Firstly, I’d like to say, the feedback from the community has been great. It’s made me really happy to see people enjoying a game I made (which didn’t happen in my last submission). Loads of great comments, which have really made my week better. So I thank you all for that.
Secondly, if you haven’t played it (but want to), you can play it here:
http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=14720
If you haven’t played it, don’t want to play it (but want to see the main mechanic), you can watch some gameplay here (notice how pro I am):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8c7DNfhfSc
What went well
- Weapon controls (main mechanic)
- ‘Juice’ when killing enemies (and levelling up)
- Amount of weapons
- Most comments say the game is addicting and fun
Based on the comments, the best thing about the game is the weapon controls and the satisfaction of killing the enemies. This is especially good for me because the worst thing about my last submission was the controls (and the difficulty). I think people like the weapon controls because they’re a more intuitive take on a stereotypical melee combat game’s weapon controls. There is more of a ‘feeling’ when handling the weapon in the game. Instead of clicking a button and letting the computer control the weapon, the player has to control weapon using the motion of their mouse. I thought that players would control the weapon in the same kind of way but I’ve noticed (on people’s Twitch streams) that they all have different styles, even though there are only 2 kinds of base attacks you can use.
The satisfaction of killing enemies is another thing people like. I think is because of a mixture of 4 different things: The screen shake, the sound, the death graphic and the blood particles. In the past, I would’ve assumed that XP points alone are satisfying enough for the player but it actually isn’t. I think the thing that makes killing the enemies satisfying is basically the feedback from the game. The screen shake makes you feel like your weapon has actually done something, the sound fits nicely with the death graphic (the hole in the enemy’s head) and the blood particles make the death seem more violent (realistic). I added these things after watching a talk about adding ‘juice’ to your game: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy0aCDmgnxg
What went wrong
- When detecting a collision, the game would sometimes skip enemies (for a reason I’ll detail below).
- There wasn’t enough juice in terms of just hitting an enemy and not killing him (sometimes audio is played but only past a certain damage rating).
- Game begins to get boring past a certain point (repetitiveness).
I’m pretty happy that most things people suggested could be improved are mainly bugs. The missing collision detection, for example, is a small bug that could be fixed by adding a little section of code. Repetitiveness, on the other hand, could be solved by adding different variations of enemies and giving them weapons to dual you with. I could have added this but by the time I had updated all of the art, I was so brain dead that I wouldn’t have been able to make any big changes to the game (like duals).
For the lack of juice when hitting an enemy, that was actually something I intentionally caused (which was a bad thing). When I first added the sounds and the camera shake, every time you even poked an enemy, the sound would play and the camera would shake a lot. So I added a threshold value to lower the amount of times the sound would play (the damage inflicted must be higher than the threshold) and I made it so the camera would shake at the amount of damage divided by another number. I made both the numbers too high, which caused the lack of juice. This is a problem I could fix by just changing the value but it’s too late now.
Further development
I won’t be developing the game further as itself, I’m going to steal the combat mechanic and put it into a project of mine. I’ve been trying to think of a way to incorporate combat into it and I think this method would be perfect if I added a few more features like shielding and duelling, including expanding other features such as weapon attributes and how they affect their behaviour. I’m planning to do duelling so that it’ll follow the same idea as the combat in The Colosseum. No clicking, only using swings and stabs. A way I’ve thought of doing this is by implementing weapon velocity and momentum. If the enemy swings his sword at you and you block it, the collision between the two weapons causes a transfer of momentum and causes your weapon to fly off balance, allowing the enemy to stab you when you’re weapon is out of the way (counteracted by a quick block with a shield). Although, this is only an early idea and I’ll prototype a few times before I decide.
Anyway, again, thank you guys for the great feedback. I think this LD has been a success. This game is probably my most fun game even though it’s not technically advanced, just a bit addicting. I’ll be definitely be taking part in LD 29. Can’t wait until the scores come out. My aim is to get a better place than my last game, which shouldn’t be hard because my last game was pretty terrible.
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on Wednesday, December 18th, 2013 at 1:34 pm and is filed under LD #28.
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