A design retrospective by @schonstal
A BRUTAL RACE ON A DEMONIC SPEEDWAY
The goal of this project was to make something that feels fast. You don't move, you teleport. You don't fire a bullet, you fire a laser beam (that instantly hits everything in your path).
Every moment that passes, the ship's energy builds and the boost gets faster and faster, until you reach overwhelming speed: the walls scroll so fast you can't see the details anymore, the screen shakes, and you have just barely enough time to processs what's coming ahead. The only way to slow down is to fire your massive laser beam, destroying everything in your path while potentially sacrificing your ability to make it to the next checkpoint before time runs out.
Taking the Rhythm out of Rhythm Games
I used to play Dance Dance Revolution pretty seriously, and one thing that I've always liked about DDR (and rhythm games in general) is sight-reading. You learn to master the patterns and then you react to them almost on instinct, using the rhythm as a guiding tool for when you need to press the button. You're reading ahead and deciding what to do in advance, and then executing that plan. This is something I love in games of skill of all kinds, but rhythm games wear this on their sleeves.
But this isn't a rhythm game. This is a game about speed. It's about acceleration and avoiding fast moving objects. You can't exactly tie that to a rhythm and get what we wanted out of it. It could be done, but that's not what we set out to build.
So we turned the rhythm game on its head. There's no rhythm in this game, instead those patterns become a track. And instead of pressing it on time, you're avoiding it, at any time you please; this forms into something that's like a highly-regular race track, a readable series of obstacles to dodge with a discrete set of places you can be. It's
something that can be intense and fast, but also readable, executable, and masterable.
Finding Challenge
This removal of rhythm was not free. Without that demand for precision, it doesn't take much mastery before you can relatively easily work through the game without much effort, since you don't have to focus on hitting that one note in that one exact spot at exactly the right time. And simply adding more obstacles wasn't satisfying--the demand of mastery of this unusual control scheme was too much, and it made the play experience frustrating.
But we wanted the game to feel more dynamic, anyway. This wasn't meant to be a rhythm game. It's an action racing game. So the question became: how do we add decision-making and more dynamic engagement to the game?
The solution we eventually found was to add a boss. Now you have one more step to your planning: you're looking ahead and have to think about where you need to be in 5 steps but also have a backup plan if you think the boss is going to fire. Suddenly you have to think about all these possible options, and those wide open spaces add depth to the game instead of leaving it hollow.
Empowering the Player, Enabling Greed
I've never been a huge fan of difficulty selectors. They're a necessity in some cases (DDR would be terrible if it was stuck on Heavy), but one thing they often do is create a world that feels like it's ushering in the player's success. Regardless of if this is what you're game is setting out to deliver, if you want a world that feels like a real, hostile place, even as over-the-top as this game is, I always want to find a way around having something that feels like omnipotent control over the difficulty of the game.
But in this case, there's an obvious factor: speed. The more you have, the worse it is (hey, that's the theme). So you can just reduce your speed, and the game gets easier!
But I also wanted to encourage the player to take risks. To get greedy. To overstep their bounds and be punished for it (or to be rewarded for it).
So we added two things:
- A dynamic "make the game easier" button (the laser).
- A timer that counts down, ending the race when it's at 0.
These two things work together to create the effect we were looking for: you can both slow down your speed and clear enemies out of the way using your laser beam, making the game easier in the near term, but ultimately costing you time as you won't make it to the checkpoint fast enough to fully replenish your time stores. This won't matter much for a new player (they wouldn't make it too far anyway), so they can use the laser fairly liberally, but a skilled player may attempt to use the beam as little as possible, trying to bank up precious seconds for when things end up getting dicey and they need to grind to a halt.
Feelings
Ultimately, this wall put together to create a feel, and in that sense, I think it was a success. We didn't work with our usual music collaborator this time and we didn't wind up having time to mess around with writing our own music and sound effects, so it feels like it could have been much more with audio. But I am satisfied with it as a game jam project, and I'm looking forward to hearing everyone's feedback!
https://github.com/mally1mk/the-tale-of-Mr.-Diggins-LD40
I'm trying to forbid Parkour in the mall but they are still doing it :(
https://github.com/mally1mk/the-tale-of-Mr.-Diggins-LD40
https://github.com/mally1mk/the-tale-of-Mr.-Diggins-LD40
I saw some players comment things like 'UI doesn't scale', 'I don't see text on the cards', 'I always win when I press attack though I don't have any cards on the table' and so on.
It's the first LD i really focused on gameplay and hopefully it feels good!
And you can try yourself in beating me in the leaderboard!
But I even failed to include already drawn and ready set of heavy armor animations:
The conclusion: Do scope down after you scoped down. And do it again if you run into any troubles in the process.
