Thanks a bunch for the detailed feedback!
You're very welcome
It made me feel powerful because I could do about anything I liked without being in possibly fatal danger - at most I would have to run to a room and hide around a corner.
Yeah, this was something we struggled with quite a bit. Our goal was simply that unexperienced players should have it pretty easy to escape enemies, while more experienced, who we though would try sneaking past and the like, would be in for a much harder time. But in the end, as you say, it still becomes very easy to avoid the buggers. However, this works at the start since you are not sure exactly how the enemies work. And as you say, this goes away later on because you become so familiar with the enemies. If we had had more resources I would have had one or two more enemies, to show new things to the player and never let them be familiar.
I think this is a valuable, lesson: When elements of the game are fresh, you can get away with a lot of stuff, because the player has not learned enough and will imagine properties that might not be there (for example that the player thinks he is in danger when he is not). So keeping in mind no to be repetitive is a good guideline.
That is a very good guideline. I suppose it is especially difficult because since my death depends on whether I learn how to 'play' the enemy I spend a lot of my thoughts on figuring out how he works in a non-narrative way. It is incredibly hard not to start thinking 'out of character' because your life depends on it.
I think this felt odd because Daniel never stops being scared of them whereas I did - so he and I diverged throughout the game. It is a missing step in his emotional development, perhaps... but this is interesting! With Amnesia you have created a new 'verb' for games, in a way, because I now realize that the way in which Daniel is scared and what he is scared of could vary throughout a game and tell a story of its own - whereas pre-Amnesia I did not know well how intimate reactions would work. As an example, Daniel could 'learn' to be scared of some things and begin to 'accept' other monsters. Seeing the dead monster could remove his fright of the monster (and indeed, he throws a rock near one later on), but then when he realizes that the monsters are not 'the darkness' he could become neurotic about whatever it may be then. I suppose this is taking part of the player's journey and putting it in the player.
I suppose the film trope database would call making an avatar take into account the acceptance of these things as 'lampshading'
No doubt I am even forgetting things I really liked because it felt so natural.
This is very interesting because we have gotten feedback from players who disliked the parts you mention, feeling they pulled them out of the game world. I wonder if this is just a problem of imagination, or if there is something else missing. For example, I am thinking that some kind of "training" at start, where the player learns to accept how the game works might have gotten better results. Instead we just throw the player into the game, with sounds of panting, blurry vision and so on.
Having played Zeno Clash some more I find the part during which I reach the highest amount of virtual body awareness is when the character is knocked down and with blurred vision tries to get up, so there may be a pattern for me - like in Amnesia I start to frantically press the keyboard and shake the mouse going 'get up, get up', apparently saying this
at myself because I feel I can influence getting up.
The effect may work both ways - not having a fixed, clear 'floating camera' view of the world means some players loose the ability to 'read' the world because the character interferes, whereas the floating camera (as happens in the walking segments of Zeno Clash as well) removes
my awareness because it feels like I control a tank, not a physical body. I prefer a 'muddy' free area.
To compare Amnesia some more, though, I thought it was far more involving than shortly having replayed Half Life 2: Episode Two, in which you press a button to open a door. Having played Amnesia, opening a door by pressing 'e' feels like I am virtually physically disabled and I got turned off at the game because of how physically locked-in I felt quite quickly. All the characters are upright, 'clean', acting like little tanks with human skin. I suppose you have ruined a lot of games for me by showing a better way!
It is a dog-eat-dog, of course, because HL2 ruined a lot of games for me by having emotive characters.
Though I remember large stretches of Amnesia as a game, a part where I was nearly insane and ran over the bridge at the end-game, with blurry vision, I remember as vividly as a dream. This may be an important factor too - evidently I prefer to remember parts of it as dreams rather than 'a game', but many players may simply prefer to have transparent awareness.
But the sensation Amnesia, panting and and blurry vision and all, is something I will happily look at again when doing the initial steps of the camera/post-processing for my next game. When I was in the sewers and had the blurry vision in full light I realized that games frequently mimic camera flaws but rarely 'brain flaws'. Somehow not being able to 'clearly' read the screen made me more involved, rather than making the screen a hindrance. So I think that even though my game is about love it will fit quite well to blur, skew, &c.
It is one of these crazy things where you skew the camera and lower the player height and suddenly I realize that the camera is not some sacred entity which you can only tie to a bone. So again, well done, the more I think about it, the more opportunities I see. Well done indeed
I remember you finding it hard to find a balance in this, but I must admit the hints and on-screen messages at times treated me like such an idiot I felt insulted.
This is VERY hard to get right and I think the only good way is to have some kind of dynamic system. What is easy and self-evident for some, is very hard and non-evident to others. It is quite an interesting problem.
I realize it is impossible to gather enough data to make this work well - time delay between finding and solving a puzzle probably has no statistical significance unless combined with a lot of factors. In that way I do not mind it because I know of very few games which did this right (and it is preferable to my alt+tabbing to Chrome). Perhaps hiding the hints in Daniels self-exposition would be nice, or having a more dedicated hint system which I choose the level of at the start. Or just having single-word hints. Or having a supply of mind-altering drugs which inflicts a health and sanity penalty but give you blurred visual clues (which by not being descriptive have no chance of telling me what I already know).
Details:
Interesting descriptions! For Daniel, we wanted the player to become Daniel and thus not say too much of his character. However, I agree that more mundane details would have been nice to have to contrast the more horrible parts.
It is a matter of us not having place for more stuff. The game is pretty much packed with notes and stuff. Still, I guess a few more personal notes could have been slipped in here and there. Need to think about this.
I had to think about this for a while, but I thought of something which might be useful. Say you take one extra lockable texture. The player walks up to a book (any book in the level) and picks it up. You make sure it takes 5ms before the book is in full view: during the same time in a separate thread you lock the texture, look up the XML book file, and dynamically render a title to the book (through vector-based glyph rendering like FreeType) and age it through various compositional techniques, unlock the texture and in the rendering modulate between the place-holder texture and the dynamic texture, making the 'actual' title appear sharp and crisp. The upshot of this would be that one man spending an afternoon on an XML file would have created a thousand books which can appear throughout the game. More than any player will ever look at, even, which means the supposed depth of detail in your world is 'as much as anyone can take'.
You could expand this and create a 'look inside' feature to reveal a few pages by creating some files which in a HTML-way describe how pages look. Again, with some clever compositional techniques you can just write the raw text with no concern about the formatting or 'ageing' of the texture, even bypass the entire texture-artist step. I suspect this is how Myst III rendered their books, but you could also just write a page or two for some books, like you see in many adventure games, or even just go to project Gutenberg and just download some old books! It would take you a few days but it is not logistically impossible in the way unique textures would be. It would be an interesting copyright situation, too.
Notes, such as on a case of import cigars (
) could load in the same way. Showing the note on-screen would even make a distinction between your spoken story-critical notes and the 'ambient storytelling' that is in the books and various details; i.e.; important books become blue and are audio, normal books do not but it still shows me your world is alive.
I thought about Daniel this morning and realized that I mostly know a sequence of events, i.e., if I remember he goes to Brennenburg I remember what happens next. But I have little emotional memory, which I think creates a separate index; I can think 'how tragic what happened' and I go to Egypt and Brennenburg and to the torture cells without specific order. I suppose more emotional detail can create separate indices which allow you to keep the story in your mind in a different form than a thread.
It is exciting to discuss this, I find
and makes me want to play the game again.
EDIT:
The parasol was a good mention - browsing paintings just now I suddenly remembered the parasol conversation. Details like that do very much resonate with me.
