Mega Avoidance!! How to make it not too dificult/tedious?

[Tamatou]

Near the end of my game I'll do a big Avoidance Medley with exactly 100 Songs.
However the order in wich the songs play is completly random.
Here is the problem:
Each Song plays for about 30 seconds.
Wich means the whole thing will take 50 Minutes.
This Avoidance is a major challenge at the end of the game and ment to be arguably the hardest part of the game but 50 Minutes is a bit overkill even tough the avoidance patterns themselfs are never too extreme. (About Meteor Stream Level in terms of difficulty)

I don't consider giving the player more then 1 hitpoint since I always hated when avoidances did that.
What I will most likely do is give the player the option to choose if he wants it to end after the 50th song is finished or if he wants to keep going. It'd be cool if I gave the player some kind of reward for doing the whole thing but I dunno.

Do you think a avoidance that big is a good idea to begin with.
Also, what it the longest known avoidance in fangames so far?
Do you have and other ideas to make this as enjoyable as possible for the player?

[tehjman1993]

Your idea of the player ending the avoidance after the 50th song (read: 25 minutes) is absurd. There's a few inherent flaws with long avoidances:

-Attack variety
-Keeping interest
-Trying to keep it fair/balanced

For a 50 minute long avoidance, I have no idea how you're going to create attacks that aren't copied everywhere ... unless you're super creative, this is a big hurdle.

On top of that, keeping the interest of the player is key. Even for those that don't like avoidance, I know many of them will give it a shot if the fight seems interesting enough, well-designed, etc. Insta-gib attacks, especially in a long avoidance, is going to turn off a lot of the players that even reach this part of your game.

In the off chance that you actually create a full 50 minute avoidance with interesting attacks, great visuals, etc. etc., keeping it balanced is an entirely different monster that you'll have to tackle. Having the 3rd attack be monumentally harder than the 1st/2nd or any subsequent attacks is easy to accidentally do (which you don't want), which also makes attack variety difficult. It's a vicious cycle.

If you are still seriously considering a long avoidance (anything over 10 minutes), here's what I would recommend:

-Giving the player an option to have hit points. You said you were against it, but it really does make a lot of long avoidances fun, to some extent. Of course, the player can opt to only have 1 hitpoint (like "impossible" mode or something), but give not-as-skilled (or not-as-willing-to-grind-for-days) players the chance to have 10, 20, etc. hitpoints.
-Checkpoints are another option here. Maybe every 10 songs (that's every 5 minutes, according to your song length) have a checkpoint for the player, so that if he/she dies, it just puts them there instead of back at the beginning of the song. You could also vary this by "difficulty" that the player selects. Maybe at the 'impossible' difficulty, there are no checkpoints! But at the normal difficulty, there's 5 checkpoints.
-Don't follow a traditional avoidance route. Mix it up! There's plenty of really neat, interesting, and fun avoidances out there that don't just have the player dodging apples. Sometimes you have to do platforming, sometimes you have to perform an action, a gimmick, etc. This really keeps it interesting, and I would most certainly recommend something unique besides just plain "dodge this attack" avoidance.

Try to consider these suggestions. I hope this doesn't fall on deaf ears. A super-long avoidance is a neat concept, but you need to make it fun, engaging, and worth the time. Trying to invite as many people as possible to try your avoidance is much better than trying to overdo it and excluding essentially everyone except hardcore avoidance players. Don't become the "Happil 2" of avoidances.

Good luck.

[Kyir]

No, I don't think it's a good idea. Even if you implement it your way, 25 minutes is a hell of a lot of avoidance without bonus HP. It might be interesting as a standalone game, but there's going to be a certain sense of betrayal from some people if they do a bunch of platforming and are then faced with something of that magnitude out of nowhere.

If you really, really, really, want to do something like this, I think offering more HP or cutting down on the length is almost mandatory. Finding 50 minutes of good song clips is also probably going to be a challenge unless you're fine with reusing the same stuff everyone else does for their bosses.

[RandomFangamer]

I could only see this as becoming one of those "Happil 2" like things where no one takes it seriously and it basically becomes a joke.
50 minutes is insane,
like, really insane.
I can't see anything over 15 minutes being still enjoyable, and even that is a stretch.
No matter how interesting the attacks are I still think this will still be a hell hole in a possibly great game.
Not to mention, this will be a major difficulty spike. I don't know how hard this game is, but if it is anything like BLB 1 this will be a major difficulty spike.

I would say that you could give the player a lot of HP, but I believe the bigger concern here is that the player will get tired. I mean, 50 minutes is A LOT of time.

Truly, I think you should lower it down to 15 minutes or less.
I'm just worried that this will turn away a lot of players, especially those who haven't beaten Meteor Stream.

To answer your last question, the longest avoidance I've seen is Rainbow Miku, which is about 30 minutes long, and that game gives the player a lot of HP.

[Denferok]

50 minutes isn't really as bad as people might think, compare it to rainbow miku which is just over 30 minutes

[Kyir]

Rainbow Miku is pretty bad already when it comes to length, let alone almost doubling it.

[BaronBlade]

Besides, Rainbow Miku has something to alleviate the length: a huge health bar. You really would need either health or intermediate saves for this idea to be anything but a colossal failure. I think with saves you could get away with 50 minutes, depending on how many you put in.

[OhNoezEinPandy]

Create the avoidance and beat it yourself. I am sure you will notice your design problems and find fixes for that.

If you do not want to play it yourself to see if it is ridicilious, don't create it in the first place.

[Tamatou]

Thank you for the advice so far.
I still have a long way to go until I get there. This is pretty much at the end of the game. I did however start working on it in advance a little bit.
Finding 100 songs is the smallest problem. As for the attack patterns I have plenty of ideas. Will some be similar to others? Probably. I haven't completly planned this trough yet. But there will be alot more stuff than just cherries. On some songs the room will darken, the kid will change size, screen will flip, water physics, amongst other things.

The reason I don't like HP in avoidances is because I don't really get a strong sense of accomplishment when getting hit alot and still beating it.

Maybe I'll have the player choose the lengh at the beginning of the avoidance [25, 50 or 100]. 25 Songs would equal about 13 minutes (meteor stream lengh) as someone who really enjoyed meteor stream I think that would be bearable. Since the songs are selected at random there would be some variety.

Overall the game has 2 regular Stages with bosses at the end (about as difficult as BLB1)
Then 5 "minigames" representing different genres (not much harder than what came befor)
Followed by a nightmare version of stage 1, a boss, a labyrint like stage, another boss (about Kamilia 2 Stage 2-3 difficult) and finally a final stage with the mega avoidance and the final bosses (planned to be about solgryn level difficult)

[Derf]

I think this is really cool and unique idea, but the problem with cool ideas is they don't always translate to real life and retain their novelty. I'm not trying to dissuade you from the idea, I'd actually really like to see it completed, but I though I'd give you some food for thought in regards to my experiences with a similar idea and avoidances in general:

I once toyed with the idea of an hour long avoidance fight. And I ran into many of the problems people here are suggesting: struggling to retain the player's interest or effort, making it interesting while also easily readable so people don't get insta-killed every new attack, etc. I eventually settled on a system whereby the player has infinite health points and at the end they get a score based on how many times they got hit. I ended up scrapping the whole thing because I realised that even when I only had to play through it once, and even though I found parts of it cool, I could barely stay interested through the 10 minutes I had roughly programmed, let alone another 50.

I think the problem is that I simply don't like avoidances at all, no matter how flashy or interesting. And I share that sentiment with many other IWBTG players. For me, when I've spent a lot of time and effort beating a game's platforming, to then be halted from completing the game, or even moving on, because of a boss or avoidance that is arbitrarily harder than what has preceded (and probably what will succeed) is a huge kick to my garden furniture. Now not everyone is the same. A lot of people like challenging bosses and avoidances and there's nothing wrong with that. Different strokes for different folks. But what you probably need to consider is that now you've made it public you're going to include a 50 (or at the least 25 minute avoidance, which to me is still absurd) in your fangame, you drastically limit the amount of people who will play and complete the game.

Now this might not be a concern to you -- and that's totally fair -- but this is something that not only requires the player to like avoidances, it requires them to love them and be good at them and have a lot of patience. Suddenly it all stacks up and then you see that the pool of people who will complete your game will be absolutely minuscule -- not to mention the fact that some people might waive on playing the game altogether because they don't want to be stopped arbitrarily by something like this. Choosing the skill level required to beat your game is always a tough point of production because it will always push certain people away, too easy and people don't want to waste their time, too hard and people don't want to waste their time etc. So it's usually a balance of what kinda of skill range you want people to be to play your game. A common way of getting around this is having the game itself be of average difficulty, but the secrets and extra stage tough as nails. You could consider putting the avoidance in its own extra stage, or letting people skip it at the cost of a "True ending" screen which is for bragging rights only etc.

Again, I don't want to be paternalistic, and I actually want to see this idea fleshed out even though I think it needs more revisions (TJ had some good suggestions) to really be feasible. I just would hate for you to put a lot of effort into your game (especially since I thought the first installment was relatively charming) to have people turned away by such an insane idea*.










*Insane in both the bad and good way! :~)

[QuentinJanuel]

It could be awesome imo if it there are checkpoints like each 5 or 10 songs to let the player do breaks.