My son likes making levels in things like Geometry Dash and has me play them. Even I get confused sometimes, and I'm a very seasoned gamer. Maybe I should introduce him to yellow paint!
lol gamers care way too much about the yellow paint. it really doesn't matter, if it isn't for you then ignore it and keep going. it helps a lot of people though so it is worth including.
I *always* had to remind colleagues during user testing that the participant could probably hear them through the glass. That fancy observation room? NOT soundproof.
I distinctly remember praising the use of yellow paint when I played the Mad Max game upon its release. (I think it was one of the first to use it...that I noticed anyway)
It made traversal flow with zero frustration.
As a bonus, it felt natural on the metals in the post apoc setting.
I once played Minecraft with my sister-in-law (4 years older) and was directing her to a spot by saying "I left a trail of torches, just follow the torches." It was night. All you could see were the torches. She still got lost.
I can argue for and against the paint for directions, just depends on the situation. I've had convos with senior LDs where if they could, they would just place a giant arrow to just tell players where to go most or all the time, haha.
I googled this right after I took the picture and sure enough there were people on Reddit asking for help on where to go. Genshin also has a wayfinding system.
lol okay so I would probably interpret this as an in-universe sign hung by the locals of whatever place this is and not necessarily meant for me to follow 😅 That said if the wayfinding system is anything like Honkai Star Rail's I shouldn't have too much trouble finding where to go despite this
An unlikely amount of time in Destiny is me trying to figure out where the hell to go next 😂 follow the lights! Wherever there's paint, bird poop or conspicuously flickering lights it's all good for me.
I’m super color blind and appreciate all the yellow paint because I legit cannot see the little carved out niche clue or whatever I’m supposed to figure out.
I got lost in Alan Wake 2 for ten minutes because I couldn’t find a ladder in the dark. I totally love the level detail and atmosphere, but a tiny nudge in the dark would have been welcome. Keep up the good work!
Yea for the words of power and the cultist supplies. Funny part was the ladder was right near a save room but it was kinda in a really dark spot so I ran past it twice.
Get rid of yellow paint. Embrace waypoints and minimaps and bigass all caps GO HERE blinking arrows and paintings that literally point at the way to go like in that one level in Hi-Fi Rush.
Tsushima's "wind of fate" is the doegetic waypoint system the industry has been searching for since 2006. Hands down the coolest thimg in gaming I've encountered recently.
Yeah, I never understood the bitching about that sort of thing.
In Tomb Raider (2013), it was white paint, which actually fit thematically, as the Solarii cult was using it all over the island.
Been playing some ONI recently and actually quite early in the game there's a section where you're on rooftops and let me tell you I spent a good 15 minutes looking for the exit, that turned out to be a barely visible black escape stairway on a gray background.
People act like it's "just a few people". It's never just a few people. We don't fix stuff for just a few people. We fix stuff when it's affecting a significant portion of our players.
I'm not a Level Designer, the only levels I designed were in Mario Maker.
And even then, you sometimes have to place the yellow paint equivalent (aka coins) on some places to give your players the confirmation that "Yes, you CAN jump this distance and you SHOULD go there"
I guess the one huge difference in paint VS coins is that coins in Mario give you more of a reward, in that 100 coins give you an extra life, so you want coins.
In that sense, the Arrow Signposts would be more comparable with the Yellow Paint
And even then, you can also make the argument of "Koopas just randomly drops these coins everywhere they go, eh?". There's a certain level of "Suspension of Disbelief" you have to have to not get lost in a game and I guess it's harder to have when a gloomy world suddenly has bright splashes of color
Right, just random coins spread around is very much something the game establishes, a bit of a suspension of disbelief feature of the world, not just signpost.
But random yellow paint serve no purpose but heavy handed signpost. It's a cardboard tree falling in the theater play. Breaks the fiction
I found the clear rates on my Mario Maker levels genuinely illuminating - getting over 15% on anything other than a straight line to the flagpole (not talking Kaizo levels here) was unusual.
Something that probably no one ever consciously noticed, but I cared about, was how I painted a line of white bricks at the bottom of brick walls in Eldritch. I was using the same brick texture for floors and walls; without this, the scene flattened out and it was hard to perceive depth.
I actually noticed your white bricks while playing and I loved them after spending hours running into walls and not knowing which way up I was in so many 3d games.
As a tired adult who can be classified as "user from hell" in games (that one with the famous rotten fingers, in which the game it touched will magically bug in the most unexpected ways) I thank devs for put wayfinders like yellow paints, arrows and companions getting my char by the hand to guide it
God, the number of times I've gotten stuck in a level or whatever because my mind keeps dismissing the bloody obvious door right bloody there as part of the scenery...
Also that trap of "oh look if I follow that path I will continue the history and maybe I won't be able to return, let me explore here first" 15 minutes later "where am I? Where should I go now?"
I play games to relax. Yellow paint, blue to highlight things I can touch, and red for things to avoid, is nice. The new Indiana Jones has stuff to hang highlight things I should care about, and a permanent map marker I can put on the screen. That makes it enjoyable rather than frustrating.
A win 👍
I worked on a game for 8-10 year olds about 15 years back, and watching the playtests taught me more than anything I had learned up to that point. I still reference it.
After people complained of yellow elements on AN OIL RIG in Still wakes the deep I noticed yellow steps, ladders and valves on a cargo train in real life and knew they know nothing. It's almost like painting important elements yellow in industrial settings helps move around!
The "yellow elements" being "buckets of paint that were dumped on everything" lol
When sign posting is diegetic, it's good. Naughty Dog uses yellow paint all the time but it's never complained about because it's diegetic. Still Wakes the Deep's was not, which is why it was heavily criticized.
Still Wakes The Deep has very diegetic yellow elements that range from yellow tarps and elements of detroyed infrastructure to things that can be painted yellow in real life for the actual workers.
An oil rig being destroyed in exactly the right way where everything yellow is perfectly aligned in the one linear path I can progress in and nowhere else is the exact opposite of diegetic.
Oil rig being destroyed into only one path is a game. Not every game can be an open world experience and for Still Wakes The Deep linear path is what makes the pacing and atmosphere have the desired impact. Opposite of diegetic is bumping into walls, furniture and small spaces trying to find a path
Exactly, I mean I don’t need yellow paint in every game I touch. But if I’m playing a game and I need to google a play through to know my next step, I’m not experiencing what the character is experiencing.
This has literally nothing to do with diegesis lmao.
This is the problem with folks learning random terms from some YouTuber called "Mad Steve" or whatever and deciding that's academic knowledge, and then are not curious enough to ever expand past that level of discourse.
Not really an applicable concept. You can say that it "lacks verisimilitude" or "is a contrivance" but it doesn't really have anything to do with diagesis.
I played back through Half-Life 2 last month, an excellent and heavily playtested game, but there were still a few times where that pre-yellow-paint design era showed itself.
Partly because I wasn't in that 90s mindset looking for weird jumps and balance beams, but either way getting lost sucks!
Yellow paint is the single best way to communicate to players to date. I’m open to alternatives that aren’t “let them wander alone in the wilderness”, but beyond that every alternative is far worse, especially if your map has even an inkling of verticality. And it should.
The new Indy, as a stealth game, highlights things when you get within 5ish metres & that’s it. This is nice bc it pushes the player to investigate more, which is fitting for an Indy-game.
They do use white dust/rope to mark places easy to climb tho.
STALKER 2 allows you to turn off object highlights (the dreaded yellow paint). Within the first few days I saw posts on the Reddit from people complaining that the game doesn't do enough to make it obvious what you can interact with...when highlights are turned off.
Even worse, I've not only seen people complaining about it but making *mods* to get rid of the hi-vis material on the sports bags that show up as some of the stashes.
You know, the kind that can exist on these kinds of bags *in real life*. Because apparently *things that exist* are un-immersive.
I feel like this stigma against games that make themselves easier and more accessible needs to fuck off.
I think Palworld’s players are a little more accepting of people who just wanna have fun with an easier difficulty, cuz that game’s base exp curve and super bosses are unnecessary.
I never got how Yellow paint indicating where you can climb is bad, but red paint indicating explosive, that's been in games for at least 30 years now, is good.
Because we do that all the time irl. Apparently red is for flammable, orange is for explosive. We mark that in the real. When is the last time you saw stairs or a ladder that were painted yellow?
We color code doors to stairwells, ladders and other shit all the time. People have to find those things. What the fuck kind of world do you live in? Is everything in your life just Beige and white?
I remember a mall from my childhood. The stairs were not yellow. Instead, there was a big circle where the upper level overlooked the bottom level in a circle and the stairs curved to the center of the circle. The stairs had a giant earth tone rock sculpture.
I have climbed so many unpainted aluminum ladders and I'm sure you have too. SOME stairwells and ladders are color coded, usually in more industrial work settings. If your video game level is an industrial work site, I'll admit, yellow paint should be required.
ah yes the old classic "Nutuh cause the one in my memory wasn't that color!" One I never said Yellow specifically i said color coded. Almost every single ladder i climb DAILY is painted.
Nobody mentions the stakeholder who didn't play his own game until 7 weeks before ship, then ordered a raft of changes while sniffing very loudly (camera off) into a headset mic in a Google meeting.
People really should be exposed to functionality testing at length so they understand how the average player really behaves.
These guys repeat the Half-Life 2 commentary argument -- half of which didn't even see it personally -- and that's the extent of their curiosity on game design academically.
Watching the "balance" fiasco in Helldivers from day one greatly changed my views about how a "normal" person approaches gaming and what their problem solving abilities are. I've been spoiled by years of playing milsims with engineers.
I'm not a level designer and I don't think of myself needing yellow paint.
I also think it's a good thing, I've seen plenty of examples and watched in frustration as people have missed *clear signposting* and whined about not knowing where to go lmao
People really overestimate the willingness of the average gamer to spend hours wasting time and lives by throwing themselves off of or at cliffs and other edifices to see which ones can actually be traversed.
There need to be visual cues of some sort, after all in real life you can just look at walls etc and have a good idea if it is climbable (for yourself at least). But it's nice if it can be done in a subtle/artistic way.
I'm suddenly flashing back to the frustration of the moss wall in the point-and-click Torin's Passage.
You had to slowly mouse over the expanse of moss listening for the correct auditory response to know it was safe to click there, all while repeated "No, nope, negatory!" played for the wrong spots
Yeah, any game that devolves into a constant exercise of "guess what the devs had in mind" for any significant number of players just hasn't learned since then. Yellow paint is an advancement.
People radically underestimate the extent to which interacting with things in the real world is based on intuition built on years of doing it over and over again. We don't have that with the in game characters and mechanics.
For sure. And any medium is going to require certain specific suspensions of disbelief and/or metaphorical interpretations of what's inherant to the medium in order to enjoy. It's part of literacy.
I fucking love yellow paint! And unrealistic harsh white sections of climbable rock.
It's an amazing way to get the player to see the world the way the character would--as an inviting series of obstacle courses.
I often forget how much knowledge bias I have until I get random people off the street to play test my games - we take a LOT of what seems like "basic knowledge" for granted.
I haven’t developed a game of my own yet, but I’ve played enough that I’m always shocked when I watch non or casual gamers play at how they interact with the world. There’s a language to games that many of us have absorbed without even realizing.
Flower was a game that people kept saying was the ideal game for “beginners” and I encouraged my wife to play. She has no idea where she was going or what to do as the “hints” were plain as day to someone who has spent 30+ years playing games and not really obvious to someone who hasn’t
I'd played Left 4 Dead 2 with my old friends for years. One time, we invited my now-husband to play with us, and watching him I was shocked at how much info I'd absorbed through osmosis since he wasn't reacting to things that I *knew* where there.
Not only thing that you know are there, but things the game is actively telling you are there through lighting, color language, or intentional design. But that’s all still a language you have to learn to interpret and build that muscle. I never even think about it. It’s kinda crazy once you see it.
Exactly. When I say I "knew" it was there, I meant to convey that I'd absorbed from the game's language without realizing it. I "knew" it without knowing how I'd picked up on it.
As someone who used to have to blow into cartridges just to get games to play, it is going to take more than yellow paint to frustrate me to the point where I don't enjoy a video game.
I'm mostly amused about it from an in-world perspective: if I were the main character I would simply carry around yellow paint and go anywhere I want. Would be fun to have a game that explained this in-world as like, yellow is a very expensive dye so that's why we use it to mark the important stuff.
Hate to admit it but I was playing Control and there's a section that I can't find that's hindering progress. I'm busy, I need yellow paint in games, I don't have the time to slowly explore like I did in my younger days.
It reminds me of that developer who said they tried to make explosives green instead of red and it made testers ignore them instead. Bulletstorm was the game I think.
Sometimes I kind of like it, I remember I was playing god of war ragnarok and that area that’s really dark would have super frustrated me if not since the way through would have blended in to the rocky texture
I game constantly. My Playstation has over 950 games played on it and that only lists toward the end of PS3.
I, for one, appreciate yellow paint.
Pretty sure most that complain are bandwagon posers who don't actually purchase games.
I think Tsushima uses bird droppings as a doegetic hint as well. Tsushima is an excellent study in diegetic yellow paint done right. The gold bird is just *chefskiss*
I may not like that game, but it does a lot of things right on a technical level. The way it guides the player with the wind rustling through reeds is also great.
Right? Standing in a huge field of flowers with the whole field rippling as the wind pushes you towards your destiny. It takes something that usually pulls you out of the game and makes it part of the experience. I could gush about it forever
Remember when Dead Space told players how to defeat necromorphs using visual markers, audio logs, AND a tutorial pop up? Yet there were still players who were frustrated because they missed the mechanic?
Yes and Dead Space was a brilliant game. If a player was too stupid or inattentive to figure that out, that's on them.
Trying to make every game for every player is how we ended up with the homogenized (and collapsing) AAA space and a resurgence of indies rejecting those philosophies.
"CUT OFF THEIR LIMBS" says literally every motherfucker for the first hour of that game.
"I'm shooting them in the head, why are they taking so many shots to kill? This plasma cutter gun"- the actual thought process of a streamer I saw playing DSR a while ago
Watched my friend play the first 30 minutes yesterday and there was a 2 minute section where they said "shooting them in the head does nothing!" 3 times.
As a person who collates feedback after playtests, the only thing that’s always consistent is that there are always a large number of people who get lost and they’re always finding new places to get lost in.
There’s also always one place that’s the bad place where everyone gets lost and no one agrees what the problem is. So you make a bazillion small changes and test them to no effect, until someone puts huge animated arrows on every surface to see if that helps or if the whole thing is just cursed.
Those who complain about yellow paint never played the old text adventures where you had to guess the exact syntax in the game designer’s mind. A little guidance is a good thing.
You know without a doubt the same people complaining about yellow paint would complain about getting lost without said paint! It's such a stupid argument. I think it can be explained rather easy too! For example in Mt Nibel handholds have yellow paint, maybe guides painted them yellow? Easy! 🤣
It just dawned on me what you mean by “yellow paint”. And lordt, if it wasn’t for that I’d never finish games. Because if I wander for too long I give up and move onto something else.
I think the second and third Tomb Raider remakes from Crystal had an option to hide mobility/interaction hints in the world and I rolled my eyes real hard at that option and made sure I had it set to show them. Because life is short and I'm a dumbass.
I've been gaming for the better part of 30 years and would consider myself at the level between enthusiast and hardcore. I've put in my hours in my teens and 20s, but I ain't got time for that these days. Clearly delineated paths are a godsend. I don't have endless hours to just wander!
Exactly this. No one has time for wasting life looking for the tiny hint that might lead me in the right direction. I definitely don’t have time for that nonsense. ><
Ooh does it? That's affirming, I remember Yahtzee complaining about yellow paint on some cliffs, then seeing a bird shit covered cliff the next day and thinking to myself "well that's the solution to that then isn't it?"
I love me some "go this way" paint. I get to walk into a room, or a garage, or an arena and I see where I'm supposed to go. Now I can take however long I want exploring this space safe in the knowledge that I have my exit.
every time i make a Mario Maker level i think it's super self explanatory and easy to navigate, then i come back to it a few months later having forgotten the layout and it's like holy shit this was not user friendly at all.
Tell me about it. I ran my first playtest the other day, and I indicated three separate times that a certain person's rooms would be empty and the group should maybe investigate to learn more about the killer.
Don't hide information, and be part of the conversation the other players are having. Figure out who would most likely know important information then tell them it. "Fighter, your experience with battles tells you xyz rooms are empty, but there's someone in room a."
Conservation of detail is the ttrpgs version. I only describe k. Detail things the players are supposed to interact with. If they ask I'll flesh out the scene, but I use detail to emphasize clues, puzzles, hazards, hints about NPCs. By the same token I try to telegraph secret doors (you feel a
Slight breeze with no obvious source or just blatantly having a resident evil statu3) bc why have secret doors no one finds? Illusion of choice is turned on full power.
Sincere answer: having the art and design teams work together so that the player gets lost or confused as little as possible, then pulling in your accessibility lead to implement optional settings for those who still need help.
(Obviously this is much more challenging for small teams)
I'm a team of one! I'm in excellent company, though. Specifically though, I'm talking about ttrpg's. The theater of the mind is so heavily dependent on the individuals imagination.
As a general rule I give a pass to indies on basically everything. Do whatever works and "go with god", so to speak. Y'all are the pioneers in this space 🙏 I reserve my side eye for the 400+ person AAA studios where nobody talks to each other lol
I feel like Dying Light has a good mix of both and it uses the yellow paint in a clever way. Yellow paint/markers/etc are canonically left by fellow survivors within the game so it feels more immersive. There's also plenty of places you can go without yellow paint so it doesn't feel so linear+
Some of the best level design in the world is at Disney and other theme parks. Highway interchanges, mall layouts, museums, IKEA, sports arenas... Showing people where to go is a huge and high-skill industry.
My library is dropping a lot of money on a new wayfinding signage project. We hired consultants and there have been multiple surveys. For a 3-story largely open-floor building. But it's a 3-story largely open-floor building that people still can't find stuff in.
IKEA and Primark can be distressing experiences with the 'tism. Primark forcing you to walk the long way round each floor to the descending staircase and proceed down another level is an architectural torment nexus.
Ask Kim about the okay we are NOT turning there and taking a header over a dark cliff on-ramp 🙃
Fucking thing
A: wasn't lit with a streetlamp
B: there was no sign at the on-ramp turn (was a hard 90 degree T intersection, almost like a side-street)
C: we all agreed that wasn't it
And some of the absolute worst level design is suburban sprawl neighborhoods where it takes you 10 minutes to get out of your neighborhood and nothing is walkable.
About ten years ago, my then roommate was throwing a party at our new house (rental). A mutual friend asked me if I always used a GPS to navigate it neighborhood.
I did. I eventually learned my way around but it took several months.
I've genuinely never understood why the whole yellow paint thing bothers people that much. Like, would you PREFER having someone constantly talk your ear off like "Hey, there seems to be an entrance nearby! I've marked it on your map."
There's nothing people love more than feeling smart. NOTHING.
Finding your way with the help of yellow paint, then proclaiming that you totally would have found your way WITHOUT the yellow paint is the most perfect manifestation of "I am so smart, plz praise me for being smart" that I can imagine.
The argument people tend to make is that older games didn't need yellow paint because they designed environments that naturally led people where they needed to go without making things too obvious.
It's true of some games (the scratch marks on the wall in PoP telling you were to wall run comes to-
Honestly, I think people getting upset about yellow paint are by and large just looking for something to be upset about and they'll go out of their way to construct an imagined past where all older games were just 10/10 at guiding players along.
Anyone who has ever tried to get to the other side of the mountain in the middle of all Elder Scrolls games should just hug every tin of paint in existence.
Yep this, Not like Crash Bandicoot added intricate/ colourful designs to denote "secret" entrances in... 1996... 🙃
Looking up "obvious missed stuff in games", brings up entire threads of people missing simple things like having a run button or a lvl up system. Or poorly made tutorials that confuse
I think nearly everyone would have a moment of something like that at some stage, people should be able to enjoy games in the way they want too, sometimes that means not needing to be frustrated <3
no bullet time sounds rough, I wonder if anyone's completed the old matrix games without it 🤔
That fun little while of dialling into the designers ideas of what's useful visual information and what's just a door with a spotlight. Even if the name of the game is extremely granula exploration I love yellow paint.
I don't play a lot of games, but I appreciate it in the games I do play. In the limited time I have, I just want to get Aloy on to her next fight with robot animals. It's also easy to head canon them as generations marking the way to escape from killer robot animals.
Like I get that sometimes for ppl, those who play games often, indicators like that can be so easily spotted that it can feel like you didn't get a chance to figure it out, but most times it was there because it was easy to miss otherwise, and often for a section that wasn't intended to be difficult
I'm on a very small R&D team and for a while we didn't have a level designer and just banged something together from like a plugin's sample map and some other bits and bobs. Then we got our level designer and all of a sudden everything felt so much better. I still don't know how.
Like, I'm a game designer. I get the smallest glimpse of insight into what a level designer might be thinking. I worked along some incredible level design folks at Respawn. And I have no fucking clue how it is that level designers do what they do. Ppl outside of gamedev can STFU
I love that kind of stuff. It helps me know where I'm supposed to go. In most adventure games, you *CAN'T* go everywhere, and the mindset of the 90s where you just spam the action button along all the walls until something happens sucks. It's helpful and more flavorful than a giant compass arrow.
I actually recommend to people learning level design to watch someone play their level - but they cannot help at all. (Streaming is the best for this.)
I learned more in 20 minutes watching an 8 year old try to get through my linear level than I had in two years building them. XD
definitely not a level designer, know almost nothing about level design techniques, but generally if the industry keeps doing a thing despite people mocking it regularly, i find there's a good reason for it.
We emergencyly* turned on Northrend teleport options on the dockmasters when Wrath Classic launched because the boats were (shockingly /s) broken. We then decided not to turn them off. I was *there* for this discussion, though I think that someone else tested the ports.
For Hallows Eve, the Undercity Portal on a high level character?
You spawn in to Blight 😬 the portal exists but the map is BFA phased now so... ya dead ahaha.
I dunno if that's been flagged up internally yet heh.
(Also, can Horde please have events outside Org instead?)
Shit I had this convo a few months back, and like yellow paint is great shorthand. The alternative is big arrows or nine thousand objective markers or just nothing, and yellow paint is at least diegetic.
Yeah it makes sense to have it visually distinct. We have to operate in a game world and are limited by the mechanics, so it's either the paint or players are constantly trying to climb things we can't.
one time i saw a playtester ignore the verbal command of what to do next, then also not read the subtitles which told them, and then also not see the glowing light around where i'd intended them to go
Inadvertently a great argument against slathering paint on everything -- some people will always be too stupid to follow sign posting, diegetic or otherwise. Why compromise art design for an unachievable goal?
only if you pretend “some people” is a very high number and “people it helped” is a very low number and “people who didn’t benefit” is high and “negative impact on people who didn’t benefit” was also high
so basically your pitch sounds reasonable so long as you never have to validate it
also that person was not stupid, their focus was drawn elsewhere due to immersion and emotional response, and english was a second language so parsing it required active effort that was missing
that kind of arrogance has no place in development, put it in the bin where it belongs
Some people lack the intellectual capacity to solve certain problems. That's just the truth. And some people have that ability they just refuse to engage with the systems in front of them or dedicate the time and patience required to solve those problems. You can't make every game for everyone
Look, there's only so much hand-holding you should be expected to do! It's a game! Knowing what to do next shouldn't be automatic. Modern games do WAY too much tutorial and explaining. There was a time when "EASTMOST PENINSULA IS THE SECRET" was considered enough direction for kids to make progress.
Figuring out what to do next and how has always been part of gaming. If you’re telegraphing every action the player should take at all times you fucked up.
I mean, I grew up in adventure gaming. I’m not advocating for oldschool Sierra obtuseness, but even platformers and shooters intentionally made gamers go “ok now what” and had them explore at times. Great games like Portal give clues and nudges, but don’t give them a big flashing arrow down path.
I just read about this yellow paint thing and I’m the exact person that needs this in a game or else I’ll spent 20 minutes trying to climb up a ledge that was clearly never meant to be scaled and then just give up on the game after getting frustrated
I worked at a bowling alley for years, we had signs everywhere to not wear your outdoor shoes on the wooden lanes. Doesn’t matter how many or how big, people will still somehow not see them.
Video games have to contend with the same issue multiplied 100x 😭 At least yellow paint seems to work?
Never underestimate a player's ability to not read words you put into your game. Usually while asking a question out loud that could be answered by reading the handful of words they're actively hovering their mouse over but refusing to read.
Oh yeah I watched a streamer play Marvel Rivals completely dumbfounded how Moon Knight kept killing him. Moon Knight kept killing him by bouncing his shots off the ankh he'd place. The streamer's character had said ~4 different voice lines about destroying ankhs.
i think about that all the time. they’d clearly fixated on something in the level that was not the right thing. and hyperfocused on it to the point where neither robovoice nor text nor glowy lights would displace
them
Just playing a game, being virtually embodied in a world with other rules, figuring out these rules, building mastery over the things the world wants you to do, all that eats up more than 100% of our brain cycles. If you're also trying to talk at the same time? Foggetaboutit
one time when i was studying league onboarding with @soupychloe.bsky.social and i was on voice with @danidonovan.com in bot lane and talking to her and she literally could not hear me because she was so focused on CSing and lane mechanics as a new player. attention is wild
back up. back up. we are too far forward we need to step back. dani move backwards. dani come back to tower. follow me. come with me. back. back. i’m going b
Gamers really do be like “I hate tutorials and having my hand held” and “raghhhhh I hate knowing exactly where the game wants me to go using non-intrusive level design” and “argh why can’t this game be a little more unfair and brutal”
Like when the fuck did people stop wanting to enjoy games lmao
I play games to relax ( I'm 44 - I got enough real-life stress, thank you). I have never minded the yellow paint thing. If I get frustrated in a game, I will uninstal it and never look at it again.
I know exactly what you're talking about. Players will trip on everything and anything. They are genuinely needy of guideposts. Even the ones that pretend they are ultragamers.
I may not have built any sort of level yet, but I've watched plenty of casual gamers and regular people be absolutely clueless on how to progress before.
Not enough people realize that the general population doesn't have the intuition that "Mr.Grew up playing games all their life" does
"gamers" overestimate their ability to figure out everything, a lot of the time not realizing that the games they play have been tested extensively to ensure ease of gameplay and direction for every player. a lot of the friends i play games with are directionally challenged and any visual aids help.
I very casually suggested to a friend of mine who works in games that maybe it could be a different color and I was very fortunate to have my friend very patiently explain to me all of the colors they had tried that had failed to accomplish the intended effect. I felt very silly, but also grateful.
The fact that they've tried other colors should be obvious, but it's still really interesting to hear.
Kind of like how when, I think it was bulletstorm, was being developed, the devs made the explosive barrels green and realized "Oh, people just refuse to shoot these unless they're red"
I think some people forget not everyone is like a pro-gamer. I appreciate subtle hints on which way I need to go. I play games to relieve stress not add to it
As both a dev and gamer nothing worse then going over the same game space a million times and missing where the fuck I'm supposed to go. I like to spend time playing games not being lost. All hail the yellow paint.
Recently I was playing stalker 2, which yellow paints shootable locks, breakable boards etc, and I had the option for it turned off. Later in the game I spent a solid 30 minutes trying to do demented platforming to solve a puzzle with a lock I didnt see because it was no longer painted
The folks facilitating playtesting at Riot had to remind me a LOT that the glass was in fact quite thin and they might be able to hear my groaning and grunting if I didn't keep it down
Comments
(People definitely need to stfu)
One kid turns and says "WoW, you're fat!" I clapped back with "no, I'm pregnant."
Two kids immediately say "what does that mean?" I panicked and left. XD
It made traversal flow with zero frustration.
As a bonus, it felt natural on the metals in the post apoc setting.
Big fan.
I googled this right after I took the picture and sure enough there were people on Reddit asking for help on where to go. Genshin also has a wayfinding system.
In Tomb Raider (2013), it was white paint, which actually fit thematically, as the Solarii cult was using it all over the island.
Would've loved lights or paint lol
People act like it's "just a few people". It's never just a few people. We don't fix stuff for just a few people. We fix stuff when it's affecting a significant portion of our players.
And even then, you sometimes have to place the yellow paint equivalent (aka coins) on some places to give your players the confirmation that "Yes, you CAN jump this distance and you SHOULD go there"
Yes they both sign post but a coin is a well established element of the world and fiction.
Imagine you used a random rupee instead and nowhere else.
Like... Did the cultists in the RE4 castle really just slosh paint around for no reason?
In that sense, the Arrow Signposts would be more comparable with the Yellow Paint
But random yellow paint serve no purpose but heavy handed signpost. It's a cardboard tree falling in the theater play. Breaks the fiction
A win 👍
When sign posting is diegetic, it's good. Naughty Dog uses yellow paint all the time but it's never complained about because it's diegetic. Still Wakes the Deep's was not, which is why it was heavily criticized.
Naughty Dog also makes linear games and they've been doing this shit right for years. I don't know why y'all are so hostile to the idea that better things are possible https://bsky.app/profile/ctg867.bsky.social/post/3lek7ptgsac2h
This is the problem with folks learning random terms from some YouTuber called "Mad Steve" or whatever and deciding that's academic knowledge, and then are not curious enough to ever expand past that level of discourse.
Second-hand embarassment.
The collective cognitive dissonance that some people have w/r/t defending bad and widely maligned sign posting is very weird!
Partly because I wasn't in that 90s mindset looking for weird jumps and balance beams, but either way getting lost sucks!
The new Indy, as a stealth game, highlights things when you get within 5ish metres & that’s it. This is nice bc it pushes the player to investigate more, which is fitting for an Indy-game.
They do use white dust/rope to mark places easy to climb tho.
I missed that at first but I’m very sure worked on a subconscious level bc I never ended up being confused where to climb or not.
How are these people real?
You know, the kind that can exist on these kinds of bags *in real life*. Because apparently *things that exist* are un-immersive.
I think Palworld’s players are a little more accepting of people who just wanna have fun with an easier difficulty, cuz that game’s base exp curve and super bosses are unnecessary.
I remember a mall from my childhood. The stairs were not yellow. Instead, there was a big circle where the upper level overlooked the bottom level in a circle and the stairs curved to the center of the circle. The stairs had a giant earth tone rock sculpture.
These guys repeat the Half-Life 2 commentary argument -- half of which didn't even see it personally -- and that's the extent of their curiosity on game design academically.
I also think it's a good thing, I've seen plenty of examples and watched in frustration as people have missed *clear signposting* and whined about not knowing where to go lmao
You had to slowly mouse over the expanse of moss listening for the correct auditory response to know it was safe to click there, all while repeated "No, nope, negatory!" played for the wrong spots
It's an amazing way to get the player to see the world the way the character would--as an inviting series of obstacle courses.
I, for one, appreciate yellow paint.
Pretty sure most that complain are bandwagon posers who don't actually purchase games.
Long live yellow paint.
Trying to make every game for every player is how we ended up with the homogenized (and collapsing) AAA space and a resurgence of indies rejecting those philosophies.
"I'm shooting them in the head, why are they taking so many shots to kill? This plasma cutter gun"- the actual thought process of a streamer I saw playing DSR a while ago
I am old and life is hard, I want to play the game, not fight with it to figure it out. I do that enough with work.
SHOW ME THE YELLOW PAINT.
I fucking LOVE Yellow Paint
What's the ttrpg equivalent of yellow paint.
(Obviously this is much more challenging for small teams)
As a general rule I give a pass to indies on basically everything. Do whatever works and "go with god", so to speak. Y'all are the pioneers in this space 🙏 I reserve my side eye for the 400+ person AAA studios where nobody talks to each other lol
It's not a perfect game but I love Dying Light and highly recommend it to anyone that likes open-world zombie apocalypse games!
And I'm not sure how to feel about that.
Fucking thing
A: wasn't lit with a streetlamp
B: there was no sign at the on-ramp turn (was a hard 90 degree T intersection, almost like a side-street)
C: we all agreed that wasn't it
(that def was it)
I did. I eventually learned my way around but it took several months.
Finding your way with the help of yellow paint, then proclaiming that you totally would have found your way WITHOUT the yellow paint is the most perfect manifestation of "I am so smart, plz praise me for being smart" that I can imagine.
It's true of some games (the scratch marks on the wall in PoP telling you were to wall run comes to-
Honestly, I think people getting upset about yellow paint are by and large just looking for something to be upset about and they'll go out of their way to construct an imagined past where all older games were just 10/10 at guiding players along.
Looking up "obvious missed stuff in games", brings up entire threads of people missing simple things like having a run button or a lvl up system. Or poorly made tutorials that confuse
no bullet time sounds rough, I wonder if anyone's completed the old matrix games without it 🤔
I'd rather the game give me the answer than open Youtube/Gamefaqs or even worst Steam Forums and Reddit.
so thank you, and keep at it.
Ive always thought that if I have to google basics, how to play or how to navigate in a game, thats a poorly designed game.
Although there is a line to be tred between immersion and assisting navigation, the workflow doesn't always allow you do work on them both.
I'm embarrassed for you.
(It did click at least that "oh, go where there's more light. cool, makes sense" but stiiiiiill)
I learned more in 20 minutes watching an 8 year old try to get through my linear level than I had in two years building them. XD
...
"But... there's a portal?"
I felt so dumb.
For Hallows Eve, the Undercity Portal on a high level character?
You spawn in to Blight 😬 the portal exists but the map is BFA phased now so... ya dead ahaha.
I dunno if that's been flagged up internally yet heh.
(Also, can Horde please have events outside Org instead?)
Seeing arm chair quarterbacks of "journalists" raging against yellow paint is apparently my spicy take trigger.
Good! If this take is annoying, I assure you my actual spicy takes are much worse. XD
humbled
so basically your pitch sounds reasonable so long as you never have to validate it
that kind of arrogance has no place in development, put it in the bin where it belongs
you are too arrogant to ever be good at this and too ignorant to understand how little you know
bonus points for implying you know a person you’ve never met better than i do and that they’re stupid
Video games have to contend with the same issue multiplied 100x 😭 At least yellow paint seems to work?
i didn’t think we were in a space where genre familiarity would be a problem but there was clearly SOMETHING wrong
them
Like when the fuck did people stop wanting to enjoy games lmao
Cool i must explore every other way first. Then go there when i feel like i looted everything.
Not enough people realize that the general population doesn't have the intuition that "Mr.Grew up playing games all their life" does
Kind of like how when, I think it was bulletstorm, was being developed, the devs made the explosive barrels green and realized "Oh, people just refuse to shoot these unless they're red"
Cue dozens of players stuck in a room saying "door does not work". Not one of them ever tried pressing the button, just shooting it.
Give me the yellow paint please and thanks.
My husband, who I love very much, was also an LD on Skylanders. I gave him feedback that one of his mechanics was too hard. He brushed it off.
Two years later, we had moved in together and my kiddo was playing THAT level. He got stuck and asked for help.
He then had to help the kid through that section of the level about once a week for the next year. I asked once "do you remember what I said?"
He said something to the effect of it had been seared into his brain forever. XD