I've been looking at difficulty settings in games for quite a while now. Different games solve the problem of keeping difficulty entertaining for their players in different ways and clearly there is also a lot of nuance of what difficulty means for games of different genres and different styles and the audiences that game designers … Continue reading Difficulty sliders don’t work
Author: frickelsoft
Revisiting Zelda: A Link to the Past
Zelda: A link to the past is one of my favorite games of all time. I feel in love with it in 1993, when we had an SNES and I was able to borrow the game from a friend. I spent a lot of time with it, because the feeling of being on an adventure … Continue reading Revisiting Zelda: A Link to the Past
C&C – AI progression over time
When we look at the progression of AI, specifically in the Command and Conquer franchise, we can see that across very few years a lot has happened to make the computer-based opponents more intelligent and more challenging, to better equip them with faster, strategic unit production, tactical attack waves and base building. All such that … Continue reading C&C – AI progression over time
Game AI: Pathfinding
Looking at the source code for Command & Conquer Tiberian Dawn, pathfinding for units has an interesting algorithm. And that algorithm is, I would consider, fairly well balanced between how intelligent the units should find their paths versus how much compute and memory resources the game had at its disposal, when it was released in … Continue reading Game AI: Pathfinding
Difficulty in games – and how Breath of the wild does it well
Designing your game for the right difficulty level is a challenge. We've all been at the point where we've played a game that was either too easy or too difficult. And especially in the beginning, when we don't know what to expect from a game and when we haven't grasped all the dynamics and mechanics … Continue reading Difficulty in games – and how Breath of the wild does it well
Savegames III – Zelda
If we are looking at games and how they implement the savegame mechanic to support their immersion and their creation of the game world, we need to talk about the first part in the Zelda series that was released on the NES console. In 1986, the first Zelda game was released on the then Famicom … Continue reading Savegames III – Zelda
The savegame mechanic in Resident Evil
In the earlier blog post about how the save game mechanic and influences the immersion and the gameplay, we had dissected various save game implementations. If we are looking at the Resident Evil implementation of saving and loading games, we will realize that the development team found a very interesting way of incorporating the save … Continue reading The savegame mechanic in Resident Evil
Modernizing retro game scenes with AI
Over at one of my favorite Retro Game Forums stayforever.de, there's a thread about turning retro game art and scenes into realistic photos, leveraging generative AI like ChatGPT or Copilot and the like. What a fantastic experiment that is - I tried it out myself and enjoyed a good two hours, converting a number of … Continue reading Modernizing retro game scenes with AI
Larry and the telemetry treasure
I am looking into how feedback and quality control happened in our beloved games in the 80s and 90s and came across something I learned that I want to share. As I research the subject space, it becomes apparent that especially in the 80s, structured testing and feedback gathering wasn't necessarily a very structured task … Continue reading Larry and the telemetry treasure
Achievements – how did that start?
I recently finished Indiana Jones and the Great Circle - what a fantastic game! I finished the main story and some side quests - in the game they're called "Field work". I managed to get most field work and the main story done in some 35 hours of game play - but returned to the … Continue reading Achievements – how did that start?
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