Mass Effect - Replay values of rpgs

One of my favorite ever game was Mass Effect: great story, great graphics, epic choices and all sci-fi stuffs.. aliens, weapons, ships and so on.

In these days I'm playing Mass Effect 2: nice start, same point of Mass Effect, but with a different angle, and many changes.

Following my feeds, I've found today a little article about Mass Effect 1&2, centered on replay values of these games.

Many times on net I've found articles where it's clear that few peoples finish games todays, so why build great and re-playable games?

My thoughts on this topic is that as developer/designer in video games you must find first a reason to justify another ride on your games and as second point make second run more fun and more interesting for players. This is difficult part and many, many successful games (from indie to AAA title) offer single player experience as one-run only. If you play games another times, nothing changes.

So why add replay values to a games? One reason is because video game genre require it: rpg is a good example, but also fighting games is interesting on this topic.

I think point is always the same, like people in Blizzard says: "Easy to play, hard to master".

I'm one-man developer, so replay values it's over my possibilities. What can I do ? How can i offer with same type of gameplay new experience?

I can move from good design in levels (see Zombie Employee, best example of my work in this area for now), to random generated levels.

Another ideas ?

Undermine

A really nice game made for Ludum Dare #48

Advanced Platform Engine - by me

Last post I've talked about Advanced Platform Engine a nice idea from Noel on Flashpunk forums.

News today is that I've added some nice feature on top of APE, in particular:

- double jump (tnx to Maikel_Ortega)

- shoot (tnx to me)

- wall jump (tnx to me and ideas from here)

- added double jump/shoot/wall jump power up to editor and into Engine

You can click on image to play and remind that controls are:

- LEFT and RIGHT ARROWS, moves left and right

- X, jump

- X twice to double jump

- jump to wall then hit X to wall jump

- C, shoot

Play now!

Download source code now

p.s: It's not a game, for now!

Quick update: last demo here, try it out!

Advanced Platform Engine

Noel did again and release a new Open Source Platform Engine for FlashPunk with more "advanced" features, like:

- slopes,

- movable platforms,

- pushable blocks like Zombie Employee,

- electricity,

you can try it now!

Nice work!

Open source platform engine

You always wanted to build a little game and if you are from '80, your eyes are full of games from 8bit (or 16bit) -era, like Sonic, Super Mario and so on.

You study informatics, or just have a computer and you think "hey, I want do build a game!", but how can I ?

Maybe you already know Actionscript 3 and build something with Flashpunk.. and always wanted to build a game like my Zombie Employee.. and now?

Now using Open Source Platform Engine you have all you need to build a platform.

You have easy way to put sprite on screen, let player control it and design levels with Ogmo Editor.. start creating!

Good work Noel!

Worm Food

You are a work, a big one. And all you want is eat foolish humans, do you need more?