A kid's review of Thimbleweed Park

One other thing I’d like to point out: attempting to read the text may distract from listening to the dialog, and doing them at once may impair the processing of both (due to over-stimulation, I guess).

This happens to some people, for instance, when reading subtitles during a movie: you really kind of tune out of the actual movie in order to process the text, and trying to pay attention to the movie becomes a challenge when your eyes keep glancing automatically to the changing text. (I know it happens to me, and I’ve heard this from others.)

Here are the things I think work best:

  • Do not tell the player about the skip mechanic (bad DZ, shame on you!)
  • Do your best to channel the player towards listening to the game rather than reading it. Perhaps suggesting it’s the recommended way for the best experience.
  • Do your best to ensure that selecting speech bubbles is a conscious player decision. If they enable speech bubbles, then they take the consequences, plus they know now how to take them out.

I am not convinced that playing a game without sound and text is really a problem you need to solve. If you really expect players who disable sound to be confused at the lack of total game feedback (no text and no voice), then perhaps point out during the instructions cards at the beginning that speech bubbles “or sub-titles” can be enabled in the “Options” screen or something like that, should suffice.

Other than that, well, something’s gotta give. It’s of course the designer’s job to give the player a good experience and offer reasonable defaults, but it’s also the player’s job to play by the rules. If the game works best when using voice or text (but not both simultaneously), then they should be told this somehow.

That said, a modern game with ambient music and voice tracks enabled, an optional but disabled feature for sub-titles, and a hidden but discoverable skip function, seems to me like a reasonable default.

As they say, your mileage may vary. :slight_smile:

dZ.

Yes, same here. But in TWP the dialog lines are appearing in the scene above the heads of the characters, not at the bottom of the display. And there isn’t much “action”, so you don’t miss anything if you read the lines. And you can turn on and off the text. :slight_smile:

But a really big problem for me was to hear the English voices and read the German subtitles. Don’t know why but in games I have to turn the English voices off.

That doesn’t work on mobile phones. :slight_smile: Especially on mobile devices the players switch from one environment (subway) to another (home). So in some places they have to turn the voices off.

But that’s complicated: The player has to read the instructions (who of us did this?) and he has to go to the options screen.

That’s why I propose to show the two buttons/voice options at the beginning of the game: The player can change quickly between the (recommended) voices/sound or the text mode.

And it should be enough not to mention the skipping feature. If there are fools who skip all sentences, it’s their problem.

A good game should work with voice, with text and with subtitles - think about deaf or hard of hearing people or players who play the game in the subway…

But yes, if the designer intend to play the game with voices, this has to be told somewhere.

TWP has this already in the options. :slight_smile:

I don’t think it’s about “a good game.” It’s about human’s ability to process information. Subtitles on a movie is a compromise to address a particular problem, not part of the intended experience.

The same with games. The speech bubbles are there to address the exact same problems as movie subtitles; I do not think that Mr. Gilbert intended the player to listen to the voice-over and read the text simultaneously in order to get a full experience.

I meant, the subtitles should be off by default, in my opinion, and the option to enable them should be easily discoverable or suggested to the player (just like a mobile movie player).

dZ.

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It would be interesting to hear @RonGilbert’s opinion on this topic. :slight_smile:

I for myself would appreciate it, if all games are having (nearly) the same experience with voice, text and text with voice. (The latter one could help for example people that are hard of hearing to have nearly the same experience as all other players.)

Perhaps it’s a language issue that is causing us to miscommunicate, but I am talking about reading a line of text at the same time as the character is saying the words and having the player experience and process both (sort of like reading a book while watching the movie based on it at the same time). Humans are not very good at processing both inputs simultaneously.

Of course, we try to focus on one or the other, which is why I said that having both at once may be distracting on the most common user’s case.

My last comment suggested that the intention was never to expect the user to process both as part of a unified experience, but to offer a compromise to address, like you said, some potential problematic cases. I’d be very surprised if Mr. Gilbert disagrees with this.

dZ.

This is not my experience. :slight_smile:

If you hear a text and read it at the same time, you understand it faster. Maybe from your own perspective you feel like you concentrate on reading the text. But your brain is listening to the voices too. It’s similar to the background music: You won’t notice the music while playing, but the music is there and produces a mood. It’s the same with the voices (they are transporting a mood too, btw). Your brain is able to handle all these inputs at the same time.

I for myself have played TWP with voices and text. Maybe it’s because my English isn’t that good. But hearing the voices and reading the text helped me to understand the sentences faster and better. (And no, I’ve not skipped the lines via the dot key. :slight_smile: )

For me this is only distracting, if I can’t follow the action on the screen (for example if there is an explosion on the screen and I have to read the dialog of the characters at the bottom of the screen) or the text won’t fit to the words - that’s why I can’t play TWP with English voices and German text (it is possible but more stressful). :slight_smile:

But this is not the case: In TWP you read the lines that are spoken - at the same time. And you see the text on the screen above the heads in the scene. An appropriate example would be to read the script of an audio drama while listen to it in the radio.

Good for you, but study after study suggests that “true multitasking” in humans is a fallacy, because the brain prioritizes certain inputs differently and may cause disruption when multiple stimuli are present.

This should at least be the common case for most players, if not for hard-core ones.

Anyway, it does not matter. The biggest problem here was me telling Dante about the skipping function. That’s easily avoided by not announcing or emphasizing this feature, which the game already does.

dZ.

I don’t understand the problem you’re describing here. In the first scenario, if the player decides to restart the game, they should be starting completely fresh. The game shouldn’t need to remember anything they’ve ever done, because the player is starting over. And there should be no need for a separate save file for saving player state. Keeping track of what lines have already been seen/heard is something the game already does to a limited degree using the existing save system. The dialogue should be tracked based on game progress, not based on the player’s lifetime experience with the game in general. If a player restarts the game, the game should be starting completely fresh. If I’m starting a new playthrough, I don’t need the game to remember that I’ve seen the dialogue in a previous playthrough.

As for the second scenario, so what if the player uninstalls the game and comes back to it one, ten, or even fifty years later? If they somehow archived their normal game saves, they can play right where they left off when the reinstall the game. If not, they’ll start over from the very beginning with all progress reset. If a player is returning to the game after an extended hiatus, chances are they’ve forgotten many lines, so having to look/listen to them once again shouldn’t be much of a burden.

I thought we were talking about the second time and beyond. Were you proposing that your speed adjustment.fast-forward should workeven the first time a line is played?

Ah. I somehow got the impression you were trying to have the player adjusts how fast a fast-forward feature would work, which seemed like it would be potentially cumbersome.

If the lines can be dismissed fast enough to satisfy the fastest readers, it starts to defeat the purpose of implementing the feature in the first place, since slower readers would be able to dismiss lines long before they could realistically have read them. At that point I think I’d just rather trust people to skip dialogue responsibly. If they can’t do that, then they’ll just have to put up with increased difficulty.

Yep.

One thing I would like to see in adventure games is an option to rewind dialogue. Let’s say I skipped the line too fast, or simply want to read a previous line again for context. I should be able to hit backspace and go back, maybe to the last dialogue tree or even before that, but without an option to choose different lines (like a VCR recording).

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That is incredibly hard in a game like TWP. Dialog is not just a stream of text, it’s also animation and game states changing. Between two lines of text, large chunks of code could have been run.

It’s easy in a game like a JRPG where it’s just a sequence of pop-ups, but really hard when the game is a very interactive and animated.

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I think the analogue to a VCR in an adventure game is the saved game. It’s not a perfect facsimile, but anything else gets very complex, very fast.

dZ.

Nah, sometimes I load a game for this reason (if I saved in the right moment obviously), but it’s not convenient at all. Some games provide dialogue logs and to me that’s the second best thing. If rewind is too complex I’d go with logs.

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A streaming text dialog log is an interesting idea.

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Please keep a possibility to fully fast skip the text. Recently I had the ‘problem’ I was curious about a puzzle somewhere in the game but had no savefile before this puzzle. So I restarted and played until then quickly. This I wouldnt do if there is too much delay.

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I think one shouldn’t force players how to play a game. Or a person how to consume a product. If that would be possible, people wouldn’t watch blockbuster movies on tiny smartphone screens with cheap headphones, or turn to the last page of a book to read the ending first.

Please don’t force them to anything. If they’re to skip a line, let them. Restrictions only hurt the people that love the game (like me).

It’s an interesting problem. If someone fast forwards through a movie, they don’t blame the movie or the film maker when they miss important plot points. But that’s not true for games. Players will skip cut-scenes and power through dialog, then turn around and bitch about the game. I’ve seen this first hand. I saw this with one of our play testers. He powered through all the dialog, then during the debrief, he complains that stuff didn’t make sense. I don’t think he really even understood what he was doing. It was 100% natural. I wonder if video games have traditionally had such bad writing and dialog (and it’s typically not that important), that we’ve trained players to feel OK about skipping it. Games are also interactive, so players are required to be messing with the game, so skipping dialog feels OK.

I don’t know if there is a good solution to this. It’s frustrating because, as a designer, I feel like I have to compromise the game to handle people who skip dialog.

If I were to add something that slowed down skipping, there would always be a power-users option to disable it. I would also only add this to mobile, due to some very specific constraints for that plat form and audio.

I had dinner with a designer friend last night who makes primarily mobile games (and really successful ones), and he said that 70% of their players don’t even have audio on while playing.

His games are very casual, so I imagine that TWP won’t be as high, but there is still going to be a large number of people that will see text only, and that encourages skipping.

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Maybe there is nothing to solve. People might slowly understand that these games use dialogues as a necessary feature to understand what happens and to progress. Those who are OK with reading/listening carefully might feel inclined to purchase these games while those who don’t want to pay attention to dialogues will probably ignore text/dialog-based adventure games. In this way, you keep developing the games that you love and let the customers self-select themselves.

A different solution might be to tell stories without using many texts or dialogues, like Amanita Design does.

That’s not for me, I love writing and dialog. Again, I feel like I have to compromise for people who don’t pay attention. But as you said, maybe it’s not a problem.

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Then just don´t do that. There is a fine line between making the experience wholesome for as many people as possible and watering something down in order to appeal to the lowest common denominator. In the end no one is satisfied. I get where you´re comming from and I like the attitude but I hope you don´t overdo it.

So I absolutly agree with this

Maybe the people with the shortest attention spans just aren´t the right audience in the first place.

I wish life was this simple. :slight_smile: Unfortunately, you have to deal with customer and journalist reviews. Those really do affect sales. While you don’t have to (and shouldn’t) pander to them, you also can’t completely ignore them, this is often a grain of truth in there.

TWP got dinged for not having a hint system. It cost us some real review scores. Since adding one, we’ve seen a very positive response from users (via the support channels). It’s hard to know if this has help sales, but the hint system is going to be very important for mobile users, and they are also who I worry the most about skipping dialog.

I don’t want to make hasty decisions or ham fisted solutions, but I also don’t want to ignore the issues. I think it’s worth the brain-space to try and figure out.

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