Suggestion for Arcade mode: Shortcuts.

[The Observer]

Cross-posted from the Steam forums:

Something like the shortcuts for Spelunky, so that we can practice certain areas at our leisure. People who use shortcuts would gain some predetermined levels and equipment, and be taken to the area in question. It could also help for people trying to get the S-rank achievements for the areas or the complete all challenges in the area achievements, they can instantly go there at the expense of the downsides.

The downside is that people who use the shortcuts a) wouldn't be eligible to have their high scores saved and b) wouldn't have the opportunity to accrue gold and equipment in the lower levels.

Not sure whether the score from a shortcut run would count towards the town progress total.

Shortcuts would probably need some sort of quest to unlock, proving that the player has reached and shown some proficiency in, but not necessarily mastered the area. Maybe get an A-rank average for a floor, or beat a boss with an A rank? Or maybe beat all boss variants for that area?

 

[Own]

The reason people spend so much time in Arcade is because "I want to beat it", not necessarily "I want to beat it well." It's meant as the ultimate mastery of the combat system.

I'd wager a fair number of people who could just throw themselves at levels over and over until they scrape by would be satisfied with just beating it that way. If you can just outright skip all the early levels they probably start seeming more tedious too - getting weak loot when all you want is to get into the meaty action.

That being the case I dunno how I feel about shortcuts. I can see the appeal, and yet I'd be sad if the arcade community died off because people just repeatedly threw themselves at shortcuts, beat it that way and decided to call it a day.

Arcade is going to need a reduction in size in the future regardless when the game is complete, though. Currently runs take about 45-60 minutes, which means a full run through when the game is done ought to take 2-3 hours. Maybe they'll just do away with double floors and just have two bosses on each individual floor. Beat one to progress to the next area, beat both for a score bonus.

 

[The Observer]

The goal of shortcuts, as I mentioned, is to allow players to practice certain areas and levels. You can technically complete Spelunky with the shortcuts, but it hasn't caused the game to die.

"If you can just outright skip all the early levels they probably start seeming more tedious too - getting weak loot when all you want is to get into the meaty action."

Starting from the beginning would let you amass gold and resources that increase your survival chances. You can start straight from the Ice Caves or Temple in Spelunky, but doing so makes it much, much harder. But if one's really that worried, using one would simply let a player play the two levels of the area, then send him/her back to Arcadia. There, problem solved, you can practice the area and still collect points, etc, but don't get to beat the game.

I don't see a problem with the length when the game's done, Lufia 2's ancient cave used to require about 5 hours to complete. Same thing with the ARPG DS version. Alternatively, an option to save after every floor would work, with the quicksave being deleted after loading.

 

[Own]

I don't see a problem with the length when the game's done, Lufia 2's ancient cave used to require about 5 hours to complete. Same thing with the ARPG DS version. Alternatively, an option to save after every floor would work, with the quicksave being deleted after loading.

Unfortunately quicksaving would probably ruin the leaderboards, even if it did delete the save after loading. Savescumming I'd imagine would be impossible to detect.

 

[Teddy]

It'll be interesting to see what we do when the game is full sized. The Arcade Mode runs will indeed be crazy long at that time, and we'll see if we'll compress the mode or add some sort of temporary save (both have been talked about), or something different entirely!

As for the shortcuts, I'm personally more in favor of adding something akin to the latest suggestion (you can get to a floor but explicitly for practice). Spelunky and Grindea are pretty different in how the strength of the character scales, and I'm not sure we'd be able to do a suitably punishing scaling that made sense to players!

Having some unlockable in town that could teleport you to an area sounds like a cool idea to me. Maybe some kind of statue appears in town, and the same statue appears on the first floor of each area, where you can save your current character and then come back to practice with that exact build until you overwrite it with a new one. Or something. I do agree that practicing should be made easier.

Unfortunately quicksaving would probably ruin the leaderboards, even if it did delete the save after loading. Savescumming I'd imagine would be impossible to detect.

If we were to implement a quicksave system, runs using them would have to be disallowed from submitting scores (unless we came up with something super clever)! Which certainly is a downside compared to compressing the mode

 

[KoBeWi]

Options for quicksaves:

Option #1 - upload save to the server. When player loads save, it's downloaded again. The problem it creates is that it may result in heavy traffic with many players, as save files may be to big to move them back and forth too frequently (but actually it's few kBs, so I don't know).

Option #2 - store save locally, but generate a checksum and send it to the server. Checksum is ~150 times smaller than save and it has constant size. If player edits save, it will generate different checksum than the one on the server and game will display message that file is corrupted. Unless someone discovers how to make a false checksum, this method is also quite cheat-proof.

 

[Teddy]

That's a neat idea, KoBeWi! Technically we could use a Steam Leaderboard behind the scene to automatically limit Steam players to a single save file, and attach the file as metadata or UGC. I'm guessing Steam can handle the traffic