Awesome feedback here Gimmy! Thanks!
Still on goal:
what the stake of completing level in the game?
What's the purpose of score? leaderboards, replayability? Reward tiers? Maybe if the combo system actually unlock reward at some threshold (faster speed, lives like in mario, etc...) it would be more fun?
Right now, the score is pretty much for replayability. There are medal tiers that you can get in the game - bronze, silver, gold, platinum based on the score that you get. Originally, I thought of making some levels unlockable based on how many medal that you get (eg. unlock this planet by getting 15 silver medals), but I don't think I'll be going that route.
But at this point, I can just as easily scrap the score system as I'm leaning more towards a collectable-reward system. I'll most likely remove the medal tiers, but keeping the score in itself and perhaps attach a leaderboard to it for those who are interesting in competing.
So instead of focusing on score, I'm re-working the game so that the collection aspect (collecting orbs) is more of a focus by making it an in-game currency and adding an in-game store. That way, I would like to encourage the player more on the exploration area (finding all the orbs) rather than trying to maintain a high enough combo.
A good design pattern is escalating complexity, if the combo system actually increase flow by pacing the game with temporary increase of speed or some other effect (the player compete to maintain the effect which also increase skill level) it might be rewarding.
That's interesting as we have a prototype 2 player racing mode in this game and it does exactly that.
There are currently effects in the game when you maintain a combo, but it's not very obvious (mostly on the HUD - I had a previous effect where Armillo was on fire but it got pretty distracting quickly).
Also the combo system seems to go against the "collect" exploration kind of gameplay, so player have to choose between exploring or speedrunning (combo). But speedrunning works better with replayability as the player must effectively memorize the lay out and learn shortcut. A good things to do is to create an interplay between exploration and speedrunning.
Yup. That's pretty much how I've felt about the combo system as well. It created this rift in the gameplay that caused the game to be played in two totally different ways - and it was a neat thought at first. But as we started focus testing this game, it turned out that almost no one cared about the combo system, and it affected a lot of things such as how we did the level design as we needed to design the level so that the combo can be maintained throughout the entire level. So in the end, I've decided to scrap it (well, dumb it down by a lot) so that I could focus more on create better level layouts rather than ensure that the combo system can be maintained throughout the entire level.
Exploration prime the player into memorizing and understand the lay out, especially on their first run, and find short cut. On the other side speed running with a reward effect could have a first tier of effect that would kicks fast, you could build optional challenge that makes the player feel smart and teach them about the effects (takes shortcut or alt path that can lead to inaccessible bonus or power) or just overpower them as a reward shortly if they play nicely.
The player would have a short term incentives to combo (i would rather be overpowered to pass the next crowd) and also long term goals of completing the level combo. The short terms reward boost also play back into the exploration since it allow to create time puzzle for opportunity challenge, the player as to pause, thinks about the relation between the collectible boost and his environment. You can actually build those opportunity challenge in tier of combo reward, for example the player get to optional alt path/power ups only if he reach the third tier, it makes the player thinks about the level.
That's some excellent analysis there. The short term reward works really well and can be rewarding. But the long term part can get pretty tricky with the various puzzle elements that gets in the way. For instance, there's this one puzzle in the game where you have to push a block through some sort of maze and even if you try to speed run it, it takes a long time. So in order to maintain that combo, you have to collect one orb, push, collect another, push, etc. It becomes strategic but even for me it gets pretty frustrating. There are also battles in the game where you get deeply engaged in it and completely forget about the combo.
It looks like you design the games by adding feature, you must thinks in term of system, you are not adding feature, you are adding complementary gameplay loops that feedbacks into each other, the primary loop is the progression loop, mechanics generally impacts optimisation loop which in turn impact progression. Thinking about what makes the main progression of the game allows you to safely plug any feature later based on what function you want to enhance.
Thanks for that advice! That's one area where I'm still learning.