Fangames > Game Design

RNG in avoidance. Doing it RIGHT.

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zaphod77:
A random phase can keep people from falling asleep. so it's a good idea to include them. however, their difficulty can go all over the place, because, well, they are random.  They tend to range from joke to moderately challenging (for the easy ones) and from hard to unfair for the toughest ones.

There is a better way.

Test the phase yourself with user specified seeds. if the seed is too easy, or too hard for you, try a new one.  Once you have collected 50 or 100 seeds of decent difficulty, randomly select a seed to start the pattern off with.

You now have something that cannot be memorized, yet won't give the player a cheap shot, since cheap shots in random patterns are just not fun. (save the cheap shots for static and streaming patterns.) It plays just like a standard random phase, but doesn't ever screw the player over or give a free ride.

I Wanna Clear the Easy Miku is pretty reasonable with it's randomness (if you pay attention you can deal with it all pretty easily). But for the second one, the randomness puts the difficulty all OVER the place, and it suffers for it. While the random barrages that expand from Miku always seem fair, the volcano and the second negi wave are all over the place.  And the small box section can get really rude at times.

Now if you find 50 seeds without discarding any for being too easy or too hard, then you have designed a good random phase, and probably don't need the workaround.

Kyir:
So do you have any suggestions regarding the construction of this seeding system? I'm curious how you would go about it.

Aside from that, I think the assumption that RNG is necessary to keep a fight interesting is flawed. If you're having that problem, you might also try looking into positional targeting and aesthetic accents, both of which I've found to improve the boss experience a lot. If you have a bunch of medium-difficulty random apple sprays or whatever it's not going to be that much different from a medium-difficulty attack that's the same every time in terms of enjoyment.

patrickgh3:
I had this exact same idea a while back. In theory it seems like it would work, but I think the hard part is putting it into practice. Ideally your system would be easy to plug into any project, and it would be straightforward to use with as much automated as possible. It's hard to gauge how hard it would be to make a system like this.

Easy or hard to make, I think the main issue would be getting people to actually use it. People who make fangames often skimp out on QA towards the end of a project (myself included), and this idea, even though it would be useful, is essentially just more work to do for a gain that's not immediately apparent. I mentioned the idea to Klazen a while ago and he said something along the lines of this, and for the most part I agree with him.

Although if you feel motivated to make a system like this, I don't want to discourage you from making something you want to make. And if it turns out to be *super* easy to use, then who knows, it might gain traction.

As for Kyir's comments, I agree it's definitely worth thinking about other ways to achieve a similar effect of less variance in difficulty, including the ones he mentioned. Though you shouldn't worry about making a *perfect* avoidance attack, because there are multiple schools of thought on what makes a good avoidance and you can't please everyone.

Kyir:
So I gave this some more thought and also realized you could just use random_set_seed. The problem really comes down to the duplication of effort required just to make and test one boss attack. I would estimate about 5 minutes to thoroughly test each seed at different places in the stage, which means at 50 attacks (the minimum you suggested) the amount of time needed for that one attack would be about four hours. It could be significantly more if the pattern is elaborate.

That's not to discourage you from doing it personally, but I think you would be hard pressed to get other people to do it, especially since occasionally getting walled is already the expectation for many people when it comes to RNG-heavy bosses.

Derf:
I agree with the comments of this thread so far. Programmatically this is not hard to achieve, but logistically I think it would grind against people. It would be very hard to test individual attacks in a vacuum since the issues may occur when they link up meaning every trial would have to be a full run through. Though contradicting that, you might be able cut costs by decreasing the amount of seeds logarithmically between attacks as people will, generally, see each consecutive attack less than the previous one (provided they don't beat the boss in one attempt). They will always see the first attack, and they will see each attack either at least as many times, or more likely, less frequently.

Though I think another idea that might work would be to code prevention techniques for walling. Such as having the boss keep an internal log of its previous attack directions and making sure each new "random" attack is not close to it, etc. This seems like good practice to have generally but I've not seen it in a lot of avoidances.

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