Playtesting and Reduction of Scope
At the end of August we put out a test build and let me tell you something, kids. It was shit. As it turns out, it is very difficult to develop a multiplayer game alone with no one to test with. Let alone four someones. A handful of people were kind enough to test the game, and one guy was super great and recorded some video.
of horrifically slow and boring game play. This video has been the single most important thing in the development of Kerfuffle so far. It reveals every single problem the game has. So after watching this like a hundred times, and getting feedback from about 25-30 play testers, here are the problems and the steps I am taking to resolve them.
SlownessThe first major problem I noticed was how slow the game was. Characters have long attack animations, long death animations, bounce around forever before despawning, and then taking even MORE time to respawn. Originally I thought it would be good to allow the players some time between a kill/respawn to re-position themselves on the map. Which is still totally a valid idea but the time between kill and respawn is just too great.
To fix this I've dramatically shortened the time it takes to despawn the character once they are dead. Instead of a beam from space to pick up the players, they explode. This despawns and then respawns the player instantly. No more waiting around. If a dead character is hit BEFORE the initial despawn explosion happens, they explode and despawn when hit. This, in theory, allow players to have more control over the pace of the match. It still grants a second or two to re-position yourself if you need it. Also explosions have a habit of making everything feel much more urgent.
The second big problem is that some of the characters have really lengthy attacks. Take Jiro's spin attack for example, or any of Quark's attacks. They just take forever. Quark in particular slows the game to a pace. He is able to zone out opponents with his projectiles, effectively creating a wall between him and his would be killers. When this happens the game just stops. The attacking player isn't advancing. No one is dying. Nothing is going on. That sucks. However fixing this problem leads me into another major change to the game...
SimplicityWhen I started to make this game I had big ideas for asymmetrical combat. Characters with crazy move sets that were totally different and completely unique from one character to the next. So thats what we did and it turned out to be a bad idea. It turns out that none of your big fancy moves are worth a damn when the guy you're fighting dies in one hit, to any of your attacks, regardless of their fanciness. Play testers were confused when switching between characters, projectile attacks, and how all of this shit was supposed to work together. The confusion was justified though. None of this shit worked together after all.
I still stand by my asymmetrical design for this game. Characters still have unique movement speed, fall speed, acceleration, attack speed, attack range, attack hitbox angles, etc etc. Aside from that I have chosen to just gut all of the goofy attacks. No more one off confusing attacks from one character to the other. No more projectiles for ANY character without the use of items. All characters now have the same 4 attack directions. Now, as I've had to explain to every single person I have talked to about this, that does not mean every character is the same.
Lets compare Shelly and Jiro under this new design. Yes they both have up, down, left, and right attacks. Yes they are all the same button presses. This is where the similarities end. Shellby attacks with spikes that protrude from her helmet. Her up attack is a tall, narrow attack with quite a bit of vertical range. Her down attack is much shorter in comparison. Jiro has a wide, short range up attack. It covers his entire sprite from left to right but doesn't extend nearly as high as Shellby's does. His down attack, while also fairly wide, has much more reach than Shellby's down attack. By having this simple difference in range, these two characters now play entirely different. Shellby has the tools to control the space below her opponent, while Jiro controls the space above. The goal of each character becomes different.
Get under a guy and jam a spike into his soft butt cheek meat.
Jump over someone and brain them with high quality tuna.
And so on and so forth until the end of time.
There are some other issues that need to be addressed like the camera, lack of effects, good sound effects, blah blah blah, that will make the game significantly more exciting but this post has already dragged on far longer than it should have.
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