of the reason I have all the Star Wars soundtrack whereas I find most traditional classical music rather bland. “Symphony in e-minor no A38” – these people back then must have been very, very unimaginative. (On the other hand, a single deliberately unimaginative title is quite a clever thing when surrounded by otherwise interestingly named songs.) I also feel like this about the titles in other forms of art, be it paintings, drawings, sculptures, or even movies.

[Gashapon]

I feel the same as you: I dislike vertical fighting. But on the design team as a whole (and among playtesters) it doesn't seem to cause any problems. In the end, it was decided that limiting the game to horizontal movement would be too restrictive, and would make the levels far too repetitive. IIRC, the game does favor horizontal movement. It's extremely rare to have more than one vertical shaft in a row.

I'm glad someone noticed the song titles. You're the first. :)

[capiVara]

Originally posted by Shamus Young:

I feel the same as you: I dislike vertical fighting. But on the design team as a whole (and among playtesters) it doesn't seem to cause any problems. In the end, it was decided that limiting the game to horizontal movement would be too restrictive, and would make the levels far too repetitive. IIRC, the game does favor horizontal movement. It's extremely rare to have more than one vertical shaft in a row.

I'm glad someone noticed the song titles. You're the first. :)

Is it possible at least all the falling debris could be changed (in the form I suggested or otherwise)? Would make it a tad less annoying fighting uphill, which is already the worst of all situations.

[Krenshar]

I have to admit, as somebody who's spent some time trying to do hat runs, I love fighting down. Spamming bouncy death into the void until money stops coming up, then creeping down to see if there's anything left, is probably not the intended playstyle, but I find it strangely satisfying.

Fighting UP, on the other hand, is pure misery, especially since many of the good bouncy secondaries are very limited in terms of how far up you can get them. I still enjoy fighting up - it's a much more difficult experience, but an interesting change of pace.

That said though, in both cases I find myself creeping along and fighting carefully, the exact behavior Shamus was trying to avoid causing. However, I think that's ultimately more an artifact of the health system: I tend to play the whole game in that glacial, creeping, careful manner, instead of zooming around and dogfighting, because of how economically punishing it is to take damage.

[Fizban]

I'll second this sentiment, if I'd remembered it was on the blog I might have asked the same question. Even with vision range maxed you can hardly see anything up or down, or at least it feels like it once you subtract the "lurch" from movement and any speed boosts. My only unsatisfying deaths are the ones where I move forward and a bunch of stuff spawn on top of me, and now that I think about it I'm pretty sure that was happening on up/down corner shafts (I've done I think 5 games, last one ended entering an up-left corner, one was a down-right corner, and I think a third was a down-left corner, the other two were failed evasions or unseen projectiles).

Pushing stuff away from up/down shafts so there's guarenteed room would probably be seen as too easy. Changing the aspect ratio so vertical vision matches the current horizontal could work*, though some people wouldn't want to lose fullscreen so it'd need to be an option. As an option I'd definitely give it a try, I do play Binding of Issac in a weirdly resized window to juke the HUD placements. If the vertical vision limits are not an intentional difficulty feature then I'd say that should really be availalbe, if they've become an intentional difficultly feature then I can't say I agree with that.

*Realized I should probably try resizing the window myself first: I think this works but I can't be sure. Making the window smaller definitely shrinks everything, but I don't know what the scaling default is in behind the scenes, if it's fitting based on horizontal/vertical/hippopotamus or what. It feels like aiming for a square gives me better vertical and also less horizontal, which could be because I'm used to widescreen or could be because it's scaling in both directions so I really am trading width for depth.

Improvents on the Enemy Scanner would also go a long way. It currently only shows active robots that aren't in line of sight. If it showed active factories that would help, as would a marking on some foes you can "see" but can't actually see (such as distinguising active factories and foes that are "hiding" in the edge fluff).

[capiVara]

I just tried it. Resizing the window or using a custom resolution with an 1:1 aspect ratio just removes visible area from left and right. Everything is exactly the same size, you just lose horizontal visibility.

Which means it appears that the game either scales everything to a defined factor of the vertical resolution, or just produces the pixels of the "sprites" 1:1. If the latter is the case, it would also mean the bigger your screen and greater your resolution (hello 4k), the farther you can see.

[kaypy]

It's scaling by vertical size- taking screenshots before/after dropping the vertical size makes it pretty obvious. Or just move to where a platform is at the edge of your visual range, resize and it should still be at the end of sight.

[Fizban]

Tried that myself, though I was too distracted by playing to properly test if there was more room to move after resizing or see if I could edge out on the vertical plane.