PART 5: Game Balance and Intuitiveness
Cutting Corners on Essentials
We could assume players will discover all mechanics by the intuitive nature of the game, but not all mechanics are that easy to discover, like drifting and chaining-multipliers.
So instead of coding a separate tutorial and welcome screen, we’ll just have the main game loop how the player how to play the game. But how do we do that?
Recycling what you have can save you a lot of time. In our case we were using an ECS system which makes everything really modular, which is great for recycling.
We already have triggers in the map for the finish line, so instead of player buttons controlling the car, let triggers in the map act as inputs as the tow car drives over them.
Cheap but effective!
No Player is the Same!
While you as a developer might breeze through your game other players haven’t been playing it constantly. If mechanics are hard for /you/, many of your players will struggle.
In our case, high number of colors on screen, or multi-color pit stops are not easy to deal with, so lets copy the difficult map, and make the cars a bit more conveniently placed and preferently mono-colored.
Highscore
We want to give players something to strive for. Since the core loop is score based lets focus on that and keep track of both easy and hard scores, so they can beat themselves.
Next up: (Getting) Community Feedback!
