| A summary of Josh Foreman's Super Adventure Box Design Deep Dive. Posted: 20 Apr 2020 08:22 AM PDT This is a summary of Josh Foreman's Design Deep Dive video for those that didn't want to sit through a 7.5 hour-long video. Level designer points were left out as, in my opinion, wasn't very interesting. Examples: escalation/combination of mechanics introduced to player. Quotes are words used by Josh Foreman. In case you don't know who he is Josh Foreman is the creative director of Super Adventure Box. [GENERAL] Josh Foreman has been at ANET for 15 years. During Josh Foreman's time, the level design and level artists were one department. Josh Foreman originally a level artist before becoming more of a level designer. Jumping Puzzles existing in Guild Wars 2 was Josh Foreman's idea first. Josh went to his immediate superior about the idea and asked what he thought. Everyone seemed on board with it. Josh Foreman was on the team developing the first holidays. Josh Foreman is currently working at a startup company that is well funded, developing a game that lets you make games. Is currently trying to add as many tools as possible to this game: "so people can make their own Super Adventure Boxes" Josh Foreman worked on these maps: Diessa Plateau, Malchor's Leap, Sparkfly Fen, Lornar's Pass, Lion's Arch, Drytop, Silverwastes and many others. He just forgot. Malchor's Leap was the map that was most frustrating to design: "I hated working on that map. That one, the concept art and everything had such grand architectural shapes but nothing that was 'this is a place and this is what this place was for' but the design was like, 'Okay, you go into the temple, okay you go into the village,' but nothing in those props invoked any of those things so it was very frustrating working on those things." When asked if there was anything created that was added to the game due to fan reaction: "It's part of our iteration cycle to see how things are received. We pivot more or less as we went. Season 1 was experimenting so let's try everything and see what people talked about the most, liked the most, praised the most, complained about the least. Literally everything you do you're gonna have some amount of the population complain about it and say that it's bad and in the wrong direction. And you have the double problem that the loudest people are typically the most upset about it so you have this knock-on/doubling effect that it's magnifies the negativity about a thing. Most people are somewhere in the middle and so don't say anything. And then you have the minority who say they love a thing and it's very hard to know how to balance those things. I would say the aggregators of opinion are pretty helpful for that like the Wooden Potato (a popular content creator) types. They don't perfectly represent all players but they are influencers like, 'Hey, this is really cool,' or, 'Hey, this thing did not strike me as good'. They can't direct development but it's definitely useful to hear that stuff. It's a tricky balance and it's impossible to do perfectly. I'm really proud that as a company (ANET) our heart was always to make the best experience that the most fans would like the best. I never had any doubt of that 'cause it's always been in my heart as well so working with people like that was great!" When commenting where players bring up an idea in a public forum and the developers were already developing it: "Someone's asking about that weird issue in video game development where someone (a player) brings up an idea and you were already working on that idea for your game and suddenly feels like, 'Did I steal that idea?' which is why officially game companies can't-- like if you write a letter to a game company and say, 'Here's my idea. do it. Please do it.' They can't be read by the development team but that whole system breaks with the internet 'cause the development team has access to the internet and the internet is full of people saying ??? (inaudible word). I personally, while working at ANET, never ran into a problem or any of the teams that I was working on be like, 'Here's this idea, or a system, or a way to fix a thing,' and we're like, 'Ooop, can't do that now. We'd be legally blah blah blah. The MMO genre in general is so predicated on getting feedback from players and changing according to that feedback. I don't know how that could hold up in court. That's an interesting question. Now I wanna talk to a video game lawyer about that. Is that something that's ever been prosecuted? I don't know." When commenting that developers or employees in companies are given a specific course to communicate on the internet or outside world or they cannot legally speak of behalf of the company: "We definitely implemented that at ANET at some point probably in large part of the mistakes I made over the years that are well publicised. I still have a kind and loving relationship with all the community people that I had to work with while they had to reprimand me. Reprimand is probably the wrong word... tell me better ways to do things. I never had the experience of them shaking a finger in my face and going, 'No! Bad!'. That was never a thing that happened at ANET. But they would definitely explain to me why the things that I was doing was not sustainable in the long run for a company such as ANET to exist." Josh Foreman was featured in several episodes of Extra Play when Dan was in Extra Credits. [SUPER ADVENTURE BOX TRIVIA] Super Adventure Box's UI was the first thing developed like the hearts and the power ups. When presenting the design for Super Adventure Box it was all done in document pages. Looking back he would've wanted to do it in video instead as the pages took hours to complete and was just: "long and spaghetti graphics". All player models, except asura, shrink when entering Super Adventure Box. This was done to make jumping feel right. There were plans to subvert the 'Kidnapped Princess' as the game progressed because Josh Foreman was a "big fat liberal" (A/N: his words, not mine) but worlds 3 and 4 didn't happen so didn't get to do it. Super Adventure Box is a team based game because we're in an MMO which is why all party members need to use the key to open chests. Checkpoints were organs to add to the whimsical theme of Super Adventure Box. During the development of Living World Season 1 they just "threw things at the wall" to see what "living world would end up being". Super Adventure Box came out of this as well in the spirit of "throwing things at the wall." Josh Foreman designed every tribulation mode. When asked about whether dodge-jumping (a feature that lets you dodge and jump simultaneously letting you jump further than you normally would) was required for tribulation: "I think it's not necessary in hard mode if I recall, but I could be wrong about that." Josh Foreman was not asked for any input in any recent additions to Super Adventure Box. Has total trust that the team knows what they're doing: "I was not contracted. That would be kinda.. weird?" When asked if Josh Foreman considered making zones (Super Adventure Box) public instead of dungeons: "That would be weird. We talked about the possibility of an open world SAB at some point...what was the context of it? I don't know if it was an April Fool's event where a whole zone (Tyria) was turned into SAB style. Adventure Super Box inverts and the magical energies of the dragon does something and Queensdale turns into SAB for a day. I think that was one idea being thrown around. Another one was WvW map or something? BUt again, all these ideas run into the same problem which is there is a significant portion of Guild Wars players that just hate everything to do with Super Adventure Box; they hate the way it looks, the way it sounds, they way it plays, they don't want it in their games. I like to make people happy, I don't like to make people sad. But I won't like the feeling that I've imposed this on other people." When asked if an idea has ever been floated for a Super Adventure Box guild hall: "I'm sure we've talked about that at some point. I don't remember... it all comes down, in all game design things, 'What is the resources available to us and what is the bang for the buck?'. It's one of those things where it will appeal to a small faction of people who would be very excited about and most people will be meh about it, and some people will actively be angry about it." When asked what the reason for World 3 and World 4 not getting made in the end: "The reason was simply priority shifting. During season 1 of Living World, everything was unprecedented. It was like, we've made an MMO and we want to keep everyone employed at this point. How do we make enough income from this MMO to keep people employed? Let's explore shall we?! And we all just threw everything at the wall and some of it stuck and some of it didn't. SAB was one of the things that stuck for a little bit then eventually slid down the wall with slime trails behind it and it wasn't enough of an impact to be like, 'Yes, this is a thing that we will always expand on'." When asked how it feels to have massive fan favourites in the franchise: "I don't know that it's a massive fan favourite. It has vocal fans, lol, which I super appreciate. But according to the numbers, when you're crunching the numbers and comparing it to other festivals and stuff it's not the top billing. It's not up there with Halloween and Wintersday." When asked why Super Adventure Box's currency is called baubles: "Two reasons: I wanted something that was very generic and fit the idea of so many games out there. All old games have some kind of collectables whether that's gold coins, or rupees, or stars. So I wanted something that I hadn't heard before but also summarised those. I wanna say the movie Labyrinth where someone mentions baubles. It might be the garbage puppet who's trying to convince Jennefer Conelly to stay in her garbage room who mentions 'have all these baubles!' or something. Or maybe it was the goblin king Hoggle that he had betrayed her for baubles. I don't know, anyway, I just like that word and it literally means what it means... frivolous collectables and it's fun to say!" When asked if Josh Foreman had any influence in Taimi name dropping Moto in Living World episode: Taimi's Game (Ember Bay release): "I'm probably not remembering super accurately, I was working on Living World at the time, I remember conversations about it, I don't remember what part I had in it except-- I'm pretty sure the idea that she was working with someone else to develop that technology was a thing. It was either me or someone else who said, 'That should be Moto. That's the thing, who else does simulations in Guild Wars?'. I think that's how it came about. I think the need for a character like that was aired by a narrative designer at some point and then he just went with the obvious choice for it." Super Adventure Box's aesthetic was based on "old school video games, early 70s to late 90s". The character designs in old school video games were very "hodgepodge" and random so they attempted to mimic that kind of design in Super Adventure Box. It's why Snakes have silly sailor hats and monkeys throwing fruit. The design of Tribulation Mode was heavily inspired by a game called "Cat Mario". Josh Foreman didn't know that there was a genre of games like Cat Mario. Josh Foreman worked really hard and a lot of hours trying to get text boxes above NPC characters. When talking about players picking up objects: "Something we could never fix in Guild Wars 2 was that objects would scale to your size" Josh Foreman wrote the dialogue for shopkeepers. He thought it was funny that the shop keeper would react to you breaking objects in his shop and that the shopkeeper was happy for you to do it. Josh Foreman never wants to make players frustrated in his level designs which is why he was very clear that Tribulation Mode be optional. Did not anticipate that Super Adventure Box was not insulated enough from the MMO systems to prevent this as it: "ended up becoming a grind or a tread mill that made a lot of people felt obligated to do to get their dailies and their rewards." Peter Fries was Josh Foreman's editor for dialogue. Fries cut dialogue that Foreman really wanted because it broke the style guide for Guild Wars 2. An example is adding obvious Princess Bride references but it was too on the nose. The healing item that looks like a box is meant to be a birthday cake. It says "Happy Birthday" on it in Krytan: "I should have made it circular. I was trying to make things as low polygon as possible." There will always be enough keys that drop from creatures to open chests and creatures that drops keys are randomised. When asked about any possibility that Josh Foreman would help with future Super Adventure Box worlds: "Very unlikely. I have a job right now that I really love. It would take an awful lot to get me back into ANET. I don't think they can afford me anymore." When asked about hiding the effect of slowed movement during combat in Super Adventure Box: "There's a lot of jank". When killing all the rabbit creatures in an area you spawn a "bunnado". It's a nod to the chicken storm that happens when you attack chickens in The Legend of Zelda. When adding new worlds Josh Foreman also wanted to add new modes. Infantile mode with world 1. Tribulation mode with world 2. Races with world 3. And some sort of competitive like PvP or team vs team with world 4. Lord Vanquish's Castle in world 4 was going to be heavily inspired by Castlevania. There would've been goblins and graveyards. There were plans to have 3 upgrades for each item. So the sword would've been stick > nunchuck > flame sword. Bombs were bomb > mega bomb > nuclear bomb. Whips were whip > boomerang > Plimpton the Falcon. Plimpton the Falcon is a reference to "George Plimpton's falcon game". The three planned upgrades for the glove was wisdom > courage > power and were inspired by Zelda Triforce: "The first one you get is the Glove of Wisdom and we decided on that one because it was more of a puzzle-y type thing. You push blocks with it. That is represented by the idea of wisdom. The power glove was a fist and it would've been some ultra mega attack of some sort that was required to smash boulders or something along those lines. The Glove of Courage, uh, what was the plan on that one? I honestly don't remember. We hadn't gotten it yet, I think that was in World 3." Josh Foreman considers the Lord Vanquish cages not good boss design. It was a compromise. Foreman wanted sub-bosses between every zone but could not afford new creatures that comes with new models, animations, effects, etc. When asked if the increased length of World 2 was intentional: "It was intentional under the mindset that more is better. I didn't know when we were able to do Worlds 3 and 4, so I kinda just wanted to get everything I could in there and that was a mistake." There was not a lot of cut content for Super Adventure Box: "which is unusual in game development." When brainstorming the Super Adventure Box commercial upon initial release: "It was all about what assets do we have on hand to do it? and we had a Rytlock costume for E3 or something so it was no-brainer. We wanted to use Rytlock. From the meetings that we had, we all agreed we wanted it to feel like a retro late 80s, early 90s game console commercial which is all ridiculous." There was a real-life version that inspired the commercial where something comes through the door and gives something to the kid. The artstyle of Super Adventure Box took over a month to develop. It had to fill certain parameters: the first goal was to invoke old school games aesthetics, and the second was that it could be made fast, and the third was that it did not copy Minecraft's aesthetic: "given the amount of time we had to work with and the amount of assets to create I'm happy with what we've accomplished. It is still very Minecraft-y, but simply having 45 degree angles made a significant difference in my eyes." Super Adventure Box was very close to being cancelled 1 week before launch because the art director Daniel "haaaaated the art. And he is right to hate it. It is terrible art. He grew up in communist Romania. He did not grow up with 8-bit Nintendo games so he has no nostalgia or love for it. He let it go intially, we showed him what we were working on so it wasn't a suprise, and he's like 'okay it's an April Fools Day thing' he's been around for many years, he thought it was a one-off thing, he didn't have an idea how long it was going to last. He wasn't aware that we were going to do more and more of these things. Once he found out he was upset. Moe had a policy where 'if a director of a particular department isn't enthusiastic about a thing we're shipping we shouldn't ship that thing' which is a very sound policy. So when Moe and Daniel were talking about it for the first time it just happened to be a week before launching it and, uh, it was very stressful. Sad times, very intense meetings. Was just a miscommunication, happens all the time in game development. The things that kept Super Adventure Box alive after was that so many people in the studio was so excited about it, like we had made T-shirts and developers were paying their own money to advertise the game they were developing and half the studio ended up buying T-shirts. There was so much cultural momentum at the time that it overruled the policy that directors not enthusiastic about shipping content should not ship it. Mike Z wasn't the producer of Super Adventure Box but he was definitely a huge advocate that helped grease the wheels at the top so that Super Adventure Box survived and became a thing. He also did the Mordremoth battle as well." When asked why Super Adventure Box doesn't have a minimap: "We tried to get one in but we just ran out of time to be able to implement one in an SAB style. We could've had a Guild Wars 2 minimap but it just didn't match the style at all" When asked about whether mounts or gliding would've been added to Super Adventure Box: "That came out well after, uh, we couldn't do anymore development of SAB. But thinking about it now absolutely we'd wanna do that! Final assault on Lord Vanquish's castle on mounts, that'd be amazing! The world 3 boss was going to be a moving platform kind of like the raft in World 2 on a big mine-cart or mine-train sort of thing where the boss was the train and you had to fight your way to the front of it. Having mounts and being able to fly next to the thing would've been the perfect vision for that." When asked whether Foreman anticipated achievements in Super Adventure Box: "Well we knew there was going to be achievements and we had to design those for sure. I feel like we kept having to add more. I don't remember the design process, but I remember sitting around and brainstorming but I do not remember what the impulse was or how the number was decided." When asked about the tech added to Super Adventure Box and how the migration or plans went for expansions and masteries (The question was barely audible and may not be correct): "We were essentially an R&D (research and development) department. It was one of those things where we were trying to get old-school mechanics in there as hard as we could and there was some stuff that was held together by ductape and bubblegum and couldn't be developed further and other things that showed a lot of promise." When asked about if there were plans to expand the Tyria storyline of Super Adventure Box involving Ketto trying to shut Moto down, the hidden Genie with the Konami Code, and is Ketto the inspiration Moto used for Lord Vanquish: "Yes, two of those things. The idea was I wanted to explore this idea of console wars next. And have competing factions of consoles that appeal to different demographics. There's really interesting behind the scenes stuff in the game industry and I kinda wanted to satire that stuff so yeah, it was going to tie into the overall story of Tyria just a little bit! I never wanted to invade Tyria. I never wanted Super Adventure Box stuff out in the real Tyria in any serious way. Maybe once or twice in a quick event and then it would go away. It definitely got out of hand as far as like all the stuff you could take out into Tyria. I know a lot of people don't like that aesthetic invading their world and my personality type is not one to just barge in and say 'yeah well, if you don't like it screw you'. I think game developers in general aren't like that. The point of making a game is to give people pleasurable experiences, right? It's always a balance of competing interests. It's not like there's one right or wrong answer to that, it's tricky. I'm not sure if we walked the line correctly or not." When asked if the current live version of Super Adventure Box is faithful to the original concept or if it changed during development: "It's shockingly close to what I envisioned, and I envisioned two more worlds obviously, haha. I got to handpick the team so I knew exactly the people who had both the skills and the personality and the aesthetic tastes that we-- so we all shared those things so everything was firing on all cylinders. The most strife (in air quotation marks) we had was the character artists always like to put cartoon eyes really close together and I always like to put them really far apart because I like that super derpy look. I did a lot of the initial character models to begin with, and then he would go and do a professional good version of them. And he kept putting the eyes close together and I was like 'no no no! This one-- it's really important that the eyes be derpy on this one!'." When asked if Foreman was the reason for Moto's brief conclusion in Living World season 3 with his holographic chamber: "No, I did not work on that but we talked about what were the plans for future worlds to make sure everything would fit together with that and develop the story further. I know I didn't work on the narrative aspects of it, I designed the narrative aspects of the real world lab of Moto's of competitors because I had this vision for the console wars and the backdoor shenanigans that was going to be going on there, the sabotage and how the game was going to glitch out and subversion of who Mia actually was and all sorts of twists and turns, it was going to be amazing. We'll get there eventually. Actually, I'm not going to talk any specifics about what I hope would happen because obviously new people are at the helm now and I don't want to undermine them and be like 'should've been this way or the original designer wanted it to be this'. All franchises often go through multiple hands and as the new person gets it they need to be able to explore their own vision for it. I'm more than happy to see what cool things they're gonna do with it." When asked what would've happened if Super Adventure Box had not made the cut: "I would've been super sad, lol. We worked super hard for 6 months on that." When commenting on Mia being Moto and that there were easter eggs already: "Yeah, obviously Mia is Moto. The funny thing was gonna be the way it developed his multiple personalities inside the Super Adventure Box because the genie of the box was in there making mischief. Those personalities were going to splinter into different (Foreman takes 3 seconds to think)...I'm not going further on that. Just to say that there were glorious very fun plans." When asked if Foreman would agree to consult if ANET asked: "Oh, of course! All I want to make clear is that whatever they do, whether I'm consulted or not and I don't expect to be because that's not something that typically happens in the gaming industry, the people who are there I've been friends with for a long time and I know they understand SAB and they would do pretty much exactly what I would do." The house numbers in the Super Adventure Box hub is simply a cube with numbers on it rotated in one of four ways. Before any worlds could be developed the design of Super Adventure Box had to be finalised. World 1 only had 2-3 months of development of the 6 month cycle. Since the foundations of Super Adventure Box had been developed already World 2 had a development time of 5 months. Due to the increased development time Josh Foreman got carried away by making World 2 a "Lord of the Rings epic": "Most people were in it for a light and breezy whimsical fun time. But I turned this into a Lord of the Rings epic and its not what it should've been, heh." When asked whether Foreman intentionally placed Tribulation traps in places players would typically try and reach because they were the usual or obvious safe spots: "Yes. The core conceit of that genre of difficulty games is subversion of tropes and expectations. So obviously one of those tropes is 'this is a safe thing' and the inversion of that is 'no that kills me.'. So we picked out the things that were most benign or helpful and make them deadly." The heavy metal covers of Super Adventure Box music, usually played in Tribulation Mode, was composed by a fan (user ItStartsAtDusK). Josh Foreman doesn't remember who brought it to his attention or who's idea it was to add it to the game but he was very receptive to them being added. Josh Foreman had prototyped the final dungeon in Lord Vanquish's castle. It would've looked like the final room in the final old school episode of Twin Peaks. Betty Baubles entire purpose is to inform the player whether they got all the baubles in the zone for an achievement. Moto's mouth being a coin-slot in the continue screen was Josh Foreman's idea. When asked whether designing the base zones or the tribulation mode was more enjoyable: "I would say... in different ways I certainly laughed a lot more designing tribulation mode. I don't want people to get me wrong, when I laugh at tribulation mode I laugh at myself dying over and over again." World 3 was going to be the underground themed world so sparkling pools and waterfalls and crystals, underwater pools, and mines. We were also going to do an underwater zone and playing around with gravity. World 4 was going to be inspired by Castlevania so ghosts, goblins, graveyards, castle and a frankenstein laboratory. [WORLD 1 ZONE 1] Water was added at the beginning levels to inform the player that water was safe. Games that Super Adventure Box pays homage to sometimes have water be dangerous. The water and the fields were expansive in the starting area because it got the most "oohs and ahhs" and it was a good backdrop for the picnic scene. A lot of the early feedback of World 1 Zone 1 involved players getting lost because putting mmo players into an action adventure platformer meant that direction was a challenge. A solution was: "hitting players over the head as obviously as possible with a big pointy hand". The snake enemy projectiles were the first of its kind at the time of Guild Wars 2. Implementing it was a challenge but it allowed its functionality to be used in other game systems. During beta testing a lot of players were very confused on how to get up to to the boss cage: "Beginner players would jump the first ledge and not see an obvious way to go. Then they'd go run around again, come back and do the same thing three or four times and it just wasn't fun. So we'd just put ten hands to point out very specifically how to go." In the shop located on the side of the mountain under the boss cage has a picture book of two people. The first page says "This is Moto" and the second page says "This is Mia who is definitely not Moto in a wig." When you save the shopkeeper from Lord Vanquish what he's really saying is "Oh boy!" [WORLD 1 ZONE 2] The bee-dog miniboss shooting bees when it barks is a reference to Simpsons. Foreman later expands and its an exchange between Mr. Burns and Homer. The idea behind Bee-dogs was that Josh Foreman wanted bees that would lead players to secret areas and Byron Miller was an: "aficionado of a website called beedogs.com that was just pictures of pugs in bee costumes." The shortcut worm was inspired by a game called Kid Niki: "There's a sea serpent where you travel through its body and its a shortcut in the level." It was heavily debated whether to have the inside of the shortcut worm constantly jump the player because it was so janky. The effect is the mushroom applied to the entire worm floor. [WORLD 1 ZONE 3] Josh Foreman's direction for the music in this zone was Castlevania and Metroid. It had to be spooky sounding. The crocodile platforms are a reference to a game called Pitfall on Atari. The harmless animated eyeball stumps along the tree branches are a reference to the movie Labyrinth. In the secret shop behind the acid water fall is another secret shop that sells baubles for baubles. There's also another secret shop in that secret shop that sells furniture coins for guild dectors. The music speed is halved in shops, which is then halved again, then again: "Shopception!" Destroying the cart at the end of the frog boss was a reference to old-style arcade games. [WORLD 2 ZONE 1] In the start of World 2 Zone 1 the hand with a sad face (directing players to a harder route) was the intended way for players to move forward. The hand with a happy face (directing players to an easier route) was added after early testing showed that players were frustrated with the intended path. The raft section of World 1 Zone 1 was the last thing to be developed for the zone. The raft itself does not move in space. The geography around the raft is what moves to give the illusion of the raft moving due to technical reasons. The Hillbilly creatures are inspired by Yosemite Sam from Looney Tunes. The moving logs on the river are a reference to Frogger. The owls that would dive-bomb you to steal a bauble was Josh Foreman's idea and would've had a narrative pay off when you got to the end of the game (world 4). [WORLD 2 ZONE 2] In keeping up with the homage to old school games this zone is the "generic asian-inspired" theme. "Which is problematic for some reasons which I won't get into." The mountainous rock texture was made by Josh Foreman and it was based on the first Contra game: "As a kid, I remember the rocks being soooo realistic! So I wanted to capture that." The arrow traps were originally designed to kill players instantly. The assassins turning into logs upon death was Lisa Davis' idea. It's a reference to Naruto. The Glove of Wisdom upgrade is inspired by Nintendo Power Glove. It also pays homage to Megaman where killing a boss rewards the bosses "cool thing". The name Glove of Wisdom had to have "of" added in as once you get the Glove of Power it would've been a copyright violation of Nintendo's Power Glove. When commenting about the idea of push blocks and using the Glove of Wisdom to move them: "These push blocks were super hard to figure out. In the original inception we were trying to make them where you could push them in any direction you wanted and our engine was not having it. We probably tried 10 different solutions to that. One was making them enemies that were shaped like blocks that would use their AI to travel from one place to another." When commenting on the block that has a push glove symbol but cannot be moved with the Glove of Wisdom: "Yes, Glove of Power! I believe this is Krytan for P and yeah, this (block) was going to be for the Glove of Power after you get to World 4. Eventually you'd be able to get your new Glove of Power and smash through that. I'm pretty sure people have figured out how to glitch through. We put a power-up over there. I don't think it was utilised since then but it was going to be used for something. I cannot remember for sure what it was. I felt like it was an experience bag but that doesn't make sense because we're not using experience. It's been like 7 years since we put it in so do not remember ." The gong puzzle was inspired by Indiana Jone's nightclub scene but the puzzle was too convoluted and difficult and was one of the main reasons for cutting it from the main path and is now an optional section: "But look how cool it is when it works!" When commenting on the amount of self-imposed crunch creating World 2 and dealing with the criticisms upon release: "ANET has a culture that actively discourages crunching, it happens from time to time but we were not one of those studios that has mandatory 60-hour weeks and weekends and holidays. But I was working 36 hours straight, go home and pass out for 12 hours, come back 36 hours straight and I did that for weeks near the end... I had absolutely murdered myself, my physical and emotional state of being was very bad when we launched World 2. And within a couple of hours, I've worked so hard, I'm expecting all this praise and adoration and what I saw the most was people complaining about how long and hard it was and I was devastated... I made the mistake of posting replies too quickly. I don't think it's a mistake to respond to criticism publicly. I've had wonderful engagements that way... and I've cultivated community respect, is that too big of a word? I've cultivated some kind of relationship with the community that I thought was positive and that I thought was worth whatever cost it had on me so I don't regret that I responded to people's criticisms. I regret how fast I did it... and again it comes down to my state at the time. I was completely wiped out physically and emotionally. I said things I regret. I didn't cuss anyone out or anything. It was along the lines of 'you're complaining that I made too much stuff?! I'm incredulous! INCREDULOUS I SAY! but no it wasn't that I made too much stuff, it's just specifically the way that it was packaged, conglomerated, had it been broken up into multiple worlds it would've been closer to fine. I still contend that there's a fundamental problem with adding this amount of difficulty in this kind of game (Super Adventure Box). This game is meant to be whimsical and fun and a nostalgia trip. Super hard difficulty is not what most people wanted out of Super Adventure Box so I kinda just missed the mark on what the core demographic was looking for and that's just something to learn from." When commenting on whether Josh Foreman had any opinions on the shortcuts added to the zone (skipping the gong puzzle as an example): "After the first round of feedback, and after I got enough sleep and came back to it, I was super passionate about cutting everything we needed to cut to make it a nice flowing experience. I want my level design to be great, and it wasn't great so I really wanted to fix it. So the first major shortcuts were added by me at my insistence as soon as possible." [WORLD 2 ZONE 3] When asked about whether it's good design that a progression upgrade for World 2 Zone 3 required a torch that costed 400 baubles and was not purchasable without first buying the bauble purse upgrade that was easily missable: "No. So here's what's happening with the balance of Super Adventure Box-- or kind of the history of what happened is I designed it initially that I'm playing an old-school Nintendo game and in Nintendo games things like that happen all the time. You get to a mystical cave, and there's a wall you can't get through and you have to go back and find the right shop, and talk to the right person at the right time... it's nonsense, it's ridiculous! And it's made to sell 1900-call Nintendo hotline type things right? So yeah not good design at all. What happened was I did a softer version of that originally. The idea was to get to a point where you needed a thing, and in order to get that thing you need another thing and it was such a common trope in old-school games and I wanted to invoke that somehow and maybe I leaned too hard in one direction and so after some feedback we changed it where you could get through that waterfall and so it became like uhm... because the... the initial impulse behind it had not been addressed. It just had a band-aid on it. It just became this weird janky mess. In the secret area filled with Bananas Josh Foreman intended for there to be a miniboss that was a giant banana but had to be cut due to time constraints. The robbers is a tribute to Golden Axe. submitted by /u/rakuanu [link] [comments] |
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/xyyiqsa5j1u41.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/zltexosop1u41.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.imgur.com/wgN6CIz.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/324t9p4l21u41.png){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/by5yo3moa0u41.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/toexhzqbq0u41.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/aozdx5v2v6u41.jpg){kind=link}
No comments:
Post a Comment