Exploring Day & Night Cycles in Video Games
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- Опубликовано: 8 сен 2024
- The ultimate guide to day and night cycles in video games (MOSTLY) RPGs!
We go over everything from real-time game clocks, timescales, story-based progression, and map toggles.
How & why designers use them and the plethora of strengths and weaknesses that they bring!
/ gamedesignfoundry
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Hey, all I appreciate you taking the time to check out the video! Hope you enjoyed it! I asked you all for a comment so I'll start! For me, it was Dying Light! The game builds itself so well around its day and night cycle, the entire narrative is a story of overcoming darkness and eventually thriving within it! Excited to see how the sequel handles this!
i like when a game has an actually dark night where u need light to see
Sonic Spyro and Rayman deserve Day to Night Cycles without the loading screens and levels already dark.
We need them having rain thunder lightning and blizzards used in their locations in their games too like RPGs do.
These would make The Sonic Series The Spyro Series and The Rayman Series feel cooler and better and more alive.
Would be interesting to see a game try to have the literal storytelling tied to the day and night cycle. Like chapter 1 is day 1. Chapter 2 is night 1 and so on. Don't know exactly what it would do but definitely an interesting idea.
That would be interesting! Trying to think if I’ve played something like that but drawing blanks at the moment!
Hmmm.... I can't recall playing or knowing such game. Plants vs Zombies has day and night cycle but it's stage based. No interesting story there. Devil Survivor series have day and night cycle but its chapters are divided by rule 1 day = 1 chapter.
@@DarkBloodbane yeah! The closest thing I can think of are things like Oregon trail and Banner Saga that measure travel by days and thus plot points. But of course the player can go faster/slower bu camping and choices they make so not an exact 1 to 1! Plants vs zombies is an interesting one!
Majora’s mask
Sonic Unleashed
House flipper seams like it could fit in to both Time Scale and Real Time game clock, because the default is the in game time which is faster than time in real life, but you can also change it to Real Time. I thought you might find this interesting
Your channel is so slept on, this is super interesting to think about!
Thank you so much! Truly appreciate that!!!
Great video man! This was super interesting and unique and you gave hella detail. Yknow me as someone who plays games at all hours of the day/night anyways;) I personally love "Real Time Game Clock" with or without with pause adjustment! Made certain pokemon a little more "rare" when we were kids and those nocturnal pokemon were harder to obtain, which was so cool.
Tysm man!! I can admit those rare encounters as a child and even as an adult are amazing!!
Awesome (and underrated) video man, really helpful!
Thank you so much!
I've known the 1st three system but the last one, thanks for the information :). Might be used on my game someday :).
BTW have you played Secret of Mana 2 (Seiken Densetsu 3) or Sword of Mana? both games have day n night cycle which affect encounters and city status. However their game time progress differently from any of those 4 above. In both games, time progresses after leaving an outdoor area and not tied to story at all. No effect on indoor dungeons AFAIK. Maybe it's similar to Map toggles but neither games have world map.
Have not played any of those titles! Will be sure to check them out! Sounds interesting!
Hey, amazing video! I never thought in depth about how game developers use time, this is great! Could you please tell me which game is on the 5:00 minute mark? Looks beautiful!
Thank you so much! I truly appreciate the kind words! That would be the first game of the Banner Saga trilogy! A beautiful series in its landscapes!
@@GameDesignFoundry found it! Looks gorgeous as you said, thank you!
How would you categorize Deathloop?
One of the few Arkane games I have not had the pleasure of playing yet! Will get back to you as soon as I get a chance to play it!
I like you how I like my coffee, Bold and in my mouth.
Wow your first comment to get through RUclips’s filter, deserves a heart react tbh!
I appreciate you making this video since I was thinking about day/night cycles, and yes it's still (seemingly) the only video on this topic. I kind of view the lineage backwards from how you put it however, with games like Castlevania II: Simon's Quest using a "Time Scale" clock and Dragon Quest 3 having an accelerated cycle based on steps. Then as far as I can tell Pokemon Gold/Silver was the first to synchronize it to real-time with a battery in the cartridge, and then soon enough game consoles would have an easy way to sync to system time, which created a little explosion of synced clock games at the time, with Animal Crossing ending up being the most successful, though Pokemon apparently still uses it.
I think one of the biggest challenges of a synced clock is making it "make sense" in the world, because it adds a lot of potential edge cases. For instance, what happens if you were in the middle of a mission, quit, and come back a month later, and a month has passed in the game? Or even just night/day mechanics like monsters spawning gets complicated if the player can quit and resume at different times of day. So only "peaceful" games or menu-based RPGs seem equipped to handle it, and even then you have to ask how many people actually want that feature these days.
i remember going afk in the tomb raider reboot, waiting for the sun to set only to be met with disappointment. not to say that i didn't enjoy the game though
Yeah such a small feature but one that is always super appreciated!🙏
Darkwood pulled this off better than any game I have experienced in my personal opinion.
extra comment for algo boost