Heavy Rain: New Screenshots and development footage*

[patsu]

I was shocked out how much people missed in my LBP creations. What I'd rather do now is testing during development, creating an idea and gaining feedback, refining it, releasing a better targeted variation, dropping ideas that clearly aren't going to work.

Tough call. Sometimes, the solution is not to drop the idea, but to improve it !

A weird story though, those action sequences. I spent a year justifying them each time they came up, and now the players are regularly listing them as their favorite scenes.

I wonder what scenes these are ? The provocative ones ? I remember he was fighting against censorships. What else ?

The other amusing thing was the feeling some players had that their actions had no impact on the story, in other words that, whatever they did, the same thing was going to happen. A lot of them brought up this point in the one-to-one interviews and at the round-table session where all the players compared their impressions. It was only when they started talking about it that they realized they had seen very different things in the scenes, much to their surprise. Because a player makes choices without realizing it. They don't realize their actions have logical consequences and therefore impact on the story. They had to talk about it in order to realize this.

This is related to his "There is no game over in HR => The game is too easy" story in the same article. I suppose if there is no clear point of reference, it is very difficult/impossible to know what's a different outcome, or different difficulty.

Once the user is engaged in the story and pace, he or she may zero in on a few key things only... like how I didn't notice the rain and thunder scenes in Uncharted 2 at all.

May be adding some community/network element for players to compare their outcome will help ? (e.g., Stats for player and character progress)

This is something I feel DD would really benefit. A developer could release a minigame of a new idea and see how people respond (in this case, a variation of the HR interface). Following feedback and analysis, the final game can be tuned, while at the same time generating a little revenue from DD sales.

Yes, it would be an enabler. They also have to simplify the game so that the users won't miss the cue or test objectives. The Sony beta cycles also tell us that it takes a %$(%*)$ long time for them to change based on user feedback.

I think the Pixel Junk Shooter game fits your model very well.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Well, PJS isn't a precursor to a larger game. A specific example I have is Snowblind Studios, which hasn't released a multiplayer fantasy game for years. This generation they could have created a mini dungeon crawler with some engine tests and control/skill tests and sold it. It'd have provided fanatics like me with a game to play, and provided them with a test-situation for usage. eg. On the forum they were asking if coop was important and whether split-screen is okay. They could have released a random-dungeon minigame with various multiplayer options and got usage statistics from players, to see if people are playing with same-console, split-screen, online multiplayer etc., to better target their game design and engine. And all this research would ahve paid for itself thanksto gamers actually buying into the experiment!

 

[patsu]

I think in general developers release the big title and then tune it via new game modes and patches (e.g., LittleBigPlanet, Uncharted 2). It's somewhat after-the-fact.

I am hoping Zipper takes this approach since the basic MAG framework is already in the wild.