[Gameplay Progression]

Area Addressed: Gameplay Progression

It's Interview Time!

For my first interview, I shall interview one of the critters.  And there'e one right there and it looks like he's doing something!

Hey there Critter!  So.. what are you doing there?





So..  what are you building?  It must be something cool!  Like you're building on top of that floating island thing with rockets.  Everyone loves floating islands and rockets!  So please tell me what you're making!





Aww, come on!  At least some sort of clue?  I'll be a good boy if you show me something sort of hint at least..





   ........ umm..  okay..

Well, that's that.  It looks like the critters are making something, but what could it be?

Also, feel free to ask the critters anything.  They might not give you the reply that you want (like with me!  ).  But perhaps you guys might have better luck than me.  *sigh*

I loved the artstyle you're going for.  Can't say much about the gameplay right now, but I'll be having an eye on this nice devlog.

Thanks!

regarding the lighting, one on the right looks better in the scenes you showed.

Also, I hadn't seen this before, its adorable, I love it!

Thanks for the feedback!!

New visuals for the critters:

I prefer the old look

Thanks for the feedback!  Yep, our dev team is also a bit mixed on the new look as well.  Old look gives a bit more of a unique look, the new look a bit more traditional.  Just thought of trying the new look as it seems to translate a bit better to cartoon art, which I'm playing around with at the moment to replace our current NIS sequences.

I love what I'm seeing here.  Keep up the good great work!

Been working on an updated lighting system:





New visuals for the critters:

I'm working on trying to get in a new look for the critters.  Here's what I have so far.



Some mixed opinions from the dev team on whether there's an improvement.  Any thoughts from you guys?

Noticed that the detail of those images is hard to see, so some higher resolution of those images here:

http://i.imgur.com/XTPzs.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/UGQPo.jpg

[Area Addressed:]

Area Addressed: Overall Visuals / Lighting needs work

Now on to some development!

So the first thing I wanted to do is to play around with the lighting a bit.

Right now, it feels that the world needs a bit of contrast - make the darker areas darker.  Since it's a spherical world, it would also be nice to also use lighting to put a greater focus on where the player is and darken the surrounding areas a bit more.  Currently, Armillo is heavily using diffuse (fixed direction) lighting to light up the world.  The light just comes in from a single direction like so:



Now in order to improve contrast and focus more light on the area where the player is, we could perhaps just increase diffuse and reduce ambient (overall scene lighting).  It just didn't get the results that I wanted.  So I figured to try out a better way, which is to replace much of the diffuse light with a point light.



This is pretty simple lighting stuff, but the nice thing is that it creates a lighting scene  where the edges of the sphere are darker and creates a nicer contrast in the normal-mapped world.  By making this change, it helps create a larger contrast through two means: One is the angle of incidence (defined by L (light) and N (normal)) which is greater the farther towards the edge of the sphere.  The other is light attenuation where light loses its effectiveness the farther away from the light source which is made more obvious on a sphere.  

So what does it look like?  Here's a couple of before and after pics:





The colors of the first scene was tuned a bit to get a better look, but not the second.  I was able to up the contrast of the foreground while darkening towards the outside of the sphere.  It also looks nice in motion as the scene is normal-mapped.  So light changes as you move around the scene is more obvious now.

Looks interesting.  One other control scheme that you can try looking into would be drag & drop.  Drag a tile onto the tile you want to swap with.  You can show the x/y lock by showing the dragged floor constrained to the particular axis.

The game play itself looks pretty simple (and that's not a bad thing at all!) and has a charming story attached to it.  Good job!

So just re-posting from the feedback thread on the areas that we feel needs work.

• Game feels that it's aimed a bit too young.  Nowadays, it seems more and more that the younger audience is often on mobile and not console/pc.
• Intro NIS is a bit too long and needs to look more interesting (Latter also noted by PompiPompi.  Interestingly, people here felt that it was short enough so I'll revisit our length complaint)
• Overall Visuals / Lighting needs work
• First level needs to be memorable.  Not there yet.
• Gameplay is 60% navigation & collecting.  Fine for the first few levels, then starts getting boring fast.
• Collection serves very little purpose (Question to ask: what's the point of collecting more that helps with game progression?)
• Orbs are too easy to collect.  They are just there.. lying on the ground waiting for you to collect.  Perhaps the harder it is for orbs to collect, the more satisfying it is.
• Barely any character progression / very little emotional connection to the main character
• Not much emotional connection to the story.  After beating the first level, perhaps there's not much feeling that you want to move on to know what happens next
• Game pacing needs lots of work.  This include difficulty and game play mechanic progression (latter noted by PompiPompi)
• Barely any art variation when progressing through each level
• the concept of collecting orbs to form critters is really weird and forgetful.  It's hard to notice it when it happens most of the time.
• Saving (more) critters feels pointless and unrewarding.  There's hardly any incentives (similar to collection complaints)
• When playing the game, the score/combo feels like a pointless goal that feels like it would be ignored unless really bored (most likely will get bored of the game before going for this)
• Trying to achieve combos is frustrating, especially when the levels last quite long as it does right now and it's easy to break it.  Also frustrating from a level design perspective as orb collectables must be plentiful and spaced accordingly in order to maintain that combo.
• Getting game over is painful. You lose your entire progress after you die.  Playing the level again is also painful as you're playing a blank slate again (replay-ability issue).
• Bonus stages feel pointless unless you're aiming for a high score.  You just go there just to get more points.  Not as rewarding.
• Visual effects needs lots of work.  Particle effects look too muddy.
• Story on parallel world needs to be elaborated more and made more interesting.

So I'll start Dev Logging here with how I'm going to try to fix the above, in addition to any other stuff I work on for this game.

Also, some great feedback from people here from the feedback thread on the demo:

• Game can be a bit hard and easy to die a lot
• Those fliers can be a huge pain!
• Barrels can obstruct flow of game
• Gameplay feels like a bunch of challenges that don't add up together
• Add keyboard settings

So here are the areas that we feel needs work.  Since the demo is just two levels, perhaps some of these aren't as obvious/applicable.  But anyways, here it is:

• Game feels that it's aimed a bit too young.  Nowadays, it seems more and more that the younger audience is often on mobile and not console/pc.
• Intro NIS is a bit too long and needs to look more interesting (Latter also noted by PompiPompi.  Interestingly, people here felt that it was short enough so I'll revisit our length complaint)
• Overall Visuals / Lighting needs work
• First level needs to be memorable.  Not there yet.
• Gameplay is 60% navigation & collecting.  Fine for the first few levels, then starts getting boring fast.
• Collection serves very little purpose (Question to ask: what's the point of collecting more that helps with game progression?)
• Orbs are too easy to collect.  They are just there.. lying on the ground waiting for you to collect.  Perhaps the harder it is for orbs to collect, the more satisfying it is.
• Barely any character progression / very little emotional connection to the main character
• Not much emotional connection to the story.  After beating the first level, perhaps there's not much feeling that you want to move on to know what happens next
• Game pacing needs lots of work.  This include difficulty and game play mechanic progression (latter noted by PompiPompi)
• Barely any art variation when progressing through each level
• the concept of collecting orbs to form critters is really weird and forgetful.  It's hard to notice it when it happens most of the time.
• Saving (more) critters feels pointless and unrewarding.  There's hardly any incentives (similar to collection complaints)
• When playing the game, the score/combo feels like a pointless goal that feels like it would be ignored unless really bored (most likely will get bored of the game before going for this)
• Trying to achieve combos is frustrating, especially when the levels last quite long as it does right now and it's easy to break it.  Also frustrating from a level design perspective as orb collectables must be plentiful and spaced accordingly in order to maintain that combo.
• Getting game over is painful. You lose your entire progress after you die.  Playing the level again is also painful as you're playing a blank slate again (replay-ability issue).
• Bonus stages feel pointless unless you're aiming for a high score.  You just go there just to get more points.  Not as rewarding.
• Visual effects needs lots of work.  Particle effects look too muddy.
• Story on parallel world needs to be elaborated more and made more interesting.

So there's our list.  Feel free to comment if you agree or disagree on any of these points.  It's also not our exhaustive list as we just noted the ones that might seem applicable to the demo, but we'll start Dev Logging about how we're going to approach these issues.

In addition, some great feedback from people here:

• Game can be a bit hard and easy to die a lot
• Those fliers can be a huge pain!
• Barrels can obstruct flow of game
• Gameplay feels like a bunch of challenges that don't add up together
• Add keyboard settings

Again, I totally appreciate all the feedback here!  So now I'll pass the torch back to the Dev Log.  But feel free to keep discussing here or try out the demo and post feedback here.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=28786.0

Thanks!

Looks good with your progress!  Keep it up!

Looks good!  Just tried out the demo.  Other than the slowness, I would also suggest to move the centering of the screen at a lower position as the dialogs occupy a good chunk of the top screen space.  Other than that, good progress.

[(with developer's comments)]

Thanks for all your feedback.  Lots of great feedback here!

I've gathered the following so far on room for improvement: (with developer's comments)

- Game can be a bit hard and easy to die a lot (I'll definately tone it down.  I'm also finding an inconsistency of difficulty from section to section on the desert world which I'll also look into)

- Those fliers can be a huge pain! (Good feedback!  I'll slow these guys down by a good amount, then for the sake of game progression, reintroduce them as faster later on in the game with a palette swap.. bwahaha  )

- Intro wasn't that interesting (Nice.  This is one area of the game that I'm planning to re-work)

- Barrel like obstacle feels annoying as they ruin the flow. (I can totally see this now.  Will remove barrels unless it's meant to slow down the player.)

- Gameplay feels like a bunch of challenges that don't add up together (Although that was my original intention for this game - some sort of obstacle course that keeps changing on you.  But I'm also finding that it lacks consistency and goes against user expectations as they progress through the level so it's a bit counter-intuitive.  I'll keep this in mind when restructuring the levels.  Thanks!)

- Keyboard settings (Will look into that!)

- XNA might not work on Windows 8 (From what I understand, it just won't work for the Windows 8 marketplace, but it should still work fine as a regular desktop app)

I was looking forward to this one, I am cooking atm, but after dinner I will check it out! (download as we speak).

Hooray!  The demo is finally out!   

I've created a new topic for feedback on the demo here (including link to the demo):

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=28915.0

So any demo feedback should go there.

Now that I've got the demo out of the way, I finally can start working on improving this game and start doing some technical write-ups on it.  *whew*!

Hello there!

I've just released the first public demo for Armillo: Parallel Universe Mystery, a cute little rolling platformer which was under development for over a year.



And here's the gameplay trailer:





So long story short, we've developed this game to the current state, wasn't happy on how it's progressing so we took a few months off to brainstorm a list of things to make this game better.  So we've decided to release a "before" demo showcasing our current state (which is this demo!), then start dev blogging about what we're going to do in order for us to be happy with it.  I'm going to reveal the list of things that we're unhappy with soon, but first I want you to try out our demo if you've got the time.  This demo has two levels, which should take about 15 minutes or less to finish.  Here is an intro to the two levels:

First is the grassy world, mainly a tutorial world to introduce some of the controls, gameplay elements, and story:



Second is the desert world, more on the beginning intermediate stage so it gets a bit harder:



So what am I looking for?

Well, feedback on: visuals, controls, and game progression.

Also some questions that you can answer:
1.) After you finish the first level, do you feel like you want to play the next?
2.) How do you feel about the story?
3.) How does the gameplay feel?  When you lose, do you blame yourself or the controls?

Also anything else you feel like commenting on.

So here's the demo:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/armillo-the-parallel-universe-mystery/downloads/armillo-demo-1-the-developers-unhappy-edition

System Requirements:
PC, with video card that supports Shader 3.0 or higher

You can also follow the development at the Dev Log.  I'm going to start doing a lot of technical write-ups about the game's development so hopefully it will be interesting:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=28786.0

Thanks!  

Just uploaded the demo to IndieDB and all we need to do is play the waiting game for it to get authorized!

*twiddle thumbs*

Gosh..  this waiting game is taking forever.  How about a new screenshot?

Here's Mega Armillo waiting for to squish some of those pesky Darkbots..



Once the demo is online, I'll let you guys know.

Here is the Flyer.  This guy is pretty annoying as he loves to spin around you.  The faster you go, the more likely he'll hit you.