Essential Polish

[princec]

Side topic to "What Constitutes Polish": what in your opinions are the essential polish items in your games?

Cas :)

[spellcaster]

Well, that's the thing with "polish" - once it's considered essential, it isn't polish anymore ;)

But I'll try it anyway
- Clear menu
- Options allowing me to change keys / joyopad, etc. usage
- (online) Highscores
- Art and Sound fitting the game

[Artinum]

Offline documentation. I *hate* installing a game on my standalone laptop and not being able to read the manual.

It seems to be happening more often these days.

[Anthony Flack]

Consistency. Making sure everything matches, and that everything has the same level of care and detail; whatever that level may be.

[Teq]

Offline documentation. I *hate* installing a game on my standalone laptop and not being able to read the manual.

It seems to be happening more often these days.

Kind of a side note to this - polishing gameplay/interface to make the game intuative enough to play without a manual

[d000hg]

Kind of a side note to this - polishing gameplay/interface to make the game intuative enough to play without a manualI don't want to encourage people to think the manual is an optional part of the game. It just leads to dumb, simplistic games.
Making the game as intuitive as possible is important, but the only way someone can avoid needing the manual is to either have played a similar game - or to have an amazingly good tutorial.

[Anthony Flack]

I don't think any game should ever need a manual. The game itself has all the necessary capabilities to explain all the relevant information in a much more intuitive and convenient form than any manual could hope to do. Tutorials, pop-ups, interactive help... any and all of the above. But don't expect people to read manuals. I haven't looked at one in years.

[papillon]

Manuals as an option can still be much friendlier for those of us who like to read than solely trying to take it in from tooltips on a complex interface.

And yeah, the kind of game I'm talking about above is not usually the kind of game most of us are making. :)

Manuals should be optional in that, barring silly copy protection mechanisms*, you should not HAVE to read the manual in order to play. In a complex RPG, the manual might contain statistical data on different skills and so forth so that the points-cruncher who wants to make the best character possible will definitely benefit from reading the manual, but there should be enough information available in the game itself when choosing skills for a person who doesn't care about making the absolutely optimal character to still make meaningful choices.


* - Yes, I have seen someone still do this in recent years. It wasn't really strict - the thing people generally couldn't figure out without the manual WAS possible to figure out simply from having a decent head for game design and therefore being able to work out where the most likely place for it to be implemented was. However, on the official forums, it would go like this:

"How do I do <thing>?"

"It's in the manual."

"Um... my copy didn't come with a manual!"

*account banned*

[Sharpfish]

I don't want to encourage people to think the manual is an optional part of the game. It just leads to dumb, simplistic games.
Making the game as intuitive as possible is important, but the only way someone can avoid needing the manual is to either have played a similar game - or to have an amazingly good tutorial.

Hmm. Not sure about that. Resident Evil 4 is one of the "best" games in a while (gc) and I haven't even read the manual (apart from a cursory glance to see if there was anything good in it). That is certainly not a dumb or simplistic game.

<edit> actually, in hindsight it probably is a "simplistic game" in that you know what you are supposed to do, unlike maybe "pikmin" for instance. However my point is that a game that doesn't need a manual isn't a bad game or a dumb game by default.

[Gilzu]

I don't think any game should ever need a manual. The game itself has all the necessary capabilities to explain all the relevant information in a much more intuitive and convenient form than any manual could hope to do. Tutorials, pop-ups, interactive help... any and all of the above. But don't expect people to read manuals. I haven't looked at one in years.

I think that a polished game which its interface isn't so intuative, should have an in-game tutorial. Or even better, start with a basic understandable set of rules, and then expand to a higher - much like most RTS games where each game you have the option of commanding more different units thus getting familiar with them.

[PeterM]

I think whether a game needs a manual or not depends heavily on the experience of the target user.

Resident Evil mainly appeals to the 'males who have been playing computer games for years' market, who really don't need manuals for games in general, let alone 3rd person action games.

My girlfriend however would like a manual (or excellent tutorial) for any game which requires more than two buttons to play. Resident Evil is a non-issue for her, since it's not her type of game. She likes Yoshi's Island on the GBA, which in a round about way teaches you how to play as you go.

Almost everybody needs a manual for some games - i.e. complex simulations.

[princec]

Imagine needing a manual to play Hide-and-seek. Yeeech.

Here's a few bits of essential polish I've thought of (and incorporated):

Loading bar
Music and sound effects volume controls
Fullscreen mode option (where applicable obviously)
60fps*
At least one of visual and/or audio feedback on UI button focus, click, and hover
Autosaved games
In-game manual
Every event in the game has a sound effect, no matter how trivial
Antialiased sprites. Games without antialiasing have to be very specially stylised these days to avoid looking shit and outdated.


Cas :)

* Personal feeling is that games running under 60fps are naff

[Teq]

Imagine needing a manual to play Hide-and-seek. Yeeech.

Here's a few bits of essential polish I've thought of (and incorporated):

Loading bar
Music and sound effects volume controls
Fullscreen mode option (where applicable obviously)
60fps*
At least one of visual and/or audio feedback on UI button focus, click, and hover
Autosaved games
In-game manual
Every event in the game has a sound effect, no matter how trivial
Antialiased sprites. Games without antialiasing have to be very specially stylised these days to avoid looking shit and outdated.


Cas :)

* Personal feeling is that games running under 60fps are naff


Agree with most of those, but loading bar?! Surely something a little more engaging than a bar...please? ;)

[princec]

There's the funny thing... "essential" being the essential ingredient. You don't need to do anything fancy at all. Just so long as you indicate progress during the lengthy loading operation it doesn't matter what you do. I like to put the absolute minimum effort into my games, seeing as I've got almost no free time at all to write them.

Cas :)

[PeterM]

On the topic of loading,

I used to hate it when C64 / Amiga games had verbal loading progress reports:

"Loading..."
"Still loading..."
"Nearly there..."
"Just a minute..."
etc

Glad we don't see much of that now. I currently dislike it when games have loading animations which are:

So complicated that they also require loading
Poorly threaded so they jitter while loading (forgivable on PC because of the unpredictable nature of IO speeds and OS activity, but not so much on a console)

[Cartman]

In college my favorite loading screen was one in which there was a little ANSI character guy who danced as it loaded. I don't remember the game(probably sucked) but the loading animation was very entertaining.