Podcast Thread

[Golem]

post yer outlines

[Yourself]

Not unlike Balcube, Splatoon draws a relationship between offense and defense through environment mutability; ink fired from the characters' weapons pools on surfaces to create aligned regions that provide stealth, speed, and refill for allies while slowing and damaging enemies. This mechanical relationship affects both the single-player and multi-player gameplay, so feel free to use examples from both!

- Hi!

Part 1: How ink defines the environment
- Ignoring ink, how does level environment factor into your combat strategy?
- - Offensively? Defensively? Mobility?
- - Piecewise features (ramps, columns, walls...) versus overall architecture (map height and width, routes, dead ends...)

- How does ink redefine this environmental factor?
- - What traits of the landscape does it affect?
- - How are ink regions dependent on architecture, and how are they independent?

Part 2: Inking the environment
- When do you take time to specifically ink the environment?
- - What gameplay goals, short-term or long-term, does this serve?
- - Are specific regions or features more valuable than others to ink?

- How do you approach inking a determined region?
- - Are there firing and movement patterns you find yourself repeating?
- - How do you manage ammo?

Part 3: Enemies and ink
- How do you control enemy ink?
- - What strategies do you use to affect where enemies shoot?

- How do you use ink to control enemies?
- - How does ink affect enemy (player and AI) behavior?
- - When do you choose to shoot the enemy and when do you choose to shoot the environment near them?

Conclusion
- Thanks for playing Splatoon! How's Dave?

[Golem]

When I first read this, I wanted an abstract take-away point. That's not to say I have any idea what one would be, and that's not to say that there isn't one in here, but all of the questions are specific and concrete. I have a hard time immediately linking ink to other games.

But then, when I reflected, I realized Splatoon is a deceptively complex game. Because you can paint almost every surface, most of its complexity comes out through your mechanics (like a Sonic Heroes or something). But then, your own mechanics are easy to grasp, with few complexities in their execution: walk, shoot, jump, squid. Because you can affect most of the environment, your simple mechanics then have relevance to every piece of architecture, giving your simple moveset the complexity of whatever environment you're in. Splatoon uses simple ideas to power complex gameplay. As a result, the game's depth isn't obvious on first glance. These specific questions ground us and give us a good sense of the relationship between simple mechanics and deep gameplay.

I also wonder what it would be like to have a koopa enemy in Splatoon. You could kick it, and it would bounce off walls, leaving paint in its wake.