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sometimes I feel really improverished by my sub-par visualization skills. I'm trying to visualize a thing where like... you're an agent trying to shoot your shot – like one of those old 2d video games, where you're a spaceship that can shoot and move in any direction https://t.co/q0sZOCTbzo
Right – turns out what I'm looking for are examples of "twin stick shooters" – games that require you to use one stick to move, and another stick to reorient. Here's Beacon, which is one such game. I've been thinking about this a lot while helping my wife get better at FPS games https://t.co/boaxXKTphZ
technically you could say that FPS games are "twin stick shooters", except that if you're playing on the PC, you use WASD for movement. There are different degrees of complexity. Older games were simpler. Wolf3D, for eg, was all "ground level", you never had to aim up or down https://t.co/KBfTobTjLc
If you're completely new to video games, and you're overwhelmed by the sights and sounds and options in the latest ones, it probably actually makes a lot of sense to play some really old games first. Pong is probably the simplest game to learn, and it trains your attention https://t.co/kw7oY7J9Ux
The original Prince of Persia is another great game for developing your most fundamental skills as a gamer. There are only 3 "floors" in every screen. You might die a bunch of times, but you learn by tinkering and messing around. This is real learning-by-playing that gamers do https://t.co/h3LuQV579j
When you watch something like this, even if you're a moderately experienced gamer, it can look ridiculous; post-human sorcery. But it's really the same fundamental skills – moving into space, pointing and shooting, anticipating, reacting https://t.co/n7l2pqiK7r
I discovered a game on Steam called Planetary Dustoff, made by a small Swedish game dev @rymdfall. It looks really beautiful to me – it seems easy to play, & it's intuitive. Maybe not 100% beginner-friendly, but definitely a game that teaches you to be a better gamer as you play https://t.co/e653YZLfuX
Here's the 1st boss fight. See out how it teaches you to use cover. It doesn't explicitly tell you this, but you'll figure it out naturally once you notice the boss's shots don't go through walls. Beginner might die a couple of times but it'll be very rewarding when you solve it https://t.co/jwxYRPSF78
I got here because I was thinking about trying to visualize ideaspace as a twin stick shooter environment – but rather than trying to go around killing things, the challenge is to find "openings" when you're surrounded by rings of debris. Here's Asteroids, from 1979 https://t.co/1HXzUxpWLg
"Slicing the pie" is a concept that I appreciated intuitively from years of experience, but had to explicitly learn to teach my wife because I couldn't understand why she wasn't doing it. (Once you get it, the behavior sticks, because it's so "obvious".) https://t.co/Jwzk1YEm3R https://t.co/viPEgrbPYQ
