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DroidFreak36
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Friday, January 5 2018, 4:07 am EST
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Krotomo brought up another issue in the Discord chat after the discussion about the camera viewing outside the level:

'krotomo' said:
Also, this is a very unrelated suggestion, but I think you should consider expanding the area of the level that is visible on screen
One of the biggest problems with making levels is that if a player can't see the entirety of a trap before they activate it, that's not really fun because they can't anticipate what's going to happen
So having a bigger FOV would allow for larger, more complicated traps


'DroidFreak' said:
Yeah, I've considered that. But there are a couple of hurdles there:
(1) Levels designed with hidden gems or otherwise hidden areas exploit the small screen size to hide the gem outside of the visible area, but expanding the screen size could interfere with that.
(2) Expanding the game size while keeping it fixed could be a problem for smaller screens (e.g. if I make the game 1080x1920 and people play it on a 1280x720 screen)
(3) Conversely, if I make the game's size adjustable it could be potentially unfair and also potentially impossible to get around issue (1) by hiding areas further away.
So far my solution to all of those has been to just stick with 440x600 but ideally the size would be adjustable. :thinking:
Here's a potential solution to all of those issues:

* Make the screen resolution adjustable.
* Add the ability to shroud areas with a new shroud layer. Shrouded areas would appear as whatever tile they were set to in the shroud layer until they come within a certain distance of Hannah, at which point they would be revealed.
* Add the ability to free-look around the entire level.
So for instance, the secret area on level 9 could be hidden behind a terrain shroud so that you can't see it until you find the secret area.
I'd probably make it so that when a shroud tile is revealed, all connected shroud tiles are also revealed and a message pops up saying "area revealed" or something of the sort.

I'd probably co-opt the water related tiles into special fog tiles when placed on the shroud layer. Like, fog-of-war type behavior for one and fog areas that are revealed all at once for another.


'krotomo' said:
As for the screen resolution, you could probably limit it to something that the vast majority of people have


'DroidFreak' said:
Yeah, maybe the free-look would have a maximum radius.
There's probably not much point supporting 4k since the game's graphics are pretty fairly impossible to make out at that zoom level. I could make the max resolution 1080p and then people with 4k screens can zoom in the page.
Then make free-look have a radius of 1200 or 1500 pixels, so that it extends a bit beyond the edge of a 1920 width screen.
For reference, a 1200px look radius would let you see all of level 11 from the center of the level. It's 2336 pixels wide by 2048 pixels tall.


If you have any feedback on that, be sure to post it here or in the Discord.




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krotomo
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Friday, January 5 2018, 5:23 am EST
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Gameplay-wise, I think that expanding the resolution would add a lot of options. It would allow for larger traps and puzzles. Speed traps could be much larger because the player would be able to see the entirety of the trap and figure out what to do ahead of time. Longer speed traps, like the one on the right edge of Parallax, could be more complicated because the player would have more time to react to what jumps or other actions they need to make. Puzzles could be larger as well for similar reasons.

But there are also many problems that could arise with this. If the player is making their way through a tight passage, the majority of the screen could be filled up with terrain or with other parts of the cave. Aesthetically, this would look ugly for obvious reasons. Even worse, this could serve to confuse or distract the player as the majority of the screen would contain information that is unnecessary for that current section of the cave. The resolution of the game has to be limited. 1920x1080 might be a little too big, and I certainly wouldn't want it any larger than that. I also think it would be better to keep the resolution fixed because designing traps and puzzles depends heavily on knowing what the player can see and what they can't.

Still though, I'm all for expanding the game's resolution by a good amount. At the very least, the resolution should be widened. The majority of speed traps and platforming in the game involves movement that is horizontal, not vertical, requiring the player to react to what is on the left and right edges of their screen. Because of this, it doesn't make sense for you to be able to see as little to the left/right as you currently can with the 600x440 (15:11) resolution. Instead, I suggest at least a resolution of 960x540 (16:9) as a minimum.
Yaya
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Friday, January 5 2018, 10:50 am EST

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Hmm, this is issue never occurred to me, but I can see the problem with finding a good solution to it.

One thing that popped into my head is that a lot of bullet hell games that get ported to Steam were originally released in smaller resolutions or on arcade machines, and those are the kind of games where widening the resolution would really mess up the gameplay. So a lot of titles use the original resolution or a slightly improved one, and then just put a picture in all the extra space (example). Many titles let you customize this area-- you can leave it as it is, have it always display basic instructions, a more complicated scoring breakdown, etc.

Obviously HATPCR isn't a super complicated game, but there are still things that could be included in this free space. Such as... high score table for a level, more specific death counter (x amount of deaths by spikes, x amount of deaths by drowning etc), keyboard inputs, a message from the level creator, a timer, etc.

I don't think this is a perfect solution by any means, but I'm throwing it out there. I don't think gameplay would suffer from making the area a player can see a little larger, but even at HATPC's current resolution, some areas can be really overwhelming and difficult to tell what's going on, so I'm not sure if a "fullscreen HATPC" would be in the game's best interest.

Another idea that just occurred to me which may be waaay easier said than done, is allow the degree of camera zooming to be customized from area to area in a level editor. IE: If Hannah's crawling through a tunnel, just show her immediate surroundings, if the tunnel leads to a large puzzle area, mark it in the level editor that the camera will zoom out.



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krotomo
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Friday, January 5 2018, 6:06 pm EST
The Shepherd

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Quote:
Another idea that just occurred to me which may be waaay easier said than done, is allow the degree of camera zooming to be customized from area to area in a level editor. IE: If Hannah's crawling through a tunnel, just show her immediate surroundings, if the tunnel leads to a large puzzle area, mark it in the level editor that the camera will zoom out.

I think this is the absolute best possible solution, though like Yaya said IDK how easy it would be to implement. This would be super good not just for gameplay purposes, but for aesthetic purposes. If you make a tight cave or passage have a really zoomed in resolution, that can have the effect of making the player feel claustrophobic and trapped, whereas if you make an open area really zoomed out, it can emphasize the size of it by making the player feel small. I'm pretty sure most modern 3rd person games do this; Ori and the blind Forest and Inside are some good examples.
atvelonis
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Friday, January 5 2018, 7:09 pm EST
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According to Steam's most recent hardware survey, most PC gamers are using 1920×1080, and by a pretty large margin: 76.07%. Last January, the figure was only 38.21%. We aren't seeing such a rapid adoption of a higher resolution now, but 1440p is taking baby steps, at 0.14% growth this past month. 1440p isn't going to experience that explosive level of growth for several years to come. If you're going to fix the game at one single higher resolution, something that goes well on a 1080p screen would be appropriate.

I wouldn't mind a slightly broader field of view, but it would be really easy for this to get out of control: Hannah is the centerpiece of the game's appearance right now, and if you make her field of view larger, by extension you make her that much smaller. At a certain point it just becomes hard to see what you're doing without putting your face right up against the monitor. If the field of view is gigantic and Hannah remains the same size, you're left with a bunch of unrelated areas of the cave (as Kro pointed out) and a lessened ability to focus on the part that matters: where you actually are.

We've touched on this in previous threads, but in addition to possibly increasing the resolution of the game to support a larger FOV, we could actually make the tiles themselves HD, thereby forcing the size of the game window to scale up. The game takes up ~12% of my 16:9 screen now, so if you, say, doubled the width and height of each icon, it would take up 48% of the screen instead, while still maintaining the ~4:3 aspect ratio that it is currently. I'm not sure how many HD sprites we already have so we might have to create some higher-resolution icons manually. That would be challenging, but not impossible.

I agree with Yaya and Kro that the variable resolution thing, presumably controlled by the level creator (?), would be an interesting solution. Ori and the Blind Forest does this very well and I think it could probably also work in HATPCR. I have no idea how difficult it would be to program something like that into the game, though.


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krotomo
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Friday, January 5 2018, 8:11 pm EST
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Quote:
I wouldn't mind a slightly broader field of view, but it would be really easy for this to get out of control: Hannah is the centerpiece of the game's appearance right now, and if you make her field of view larger, by extension you make her that much smaller.

I think that expanding the game's FOV is necessary. In its current state, the FOV is often very limiting for the reasons I stated earlier. It's just important not to make the FOV too big.
DroidFreak36
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Saturday, January 6 2018, 2:21 pm EST
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If I were to do that variable zoom thing, I probably wouldn't make it manually set by the level creator, I'd have it happen automatically. Probably make the game check how many non-solid tiles are near Hannah (with a space-filling algorithm like I use for the local water level) and compute the target resolution from that, so it automatically shrinks in confined spaces and expands in open ones.

I'm not sure if I'm actually gonna do that for technical reasons, because it'd be pretty complex to render the game at variable zoom levels, but it is something to keep in mind.

Regarding how big the FOV should be in general, I definitely recognize that making it too big could look bad, but I also agree with Kro's sentiment that the player ought to be able to see puzzles without needing to get right next to their mechanisms. I think the way to rectify those concerns is to add free-look and shroud, like I was talking about doing. That way the FOV can still be relatively small, the player can have access to information on a large portion of the level, and level creators can still hide areas of the level they don't want freely visible.

Probably the right resolution for most situations would be 2x the normal zoom - on a 1080p monitor (which as atvelonis points out is the vast majority of people) that'd make the game's internal resolution 540*960 instead of 440*600, so a bit bigger (especially horizontally) but still similar enough to the original FOV. I'd probably dynamically adjust the zoom level by the size of the window, though, so as not to render the game at 2x zoom in a small window.

As far as making the game HD (doubling the texture resolution so it isn't pixelated at 2x zoom), I doubt it's gonna happen. I mean, I'm willing to do it, but only on the condition that we get high-quality HD sprites for everything in the game. Making such sprites is far beyond my abilities, so it'd basically require getting a talented artist to help with creating them. So for now although the game would be rendered at 2x zoom, it'd still be running everything internally on a 32x32 grid and everything in the game would be a multiple of 2 pixels on the screen.




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Mymop
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Monday, January 8 2018, 11:02 pm EST
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I've got an idea. In the game, when the player presses the arrow keys, Hannah moves around, and the camera follows, right? It would be great if it were so that when the player holds the shift key or something (it could be some other key, shift is just an example), it switches from moving Hannah to moving just the camera. So, you'd be going along a level, and when you come to a trap you might hit shift and then use the arrow keys (while holding shift) to move the camera to where you could see the whole trap without moving Hannah. Then, once you finish surveying the trap, you'd let go of the shift key, and move around as normal.

If you could move the camera around like that, it would allow the player to see exactly what he/she wants. The player wouldn't be overwhelmed by a huge field of view, and (unless I'm misunderstanding something) no changes would have to be made to the game's resolution and you wouldn't need to add a zooming feature, but players would still be able to see as many details as they want. And the whole thing would be very easy for the player to use.

Another similar feature would be to allow the player to move without having the camera move, which might make it easier to see when to move in a trap that requires precise timing, for example.  


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DroidFreak36
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Tuesday, January 9 2018, 4:53 am EST
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@Mymop Moving the camera without moving Hannah is exactly what I mean by free look. And shift would probably be a pretty good key to use for it.




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