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I don’t mind yellow paint as much as it is a sign of the broader issue of big games trying to be idiot-proof. If a game has yellow paint I expect it to be as easy as it can be outside of giving me literal god mode.

  • squaresinger@lemmy.world
    0·
    7 days ago

    Tbh, all these solutions are yellow paint in a different coat.

    Wanna guide the player through a path? Have a guide NPC go before you (might even be the villain in a chase sequence!).

    So now I have to tag behind an NPC that runs at 75% of my speed, because if I lose them the whole concept falls apart, so I have to bumble around behind them? No thanks. Or if it’s a villain, the whole immersion breaks after I realize the villain doesn’t actually run off if I don’t follow, but instead just waits at the next corner for me to catch up.

    Want to clearly show in which places you can do X thing? Have a clear visually distinct asset that stands out mark those places. Make sure you don’t have similar assets elsewhere.

    So the yellow paint is a yellow asset? Or a slightly less yellow asset? It’s the identical thing, just a little less visible. That was OK for Wii games and before that, because anything that deserved its own asset was interactible. There’s a plain wall with a 16 polygon cube on it, well of course this is an interactible button. Now do the same on a highly-detailed wall with bumps, groves, wood supports and so on.

    If the argument is accessibility, just make it an option to turn those special assets bright pink/yellow, or just a much more distinct (even if visually unappealing) asset for higher-budget games.

    So yeah, that’s just yellow paint in 3D.

    Wanna show which ledges are grabbable? This may be the only acceptable use case. But even then, there are more discrete ways like shining stones or have the character extend its arm towards it or something. Or just make basically every ledge grabbable. I had no issues in either sm64 nor in the original assassins creed, and neither had yellow paint.

    Assassins creed didn’t have to show you what’s grabbable, because everything was grabbable. You could literally run up to any random wall and the player character would climb it.

    SM64 falls in the “16 polygons per wall” category.

    • calcopiritus@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 days ago

      Yes. All of those aim to solve the yellow paint problem, so they serve the same purpose as yellow paint. The difference between yellow paint and other solutions is that those other solutions have some game design thought behind it.

      You don’t have to have an npc walking slower than you. You can make it run faster, and just wait for you if you get too behind, like any human would. You don’t have to have the villain stop in the chase scene. If the enemy gets too far, you lose and restart in the last checkpoint, like it always has been.

      You don’t have to have low-poly art for this to work. Not everything in assassin’s creed was climbable. But you know when it was and when it wasn’t, do you didn’t even try to climb what wasn’t. You could climb vertical walls of mountain rock. You couldn’t climb up flat walls either, you had to have bricks sticking out. Granted, most buildings had something to grab onto. But you saw which elements you grabbed onto, if those weren’t there you would know why you can’t climb.

      If your level design is clear and consistent, you don’t need yellow paint.