Midnight Mansion 3 - your opinion wanted!

[Invidian]

You'd have to have a system where you sign in as a certain player as well. My niece wouldn't be able to play when I take my computer over there if all the mansions have turned into Hard ones.

[Sharpie]

42657D626F626A650B0 wrote: You'd have to have a system where you sign in as a certain player as well. My niece wouldn't be able to play when I take my computer over there if all the mansions have turned into Hard ones.

You can do that now. At the main screen, lower right it shows the current player and an option to change the player. This keeps track of which of the current mansions each player has beat.

[jacobvann]

6F424F40484F424D41402E0 wrote:
The problem I foresee with this is that some players just want to jump into

hard

mode straight away, without having to play through normal mansions.  Personally I like to play Normal and Hard modes (and occasionally Easy, just to see what is new and different) but it doesn't seem nice to force all players to play through Normal before they can access Hard.  In fact, I think that may even be a

Twinkie Denial Condition

in the Game Designer's Notebook (Bad Designer!  No Twinkie for you!)

You can very easily get around this by having a setting on the options or from the New Game screen. Something like

Start Me on Hard!

I don't see how my solution is any more restrictive than what we already have (with the exception of no typical Easy mode)

[brell]

But if we don't have an easy mode (whether it is a part of a bigger mansion or not, we will propably discourage new players from buying the game. They will think that MM is too hard for them.

[brell]

Vern, if you are going to make major changes in MM3 anyway, how about making use of all the unintended stuff that builders have found, like ladderjumps etc.? Those things are IMO one of the many jewels of the game and I am sure there are still some more to find, more so now, that MM2 is out. There is clearly much more than meets the eye in the game. Unintended or not, this is what keeps the game alive, because these are actually new features to the players.

[jacobvann]

3626313838540 wrote: But if we don't have an easy mode (whether it is a part of a bigger mansion or not, we will propably discourage new players from buying the game.  They will think that MM is too hard for them.

Well, Alan wasn't talking about lack of Easy mode.

[VernJensen]

My thinking is that many casual gamers, old and very young alike, who have gotten into the game, wouldn't have, if we hadn't had an Easy mode in the original Midnight Mansion.

I remember watching a 6-year-old piano student of mine try the game on Normal. He literally fell into almost every ditch he possibly could, anytime there was a jump of 3 tiles or more. Lessons learned: make most gaps on Easy only 2 tiles wide at most.

While this resulted in gameplay that was downright boring to me, Jacob, or Alan, it is likely the only way that casual gamers would have ever gotten ito the game.

Even giving a player infinite lives on Normal isn't the same, because while the player can repeatedly run into enemies and

take them out

that way, the jumps won't get any easier. I'm thinking mansions still need to be made specifically for Easy mode.

What makes this difficult however is that players have come to expect *more* changes between easy/normal/hard than just making it actually easier or harder. They want more rooms. New secrets. etc. And this takes a *lot* of time. And every minute that Jacob or I are doing easy/hard changes, is time we're not spending that could be spent on additional artwork or programming features. And when it comes to other mansion designers, it's time that could be spent instead on additional mansions.

Jacob's reason for wanting to eliminate easy (and possibly hard) mansions (and just have an

Easy mode

that gives infinite lives) is we could provide 24 mansions, instead of 8 that have 3 difficulties. Which would players rather have?

But it seems the response from this thread is loud and clear: players would rather have 8 mansions, with 3 distinctly different difficulties, than 24 mansions that are all 1 difficulty (with game modes that change how many lives Jack has).

I think sticking with 3 different difficulties is the right choices, to keep attracting more casual gamers (old and young) to the game. But we are considering ALL options for MM3!

We even briefly considered removing the

pseudo-3D

look that Midnight Mansion has, making it more

flat

like Super Mario, which still looks very good. But after a mockup, we decided against this!

Sometimes it's just good to re-evaluate decisions and make sure they're the right ones.

[RobSeegel]

Vern, when I saw your initial post with the smaller sized mansions, I was actually thinking that the main driver might have been the desire to move the game to mobile devices. I was thinking the smaller size mansions made much sense in that context.

I wonder if it might be better to have a Mobile or Micro-edition of the game that is more tailored to the needs of the smaller devices than the same exact game. Again.. more work would be needed.

[Wingy]

I agree with Vern here keeping the game 3 difficulties. The number of mansions, however, could vary, with larger ones and smaller ones to fit in with a nice storyline, in my opinion.

When you first mentioned to me how easy mansions' gaps should be 2 wide I had to agree, after watching my younger brother have a go at my Leofani Manor Easy, prior from when I made the change you suggested to make the gaps smaller. For example, that gap in the 'mad scientist's lab' there was originally 4 tiles wide. I remember you had someone test it and they didn't even attempt to jump it, instead they tried to find another way around. Making the mansions so to speak 'stupid-easy' to us is indeed advisable even though not quite enjoyable to more advanced players. That's what hard mode is for.

Anyway, on a side note, Rob was speaking of having MM on mobile. Speaking of that, I was kinda curious on how you would have that work on the iPhone and whatnot.

I noticed that Apple's new Retina (on the new touch and on the new iPhone) display has a massive screen resolution for such as small space -- 960x640. MM's game resolution is currently 640x480. This leaves so much room for controls and whatnot -- I remember Toybox (or someone) giving an example to have certain parts of the screen which you can touch do different things. I must say, that would be rather complicated and not too user-friendly.

With the larger display on the iPod now, you'll have about an inch on each side of the screen for controls such as movement (up down left right buttons) and on the other side two buttons for the action and map and across the bottom jump, or something. You'd have lots of room for these controls to be put in.

On a further note: Remember Pangea software and Enigmo? Did decently well on computer in terms of sales. The guy released the first version on iPod after Enigmo 2 was already had already been out for a couple years. Instead of just flat-out putting Engimo 2 out there because it's simply better he went a head and released the first version instead. It sold awesomely, and waited about a year and then released Engimo 2 for the iPod which did really well I hear. Are you going to plan on doing something like that with MM on the iPod/iPhone? : Anyway.

[rose]

Keep the Easy versions. I would never have been able to get far in a Normal mansion when I first started playing MM, and I didn't start young. It takes time to get the skill to jump and kneel and what ever. Brain - finger communications has to be trained.