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>>In-game-only representation rubs achievement people the wrong way. If you have achievements, add them to Steam too.
Vice versa is also nice, for those of us who like to replay games.
and thanks for the other feedback. makes sense, noted and it'll make it into the guide. not expecting much buzz and activity but I'm gonna wait a while and see if there's other stuff to edit/add.
If only more devs would actually do this - a lot of it should be easy enough to put into most any games.
Progress issues, and those awful typewriter sounds and letter-by-letter or line-by-line text are my particular hates. Reasons enough to avoid purchase.
thanks. the mouse wheel is a good point (I hate laptops so much), but one of the big problems with mobile ports is they often work like mobile games on pc instead of using right click, the wheel or mouseover stuff. I remember a few games (not their names) implementing touch controls as an option, so how about something like this?
Not all mice have a mouse wheel, make sure to include alternatives for those functions.
Not everyone using the mouse interface is actually using a mouse (touchpad or touchscreen). If you can simplify your controls to only use one button or provide optional touch controls, a lot more people can play it on a lot more devices.
Light mode is also a necessity! Some of us find light text on dark background painful and eye-straining to read; it's not automatically a better option. Games should have both dark and light modes as a minimum.
(So should websites and apps - Steam itself is terrible about this. I have to use a bookmarklet to zap colors on literally every Steam page if I want to read the text without pain. I use the app as little as possible because text is so hard to read in it.)
ETA: also, great guide, thanks for compiling it!
And they should follow best practices on where to put those folders in the first place!
inigoth: I get where you're coming from, but uninstalling normally only removes what was installed. if logs, saves, screenshots, etc. are stored in the install folder, they're not part of the install process and won't get removed. annoying for random files but imagine losing your saves because of this if the game doesn't have cloud support.
of course, this wouldn't be an issue if there was a consensus on save locations and similar, like belisama said, but even best practices are all over the place, and one typo can mean an entirely new folder and seemingly lost progress after a patch, happened a few times. I like to back my saves up and have to look at 15 different places for every single game.
While I largely agree with this, I personally don't feel that lack of mid-level saving is much of an issue if it's the type of puzzle game where all puzzles take no more than a couple of minutes to solve, especially games where the majority of your time solving the puzzle is spent thinking about the solution and then experimenting, and actually implementing the correct solution takes under a minute. Examples of games like this that come to mind are Toki Tori and Baba is You. That said, it certainly doesn't hurt to include mid-puzzle saving regardless even in such cases.
I also agree that this is a good thing. However, it's my personal opinion that the general dislike of light themes in games, UIs, and operating systems is due to people's tendency to have their monitor backlight on too high. If you turn down the backlight to an appropriate level compared to the brightness of your surroundings, even a fully white screen won't cause eye-strain.
Optional is good, but I'm not sure about off by default, at least for screen shake. Many games employ screen shaking to make various effects or actions feel more impactful, and if it were off by default, most people wouldn't experience the effect, since I don't think the majority of people bother diving into the settings to see what can be changed.
This is one of my biggest pet peeves. I hate it when games don't allow you to pause cutscenes, or only give you the option of skipping it. Big no-no.
I've noticed once or twice a game where the only difference between a selected option and a not selected option is the color. If you're not using a mouse, this can become a problem when you're presented with a menu with only two options, and it's not immediately clear which color is supposed to represent the selected option. So I'd say it's also good to have an extra indicator of selection besides just color.
Ugh. I gotta be honest, I don't like the idea of having to do this one much. I'm not terribly fond of having to include achievements to begin with, but with a Steam release it's pretty much expected. However, I can see the appeal for people for whom achievements are important, and for having parity across platforms that don't have built-in achievements (like Switch).
It's unfortunate that there are those who would do this. If they are unwilling to accept criticism, they probably shouldn't be publishing something. I guess maybe they're afraid that having on-forum criticism could affect the public image of the game, but a review does so much more, and developers can't delete those.
I actually like those kinds of things, as long as it's not painfully slow and you can skip to the end of the line or chunk of dialogue with a button press. =/ I totally think it's good if it can be toggled off, though, for those who don't like it.
Related, if you have both "new game" and "continue" on your main menu don't have the default selected option be new game, especially if you don't do the above.