Idle Digging - Shovel Knight

[Trip Hazard]

(damn you, autocorrect)

[gavku]

http://yachtclubgames.com/official-shovel-knight-enemy-names/

[Griddlelol]

After quitting, I came back, and last night beat the level I was struggling on (Tower of Fate: Entrance). I don't know what it was, but I completely aced it. I just found the first section incredibly hard, but everything else was manageable. I now think it's a pretty ok game.

[BadHat]

Is that the bit with all the crumbling platforms and spikes? If so, that section gave me more trouble than anything else in the game, including the final boss, which I aced first try.

[Griddlelol]

It has a lot of breakable platforms, plus a Gryphin that guards a doorway with pots of lava and spikes. The worst part is, after a while I could get past that stuff reliably, but then there's a relatively simple jump that I kept over-thinking because I was tense from the first part, and ended up dying to it every time. 

 

I beat the

boss rush

last night. I have gone from finding the game ok, to actively liking it. I can't play it for more than an hour or two at a time though because it's so stressful. Which isn't great because if you stop within a level you go lose all check points, so you have to commit to finishing a level each time you play. 

[Problem Machine]

I've been playing through this and developing a real love/hate relationship with it. I think the core of the game is good, and the graphics and music are great, but some of the specific decisions are driving me crazy.

 

First, the acceleration on the character is real strange. It seems like you can instantly reach top speed from a standing start, but you decelerate kind of slowly if you want to turn, except both of those are muted if you're in the air so I constantly find my character lunging further than I intended him to when I'm on the ground.

 

Second, the decisions about what resets when are super arbitrary and kind of dickish. Like, enemies will respawn if they go off screen, platforms will regenerate when they go off screen IF YOU NEED THEM TO COMPLETE THE LEVEL but if they're there for optional loot then they stay gone. In general, it seems like they depart from the NES aesthetic a lot, which in itself is fine except it seems like they frequently do so simply to inconvenience the player by forcing them to go through the level again if they missed something.

 

Third, the rules are frequently not conveyed well. It's actually kind of cool how many different interacting design elements they get into the levels, which is a place where they depart from the NES aesthetic in a way I appreciate, but sometimes the behavior of objects is weird and surprising when you find them. In particular, I remember the first time an anchor dropped, I immediately jumped over assuming I could climb the chain like a ladder: Nope, the only interactable part of the anchor is the crossarm, and you have to jump on that before it goes off the bottom of the screen for reasons. Having platforms that temporarily and lethally dip off screen is something that most platformers tend to avoid unless there's a clear reason why that temporary fall would be dangerous (lava, water, etc), none of which is present here, so the anchors are doubly bad design. In fact fuck that whole water level: Between the anchors and the water physics interacting with an already iffy control scheme, it was a total chore to get through.

 

Fourth, fuck the whole currency dropping thing. I'd so much rather just lose the money permanently than have to go back and try to pick it up, especially when the placement of the money bags is extremely iffy.

 

I'm still basically enjoying the game. I'm about 2/3rds through and I'll probably finish it, but man I wish they'd made some different decisions here.

 

Then again, I've been developing a platformer, so I'm probably more than a bit nitpicky.

[tberton]

On the currency drop thing: if you don't want to have to pick it up, just don't. There's nothing forcing you to.

[Problem Machine]

If only things were that simple

[tberton]

Leaving aside that I have some fundamental problems with that argument (mostly that "winning" and "optimal play' are ill-defined terms) that would be better discussed elsewhere, I fail to see how Shovel Knight runs into that problem.

 

First, money is quite secondary to your ability to beat the game. All the items it gets you are useful, but by no means necessary. You only need to maximize your money if you're extremly paranoid about getting the stuff you want as fast as possible, or simply trying to max money for the sake of it.

 

Second, money is plentiful. You can easily acquire more than you need through regular play, without worrying about reacquiring what you've lost.

 

Third, you only actually lose the money if you die. Strong play prevents this and thus sidesteps the "problem" entirely.

 

Fourth, you don't go "back" to get the money. You go forward. You money drops where you die and your last checkpoint is behind that point, so retrieving your money almost always involves going somewhere you were already going. The only time this wouldn't be the case is if you died going somewhere you don't intend to return, which is a pretty rare situation.

 

Fifth, only one bag ever spawns. There's no way to grind them. They don't stay there after your next death, so there's no supposedly onerous spectre of all the money bags you could have retrieved hanging over the game.

[Problem Machine]

It doesn't matter if it's secondary, it's presented as the right way to play. The game actually has a really weird relationship to money drops, seemingly making a bunch of decisions to keep you from gaming the system (not spawning money if you've already collected it in a level) while also providing a ton of ways to game the system (replayable mini-games etc).

 

Your third point is total bs. Bad design is bad even if it only triggers when the player makes a mistake. That same logic can be used to justify any death system in any game, no matter how onerous or absurd.

 

Regarding your fourth point, since the overwhelming majority of the time I end up dying on optional side challenges -- frequently on my way back from completing them -- that's untrue. I could just choose to ignore the gold, but then I'm losing most of what I got from the optional side challenge. Fun.

 

I never said they were grindable, that was just a side note of how unfun incentivization can occur in a game design. In this particular instance, the unfun incentivization is putting something that you've lost (exploiting player loss aversion) in a place where it isn't necessarily retrievable (poor implementation) and then further punishing the player if they fail to do so, while feeding back into the same loop (vicious cycle). It's a concession that's supposed to make things simpler for the player that in practice makes things more frustrating and onerous, similar to the regenerating health example I cited. I think that trying to make things easier in a way that just makes them more obtuse and counterintuitive is a common pattern in the game, such as the stupid fish that jump out of the lava, spend an unknown amount of time hovering in place, and then fall back down, and sometimes they're on a timer and sometimes they trigger when you walk next to them and you have to bounce off of them so all of those specifics actually become really important. All of those design decisions, made to make them stay in the air longer and be there at the right time, end up making them far more frustrating to navigate than if they just followed a simple and predictable pattern. It's the best of NES overworked to a state where it no longer has the elegance and predictability that made those games work, and it makes me wish they'd stayed truer to the guiding principles of the game's aesthetic.

[tberton]

I still don't understand how it's presented as "the right way to play". What in the game suggests that, rather than it simply being an additional challenge for those interested?

 

To me, the system presents an interesting choice: I know I just failed at something - a fight, a jump, whatever. I lost something because I failed. I can retrieve what I lost, but that only works if I think I'm good enough to succeed this time. Every time I consider whether I want to grab one of the money bags, I have to ask myself "do I think I'm better now than I was last time"? Deciding that for myself is really interesting. There were many times that I tried to retrieve things several times and repeatedly failed. Eventually, I had to decide to cut my losses. But both those decisions - failing multiple times and eventually giving up - were my own, not that game's.

[Problem Machine]

Money is incentivized. Money is good. This is a trait that is inherent to money, especially in games: It is That Thing You Want. Taking it away when you mess up serves the purpose of giving you a reason not to fuck up. What, then, is the purpose of dropping it there so you can pick it back up?

 

So that then raises an interesting question, being: Why does this work in Dark Souls (imo) when it doesn't in Shovel Knight (again, imo)? I think a big part of it is that it's very wishy-washy here. You don't drop ALL your money when you die, you drop just enough to be annoying. The stakes aren't high enough to feel invested in, just high enough to feel annoyed by. Also, Dark Souls is a game where you have a number of strategies at your disposal: You can try running past the enemies that killed you before, or luring them out, or using a special item to defeat them. In Shovel Knight, there's no decision to make, you just have to go back where you were and not mess up this time. So what's the point of having it at all, if most of the time it will make no real difference and the few times it will it will be by driving the player to do some obnoxious shit like go through an optional challenge again after having already collected the reward?

 

Stuff like this makes me feel like the game is built around 'wouldn't it be cool if' style brainstorming rather than a specific guided intent. It feels amateurish... even if that style of amateurism is pandemic in the industry.

Edited July 26, 2015 by Problem Machine

[tberton]

Money is incentivized. Money is good. This is a trait that is inherent to money, especially in games: It is That Thing You Want. Taking it away when you mess up serves the purpose of giving you a reason not to fuck up. What, then, is the purpose of dropping it there so you can pick it back up?

 

The purpose is what I said in my previous post - it allows you to challenge yourself on your own terms.

 

I don't actually understand how you would have to go back to an optional challenge that you've completed in order to retrieve a money bag. If you completed the challenge, surely you didn't die and thus there's no moneybag left there.

 

I guess this in part just comes down to a fundamental disagreement. You seem to be taking a hard line that any situation where a player does menial tasks to get a slight edge in the game is ultimately and fatally the fault of the designer. I think that can sometimes be the case, but in lots of situations players are complicit in that process in ways that designer can't always predict or control.

[Problem Machine]

Sorry, but if you can't predict that players will do tedious bullshit to get the currency in your game which you have explicitly communicated to them is valuable then that's very very much on you as the designer. Predicting how players will react to the stuff you put in the game is your job.

 

So let me dig out (heh) the specific example I'm thinking of. There's a challenge in the lava level that you get to by climbing over some blocks without destroying them (my first time through I accidentally destroyed these by angling slightly too low on my d-pad, which lead to my observation about the arbitrary respawning of game objects). In this section you have to jump across fire fish to get to the chest, and then back across (thus all of my frustrations with their specific behavior). I got through this on my first time, but on the last jump on the way back I messed up and fell into the pit. Okay. Now, my three money bags spawned in such a way that in order to pick up the third one I couldn't bounce off the fish at the top of its arc, but had to jump on it when it was on its way up: A slight timing challenge but not that big a deal, except the fish is actually traveling so fast it will go right through your bounce attack and hit you and knock you into the pit. So if I didn't want to just give up I had to do this challenge which the designers explicitly didn't account for in their design, which wouldn't be that hard if the enemies behaved in a more predictable manner. I eventually got it all back just by dying in slightly different places until my bags spawned somewhere where they weren't impossible to retrieve without dying.

 

Giving the player an incentive to do something that sucks is worse than no incentive. Even if the player doesn't have to do it, they'll want to, and as the designer if you're encouraging the player to do something tedious with no understanding of why you have fucked up.

[Griddlelol]

I'm going to chime in with my bullshit opinion:

 

I ignore the money. It's completely pointless. 

[BobbyBesar]

The weirdest thing about this is that in Shovel Knight (at least on Normal difficulty), death is essentially meaningless because checkpoints are so plentiful. But money requires time to grind.

 

Also, one of the most likely outcomes with the death bags is that you retrieve them, but die during (immediately after) the retrieval. This was especially easy to get into with the ronin-heroes)

 

So, it can be rational (and not fun) to try over and over again to get the same bag back up to n times, as long as n*time to get bags < time to grind that much money. 

 

In that regard, the game felt largely designed around considerations for expert players / achievements challenges (speed runs, no death runs, etc).

[tberton]

The free expansion for this game, which includes an entire campaign where you play as Plague Knight and a Challenge Mode, is out today! It's absolutely nuts how much content Yacht Club has added here, with no price tag. And if they keep to their Kickstarter goals - which they seem to be doing - there's a ton more on the way.

[Ninety-Three]

I tried the Plague Knight DLC (after having to re-beat the final boss to unlock it for some reason). I've only played through level 1 + King Knight, but, eesh, I'm not into it. Plague's inertia feels bad. Just running around, he feels like he's always on an ice level (I get really nervous around the edges of pits) and his air-control is really bizarre. I've probably bomb-blasted myself into pits a dozen times now, and I still don't know why some of my jumps do exactly what I want, and some I might as well take my hands off the keyboard for all the game does with my input.

 

But worse, the DLC is basically "Play through all the same levels again except as Plague Knight" and from the very first Black Knight fight onward, you can really feel how all the encounters were balanced for melee-focused, low-mobility Shovel Knight instead of Plague. So many enemy types (including bosses) are utterly trivial when you have a spammable ranged attack.

[tberton]

Sorry you're not liking it. I really loved the Plague Knight DLC. Yes, it's still the same levels, but given how Plague Knight controls different and the items are placed differently, a lot of them feel significantly different - things that were challenging for Shovel Knight are straightforward for Plague. Likewise for the enemies: some are much easier, but I found that anything that Shovel could easily defeat with the downward thrust is much tougher for Plague.

 

As for the movement controls, they definitely take a bit of getting used to, but once I got the hang of them I found it super fun. One tip: you should use the Bomb Blast as your second jump, not your third. That is, go Jump - Blast - Jump. You get better distance that way and more control. However, apparently they patched out the ability to have attack binded to two keys at once, which allowed you to constantly be charging a blast. I don't know why they did that, since the game is much easier to control if you're constantly charging.

[melmer]

If you don't own shovel knight, now is the time to buy it

 

http://yachtclubgames.com/2017/02/specter-of-torment-and-treasure-trove-initial-release-date/

 

its going to get updated to include the two extra campaigns in a few weeks time. 

 

Ive just doubled dipped and got it on my PS4. My GOTY 2015. Really looking forward to playing all the new CONTENT

[Kolzig]

I wonder if Shovel Knight will be the last game on Wii U that gets an update, especially a huge update like this.

 

Going to be so much fun in April when Wii U and other platforms get it.

[plasticflesh]

Just got into the Spectre Knight Knight DLC. Really nice movement style. Cool story.

 

Crashes a lot on my Windows thing though. Frustrating

[aoanla]

(And now the King Knight DLC seems to be progressing - even if it's not as soon as people had hoped.  

Sadly, for me, I love everything about Shovel Knight except playing it - so this whole "oodles of additional content" thing is just additional frustration that I just don't get it )

[miffy495]

I enjoyed it well enough, but the end-game boss rush frustrated me to the point of quitting, so I never finished it. It was a good game to pick up at launch on my Switch though, and served me well on a couple of airplane rides this summer.

[dartmonkey]

The new amiibo look great, but like you guys, I'm just not that into it! The first playthrough was fine but I just haven't been inclined to return.  But man, that King Knight amiibo looks amazing!