
Chaos Tomb: Visualizing Gameplay with D3 and SQL - dietrichepp
http://www.moria.us/ludumdare/ld32/analytics/
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cLeEOGPw
The most obvious design mistake is to make essential weapons and items (double
jump) hard to find and easy to miss. This punishes a player for playing "as
intended", i.e. finishing level. Items that are hard to find and has
possibility of not being found at all should offer just slight benefit, so
without it player can still complete game without feeling that he missed out.

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dietrichepp
My goal when making the game was actually to make players feel like they
missed out, but let them complete the game anyway. If I remade the game,
however, I think I'd create another category of item to collect (trophies /
coins / stars / whatever) which have no gameplay value but allow you to keep
score, and then I could put the hearts and weapons farther out in front, where
they're easier to get.

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cLeEOGPw
But were players even aware that there were essential weapons and abilities to
be collected? If no, then it would be another design mistake. Hiding essential
information from player. With endless stream of games it's not a time to rely
on player curiosity and let them explore - you would have to build a
reputation of someone who makes games worth of exploring. When just taking
random game almost nobody will spend any significant time trying to find
secrets.

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dietrichepp
If you've played the game and have feedback to offer, I'd welcome it.

Exploring the game to collect weapons and other resources is explicitly the
goal of the game, it's in the game's description, you're graded on it at the
end of the game, and there's literally nothing else to do. There's only one
"secret" in the entire game, and I wasn't expecting anybody to find it.

And, screw "building reputation". I'm not doing this to get rich or famous. If
the game is compelling, people will explore it. This is a game jam game
anyway—roughly 50 man-hours of development, barely a prototype. Making
prototypes lets me collect analytics and get gameplay feedback, which is the
best way out there for developing applied game design skills. But, to be
honest, I only do it because the community is so awesome.

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robbles
Some of these graphs REALLY are in need of labels on their axes. Number of
deaths? Which is the count of users?

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dietrichepp
Sorry! Almost every graph has "player count" on the Y axis, and then the X
axis is the title of the graph. This was my first experience with D3, and if I
had a bit more experience, I probably would have given better axis labels.

