Some things I hope are changed before release

[CupertinoEffect]

Was going to post this as a review, but I exceeded the character limit, and it's not really a review so much as a checkilst of problems I have, so I figured I may as well make it a discussion instead and make a shorter review later. Lobotomy Corporation has the potential to be a truly great SCP simulator when it's finished, but there are a few problems I have with it that definitely need some sorting. And I don't mean problems typical of pre-release, like placeholder art or unfinished mechanics or what have you, but problems with the actual design choices made. Not things left to be finished for the full release, but mistakes made by the developers crafting what they have so far.

1. Unwinnable scenarios are totally possible. Actually, they're decently common. For example: To keep Spider Bud happy without sacrificing any agents, you need to feed it. But using Principalist agents to do anything with Spider Bud causes them to enrage her, and she has a penchant for killing male agents. It's entirely possible to start the game with Spider Bud as your abnormality, and the only agents with the feeding skill as two male Principalist agents. That means you've lost the second you hit play. Rogue-lites are supposed to have an element of chance, with some runs objectively better than others, but if you die it should always be because you lacked the skill or strategy to deal with what the game threw at you, NOT because the game gave you a completely unwinnable set of circumstances. It should be MY fault, not the game's fault. That's just bad design.

2. This might just be with my screen resolution, but some of the text is far too small to read. Particularly while characters are in hallways.

3. Selecting agents for tasks is very unintuative. You click on the containment to bring up the 5-6 possible actions. Then click one of the actions, and another window opens to show all of the agents who can do that task. Then you click the agent you want. This causes you to have to either memorise each of these incredibly expendable NPC's attributes so that you can plan everything out in your head completely independently of the unhelpful UI (which means your UI is bad), or you click through all the options and strategise slowly and frustratingly with the game working against you. Most of the game is spent paused, not because you're plotting out an amazing game of chess in your head like you would in, say, FTL: Faster Than Light, but because you're struggling against the awful UI. Wouldn't a better solution be having a list of ALL agents, each with the symbols of ALL 3 of their available skills, but greying out the ones that can't be used for the skill you've selected? That way you have all the information right there in front of you and can make your choice that way.

3.5. You should be able to change your mind and cancel an agent's task before he gets to where he's going. Because of the clunky UI, I keep running into the problem where I forget agent A has feeding when I send him to clean some abnormality, and then have nobody to feed this other abnormality, because the game didn't think that was relevant information when choosing who would clean. It's relevant. Either fix the UI, or give me a cancel button so I don't have to deal with the current broken UI screwing me over. This also goes for dealing with an escaped abnormality or insane agent. There needs to be a "stop attacking" button. And if there is one then it probably isn't where it should be. That is, right next to or even replacing the "start attacking" button.

4. The movements of the agents are INFURIATING. If one just wanders really, really far away for no reason, and then takes a really, really long time to get back to where I want him, Spider Bud gets angry in the time it takes to get him there, and there was nothing I could do. Again, this isn't fair. Even when playing completely perfectly there are elements of the game that work against me in unfair ways. A rogue-lite should always have room for a perfect player to get by on skill alone. In The Binding of Isaac you can do an entire run of the game in an hour without picking up any items or getting hit once, and the only thing keeping you from doing that is your own skill level. Here, making the perfect system is impossible because the agents wander off and go down an elevator and down a hall and up another elevator and into a useless room and loiter around and then have to go backwards through all of it again and waste my precious time as my energy levels steadily decrease for every second that they aren't dealing with the abnormality, instead of staying where I need them, and when the anomalies work on second-accurate timers with little room for error then that's just inexcusable. It's bad. HOWEVER. This sort of free-roaming seems essential for how the break-outs and agents going mad work. Those particular elements are entirely built around the fact that people are moving all over. This is what I mean when I say this seems like a mistake instead of something that would naturally be fixed over the course of pre-release. It's something that the devs would need to go out of their way to fix, because it's so deeply ingrained in the meta of the game. Two gameplay elements are fighting against each other here, the core game where I use my managerial skills to keep everything under control, and the secondary gameplay where it becomes more combat oriented and I have to try and get things back under control. They don't work together, as presented right now.

5. I know that this is likely a translation problem, since the first language of these developers is not English and the translation is (I hope) not final, but some of the descriptions given regarding the abnormalities are very unclear on what they mean. I still don't know how to deal with One Sin accurately, and I've got his max observation level. Sometimes talking to him makes him happy, sometimes it doesn't, it seems to correlate to the agent doing it but I'm not sure what traits are involved, it seems to indicate that consulting it with one agent improves the mental state of all other agents, but since I can't actually see the mental state of any given agent (as far as I can tell, anyway, if there's a way to view it then I don't know what it is) I don't know if this is true. And what's all this about lightning? What? A lot of the appeal of this game comes from the ideas behind the SCP Foundation. What are these things? What do they do? What are the rules? The game is about experimenting, shoving characters at the abnormalities until you understand how they work in a manner similar to shoving D-Class at an SCP. And that's cool. Very compelling and interesting gameplay. It's hindered by the fact that most of the time the rules and interactions are unclear. The main draw of the game needs something more to help it along. I shouldn't need to use a wiki to figure out how the monsters work in a game ABOUT finding out how the monsters work.

6. The description pages for each abnormality are a complete mess. They're unstructured and unordered ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, and sometimes I really don't understand what they're trying to get across. Again, the last part might be a translation problem that would naturally get fixed before release, but the rest is a basic structure problem. Clearly they're supposed to read like SCP articles, but they're not particularly good ones. There is more to a compelling SCP than just the premise, it's also the execution. Actually, the execution is significantly more important. SCP-2226 is just an guy made of anti-matter. That's a pretty simple premise, right? And yet, that SCP is FANTASTIC because it's written really, really well! Contrast Lobotomy Corp where there are some pretty interesting ideas for monsters in here that get brought down by how ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and uninteresting the description tabs are.

6.5. Why would I only learn the story and origin of these creatures AFTER we've already contained them? That's weird. Wouldn't I know where I found it WHEN I found it?

6.75. Wouldn't it be cool if each of the abnormalities just started with a sheet that was like an SCP document, but with no information? Like "This abnormality takes the form of an over-sized human skull wearing a crown of thorns and impaled on a cross. It possesses the ability to levitate by unknown means. Its intelligence is unconfirmed." Then as you figure out how it works and do observations, add to that until you have a full document. Hell, you could completely do away with the Special Abilities tab and just make the description tab better with some actual SCP-style documentation. Then again that's just me, this is hardly a "flaw" with the game's state and I don't intend to pass it off as one. Just something I would enjoy.

7. Overall the layout is just annoying. It wants to be like FTL, where you have the whole scenario laid out in front of you and are able to strategically and efficiently deal with it as you see fit, micromanaging every subsystem and crew member and enemy as you make your way to victory. But instead it's just a big mess that's constantly working against you. There is not a single screen of the game where you look out upon it and have all the information, the controls make micro-management nearly impossible and you're almost never in control of your crew and when you are it's limited and clunky and annoying. You could argue that this makes the inevitable breakout chaos work better, but no. That's like complimenting a scary movie for having obnoxious shaky cam and bad cinematography because it makes it harder to see what's happening and as such makes it more chaotic. That's not good design. It's just slopy. Again, in FTL, the entire ship would be on fire and in complete chaos, but it was FAIR. You had all the information, you could make the crew do exactly what you wanted them to, you could still multitask between fixing your ship and firing on the other. Here, you just don't have complete control over anything. Which is weird, since it's a game about controlling everything. It's annoying and makes what could be a tight, well-structured experience annoying and lame.

It has potential to be something fantastic, but there are fundamental problems with the game that definitely need to be seen to that won't just naturally fade away as release draws closer. Polish is important, and the game will likely just get more and more polish as we go, but it's not as important as the fundamentals of your game. I sincerely hope for this game to turn into something fantastic, but it's just not there yet.

I do like:
The abnormality designs.
The music. Heck yeah.
The basic ideas for the stories (very rarely the executions).
The amount of traits in play in each agent (abnormalities responding differently to gender, lifestyle, etc. Very clever, very open to some great SCP shenanigans)
The variation in anomalies.
The art. Mostly.
Not the gameplay.
The gameplay is broken to heck.
Fix it.

[Paintbrush Poltergeist]

6.75 is a great idea.

[DummyThiccFlanders]

I've been waiting years for someone to make this game and was planning to make an immediate purchase. However, after seeing this list of entirely legitimate concerns about issues that would greatly reduce my enjoyment of the game, I have decided to hold off on my purchase until I know they have been addressed. CupertinoEffect is right that most of these issues require real thought to resolve and won't just get better with polish.

Also, add in mod support. Good things happen to games with a lot of moddability.

[CupertinoEffect]

Originally posted by QuaffTheRaven:

Also, add in mod support. Good things happen to games with a lot of moddability.

Yes, definitely. There are 2000+ SCPs just waiting to be modded in.

[CupertinoEffect]

Originally posted by sod7575:

Yeah.. that's about it. I love your ideas, but it would be even better if you also suggest new ideas rather than criticizing the current ideas.

Well, alright then.

Wouldn't it be cool if we had some sort of control over the actual methods of containing the abnormalities? The biggest inspiration here, SCP, was entirely founded on how to best contain them. Actually it's named after the contaiments. SCP stands for Special Contaiment Procedures. The motto is Secure, Contain, Protect. The containment is really important to the point that SCP was named after it, but most of the monsters in Lobotomy Corp are just in rooms. There's nothing about the actual containment that we get to influence, just how we treat them while they're in there.

Here's what I would do: Start each anomaly off in a "standard" cell with only basic traits. Basically the cells we have in the game already. Then give each cell a menu with traits you can add to it in exchange for the energy you've collected. Say an anomaly is happiest in the dark, use a little bit of energy to give the cell a "no lights" trait. Say the creature can absorb metal and use that to escape, use a lot of energy to give the cell a "no metal" trait and replace all the metal with concrete or plastic or what have you. There's immediately a lot of thought that goes into this with the creatures already in the game. No need to expend energy to make the doors stronger for passive entities like One Sin or Teddy, so you can hold on to that energy and use it somewhere else. Use that energy to enhance the locks on an agressive entity that's likely to escape. Suddenly the value of the energy factors significantly into how you play the game, and how you deal with abnormalities becomes more than repeating its favourite action over and over. I think this would add a lot to the game.

Maybe even give the player the ability to impose rules on the containments on the same menu, which don't cost any energy. Check the little "no male employees" button on Spider Bud's room and it will make sure no male agents enter. Maybe get some more complex things in the mix. With the metal absorbtion guy I made up before, obviously even if his cell doesn't have any metal, an agent entering with a gun would be bad news since it has metal in it. So tick the "no guns" rule. When sending in an agent with a gun, they can leave it outside and be temporarily unarmed. Maybe use some energy to supply that room with wooden or plastic weaponry so that agents don't need to go in totally unarmed, so that they can retaliate if the abnormality tries to attack them and they can't bring their gun.

Then, going with point 6.75 in my post, have everything be in one procedurally generated document that updates as you learn more about the anomaly, and have all the rules and cell changes you've made be reflected in the document with a little "how to deal with anomaly" section. If you can't bring in metal, add the line "The anomaly is not to be exposed to metal." If there are no guns, "agents carrying guns are to leave them outside of the abnormality's room." If two things go together, like my weapon example, add a conjunction to the procedural generation. "Agents carrying guns are to leave them outside of the abnormality's room AND self-defense weapons are provided on entry."

Then you can add especially monsterous anomalies, along the lines of SCP-106. If you have a ton of energy, you can outfit the room with electric barriers. This would keep most creatures in, but cost a lot of energy so you would have to decide on which creatures it's worth using. It's a last-ditch effort for the absolute monsters. Apply the rule "no agents can enter the cell," or put the electric wall between where the agent stands and where the monster stands so the agent can still talk to it. Maybe spend a lot of energy to get the "food dispenser" trait. You would still need an agent with the feeding ability to activate it, but since they would die if they tried to feed it normally then you need to change your containment approach to find the solution.

Maybe even have routines you need to set up. Let's consider One Sin (the floating skull) in terms of what the SCP Foundation might do. And assume that they only have access to researchers and not D-Class.
One Sin feeds on human sin, which he does by accepting confessions.
But, problem: A person only has so many sins, and sins that aren't considered as horrible by One Sin don't feed it as much. If there are only a few agents, they'd only be able to feed him a few times before all the really good sins are gone.
What would the Foundation do?
Well... Maybe they would use their resources to "acquire" an innocent human child from somewhere. Then have an agent murder it.
Basically "farm" sin.
Then the agent can go to One Sin and confess the new murder, feeding One Sin well.
Now let's translate that into the game. Give each agent a hidden "sin value." There's no way of knowing what it is, but it's there. Say my agent's number is 1-3. That's 1 huge sin that would feed One Sin really well, 3 decent sins that would feed him decently well, and infinite tiny sins that would barely feed him at all. Eventually this number would decrease to 0-0, and the agent could only feed him tiny sins.
To increase this number, give the option to deliver a person to the agent and have them kill it. This changes their sin value to 1-0 (or, so that the effect lingers a bit instead of having one dead kid = one feeding session, 1-2) but also causes psychological damage. It also costs energy. You can keep doing it to keep a steady supply of sin for One Sin to eat.
And then intergrate the sin value in a number of other places, so buying the kids isn't necesarry. Killing other agents, using the violence skill on innocent abnormalities, killing people under the influence of mind control... This means that sometimes making the decision to do the wrong thing for one abnormality is the right thing for another. By this model, everything becomes part of sort of a big, interconnected net where the decisions you make for one abnormality have the potential to change another. That's what meta is all about. You end up with a game where there's no one right answer, but dozens of answers, each with their own positives and drawbacks. Suddenly the game would have STRATEGY, meaningful decisions, a whole heck of a lot to think about and a whole lot more under your control. It makes the game more replayable, since no strategy is perfect, but many of them work. Even if you have all the information on one abnormality, how you deal with it is affected by what other abnormalities you have, how you deal with them, etc. FTL managed to do this by just giving the Kestral two starting weapons that work differently and a bunch of systems to fire on. Do you use the shield-penetrating weapon to bring down the shields first? Or do you use it to bring down the weapons and use your other weapon to break down the shields before the weapons are fixed? Do you take another shot on the oxygen system to make fixing the weapons take longer? There's a lot to consider, and that's what makes FTL so great. There's no one strategy that's the best one, there are many. This game could have that too.

This whole game is about learning how these creatures work, and as the game is right now the most interesting part of the game is finding out how the creatures react to different traits of agents. I think having more traits and giving you more to think about, plus giving a unique value to the energy you're collecting as a resource you need to spend and save and manage, would definitely compliment the basis the game is built on. There would be more to experiment with than 5-6 interactions, two genders and 4 (I think) lifestyles. It would be more than just "send this guy in and do the same thing six times until it's happy," and it would mean that even on runs where you already know how to deal with the abnormalities you would have more set up to do than just immediately going back into the routine you already know works. You would have to get the energy to build up the optimal containment, and make due with what you had before that.

I, personally, would love this. But I don't think that's the direction the devs plan to go with it so I don't know. At any rate they should definitely fix what they've started making before adding anything new.

[Order_of_Dusk]

To CupertinoEffect
Your idea is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ amazing, I'd love to be able to customize containment chambers and add containment procidures.
Seriously like send that idea directly to the devs because it's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awsome.

[=GonTar=]

Originally posted by CupertinoEffect:

I, personally, would love this. But I don't think that's the direction the devs plan to go with it so I don't know. At any rate they should definitely fix what they've started making before adding anything new.

Why isn't this guy the lead design Developer of Lob Corp?
Or why isn't this pinned on top of the Forums?

[Angela™]

Originally posted by =GonTar=:

Originally posted by CupertinoEffect:

I, personally, would love this. But I don't think that's the direction the devs plan to go with it so I don't know. At any rate they should definitely fix what they've started making before adding anything new.

Why isn't this guy the lead design Developer of Lob Corp?
Or why isn't this pinned on top of the Forums?
:heart:

Don't feed the necropost abnormality hereby referred to as F-10-87

[CyanDoomdragon]

Originally posted by Cyriel-1728:

Originally posted by =GonTar=:

Why isn't this guy the lead design Developer of Lob Corp?
Or why isn't this pinned on top of the Forums?

Don't feed the necropost abnormality hereby referred to as F-10-87

An F- means he's from a fairy tale, what fairy tale is he from? Also there's no -10- type abnormality. Plus -87 already exists, the scarecrow from the Wizard Of Oz.