In this update I’ll be talking about the game design and unintuitive interaction problems that I’ve been facing on Soul Searching.
I’ve been letting people around me know that Soul Searching is my main project now. We had to freeze Orphan, because Alper’s (the artist of Orphan) personal life got in the way. Also, Orphan will be changing its name, because there’s another game with the name Orphan, sadly. I liked that name, but oh well, we’ll come up with something better. Soul Searching is a one-man project for now, with me doing all the code and graphics and music etc. Being the only person to be making this game means I can try new things quickly. So it’s a very dynamic and fast game development experience, which also boosts my motivation. Minimum amount of real life dependencies might just be the thing that this project needs, at least for now.
I’m kind of in a state where I keep thinking about the game design problems I have, and the gameplay problems, the unintuitiveness of the current build. probably for the best. I don’t think I can really get into a PR mood, where I tell people how awesome my game is, because my game is not awesome at all right now. But there’s lots of potential for it to be awesome in the future.
I’m doing a lot of testing and seeing a lot of raw parts that need to be better. I even kinda get into an apologetic state, telling the player “Sorry about that, I noted that down, I’ll try to fix that.” etc.
I’ve been to Nordic Game Jam last weekend. It was a lot of fun. Very tiring (sleeping on the floor kind of tiring), but fun. There were lots of people, and I made some Polish friends! With the hopes that showing some people the current state of Soul Searching, I prepared a build in a week before coming to Copenhagen, selecting the features I want to test. So, new features/changes:
https://vine.co/v/OPmEK2LJEUYA map that you can see the locations of the islands
https://vine.co/v/OPmEHzjhEjhBinoculars to see if there’s any island around quickly, since the map only gives a general impression of where you are compared to the island.
Random placement of islands.
https://vine.co/v/OPm99lxMILDChanged the way to catch fish (now you can aim where you want to throw rod).
https://vine.co/v/OPm02EV3je1UI alerts (“Hey you haven’t been eating anything, you’re gonna die soon, dumbass”)
Added music to the game. The soundtrack is just demo recordings for now, but some people really enjoy it even in this state! (Put the current theme song above).
https://vine.co/v/OPm06WDzxFAA mechanical engine thingy that makes the boat accelerate. Before, I only had two rows that rotate the boat, so you couldn’t really go straight in a faster fashion.
Rewrote the interaction system, so it’s now more systematized and let’s me adding new interact objects fastly. This will save me from a lot of input bugs that I’d have later on.
I refactored how the game handles input, so now I have a safe ground for adding co-op mode to the way. Currently the game supports these input devices:
Keyboard + mouse
Keyboard only
Mouse only
I’ll be adding gamepad support soon, because that’s easy thanks to Unity.
Good news, people really like the game!
It’s was a joy to see people enjoying being on the sea, playing around with gadgets, and having a good time. So I believe that there is a good foundation. But the thing is, the playtesters were all game designers or developers of some kind. So, when they were playing the game, what they liked about it is the potential of the game. Maybe there’ll be a great world to explore, people to meet. New boats, new gadgets, better visuals and what-not. But it gives me confidence that with enough work and patience, I might be able to make this a great game. This is not a feeling that I had before all that much. The most similar feeling I remember is when I released the trailer of Ode to Pixel Days, some people were pretty excited by it.
The hardest part for me making this game is the game design. This is the most game-y game that I’ve done. My older games were more like telling a story in a short and to-the-point fashion. So this project is pretty challenging, but I’ve got lots of smart people around me to help with the problems. Let me tell you some of the decisions I made for Soul Searching:
If it’s an object that you need to use in real life, you should go to that object and interact with it, instead of pressing a button to summon that object.So, the game has a map. Games generally have a map button that just pops up the map. But I prefer having a map object that you can go to and interact with. There are some reasons for this. 1) Having a simple control scheme, getting rid of unnecessary UI elements, and button prompts. 2) Having a more natural feeling game experience. I believe that when the player thinks about looking at the map, instead of a button press, going to the map and interacting with it is a more immersive experience. 3) For the map example, I don’t want the player to know where they are in the world at any given moment. A possible problem that this decision might cause is, if there are a lot of objects around, the player might be overwhelmed with the amount of running around they need to do, and might find this approach impractical. And for the map example, people might find it frustrating they can’t look at the map at any given moment, they might get lost.
Imperfect map.I don’t want the map in this game to decrease the joy of exploration. I’ve seen in previous testing, how much excitement it gives to bump into an island blindly. I want to keep that. In the current build, the map is very crappy, so it wouldn’t be very clear where you actually stand. That’s not a good approach, and was just something that’s done because I was in a hurry. I want the map to be clear about where you are/might be. But it’s for sure that the map won’t include every island in the world. The small islands that gives the player fruit and clean water won’t be in the map. City islands will be in the map, but you’ll be also searching for cities far away that your hometown people didn’t know of, so they couldn’t have a map of those cities. You’ll be unlocking the map slowly, maybe buying some map pieces on islands or drawing the map yourself. I believe that this will give it a better experience of exploring an ocean.
Problems of the current build:
Oh my god there are so many things on this small boat.
Since there is only one kind of a boat in this game, with no changeable gadgets, and I want to test all the gadgets that I’ve done, the boat got crowded and overwhelming. I’ve seen people interacting with two objects at once, because there’s the gadgets are too close to each other. The solution for this is to unlock some gadgets later on in the game, and be able or even forced to buy a bigger boat when you have too many gadgets.
Slowwww gameplay.I’ve seen players interacting with only one gadget for a long time, because there are not many things they have to do on the boat. I need to break this cycle, because there’s no fun in pressing space for a minute straight. As a first step, I’ll make the boat faster, and maybe the islands closer to each other. The game is not balanced at all right now, so I can take steps easily to balance with other stuff later on.
No real challenges yet.I wanted this build to be a more relaxing experience, with some sombre music and an enjoyable ocean. No players starved to death, or run out of clean water. One player fell asleep while swimming and then drowned, that was funny. But my goal for this game is to create both a relaxing world and challenging/strategic gameplay.
Crappy UII already knew that the current UI needs to be remade, and the tests also confirmed it. Need to get rid of all the bars that are not absolutely necessary, or make them appear so they don’t mix with more important bars like hunger and thirst bar.
Lots of stuff to do, so much time until the game will be completed. Let’s work.
Community
