The Neuroscience of Game Design

This thread was inspired by a question recently posed on Twitter: "Hey #gamedev, tell me about some brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling." Link Here

The response to that question has had more than a few veteran game designers pop up with surprising tidbits of info that even long-time fans of games were unaware of. For example, the latest Assassin's Creed and Doom titles give players slightly more HP than what actually appears when taking damage that should have been lethal. This is done to help amplify that "fight or flight" moment that occurs in your mind when your character is near death. There's a bunch of other goodies in the twitter feed's replies, but I've picked out some of the better ones for people to see here on TV Tropes:

• In Bioshock, if you would have taken your last HP of damage, you instead were invulnerable for about 1-2 sec so you get more "barely survived" moments.
• After Half-Life 2's internal aiming mechanics determine a shot will miss the player, it looks for something interesting it could hit instead, like an explosive barrel.
• In Mini Metro for Windows and smartphones, the station overcrowding indicator hangs at 100% for two more seconds before you actually lose.
• Not a mechanic per-se, but in Hi Octane the devs simply displayed different stats for vehicles without ever actually changing them under the hood.
• All blizzard games lie about their hit percentages. You can't miss a 50% chance three times in a row - the actual hit chance increases after each miss until it reaches 100%.
• Far Cry 4 deliberately turns down the accuracy and damage of NP Cs the more there are near the player. Helping you feel like a badass. :)

There's even more in-depth examples on this article from Polygon discussing the psychology and techniques behind it.

But what I'm really wondering is: what examples do you fellow Tropers know of or encountered in the games you play?

-Fire Emblem has its infamous "True hit" where when determining whether or not you hit, the game does not roll one, but two dices, and then average them to see if you hit. If you look at the calculations, the further you are from 50% and the more the odds are exaggerated, with a 80% being actually a 92% and a 20% being 8%. Only apply to the hit thing, so the %age of crit are real. Which means a 10% crit has a much higher chance to happen than a 20% hit.

more details here : https://serenesforest.net/general/true-hit/

... But starting with fire Emblem Fates, they changed the way this works. Under 50% chance to hit, the game goes back to only 1 dice roll, which suddenly means <50% hit chance hit a lot more often, and higher than this, they triple the first dice roll, add the second one and then divide the sum by 4. T He concrete result means you still hit more often than with real %ages, but a lot less than with true hit.

So if you go from a fire emblem with true hit to fates/echoes, prepare to have the feeling the RNG wants you dead A LOT.

- Omega Flowey from undertale doesn't actually deal fixed damage, but instead constantly halve your current H Ps, so you spend 80% of the battle visually hanging to life by a few pixels of life even though you actually can take five more hits or so.

Call of Duty campaigns from Modern Warfare to at least Black Ops II always treated RPG's (or equivalents such as Bazookas or Panzershrecks) as a HP to One attack when used against the player by NPC's. Unless you were already sufficiently damaged (pretty much 1 HP in the background) or the rocket in question hit something else that makes lethal damage (like an exploding car), you could take whole rounds to the face and survive. Even Javelin anti-tank missiles in Modern Warfare games would do that if you caught yourself in the blast radius. (Though in most of the Javelin setpieces, you have sufficient allies nearby that if you're caught in the blast, so are they leading to a "Friendly Fire Will Not Be Tolerated!" Non-Standard Game Over.)

And even then I think you could take rocket after rocket after rocket so long as you weren't hit by anything else.

Well, this is clever.

I am very much in favour of lying to players.

I suppose Dynamic Difficulty can count? Spyro 3 and Resi 5, for instance, adjust the difficulty based on how well you're doing. This is probably to give slack to weaker players without hurting their ego, as well as to humble those that are too stronk.

edited 20th Sep '17 4:11:16 PM by PolarPhantom