How do you speed up Scale X Fang?

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

The funny thing about Adrian Veidt is that he's the author's attempt at creating a character smarter than himself. He watches several televisions at once and makes judgements about the people of today and what they want based on what those in Hollywood show them. He is so very impressed with himself, just like his creator, dressing him up in every funny name and stolen idea he can thinnk of. He guesses at things with Hollywood Logic and is usually stated to be correct by his setting. And his evil plot to kill New Yorkers "for the greater good" will backfire as soon as Rorsharch's diary is read by anyone who can put two and two together, or as soon as anyone notices there are no more aliens. The story of Watchmen is contrived for the sake of a moral the author didn't entirely understand, because his idea of deconstructing superheroes was to make them ugly and flawed freaks in a dirty world. In that sense, his "literary masterpiece" shares much with a Family Guy scene where Looney Tunes is "parodied" by making Bugs Bunny into an ugly wife-beating drunk who dies when shot with a gun.

Talking to Rorsharch inspired that therapist guy to understand his viewpoint and choose to do the right thing without being a jerk. Rorsharch is certainly a jerk. I'm not entirely sure if I'm allowed to swear on this site and use language more suitable for that story. He's principled, and he regularly risks his life to save people in this dirty, brutal, disgusting, irrational, dirty world, even though he feels there is no way to change human nature for the better and make a positive difference with your heroic deeds. Funny how Adrian Veidt tries to "make a positive difference" by murdering people in a short-sighted plan that, even if there was no Rorsharch, would still fail as soon as people start to wonder why no more aliens are coming. To understand this, you need to be smarter than Watchmen's intended audience. Watchmen's intended audience were smug out of touch upper-middle class people who sneer with disgust at the working class and dismiss anything they have to say about the world while fantasizing about killing millions for their own imagined "greater good". Watchmen's intended audience was pseudointellectuals, and anyone who saw anything respectable in Rorsharch is hated by Rorsharch's creator. Subsequent trash coasting on the success of a bad story in the right place at the right time to get unreasonably popular and practically single-handedly create the dark age of comic books would go on to try and "clarify" the creator's intended worldview, and how he wanted you to experience this uninspired derivative lazy parody of a genre the author did not really understand at all. He was not the first person to claim there is something "inappropriate" about costumed crimefighting, but I do wish he was the last. "Why doesn't Batman just snap Joker's neck?" is not a witty original observation, and neither is "If Superman was real he would be a horrible person". It's like asking "Why doesn't that Coyote just shoot the Road Runner with a glock?". It rejects the premise and misses the point. Any genre could use the tired cliches of "deconstruction" to draw in more attention, but most genres are above that sort of trend-hopping attention-seeking. I'm glad the world is starting to realize "deconstructing" something is far easier and far less impressive than building something people want to imitate or deconstruct.

Watchmen is not a masterpiece. Watchmen is to the Superhero genre what Drawn Together is to Western Animation.

And anyone who would pick Adrian Veidt as their avatar, the face that represents them on a forum? A smug fool who thinks he knows and understands far more than he does, the embodiment of his creator's narcissism? I would have more respect for a child who picks Lelouch Vi Brittannia as his avatar, or Rick Sanchez, or Wolverine, or Vergil, or Punisher, or any other megacorporate safe "edgy" character meant to appeal to a... well, a very specific category of person who tends to be easily parted from his money. You're not "edgy and different and unique" if you love a character like Walter White or Patrick Bateman, you're susceptible to marketing and you're the target audience of that product no different from someone in the target audience of Kirby using a Kirby avatar. There's nothing wrong with loving the taste of mcdonalds, but if you're going to pretend mcdonalds is high art or represent yourself first and foremost with your love of mcdonalds while trying to act like the mcdonalds clown, or in this case, representing yourself first and foremost with your love of baby's first dark and edgy kid's comic while trying to act like the Ozymandias clown, people aren't obligated to respect that. If being smugly dismissive and wrapping yourself up in layers of irony to shield yourself from critical thought was hard, reddit wouldn't be absolutely full of people doing it. And it is, of course. Expressing love for Adrian Veidt isn't embarassing, but trying to emulate him is. One more time, for the kids in the back... There's nothing wrong with making your avatar an embarassing character, but idealizing him and trying to emulate him without understanding what's reprehensible about him is. Kids don't grow out of this behaviour unless they're told to grow up, and it helps for someone to explain why it's so cringe, so inauthentic and embarassing, so I gave it a go.

I know nobody reads these things, because it is easier to smugly dismiss someone than it is to read what they have to say about your choices and question if they are right about your choices. Anyway, back to the topic at hand.

Nobody asks "How do I skip the puzzles?" when they get into Professor Layton. The answer is obvious, you use a guide with all the answers. However, If that person was told of a cheatcode to make the puzzles skippable, would fans say the game is being "played wrong"? You're not experiencing all of the game. You're choosing to skip them. They would say you're not playing the game how it was meant to be played, by playing it how you want to play it, but would they respect it or hate it? How would fans of Professor Layton say the same to someone who skips cutscenes and only goes through the puzzles. He's here for the gameplay, not the story. Nobody cries "You are ruining the game for yourself" when they ask what the most efficient way to grind in Persona or Fire Emblem is, or when they ask which characters result in the most efficient overall power gains for your army when given infinite grinding time.

However, comparing Scale X Fang to Professor Layton is far too generous of me. I've been too generous the whole time, because I didn't want to come right out and say it. But it will probably benefit the developer hear someone to come right out and say it. Speed Up is a band-aid to make grindy filler content take less time to get through. If it can be sped through, if it doesn't serve an artistic purpose, it's just dead air, empty space, a waste. Your game is not Metroid, empty space is not used for atmosphere. There are ways to use empty space and downtime artistically for a point... Some day, please watch some TED Talks about them. The speed up function minimizes the impact bad design choices have on the player's time with the game and the time he has to spend mindlessly mashing through or backtracking wondering when the next better-designed part will be experienced. It is very easy to respond to "running to the pokemon center and back is just one of many use cases in which the Speed Up button makes the game more convenient to play, I do hope you will listen and understand this" with "Tee hee hee, you are bad at the game! That is the only reason why it would bother you more than me! You are not supposed to run to the Pokemon Center to heal! It is supposed to be a punishment! Scrubquotes, much? Skill issue! Tee hee!". And it is easy because it does not require thought. It does not require self-reflection. It does not require learning more about game design and why people want to play game at their own pace and have their intelligence and time respected. I'll be honest, developer of Scale X Fang... I don't think you have what it takes to make it in the game development industry right now because of your thin skin and smug dismissive attitude. When I get hate mail I ignore it, I don't rip it up and scream "This is why I hate the fanbase and wish I never made anything", though you are wrong to write off what I say as hate mail. I don't hate you. If I did I'd call you a few names and move on with my life. I've been trying to help you this whole time. You're not obligated to respect this but I do wish you understood it. I've been trying to help you see why I am right. Your excuses for removing the speed up button don't make sense under scrutiny because they're not the real reason behind your choice.

Afraid of people missing non-repeatable instructions and getting stuck and bothering you with "where do I go after x"? Make the instructions repeatable, it's not hard and it's not impossible and it's not going to compromise your artistic vision.

Afraid of people grinding too much if you make grinding too quick? Level caps, harsh level caps that pit your Pokemon against stronger Pokemon and challenge the player to make up the difference with his wit.

Afraid of people mashing through combat? Make the combat require preparation before the fight and improvisational skills and strategy during the fight.

Afraid people will mash through the game with the Turbo A button doing all the gameplay for them and the Speed Up button making it faster? Focus more on making art people want to appreciate, and focus less on dictating how it is experienced. Become okay with the people who don't want to appreciate your art the way you want it to be appreciated. I'm sure this sounds to you like an insult. It is not meant that way. I'm sure you'll be more mature once you stop being a teenager. I'm quite embarassed by how I used to behave when I was a teenager, to tell you the truth. It'd be more embarassing if I hadn't grown or changed at all since then, and I doubt I would have grown or changed if people hadn't helped me improve my work with their feedback. But please understand, not even the biggest ego in Hollywood ever tried to make his VHS or DVD tapes stop viewers from skipping scenes or fast forwarding or rewinding. Don't be afraid of people making your game more comfortable to play. Some people have jobs and spouses and kids and IRL hobbies and obligations to loved ones. I garden, you know. And farm. I love it. It's such a soothing experience. I think you should give gardening a go, grow some potatoes if possible, nobody can mess up potatoes, not even a beginner. Eat those potatoes, it'll feel good knowing you made that with your own hands for yourself. When I spend time gardening, or spend time walking, I come out of that better off. That's just some of what all art knows it's competing with. The modern man doesn't have enough time in a day to do everything he wants to do. Trying to do things more efficiently can only go so far. Podcasts while jogging and walking, reading or gaming while resting, music while exercising and farming, slow-cooking meals at home while you're out or preparing many frozen meals at once. There's something called RapidReader that helps you read faster, it's designed to linger on some words more than others to help the brain perceive each word, I love it. It should help you read whatever you want to read. Have you ever downloaded a Game Maker's Toolkit video in MP3 format and listened to it while jogging? This is a huge world full of things to do. Time wasted isn't just time wasted. It's time spent not doing more efficient things.

You should be creating art for you, and you shouldn't care whether some people ruin that for themselves. But if you do care, that's okay. If you plan to go into commercial game development some day, you should. If you do care, you should ask professionals with decades of experience in game design how they solved problems like "players trying to play fast miss stuff and ask me where to go instead of listening to the information and instructions they are given ingame" or "Players choose to mash mindlessly at increased speed instead of playing my game how I want them to play". Pro tip, there's no shame in using alt accounts with randomly generated names to ask industry professionals at r/GameDesign all sorts of questions you'd rather not be seen asking. There are solutions to the "How do I stop people turning their brains off and mashing and grinding, and stop people from wanting to speed this grindy process up" problem that can make Scale X Fang 2: 2 Scales 2 Fangs a better game to play.

I do not expect this to be read and seriously thought about. But hey, I felt like writing it anyway. Maybe it could help someone.

 

[Captain Ahab]

[Wall of Runes]

Your attempt (if that) to psycho-analyse me via my choice of a funny smug face from a comic I happen to have read is cute but ultimately misguided. Nobody cares about your opinion on Watchmen. I chose this because it's a funny smug face that gets under people's skin. Evidently, I succeeded, given that you have gone on *two* separate rants about it. The reason should probably just stay between you and God, maybe Watchmen killed your grandma or something.

As for industry professionals -- I am one. My other professional friends are all laughing at your posts too. You're hopelessly tied up in thinking that you understand game design but have no evident design credits on hobby projects or professional projects, nor do you demonstrate an understanding of Scale x Fang's basic design concept, one that was lifted almost verbatim from a *different* official Pokémon offering. Perhaps you're familiar with the extended explorative excursions offered by Pokémon Legends Arceus? Where going out underprepared will result in your defeat and it's a fairly long-ish walk back to the camp and Jubilife Village?

Your argument's premise, that Scale x Fang features lots of grindy content, is faulty from the start and displays an inherent lack of understanding with regards to how the game is paced. I played through the demo, and never once did I need to actively "grind" outside of one instance of getting a couple levels up on a wild Pokémon I caught a little later than maybe I was supposed to, which took approximately five minutes to do over the span of two trainer battles. Consider that maybe other fangames have conditioned you to "the grind" (which, to be fair, a lot of them do!) and that this mindset has carried over to this new game, deliberately designed and paced to counteract "the grind", has come as a system shock to you? Did you do any introspection whatsoever? Consider that maybe your own position might be incorrect and that ultimately Pokémon as a game was designed to be picked up and played piecemeal and makes numerous concessions? How do you play normal Pokémon games on hardware? DO YOU play normal Pokémon games on hardware?

Perhaps it would benefit you to actually play the game in question instead of typing up these elaborate essays? Or maybe you should be honest about your feelings and say "I like it when I can speedup in Pokémon games" rather than trying to come up with objective reasons to play games beyond their intended boundaries, something 90% of society has had little or no trouble with for over 40 years.

I can only hope whatever bee is in your bonnet gets out eventually dude. Up until right now, I thought you were a funny moron, but now I think you have deeper psychological issues with being told "no".

EDIT: I just noticed you mentioned Game Maker's Toolkit, which is funny, because he spent most of his time not actually making any games. When he did finally make a game, it was a ponderous, buggy, poorly designed and ill-conveyed mess. Experts are able to demonstrate design, not merely *talk* about design. Expertise is self-evident.

 

[Max Elixir]

[more rambling predictably not responding to anyone's arguments in particular and a massive diatribe about watchmen]

sincerely, who asked, jason? you're just talking to yourself at this point and no one is impressed or moved by non-arguments.

I know nobody reads these things, because it is easier to smugly dismiss someone than it is to read what they have to say about your choices and question if they are right about your choices.
[...]
I do not expect this to be read and seriously thought about.

You have still yet to read or respond to a single person's posts in the thread, choosing instead to flail and lash out at the nearest imagined adversary because you can't actually refute anyone's points about a game you haven't played. And the worst part about all of it is that you have rendered your position so radioactive with your horrible argumentation that no one who might actually agree about your position on emulator speedup wants to step up and give their two cents, because they would have to be seen as associated with your inane rants.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

I'm not writing this to impress you, son. Is that what you think this is about? I'm not obligated to respect anyone who isn't going to respect me as a person. I do not care whether I am "outvoted" by one guy and his discord buddies, and I don't care if others are afraid to go disagree with you. I don't care if you feel like blaming me for how most people don't feel like involving themselves in a debate with such a simple and obvious correct answer, and so many people (like, almost enough that you'd need two hands to count them all) unwilling to hear it.

It is my opinion that even though a developer should be able to design whatever he wants and impose his vision for how it should be experienced on the player, a player should also have the freedom to interact with media how they see fit. It's possible to disagree with this opinion without trying to dismiss what I say, deny my worth as a human, or insult me smugly because you think it makes you sound like a clever and respectable person. When I make arguments for a point that sails right over the head of people who want my respect but don't feel like earning it... Well, do you expect me to try to write longer posts you won't read or think about? It's possible to disagree with someone without being just another hater, and without blinding yourself to the possibility that he might be right.

People keep saying in this thread "Are you reading my posts? Are you listening to me?" while not listening to me, but expecting me to listen to them anyway. This could go on forever if we never listened to each other. Fortunately, I'm the bigger man. Yes, I read your posts. All of them. That's why I know you're not only wrong, but coming at the issue from the wrong angle entirely, if you do not see the real issue here. Trying to force your singular vision of how the game should be played onto the player ignores the people who don't wan't that, or can't work with that. Doom Eternal's vision for how the game is played requires playing like Doomguy. Dark Souls's singular vision for how the game is played requires playing the game like it's Dark Souls. These games are up-front about what they are, and there are valuable artistic reasons for dictating the pace of their gameplay. These games were meant for a singular vision respected by their fanbase. However, you've noticed that the choice to remove speed up is not respected by the people who are happy to know there are ways around the anti-speed up measure. Scale X Fang is not Dark Souls and it is not Doom Eternal. Controlling the pace of the game isn't vital to its themes or gameplay fantasy or revolutionary new narrative experience. Playing this game the way it was meant to be played means playing like it's 2004 and you've got all the time in the world to play a GBA game on the GBA at the developer's intended pace, while playing this game the way I want to play it means spending less of my life waiting for it to catch up with me while using the exact same amount of brainpower, and interacting with the game's systems just as much.

Am I listening? Yes. Well, to tell you the truth, I didn't bother with the most recent post from the Ozymandias avatar guy. If it starts with smug dismissal and childish playground-level insults, I doubt it will increase in maturity level in time, though I hope the one who posted it does. Your foolish pitiful attempt (if that) to" blah blah blah... Bruh, trying to "talk adult" and "sound mature" is so inauthentic. Or as the kids say these days, it's cringe. Mad cringe, yo. No cap, fr fr. Even a bad attempt is still an attempt, dismissing what I said as an attempt and then dismissing that with "if that" doesn't even make logical sense. I've struck a nerve, but I don't care about you or your feelings. At my age I've heard more than enough of that pseudointellectual word salad from people who want to sound respectable. But respectable people don't need to put on airs and "sound respectable". Stop trying to sound adult, and listen to more adults so you can work on your impression of one.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand... It is my opinion that even though a developer should be able to design whatever he wants and impose his vision for how it should be experienced on the player, a player should also have the freedom to interact with media how they see fit. It is factually accurate that the question "How can I stop people from speeding through my game without appreciating it?" had a more interesting answer than "Try to stop people from using the speed up function and fail, to the relief of everyone who actually wanted to play some of it while speeding through the bad bits". Excuses for why the speed up had to be removed miss the point. And the point is that there are better solutions to game design questions people have been solving with better solutions for literal decades.

The relief... Shouldn't that tell the developer something? People don't speed up Pokemon games because "ThEy DoN'T wAnT tO aPpReCiAtE aRt AnD jUsT wAnT tO rUsH tHrOuGh To ThE nExT pIeCe Of CoNtEnT". People speed up the parts of Pokemon games that are uninteresting to them because they want to get back to the things in their life that are more important than experiencing the uninteresting parts of Pokemon game at the developer's desired speed. It doesn't matter how many people say "You're just bad" or "You're not listening to me because you don't agree with me yet, but maybe if I insult you again you will". It doesn't matter how many people are wrong.

If the developer could successfully stop people from making the game more convenient to play, it wouldn't make the game better. It wouldn't make the game "more appreciated". It would make fewer people start experiencing the art in the first place. Fewer people would think the game is worth their time at all, if they could not make the game compromise with how much time they are willing to give it.

Excuses were brought up for the fundamentally wrong-headed choice to make the game worse for all of its players (again, the relief of most players when they are told how to undo that choice should say something hard to ignore), and recognized for what they are: Excuses. Mother 3's audio based rhythm game might lose something if it also came with a visual cue, but a visual cue is the only way a deaf person could interact with this mechanic. It is not a good comparison . "But what if people miss something they shouldn't by speeding through text like unrepeatable information"? Make it unmissable, or repeatable. Phoenix Wright did it on the GBA in a game all about comprehending text, so you can (hopefully) comprehend the value in that. There are people who play games for their gameplay and don't care about their story, and people who play games for their story and don't care about their gameplay, and there are some games that respect this even if these are games that weave both narrative and gameplay together. Can you respect people who play games as a form of recreation between moments of a busy life, and not as a means to escape from life for innumerable hours at a time?

I leave you with this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaKdp5N9gtg

Beautiful things can happen when people are allowed to play games at their desired speed.

 

[mgriffin]

Well, do you expect me to try to write longer posts you won't read or think about?

Please write shorter, more focused posts. Your most recent three are long, rambling, difficult to read (although I have read them all), and don't address really any of the non-troll points people have made. Your earlier ones were better.

I certainly don't feel like you responded to anything I wrote—if you disagree, I'd appreciate if you could point out those replies because I have genuinely missed them.

 

[Captain Ahab]

Can you respect people who play games as a form of recreation between moments of a busy life, and not as a means to escape from life for innumerable hours at a time?

I dare you to walk into Game Freak's offices and say this to their design leads

 

[Max Elixir]

[pseudointellectual word salad]

Keep in mind that the discovery of a workaround to antispeedup now only ensures that such a workaround will be snuffed out in future implementations of such a feature. It's not so much a triumph of the poor poor folk who are somehow incapable of playing a video game at normal speed as it is them participating in a bug test, and reporting the bug. And, just so you know, posturing about how wrong everyone is without being able to really explain why is super super transparent.

"You're not listening to me because you don't agree with me yet, but maybe if I insult you again you will"

The purpose of debate with an unreasonable person is rarely to change the mind of your direct opponent so much as it is to plant a seed the mind of observers who are initially opposed to your position.

Please write shorter, more focused posts. Your most recent three are long, rambling, difficult to read (although I have read them all), and don't address really any of the non-troll points people have made. Your earlier ones were better.

I certainly don't feel like you responded to anything I wrote—if you disagree, I'd appreciate if you could point out those replies because I have genuinely missed them.

Unfortunately now that the identity of the thread creator has been made clear to me I can assure you that you will never get your wish. The pointless walls of text being shot into the void will be able to continue, largely fruitlessly (as we have kind of already said everything that needs to be said on the topic), so long as either side continues to reply. But, ultimately, this is to the benefit of those who align with the idea that it's perfectly fine for a creator to restrict how the game they create is played in some manners, especially forms of anticheat. They're never going to reflect on what has been said and form stronger arguments, because it's not something they've demonstrated any ability to really do.

In effect, they're being farmed for content. Arguing against a person whose game design philosophy largely begins and ends at "the customer is always right" and whatever the last four """game design""" video essays he's watched told him to think is so perfect, you would think we were some kind of mastermind cabal inventing a fake person (or AI) to argue with. But it's funny for all parties involved because it's totally genuine. We can't make this up and they aren't able to stop, which is why we're still here having a laugh. Someone could make another thread about it if this one is so thoroughly poisoned that no one wants to jump into the conversation, but they would probably just start posting the same things there if that does happen. We might just be stuck circling the drain where no one wants to join the debate and the useful part of the conversation largely screeches to a halt (though I would argue every post in this thread has been useful in some way so far).

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

This guy!

I bet he still thinks I'm judging him solely by his avatar, and not by how he chooses to present himself.

I don't what people like this think of me.

We are not talking about Game Freak's Pokemon. One developer afraid of not being "appreciated enough" tried to make his game worse to play, and failed, to the relief of everyone who would have never played it if he succeeded. Doesn't matter how hard anyone tries to deflect or spin this.

 

[Captain Ahab]

This guy!

I bet he still thinks I'm judging him solely by his avatar, and not by how he chooses to present himself.

I don't what people like this think of me.

We are not talking about Game Freak's Pokemon. One developer afraid of not being "appreciated enough" tried to make his game worse to play, and failed, to the relief of everyone who would have never played it if he succeeded. Doesn't matter how hard anyone tries to deflect or spin this.

I don't present myself as smarter than you. I am smarter than you. Of course you backpedal now to "Actually, I was talking about...!" despite spending a really, really long time talking about Watchmen for some reason. Anyone with eyes can tell that it was the profile picture that got you worked up; mission accomplished. It made you even more angry than I intended for it to make most people who can't see forests for trees.

Nobody needs to deflect or spin anything. You poisoned your own position so thoroughly with your incessant rambling that not even people who thought you kinda-sorta had a point even bothered to continue the discussion.

You've run out of entertainment value for me so I'm going to go make actual games and design real gameplay for players who play games at normal speeds, gaining valuable insight and experience from the act of doing the thing, instead of simply getting all of my opinions spoon-fed to me by evidently inexperienced grifters on YouTube.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

People are personally attacking me because they want me on the defensive for the entirety of this conversation.

"You're just bad at the game", "You didn't understand anything Josh Strife Hayes said", "You just want to mash without thinking and that's why you want grinding to take less time", "The game is perfect and you're the problem for not appreciating it enough", "You want a convenient game? Tell that to Game Freak!", "You WANT to grind and you're not playing Pokemon correctly if you want everything in your party at an equal level and you're a bad person if you want that process to be fast".

People desperately want me on the defensive because they know they cannot defend the reason this thread exists. If you thought there was something wrong with my understanding of Josh Strife Hayes or game design you'd elaborate after you throw out your playground insult. Or before. Or elaborate instead of hurling insults at me.

The developer is not Game Freak in the early 2000s designing a videogame primarily for children with practically infinite free time and little choice as to what else they could do with their free time. The developer didn't develop his own game for a console that intrinsically lacks speedup, he designed his game for an emulator that intrinsically has speedup and felt his game was "above" that convenience button. The developer is designing a game in his free time and he's welcome to design that however he pleases, however his choice to try to remove speedup hurt his game and most people who played it are glad he failed at this because that failure made the game more playable.

That's the real issue here, and I've been too polite by dancing around the issue, bringing up accessibility, trying to explain why you should be empathetic to people with needs that differ from your own, trying to explain why it's important to understand people. When really, it would have been enough for my original post to say "Not even YIIK tried to prevent players from speeding the game up with Cheat Engine. If this is a marketing tactic to try and make your game controversial, good job being remembered as a developer more narcissistic than the people responsible for YIIK. I hope the developer grows up and makes something better later on so he's remembered in a more flattering light, and when he does I hope he remembers accessibility problems are something that require smart solutions".

"I don't want people to rush through my game, I want people to appreciate it, so... I'll give the game more grind than it needed and try to take away the player's ability to speed through parts of the game that are uninteresting to them such as long monologues, speeding up the menus, grinding, any boring battles, any boring overworld traversal, any boring text, anything they've already seen during a repeat playthrough and don't want to go through again at the normal pace..."

There are many use cases for Speed Up besides rushing through stuff you don't want people rushing through.

It doesn't matter if you say you were afraid of people speeding through text and missing non-repeatable information you could have easily made repeatable, or written a multilingual walkthrough for. It doesn't matter if you say you were afraid of people ruining the music when youtube and bandcamp and soundcloud can play your game's music at normal speed in another window. We know what the actual fear was. "I want to be appreciated so I made my game take longer to get through and tried to make sure they can't speed up any of it" has one answer but I don't think you'll like hearing it. It's this: Brevity is the soul of wit. When people find ways to speed your game up, they improve your game's pacing to a level tolerable for them. They are not "refusing to appreciate the art", they are playing a videogame at a pace comfortable for them. When I say your game isn't Dark Souls or The Last Of Us 2 or whatever, I don't mean to insult you. What I'm trying to explain to you is that because your game isn't making an artistic statement with the grind, there is no justifiable reason for it to be there in the way of getting to the next section of meaningful content. And it doesn't matter if anyone says "there isn't much grind", because what's "too much" is subjective. Grind bars exist to artificially lengthen the time the game takes to complete, because it's easy, and Speed Up reduces the time the game takes to experience by letting you get grind over with easier.

You're not the only creator with an ego, it's quite a common problem for beginners. You will feel better when you learn to emotionally distance yourself from the art you create so you can rationally objectively analyze it and ask yourself what you can improve on next time, and so you can hear criticism of the art without freaking out and calling for your friends to circle the wagons. If someone ruins their experience with the game for themselves, it's up to you whether you want to blame that guy and ignore him or blame the game design that allowed it, but speedup isn't part of the game design, it's something outside the game, a part of the platform your game is played on. It's a solution for archaic game design problems with better solutions. It's like trying to design a single-player fangame to not play nice with Cheat Engine because you're afraid people will speed up the grind too much. Grinding is called grinding because it isn't meaningful gameplay, it's fake progress and for every game where grinding "isn't that bad" there are games without grinding that are better off for it.

If the player can get through content with a blindfold on mashing A with the speed increased, or get through it the exact same way with the speed down, the speed is not the issue. The speed is just what decides how bearable the issue becomes.

One annoying thing about forums is that when they split people up onto various sites and split people on those sites up by category and split them further by topic, it enables a certain type of person to say "Me and all my friends disagree with you, therefore we must clearly be right because you are outvoted and nobody else wants to talk to us and say we're wrong". Gee, I wonder why so many people don't want to be involved in this tiresome conversation, and why so many people don't want to subject themselves to all the blame-slinging and gaslighting coming from the hysterical fanboys. At this point I'm surprised nobody's said "My post count is bigger than yours therefore I win" or threatened to report me for violating vague rules up to interpretation violated several times over by others in this thread not on my side. As a kid, I thought this was a problem that would go away when most people using the internet weren't kids or teenagers any more. Seems some people never grow out of it.

But maybe I'm wrong to say the developer was just afraid of not being appreciated as much as he felt he should be and his ego is the issue that caused him to try to make his game less playable and thankfully fail. Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he really didn't know any better solutions to "How do I stop players from playing my game too fast and missing stuff and ruining my game for themselves?". I'm quite certain that if I asked r/gamedesign for better solutions to the "I don't want my game rushed through, what if they miss stuff or play it wrong?" problem without mentioning the developer or game, people would be able to provide interesting solutions that could improve the game design of Scale X Fang 2: 2 Scales 2 Fangs.

And for the Ozymandias profile picture guy: It's a shame it's impossible to convince you that you're being fairly judged for your embarrassing behaviour, and not unfairly judged exclusively for your embarrassing avatar. But I have no interest in reading more posts from you if they're only going to be full of projection and insults. What do I gain from reading that sewage? You're not writing this for my benefit, you're writing this for you, and you aren't respectable. There are plenty of characters who, for various reasons, aren't respectable choices for profile pictures. I wouldn't bother bringing it up if it was any other character. But Ozymandias is the funniest one I am aware of, because the character is a Rorschach test. If you're in his storybook's target audience he'll appeal to you because the writing tells you he is someone smart to be respected, and if you're in the creator's IQ range he'll appeal to you because his politics align with his creator's, but if you know, you know. If you know why he's wrong, you know. He's an expression of ego, and baby's first idealized self-insert OC with plot armour is the perfect villain for an uninteresting comic book that attempts to deconstruct comic books in the way that Family Guy's writers deconstruct Looney Tunes by writing "And then there's a cutaway gag where Lola Bunny cheats on Bugs Bunny with Daffy Duck who shoots Bugs with a gun and blood go everywhere hahahaha". Its imitators copied the edge and none of the substance because there wasn't really any substance to copy beneath all the edge, observations like "what if the villain just did his evil plan before the hero showed up and what if the villains arent always bad and teh heroes arent always goody two shoeseses" weren't new at the time, the world was just a dark and ugly place full of awful people where the heroes didn't always win. A child's idea of what makes something mature. To compare it to a teenager's dark and edgy Pokemon hack/fangame would be an insult to teenagers making Pokemon romhacks/fangames.

 

[mgriffin]

I don't think you'll like hearing it. It's this: Brevity is the soul of wit.

Excuse me? Hypocritical much?

Also, I don't find Scale x Fang long-winded, nor grindy. But obviously we're past the point of you actually caring whether your criticism of it is valid.

 

[alberto_021200]

"I want to be appreciated so I made my game take longer to get through and tried to make sure they can't speed up any of it"

If this is your dissection of the arguments that have been made so far, then there is no point in even continuing, which is ironic considering I am now replying to this. As someone who's been reading this thread around its inception, you seem to be against arguing any proper points, instead spewing straw-men to knock down inside of your head. Then you get upset when people do not refute your points, but this is impossible because you often shift your points and don't actually faithfully engage with those who have replied to them. LuckyTyphlosion wrote an excellent response to one of your long winded, rambling, barely coherent essays, to which it was promptly ignored. A shame, because it's a fantastic response. One that undoubtedly took a large portion of time to be written, unfairly blown off.

To ring back to the quote in the beginning of my message, if you think a developer taking measures to ensure the game is played at the normal speed is "making it take longer to get through", then I truly have no words. There are thousands and thousands of games, and to even imply that a developer wanting you to experience the work they have made at a normal speed is "making it take longer to get through" is utterly asinine. A game like Fallout is intended to be played at it's normal speed, and if their developers were aware of an external feature allowing it to be sped up that resulted in features and systems becoming obsolete or skipped over, why would the developers not disable it?

Speedup is not an accessibility feature. The same way that infinite rare candies or the ability to spawn Pokemon instantly is not an accessibility feature. It is an external tampering of the game to produce unwanted (on behalf of the developers) results. The ability to change text scroll speed is an accessibility feature. Perhaps external features can be accessibility, but if those external features are an unrequited change of play-style, developers rightfully can (and will) create ways to disable them.

You were told already to write shorter, concise posts where you either refute or create a central point and make a stance clear, but it seems you are completely incapable of doing so, harping back to Watchmen for whatever reason. Instead of randomly attacking someone for something as trivial as a profile picture choice, you would be much wiser to respond to what someone said, rather than making yet more nonsensical equations that rely on unorthodox, poorly defined logic. I would suggest ending the rambling and choosing to play another game. Scale X Fang does not seem designed in mind for you, and no one seems capable of changing your mind, despite the ironic nature of saying the developer has an ego. I do not think you are well versed enough to properly discuss game design choices, yet alone critique others.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

You might think it is justified to make a game grindier than it needs to be, with more filler content than is necessary, and try to take away the player's options to speed up the game or even just the grind. "It has to be done, otherwise people might miss unrepeatable information or ruin how the music sounds for them". You might think it is justified to say "The player has to play the game how I want them to, at my desired pace, otherwise they might ruin their experience with it and not spend enough time appreciating it before moving on to something else".

However, This is problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, it implies that players do not have the ability to make their own judgments about what they find enjoyable in a game. Everyone has different preferences, and what one person finds tedious, another may find enjoyable. Additionally, it suggests that players should be forced to engage in repetitive and grindy gameplay in order to fully appreciate the game, which is not a fair or reasonable expectation to place on players. Furthermore, taking away the player's options for speeding up the game and reducing grind is not a justifiable action. It limits players' freedom and autonomy and goes against the principle of player agency which is an important aspect of the game design. It is not morally justifiable to sacrifice player's agency and enjoyment for the sake of game's appreciation.

It is important to consider the fact that not all players have the same amount of free time or patience. People who have less free time due to their socioeconomic circumstances, such as those who work multiple jobs or have families to care for, may not have the luxury of spending hours grinding through repetitive content. Similarly, people with ADHD may have a shorter attention span and find it more difficult to engage in prolonged periods of repetitive gameplay.

For these players, the option to speed up the game and reduce grind is essential for them to be able to fully enjoy and engage with the game. Without this option, they may be excluded from the gaming experience altogether. It is not fair to these players to limit their ability to enjoy the game based on factors outside of their control. Providing players with the option to speed up the game and reduce grind is a way of accommodating a more inclusive and equitable gaming experience for all players, regardless of their socioeconomic circumstances or whether they have ADHD or not.

The claim that taking away the player's ability to speed up the game is necessary to stop them from missing vital information or ruining the soundtrack is not a valid justification for limiting player agency. Firstly, it is not reasonable to assume that all players will automatically skip through important dialogue or ruin the soundtrack by speeding up the game. Players should be trusted to make their own decisions and use the option to speed up the game responsibly.

Additionally, there are other ways to ensure that players do not miss important information, such as providing summaries or recaps of important dialogue, or allowing players to replay cutscenes. For example, many games have implemented subtitles or closed captions for their cutscenes, so that players can still read the dialogue even if they speed up the cutscenes or miss something. Phoenix Wright is a game all about noticing things in dialogue (and noticing other things, it's a game about a mystery-solving lawyer) and it makes important dialogue repeatable.

As for the soundtrack, the developers could design it to be adaptable to different speeds, or they could give the player an option to turn off the speed up feature while listening to the music. This way the player can still benefit from the speed-up feature while progressing through the game, but still enjoy the soundtrack how it was intended to be.

It's important to remember that players should be given the agency to play the game in the way that they find most enjoyable, and that there are other ways to ensure that they don't miss important information or ruin the soundtrack without taking away that agency.

In summary, taking away the player's ability to speed up the game is not necessary to ensure that they do not miss important information or ruin the soundtrack. You could make important information repeatable, or put the soundtrack on Youtube/Bandcamp so players can enjoy it via a browser while they play the sped up game. There are other ways to achieve this goal while still allowing players the freedom to play the game in the way that they find most enjoyable.

 

[Max Elixir]

You might think it is justified to say "The player has to play the game how I want them to[...]"

Yes, because it is. Games having rules for how they are played is normal. Also please don't try to make "playing a game by its rules" about socioeconomic circumstances. That's embarrassing talk.

While playing Monopoly by yourself in real life you can just cheat and take extra money out of the bank or get do-overs for your dice rolls, because there's no physical or magical force preventing you from doing so. A Monopoly video game not allowing you to simply cheat at will is not wronging you or "taking away agency" in a meaningful way, because what you're used to doing is not within the scope of how the game is designed to be played-- you aren't actually entitled to the agency to engage with a game in ways it is not designed to be engaged with. The same goes for emulator speed up or cheat codes applied to a game by a third party (as in, not inputs built into the game).

If "I can listen to the soundtrack on Youtube or Bandcamp" is your only response to being told you can't do anything you want, maybe "You can watch someone play the game on Youtube if you don't want to play it" is a response to that you would understand.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

Games have rules for how they are played, not how they are experienced. Wait time isn't gameplay, it's filler. Grind isn't gameplay, it's filler. Like the filler in a One Piece episode where they stand about staring at each other for a bit, use flashbacks to remind you of stuff that basically just happened, all the stuff One Pace and Naruto Kai and Dragon Ball Z Kai skipped. Games like Gris and The Longing use tedium to make an artistic point only possible in videogames. Even YIIK, as much as I disliked that game, wanted to make an artistic point by making the bad route where you play the RPG like a RPG to grind up and defeat the final boss bad and the "correct" route where you instakill the final boss by doing something you aren't supposed to "correct".

Your statement suggests that players should be restricted to playing a game only in the way that it is "designed to be played" and that players are not entitled to the agency to engage with a game in ways that it is not designed for. However, this is a narrow and limiting view of what constitutes a "legitimate" way to play a game.

It is important to remember that players have different preferences, abilities, and resources. For some players, being able to speed up the game or use cheat codes or edit their save may be necessary for them to fully enjoy and engage with the game. Restricting players to only playing the game in the way that it is "designed to be played" ignores the fact that players may have different needs and abilities.

Furthermore, this statement is dismissive of the fact that socioeconomic circumstances can play a role in how a player engages with a game. Not all players have the same amount of free time or resources, and limiting the ways in which they can play the game can exclude them from the gaming experience altogether. Some of us have different needs, and meeting these needs is a part of accessible game design. Not all of us are teenagers with infinite free time. You will never matter more to me than my girlfriend. The developer of Scale X Fang will never mean more to me than my girlfriend. The subjective value in playing through all of a game at its intended speed is not worth more to me than the most beautiful woman on the planet, with gorgeous eyes, an adorable laugh, and a huge heart. I love my woman. I love taking my woman places. Some day, when you're all old enough, I hope you all meet good women. They do exist, you just need to be looking in the right places. Come on, guys. How many remakes and ports of old RPGs have speed up? Final Fantasy XII has speed up, for crying out loud.

Additionally, the comparison to cheating in a physical game of Monopoly is not a valid argument, as playing a video game is a fundamentally different experience than playing a physical game. The context and the medium of the game are different, therefore it should be treated differently. Furthermore, Monopoly is a multiplayer game. Cheating to gain an advantage over other players in a multiplayer game without the consent of other players has no relevance to a discussion on whether a fangame developer is justified in trying to take away the player's agency and ability to set the pace of his own adventure due to the fear of not being appreciated. You could compare it to a House Rule in Monopoly designed to make the game better to play through, but you didn't think of that. Monopoly is also a joke game, thank you for outing yourself as someone unironically filtered by a board game that started life as a political joke. The banker can't go Bankrupt in Monopoly, read the rulebook, he is inherently advantaged over all other players as part of the political commentary, insert political commentary about the federal reserve and banks bailed out by big government here, I know there's not much point in me writing that when it'll fly over your head. I'll never understand how y'all can smugly dismiss what I have to say, hurl childish insults at me, and cry foul if I don't walk on eggshells trying to avoid offending you. I can explain these concepts to you all day but if I could understand them for you, we wouldn't be having this conversation. Please, write your posts and then proof-read them. Remember in '08 when banks were deemed "too big to fail" and banks received tax payer funded bailouts, which went to banker executive bonuses? There are things in life more important than whether somebody on the internet thinks you are cool. There are things in life more important than Pokemon. There are things in life more important than whether someone is playing a Pokemon fangame at the intended speed.

Lastly, the statement "if "I can listen to the soundtrack on Youtube or Bandcamp" is your only response to being told you can't do anything you want, maybe "You can watch someone play the game on Youtube if you don't want to play it" is a response to that you would understand" is dismissive and diminishes the value of the player's agency and autonomy in choosing how they want to engage with the game. I can, when playing the game at my desired speed, listen to its soundtrack at the developer's intended speed. This is a silver bullet that destroys your argument. It's a shame that it went over your head. What's the point of a bullet if it goes over someone's head? This isn't a John Woo movie. You'll have to watch some of those when you're old enough, they're masterpieces.

 

[Max Elixir]

This is a silver bullet that destroys your argument. It's a shame that it went over your head. What's the point of a bullet if it goes over someone's head? This isn't a John Woo movie. You'll have to watch some of those when you're old enough, they're masterpieces.

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

I don't know why I should explain the joke when so many other things have gone over people's heads in this thread, but because I am the bigger man, I will continue to try...

The best John Woo movies have a lot of gunfire. The scenery is destroyed. Gunfire goes over the heads of people. And goes past people, misses them in other ways... If you'd like, I could draw a diagram. See, the silver bullet went over your head, like a bullet in a John Woo film, just like the points I made went over your head, and the joke of Monopoly also went over your head. That's the joke. Let me know if you need me to explain another joke, like a joke about your mother sitting around the house.

Monopoly isn't a balanced multiplayer game you'd ruin by cheating at it. It's a game you'd play normally by cheating at it, if you were the banker. I don't think you could find a worse comparison on the planet when trying to smugly dismiss me as someone this game "isn't for". Cheating in a multiplayer game has nothing to do with finding ways to bypass or minimize the grind in a single player game, and it says a lot about you that you'd even try to argue for this. The game isn't inherently discriminatory like a purely audio challenge would discriminate against the deaf or Dark Souls would discriminate against people who can't understand the challenge and rise to it. It's inherently discriminatory against people with better things to do. The game isn't hard, it's tedious. That's not a "challenge to overcome", it's a slog to sit through, and you should ask yourself why so many people are happy to bypass such an artistically worthless piece of the game. "The game doesn't have grind, because I don't think it has too much grind" is inherently contradictory, it's an admission of fault. You know the game has grind, you just wish everyone was willing to spend it on the worst parts of a pokemon fangame. The game is grindier than it needed to be solely because the developer was afraid his game wouldn't be appreciated enough if it didn't waste time to artificially extend its runtime and take away the player's means of speeding up filler. This isn't an artistically valuable choice, it's a sign of weakness of character. The sour grapes attitude of "If you don't love everything about my game it's not for you, people like you make me sick and make me wish I never made anything" is just a red herring used by developers afraid of self-reflection.

Anyone can make art. Nobody is owed praise for making it. Not everyone can make good art. If the developer of Scale X Fang continues his career in game development, I hope he grows up and gets thicker skin. YandereDev responds better to criticism.

Art is art. Saying it's "not for you" isn't a magic spell that gets you out of criticism when people are criticizing the choices you made. And whether you enjoy grinding in RPGs or not, trying to force grind and backtracking onto players and take away their means of minimizing that design choice's negative impact on their life is cringe. Nobody can weasel their way out of this by saying "This problem only affects you because you're bad haha" or "This isn't a problem for me so it's not a problem for anyone" or "This isn't a problem and you're bad if you think it is". It's Pokemon, son. A Pokemon fangame. It's not exactly Elden Ring. Why would anyone be afraid of people skipping the bad parts to improve their overall experience with the game? Then again, I can understand why the developer is afraid of people speeding up all of the game to get it over with faster, because I've played it.

 

[rwbonesy]

why is this thread still going

 

[Captain Ahab]

why is this thread still going

Because no good deed goes unpunished by God

 

[SuperSpyroDragon64]

This conversation won't go anywhere constructive until people understand the difference between sprinting THROUGH The Louvre, and sprinting TO The Louvre.