thomasmahler
@thomasmahler • 34,523 subscribers
CEO | Creative Director @wickedgame @moongamestudios Designer and Director of Ori and the Blind Forest, Ori and the Will of the Wisps and No Rest for the Wicked
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Oh hey! It runs. Now we just need to make it run well! 😂🤣
thomasmahler307,651 просмотров • 3 месяцев назад
Hey folks, Watch the video below and you'll see how I integrated floating damage numbers and health bars into some older FPS games that didn't have either. Internally, I made the argument that games are always better if players have as direct feedback as possible. And floating damage numbers and healthbars do exactly that: - Damage Numbers tell me exactly how much damage each action dealt - Healthbars show me exactly how much progress I made towards the enemies demise So, how do people generally feel about this stuff? Are you in favor of damage numbers and health bars or against it?
thomasmahler42,338 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Just realized I never shared this one here: A while ago I was interested in seeing if we could make an 'engine' for retro consoles, so, since NESMaker already exists and I've always been a fan of the NeoGeo, I dabbled with creating a 'NGMaker'. The idea would be that users could pick from some simple template projects and ideally create all kinds of games with it without having to get into the nitty gritty assembly stuff - unless they want to. The first template project I put together was a simple platformer demo where the idea was to mimic the Super Mario Bros 3 controls while fusing that with some Metal Slug energy... meaning: A run and gun with good platformer controls. I often talked about how it's important to get the basics right, so, the idea here was to simply start with a white rectangle that moves around and even that should feel fun to play. I added some entities like the question blocks that could spawn powerups and enemies that are reactive: They patrol around, notice a player character when they're in their sights and then shoot at them. If you fire at them, they have a little bit of hit feedback, etc. For the people who lack vision, careful, I'm gonna use an AI image to show what this could turn into. And the nice thing is that this runs on original hardware, as demonstrated by running the rom the maker produces in retroarch using a NeoGeo core.
thomasmahler23,109 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
Just saw this, it's pretty crazy to see what people do with AI these days 😯 I'm sure this'll improve a lot in the upcoming years, but even with Seedance 2.0 you can clearly see the Mortal Kombat in here... 😂🤣 All of this is still nothing to what we produce internally though 👍
thomasmahler33,582 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Our boy Patrick just found a video of us testing an old No Rest for the Wicked Prototype. That was from March 2019 (7 years ago, a year before Ori and the Will of the Wisps shipped!). Prototyping is so insanely fun, you can clearly hear them being proud of their work and enjoying the crap out of it even though there's literally 0 polish there yet 😄 Excuse the placeholder stolen UI. This was obviously never meant for the public to see 😂🤣
thomasmahler40,408 просмотров • 4 месяцев назад
Hey folks, I've been recently talking a lot about why we're adding different styles of play into No Rest for the Wicked and I wanted to prove my theory that that would result in players having more fun, so, long story short... I turned Quake 1 into a Roguelite! 😂 Here's what that means: 1) Roguelite-inspired Run Structure: You start with limited stats in a hub map and are greeted by actual NPCs, then fight through sequential arena rooms across 4 biomes, each ending with a boss fight. 2) 40+ boons across 5 categories: Damage, Movement, Defense, Utility and Risk. And these also come with Rarities: Common, Rare, Epic, and Legendary. After clearing a room, you pick from 3 random boon offerings. 3) Permanent Meta: Death sends you back to the hub with you retaining the 'essence' currency you collected by killing mobs. Then you spend it at NPCs: The Gatekeeper starts runs, the Wraith upgrades your arsenal (ammo capacity, starting weapons, weapon damage), and The Shaper sells permanent stat upgrades (max HP, armor, boon capacity, rerolls) 4) Difficulty Scaling: Enemy health and damage ramp up as you push deeper. 5) Damage Numbers: Floating combat text and floating healthbars for good measure, so you can understand how much stronger you become over time. All just built on top of unmodified Quake 1 maps and enemies - no new assets needed, it reuses the entire original campaign as roguelike content. To me, this is point proven: I think even hardcore Quake lovers back in the day would've spent a whole bunch of time playing a mode like this given that it'd allow you to experience the thing you love in a whole new light by crossing genres. If you're interested in seeing how this exercise turned out, here's a video for your viewing pleasure! :) I have to wonder what John Romero 🤘🏽 thinks about this given that he originally wanted to add more RPG elements into Quake!
thomasmahler15,575 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад
Folks, here's another little design exercise that I spent the last few hours on 👍 This is based on a thesis I had for basically a decade now: Aiming in FPS games with the right analog stick is quite bad. Your thumb has maybe 1cm of travel on a tiny stick, fighting a spring, trying to make precise micro-adjustments AND fast 180-degree turns with the same input. If we're being honest, that's a terrible interface for the task. Your wrist, on the other hand, has roughly 180 degrees of rotational range, uses your entire forearm's muscle groups, and can make both ultra-precise micro-corrections and fast sweeping motions naturally. It's why mouse aiming destroys stick aiming: You're using your wrist and arm, not your thumb. So the thesis is simple: what if we just used wrist rotation directly as the aiming input? No VR headset, no special hardware. Just hold an old Switch1 Joy-Con in your right hand and rotate your wrist. Small rotations for precision tracking, larger rotations for fast turns. Recoil kicks the camera up and you instinctively tilt your hand back to compensate, etc. To me, it just feels right. I built a little prototype to test this. It has 4 weapons with some recoil, cover you can lean around, jump/crouch, lock-on targeting, ammo management, blablabla. The whole point is to see if this input method feels as good in practice as it does in theory. The aiming algorithm handles all the shitty stuff: Dead zones against shaky hands, auto-clutching when you unwind your wrist, asymmetric sensitivity because human wrists rotate further inward than outward, response curves for precision at low speed without sacrificing fast flicks, etc. I made a quick video to show the prototype in action. And if you wanna try it yourself, I put a small zip file up here that contains the executable:
thomasmahler11,510 просмотров • 1 месяц назад
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