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Devlog 62: Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, select, start



@yaomon17: :beer: :gentleman:

Goulven has left the team as a level designer. Best of luck to him in his future endeavours! :coffee:



Hey guys! I thought this week I would share some of the funnier bugs and glitches that have occurred (and been fixed) over the last week. In terms of development however there has been a lots fixes to make the game playable for you guys!




Watch at the end of the line of text... Yep that’s a bug.. Rather ironic if I do say so myself.



Greg





Trev is done until the KickStarter (well, almost).





Gameplay:


So a major improvement this week was the implementation of the gamepad to the game. It made such a huge difference. It was sort of fun this time, I didn’t feel like I was combing through the game for bugs.

I’m feeling excited that every week we’re getting ever closer to having something presentable. Once the background elements are added in, it’ll start to look pro (I think anyway).

I know of a few people who are eager to play this game and have contacted me about it. Hopefully, it’ll live up to their expectations. If it doesn’t, we’ll roll up our sleeves and make the game better.

Reward & Punishment:

Not too recently, I rage quit a game called Viewtiful Joe 2. The game itself is great in my opinion, don’t get me wrong, but something annoyed me enough that I didn’t feel like playing it anymore. So I asked myself what happened and how I could avoid this in my own game.

I think that, even when a player fails, there needs to be some sort of reward for trying. A little something to encourage him or her to keep going and improve the odds of success every time he tries.
Some games do this well.

The Devil May Cry franchise allows you to keep the souls you’ve collected when you die (those souls can be used as currency to buy upgrades). Viewtiful Joe does it too… to a lesser extent however. It doesn’t take very long to buy all of the upgrades and thus collecting V-points (the currency), loses its appeal rather quickly. Muramasa let’s you keep souls too and does Odin Sphere (if I recall correctly).

This means that, even if you fail, you get some incentive to keep going. You don’t restart all over again without getting anything.

This brings to mind the first concept which I think is important:
Even in failure, some sort reward goes a long way to keep motivating the player.

Punishment-wise, I consider insta-death mistakes to be too punitive. In most games, players have health points for a reason, they allow the player to make mistakes while allowing him to keep going.

Why then, does falling down a pit should involve dying instantly? It goes against the logic of the rest of the design of the game. Insta-death mistakes can quickly lead to frustration I find as they feel “unfair” or abusive.
Which brings a second concept to mind:

“Mistakes should be allowed and reasonably punished. Insta-death mistakes can lead to frustration in trying to increase the challenge of a game.”

For instance, I feel the Dark Souls franchise is too abusive in that aspect. Losing *all* of your currency upon death (even if you do have a change to get them back if you make it to your corpse), is something which leads to discouragement and frustration and is not… fun. Even losing half of one’s currency, such as in Dragon Warrior can be disastrous enough as it is, especially in the later stages of a game.

The opposite is not necessarily better however. An abundance of checkpoints and a “save anywhere” option can distill the challenge altogether.

Muramasa while a great action game, could be a lot more punitive. Dying on a stage involves being restarting on the same screen with full health and no penalty whatsoever. If dying has little to no impact, what’s even the point of avoiding death at all. This, in my opinion, is a design choice which discourages challenging players.

Which bring a third concept to mind:
“Progress saving should be far enough in between so that it doesn’t dissipate tension while not being so far as dying leads to too much of a penalty”.


Art-wise, I got started on the "Stage Select" screen:

(the reference should be obvious enough...)



Greg will be in charge of level design from now on.