It’s funny how often in Lies of P you see an item or a room and immediately know it’s a trap. You should be able to pick up the pattern after a while, and it really feels like your fault when you fall for a trick that you knew was waiting for you.
This made me think about certain setups and encounters in Memoirium. I believe it is essential to troll the players from time to time. I don’t think I would do it as often as I had experienced on Lies of P, but it is exciting to set up a trap to be sprung.
Personally, as a DM, I like to play up being the villain. I enjoy being their enemy and their shared obstacle to overcome. The invisible trick is the tight-rope walk between challenge and frustration. It’s a constant push and pull I want to be on top of at all times. Too easy and there’s no payoff, too hard can lead players to feel bitter or angry, even if they do achieve their goal.
With that in mind, I recently added more things that would frustrate the player, such as a new annoying enemy type and punishing status effects. Memoirium needs to be a mountain to climb, but not an impossible one.
At this stage, I am also polishing a lot of my earlier work. What this means is that sometimes I am adding extra sound effects where there were none before, or updating the sounds of placeholders. I am not sure how other games do it, but I manually add all the markers for where footstep effects should be.
The attack trace has to be precise or at least LOOK precise to the player. A vital part of this game is having the time to react to attacks and knowing exactly what hurts or kills you. One of the worst feelings in any game is dying and not knowing why. When there is no lesson to be learned, then there is no growth, no progress, and time wasted is a massive frustration I don’t want players to ever feel.
I know a lot of time in Memoirium will be spent learning how to fight a boss. Hopefully, they are challenging enough that most players won’t defeat them on the first try. I also did not want to make bosses that felt like a chore to duel. My goal was to make sure bosses had readable and sometimes predictable attacks. The formula for any boss fight is to study and respond accordingly.
Though I did add an extremely challenging optional boss. I may throw the balance out the window for that one and tune up its difficulty up to 11. We shall see.
GoldenGratus Games 