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[knightSquared]

I'm having a lot of fun learning how to draw.  Right now, I'm attempting some cartoon recreations of the enemies in the game in hopes to use it for an updated intro.  Here's a Parasitebot:



If you've played the demo, these are the guys in the first level where you can squish them.

[knightSquared]

So now I'm going to start talking about the solutions that we've thought of in order to make this game much better from the issues that I've noted down earlier.  This time, I'll talk a bit about the collection aspect of the game.

Issue: Collecting orbs to form critters doesn't work
Our General Solution: Don't!!

If you've played the demo, one of the first things that we introduce you once you start playing the game is that when you collect orbs, you also form critters.  For every 5 orbs that you collect, you spawn one critter.



The concept itself is fine, but there are a few things about it that bothers me:

• It's weird that collecting multiple objects produces a living being.  We've thought of these guys being spirit creatures, but that still needs to be elaborated.
• It won't make sense unless we have a tutorial/dialog that explains this, which we do.  Even with that, there will always be those who skips these cutscenes quite quickly and explaining it properly can result in a long-ish dialog.
• It's easy to forget this concept while playing the game.  Because of this, the goal feels more like collect the orbs rather than save the critters.  It creates a disconnect.

So the solution that I propose is this:

• Let orbs be orbs and critters be critters - In other words, keep them separate.
• Orbs are collected and won't form critters.
• Critters will also need to be collected, but will now need to be rescued!

So what I plan to do is spawn the critters in a glass jar.  Very similar to how you get trapped in a glass jar in Level 1 of the demo.  Now you have to rescue the critters by smashing into the glass jar and freeing them.



I'll probably put multiple critters in one jar, but make them hard to break as in requiring multiple boost + smashes in order to break them.

So what will this do?

• Brings a bit of combat element to the game (boost to break the critters out of the jar!)
• Satisifaction that your actions are directly involved in saving the critters
• Helps with game pacing as the level designer can now focus on critter saving as a more strict goal without forcing a collection element to the player.
• No longer need a long-ish dialog explaining things

But it won't solve another problem in our list - what's the motivation of saving critters / orbs.  I'll discuss the proposed solution to this soon!

[knightSquared]

Just a screenshot:

[knightSquared]

Yay!  The first youtube video I've seen where someone checks out the demo!

[knightSquared]

Been progressing on the particle effects.  Recently implemented support for the particle texture atlas.  Previously, the game was using mathematically procedurally generated particles and some additional individual textures.

One of the neat advantages of using a texture atlas is that you can reduce the number of draw calls by just referencing a single texture but using different UV's.  Also helps reduce loading times as loading a bunch of individual textures can end up hitting up the seek times on the disk.

[knightSquared]

Hello!

I'm going to talk about how we're going to address the following issues:

• Collection is tedious.  You don't feel like you want to collect as many orbs as you can as there is barely any reward
• Bonus stages feel pointless

One thing that's kind of lacking in this game is player progression, and a nice way of adding player progression is some sort of upgrade system.  So let me introduce the critter store:



Now, after every level, the critter store is going to stock up with at least one new power-up for Armillo, providing that player progression in the game.  Not only that, but it also gives an incentive of collecting as many orbs, or going back and collecting more orbs (replayability).  It also gives the bonus stages a better incentive as you're now collecting these orbs to build up your player.

So what kind of upgrades?  For now, it's going to include upgrades such as adding hearts, extra lives, longer jumps, more powerful boosts, faster ways of collecing orbs, and unlocking new levels.

[knightSquared]

Today I started working on drawing the icons representing the items in the store.  Here's some of what I have so far:

[knightSquared]

Took a nice break yesterday, and now I'm back to doing some more images for the in-game store.



That's the image for the right-hand side of the screen where you get to see your selection of store items that you can buy using those orbs that you collect in-game.  The top bar will show how much orb you have for your inventory.



There's the texture atlas for the miscellaneous images.  From the top-left, there's the orb (in-game currency), followed by by level # of the item to be purchased as each item can have multiple levels of upgrades.  To the right is followed by a fire animation for the floating island, the selection bar, some hand-drawn number fonts, and then a dialog bubble for the critter to tell you the description of each item.

I had to keep the critter animations simple so that it fits in the texture atlas.  I always have the option to expand the atlas or create another one, but for now this will do.  The animations for the critters include a 'hello' wave, talking, blinking, and looking side to side.

I'm looking forward to assembling this stuff and see how it'll look in-game.

[knightSquared]

Finally coming together:

[knightSquared]

Store is nicely functional now.  Here's a clip of its work-in-progress.  Still need to work on its visuals.  However, it's time now to move on to other non-boring things!

[gimymblert]

I have read the whole thread, but something confuse me, what's the goal of the game? I mean it is to collect critters or to complete level?

Instead of sonic I would say it's closer to monkeyball, another popular sega games, in case you are not aware of it.

[knightSquared]

Good question!  The goal right now is primarily to complete the levels.  There actually is not much of an incentive to collect more critters, but we'll be addressing that part pretty soon.

I really like Monkey Ball and I played a couple of games out of that series a lot; although I couldn't finish it - the expert levels get pretty frustrating pretty quickly, at least to my skillset.  But most people who played our game gave it a lot more parallels to Sonic, mainly because this game is more platformer at heart.

Thanks for the feedback!

[knightSquared]

Updated the 1st post of this thread with more information about this game and some new screenshots.

[knightSquared]

I am getting rid of the main combo system!

Actually, I'm taking that system away as a focus from the game.

How the current combo system works is that you collect orbs, and after you collect 5 orbs without a 5 second break in between, a combo meter pops up with a count-down timer between collections.  Each level is designed so that you can maintain that combo throughout the entire level.  There are score multiplier rewards, such as after a 5 orb combo, it's a 1.5x multiplier, then after 20, it's a 2.0x multiplier, and so on..  So there's a big score incentive to collect a huge enough combo.



So why am I scrapping it?

Well, I've found that the current combo system introduces the following problems:

• It's not a fundamental part of the game.  It only adds to the score and nothing else.
• When playing the game, we found that the combo is a goal that most people ignore when they first play this game.  Only when they realize that it helps with score will they then take note.
• Trying to achieve combos is frustrating, especially when the levels last quite long as it does right now.  It's very easy to break it.  Imagine playing a level for 10 minutes, only for that combo to break.  Very frustrating!  
• Combos tends to be fun when it comes to repeating quick tasks where the player feels like they are in control, like juggling hits in a fighting game.  In a platformer, combos for collectables means that you have to memorize the level in order to chain together the proper collectable sequence.  It's a very non-rewarding task.
• Also frustrating from a level designer's perspective as collectables must be plentiful and spaced accordingly in order to maintain that combo throughout the entire level.
• HUD can be distracting.  Even though the combo isn't part of the main game, it's still there in the middle of the screen.
• Also, seeing the combo meter deplete can feel depressing and distracts from the overall game.

So I decided to scrap the main combo system.

But then I won't remove the combo system completely.  In fact, I'm leaving in a mini-combo system with a smaller time window, but with no visible HUD.  You will see the score increase with each collectible and the audio orbs pitch up and down as long as you collect these orbs within that small time window.  So for those who can figure it out, they can aim for a high score, otherwise they can keep playing the game as normal.  So instead of 'play the whole level, maintain that combo throughout its entirety, and we'll display your progress on the screen', it becomes a 'here's a small section of orbs.  collect those as fast as you can if you realize that it's a good thing.'.

Plus without the main combo system, it means that when I design levels, I can space out the orb collectibles apart adding more variation to level progression and helping with game pacing.  This also adds value to the collectibles as they will become more sparse rather than scattered everywhere.



For those who will miss the main combo system, feel free to throw virtual eggs my way.  

[knightSquared]

Some animated gif action!  Changing the way how you save critters with some updated particle effects:

[knightSquared]

Yikes!  Been quite busy in the past week with a project from the past whose ghost keeps coming back to haunt me.  But I finally now have some time to work on Armillo again.

So I've been polishing a background for a new cartoon style NIS.  Here's the work in progress:



NIS Sequence Caption: "All was peaceful, and it was just before night. But enemies were nearing, with Critters in their sight."

[knightSquared]

Just when I felt I started to have time for this, I got sick     *cough* *cough*

Now that I'm feeling about 70% better, I just started re-writing the cut-scene routines.  Looking back, the code was pretty messy, so I thought that it'll be great to just restart most of it from scratch (my laugh at my own code moment). 

So I'm working with four render buffers for this.  Two sets of two buffers - One is the lead comic panel, and the other a secondary panel which places itself behind the lead panel.



The lead panel will fly away and the secondary panel comes in at key moments during the cut-scene.

In each comic panel, I'll be rendering 2d image animations drawn in Photoshop and placed using code.  The two buffers in each panel is used to fade in and out two different scenes within each comic panel.  So I can start fading in say a flaming background in front of the characters to showcase that something is going wrong.  Hopefully this will work out.

[knightSquared]

The new NIS system is progressing better than I expected (so rare!).  Here's a couple of screenshots of the work in progress so far:

[gimymblert]

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[knightSquared]

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.