Dev Diary - 17 Apr

13 Apr 2021

Long day fighting with the camera to get a smoother effect for the boss fight. Originally the player would just run into the boss no differently than any other enemy, but that tended to keep players fighting on the very edge of the screen which felt both unnatural and ugly. Worse, it would more or less skip the cutscene because the player would be hugging the edge so far that you couldn’t even see the cutscene take place. I spent quite a bit of time making sure that the camera slowly pans to make the boss fight more central and even add a barrier on the edges of the screen to prevent the player leaving. Honestly, it makes sense. I also added the final escape animations and props so with that, the boss fight room is completely done and just requires playtesting.

14 Apr 2021

With almost everything completed, the two objectives left is the lose screen and the win screen. The lose screen mostly just needs to be hooked up for a start, so I spent the day allowing the player’s deaths to take them to the death screen and having the death screen take them back to level 1. I debated how that should happen, why, the timing, etc., but I think a game as brief as mine would benefit from just popping them back into the action rather than taking them back to the main menu every time.

15 Apr 2021

Now that the death screen properly works, my time was spent making it look nice. There were a lot of ways to handle it, either a still picture or maybe the captain behind one of the prison gates, but in the end I settled for a quick animation that looks like a helmet hitting the floor. It’s simple but it gets the point across and I think it fits the feel of the very 8-bit-y game I’m making.

16 Apr 2021

I added a brief win condition just to test it out then rolled it out to two playtesters. Throughout the game it seemed like having the prison cells fully heal the players might be too much of a boon, but I’m not really making a Dark Souls and should probably just keep that in. Players really only started struggling in levels 3 and 4, which I guess kinda makes sense. I’m not mad about it. Navigation looked natural, players weren’t confused by much, and there wasn’t much backtracking. The biggest issue is the boss. First, is it too punishing to send the player all the way back to the beginning for losing? Would anyone want to beat 4 levels again to try at a boss? Probably not. Then the boss itself. Panic fire tends to get through the phases well enough that the player doesn’t learn to pattern recognize. If you spray-and-pray you can likely kill the first form. THe second form went down just as easily, but it seemed to be luck based on how the player did. One way or another, the player and boss die far too quickly, removing any sense of actual fighting and more just blindly shooting.

I don’t have a huge amount of time for playtesting anymore, but that one is pretty important. Consider raising the boss’s health dramatically but reducing his fire speed or maybe bullet damage. I’ll have to test which feels more natural.