Any way to rewind?

[inspiral66]

@idolon, that's a considered bit of math there, but I think we need to take into account that making a player replay those earlier difficult section makes him or her a better player, so something that once felt incredibly hard to begin with becomes almost second nature. Thus, as we progress and unlock levels, the game's designers can assume the player has reached a certain standard of ability and create subsequent levels accordingly. Of course we all have our limitations. i.e. if I compare myself to some of my friends I'm better than C but nowhere near as good as A. Having said that, I am in favour of a checkpoint system. A simple checkpoint - one per level - would make the game accessible to more people. And surely that's a good thing?

[Idolon]

The math isn't exact, but the point still stands: any form of checkpoint/save will reduce frustration more than it reduces difficulty, and that in my mind is an improvement.

[peter tron]

look, i've read through this thread and i have taken in both sides.

i myself am in favour of some form of quicksave/checkpoint system.
anything, one per level, having to earn it, anything!
something needs to be there.

what winds me up is when others that oppose checkpoints/quicksaves somehow think that they make the game easier.

how is that even possible?
i mean, really think about that!

i have also noticed that those in opposition seem to be completely ignoring the fact that some people have VARYING DEGREES OF SKILL.

this is called being human, it is quite normal.

if you had a checkpoint before a nasty 'pixel perfect' jump, it wouldn't suddenly reduce the difficulty, would it?
it would still be as hard as it was before.

i don't feel having to go back to the beginning to replay all the other traps/puzzles that you know off by heart and could do blindfolded is helping to improve your skill to deal with the impending difficult section.

it's tedious-you know how to do it-WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN??

look, it's a no-brainer:

checkpoints/quicksaves CANNOT make a game easier, but they do make a game more bearable when having to deal with a tough section.
a player should not be penalised by being made to go back to the beginning, just because they don't possess the same skill set as those "elitists".

it's not the difficulty that's the real problem, it's the tedium of repetition.

oh yeah, i grew up in the early 80's when games were really tough. no quicksaves then, hah!

what i'm saying is:

i knew what it was like then, so elitists should respect my background.
i survived through the 80's gaming culture, and i don't wish to go back to those stressful, turbulent times of ridiculous playability factors and non loading multi-load levels due to misaligned azimuth heads on yer spectrum 48k cassette recorder!!!

(of course, there was LOADS of good times too, don't get me wrong!)

[inspiral66]

Well said.

[peter tron]

i mean, really. somebody's got to tell these arrogant people.

[Vyrastas]

Originally Posted by peter tron

look, i've read through this thread and i have taken in both sides.

i myself am in favour of some form of quicksave/checkpoint system.
anything, one per level, having to earn it, anything!
something needs to be there.

what winds me up is when others that oppose checkpoints/quicksaves somehow think that they make the game easier.

Took the words out of my mouth. I just started playing this game recently, and once I got a goodly way into it, kept thinking there should be some kind of checkpoint or 1-2 move rewind or something. Redoing everything because you're short one block at the end is not fun or challenging. It's just a waste of time. The argument that a checkpoint/rewind makes the game easier holds no water. It's still just as hard. Adding that feature just removes some of the repetition that some of us find pointless. The repetition doesn't make you a better gamer, you're not building up FPS skills or hand/eye coordination or muscle memory... you're just mindlessly placing puzzle blocks that you've memorized positions for.

I grew up gaming in the 80s too. I love a challenge as much as anyone and when I like a game I go the extra mile to master it. This is a decent game and I like the puzzles, but the repetition of trial and error here is just not fun, regardless of the challenge.

[k4ever]

Originally Posted by inspiral66

Gaming has changed enormously over the past two decades. I can remember the days when you loaded games from a cassette and had three lives to complete it. Saves? What are those? And they were expensive. I could only afford a new game on my pocket money once a month! And if you got stuck you had to hope one of the few gaming mags would publish a walkthrough.

*sighs* Those were the bad old days!

Thankfully we now have saves, quicksaves, checkpoints, we have regular updates and patches, and walkthroughs on YouTube. The gaming community no longer comprises teenage diehards and we can buy our games for a couple of quid and then have it squirted down the phone lines to our computers. This is all for the better. In no way is this worse. Blocks That Matter is an exceptionally good puzzle platformer and I've recommended it to lots of people, but even I wonder why the devs are holding out against installing a checkpoint system when so many want it. If it's because the coding would be a nightmare or cause problems on some PCs, I can sympathise. But if it's because they think the game will be less pure or somehow less honest to its roots, i.e. block games from the 80s and 90s, then I think they're making a mistake. It's not about spponfeeding gamers and making things easy, it's about opening games up to everyone.

Originally Posted by Idolon

Here's something about level design I wanted to bring up.

With every danger, the player will either pass or fail. Suppose upon every failure the level is reset for simplicity's sake. There is a probability for each danger: For x number of times that the player tries, how many times will they pass? This probability would be shown as a fraction:

__Pass__
Attempts

For example, if the player will theoretically fail for every time they pass, it would be 1/2, or 50%. Now, why do I bring this up? This can be used to calculate the overall difficulty of a level (as compared to others).

Suppose you find the pass/attempt ratio of every danger. If you take all of these fractions and multiply them together, you will get the theoretical probability of the player passing the level. For example, a level that has a danger with a 1/2 chance of passing, a danger with a 1/3 chance of passing, and a danger with a 3/4 chance of passing. The level will have a 1/8 chance of being passed. This means you can expect your player in a perfect world to fail 7 times before passing in this particular level. In the real world, players will obviously fail more or less times than this, but this gives us an approximate figure.

Now, here is another example. Suppose this is a list of pass/attempt ratios of each danger in the level.

1/8
3/10
2/7
5/11
1/20

This would be a very, very difficult level. The chances of passing are 3/12320, meaning you can expect the average player to fail in excess of 4100 times before succeeding, and therefore should probably never ever be made. I'm just using this extreme example to make a point.

Now, what effect would a checkpoint have on this level? Let's say we stuck it in here:

1/8
3/10
2/7
=CHECKPOINT=
5/11
1/20

Now let's separate the level into two groups: pre-checkpoint and post-checkpoint. The chance of passing the pre-checkpoint portion is 3/280, or about 92 failures per pass. The chance of passing the post-checkpoint portion are 1/44. Since the post-checkpoint portion does not depend on the first portion's passing for every trial, we can simply add the number of approximate failures of each portion to get our total probability of passing the level. As a result, we can expect the player to fail ~136 times before passing, as opposed to the original ~4100.

Now, let's suppose each trial of the level took 10 seconds. 136 failures * 10 seconds = 1360 seconds, or 22m 40s. 4100 failures * 10 seconds = 41000, or 11h 23m 20s. This is a difference of 11h 40s. Note that these calculations do not take into account trials that do not reset on failure, or the fact that trials will have different lengths of time.

I hope you can see why a checkpoint would be a good idea in this case. Checkpoints aren't always a good idea, but they generally lower the frustration much more than they lower the actual difficulty.

Also, be sure to check my math.

Originally Posted by peter tron

look, i've read through this thread and i have taken in both sides.

i myself am in favour of some form of quicksave/checkpoint system.
anything, one per level, having to earn it, anything!
something needs to be there.

what winds me up is when others that oppose checkpoints/quicksaves somehow think that they make the game easier.

how is that even possible?
i mean, really think about that!

i have also noticed that those in opposition seem to be completely ignoring the fact that some people have VARYING DEGREES OF SKILL.

this is called being human, it is quite normal.

if you had a checkpoint before a nasty 'pixel perfect' jump, it wouldn't suddenly reduce the difficulty, would it?
it would still be as hard as it was before.

i don't feel having to go back to the beginning to replay all the other traps/puzzles that you know off by heart and could do blindfolded is helping to improve your skill to deal with the impending difficult section.

it's tedious-you know how to do it-WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN??

look, it's a no-brainer:

checkpoints/quicksaves CANNOT make a game easier, but they do make a game more bearable when having to deal with a tough section.
a player should not be penalised by being made to go back to the beginning, just because they don't possess the same skill set as those "elitists".

it's not the difficulty that's the real problem, it's the tedium of repetition.

oh yeah, i grew up in the early 80's when games were really tough. no quicksaves then, hah!

what i'm saying is:

i knew what it was like then, so elitists should respect my background.
i survived through the 80's gaming culture, and i don't wish to go back to those stressful, turbulent times of ridiculous playability factors and non loading multi-load levels due to misaligned azimuth heads on yer spectrum 48k cassette recorder!!!

(of course, there was LOADS of good times too, don't get me wrong!)

Nuff said! lol

Actually, I would like to put my 2 cents regarding the "hardcore gaming community". Im 32 and have been playing videogames since my cousin got his atari 130XE, and then after my cheap dad bought me an atari 2600, while my neighbour was already playing in his godly NES. From that time, till the PS1 came out, one didnt have too many great games released all at once every month. I was a kid and had all the time in the world to play videogames AND to go through all those excruciating, stressful game segments where one error you made got you killed, and either it was game over, or you will have to replay the whole level again. Now not only I dont have that available time to play games since I have a family, a job, etc ... BUT theres also hundreds of games out there that are really good ( the so called INDIE boom ). Why would I spend hours and hours on a game trying to finish a couple of levels, when I could have played another game and finished the whole thing in the same time? When I was a kid I wanted to finish all my games 100% and it didnt matter if I wasnt having fun playing it trying to achieve that. Now I want to have fun everytime I play a game, so by not adding a checkpoint feature in BTM the devs are just being somehow hard on people like myself.

The thing is that I like myself to be challenged and still have a lil bit of that 80s kid in myself that make me push myself into a difficult portion of the game in order to complete it and feel good about it .... thats my reward. Others may not feel that way and may opt to stop playing the game. I understand their point of view and somehow include myself in that group. I already made a thread about how I love this game, but its just this checkpoint issue that stopped me for giving this game a perfect score.

[Waypoint]

Eh. Toki Tori's puzzle system was designed around "can't take it back" mechanics. The tools were unrecoverable, you had one chance to freeze monsters in place down to half-block accuracy, monsters had to be beaten to key points before they blocked you off and manipulated around tricky obstacles, and levels tended to be longer.

BTM's system is already lenient as hell. You usually have an overabundance of resources, almost all misplaced blocks can be reclaimed without trouble so long as you exercise a modicum of foresight, monsters are rarely more than a mild annoyance, the few times you need to move them around they err on the side of status quo and don't walk off edges, Extreme Temperature was about the only really difficult platforming test in the game, and most of the trickier "you have one shot" timing gimmicks are in short levels. A rewind just isn't worth the trouble to implement.

The other thing about rewind/checkpoint systems is that the game tends to be normalized around its extensive use. Like, every time. Toki Tori was aggressive and brutal in how many ways you could blow it. Modern FPSes are designed around thirty-second chunks that you're barely mechanically capable of passing on an individual basis with perfect aim, extensive foreknowledge of enemy positions and scripting, and a tailwind of luck to boot. BTM was a really relaxed game that generally speaking wasn't really trying to eat your face, even when you were being chased by a giant slime that was trying to eat your face. The levels were designed to be reasonable to go through in one go. I get the feeling if they included a rewind, the latter half of the game would've looked a lot more like Extreme Temperature; and while it was fun as a one-off optional bout of masochism, we really didn't need a game's worth of it.

[Shad0WeN]

^^ I agree that a rewind system is not critical in the base game, however a few of the community made levels I tried were big and could have used it.