hello, tigs.
say 'hello' to the nice people, fishbane.
huh. well then.
so, gears are turning! release is
.
i am droqen's pal, and i have been helping him with this game. times we've spent in front of our computers over the last two weeks have been great bursts of fruitful creativity. my contributions involve yelling a lot. occasionally, what i express comes out as equally constructive towards the game's development as it is loud and distracting. besides that, i've done a little bit of conceptual work and level design, but the game itself (art, code, music) is pretty much a one man show.
nonetheless i have been party to what i feel has been some really interesting thought and discussion, and i figured i'd share some of it with you. this being a devlog, i hope my digressions don't bother you too much. i don't have a blog of my own, so please excuse me if i get a little bit livejournal.com here.
these are the things that i personally have learned for better or worse, helping droqen out. maybe they are topics you've already developed an opinion on, but this is how i see things. in relation to fishbane, anyway.
on the ground level,
iterative design is stupid! polishing and retreading is a waste of time. it's much better, much smarter to just learn your lessons and tear everything apart. having a low overhead between concept and final result in fishbane's development means that we've been able to keep the creative flow instead of letting things stagnate.
iteration really isn't stupid though. while we've dismissed many ideas, and thrown away probably half as many levels as we've built, what we kept has been carefully maintained. as exciting as the rush to produce new fun ideas is, stepping back and carefully planning in sequence gives way to great ideas. the most interesting enemy in fishbane was a result of this approach.
coins are stupid! bananas, music notes, whatever. collectibles are just a distraction from what matters, and a lazy way to pad a game. playing to accumulate is
not a healthy kind of behaviour.
except,
they aren't stupid, and neither is score. in say, pac man, lode runner, and super mario bros, they served the purpose of encouraging an engagement with challenge and risk. while many games appear to have taken all the wrong lessons from the success of games with token-collecting, it's still a useful idea. if you're curious and willing, try ignoring fishbane's coin-equivalents when you play the game. try collecting them, even!
level design should be kind. while running playtests, we are managing to iron out the necessary amount of frustration from what we deem to be the appropriate places. this doesn't mean things won't be engaging, it means that most players shouldn't get stuck, or lost, or face an obstacle that seems hopelessly beyond their ability. it means that if a certain challenge is out of scale for where it takes place, we remove it.
level design should be evil. many of the things we've removed are going right back in. they'll be weighed and measured and put back in a place that is almost sadistic. the hardest levels will be optional, but we hope you don't chicken out. by requiring an observed knowledge of the game's inner workings through punishing difficulty, a much greater experience can be had, where the game still remains fair. on tigirc, kind tester payleaf had
this to say about a section of
one of my levels. incidentally, this level looks hilarious now, not only because it's kind of ugly, but because it can be broken in many ways. it is the second one i put together, and one of very few finished at the time. it was probably the most interesting level me or droqen had conceived, though since then droqen has made many levels that far out-strip it. anyway, payleaf does not approve. fair enough; that specific token had been placed after discovering a quirk that would let fishbane move to that position. i have since removed that part; i've taken that single frustrating moment for payleaf and made another entire level out of it. i hope he plays it!
enemies are your friends. i am so certain i am right about this, i'm not even going to make a
counter-point! enemies in so many games are boring and static because they serve a single purpose. note that this is an issue of design, not programming. we don't need procedural ai to explore their use. enemy logic in fishbane is appropriately deterministic. at the end of the day, they are just obstacles, but hopefully interesting ones. when you explore the way enemies interact with their environment, and each other, when the player-character is made
just another creature, the game becomes more involving. maybe you don't want to be collecting stuff. maybe you don't want to be killing your enemies. after all, that harpoon may be good for killing other dudes, but you can still put your own eye out with it.
that's all i got, for now.
you can expect to play fishbane soon! the exact release details are up to the will of potential sponsors.
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