DEVLOG 002
Right, where was I? Ah yes, I was going to talk about how things had changed through the various iterations of the design. Let’s do that then!
Mable The Journey – LUDUM DARE VERSION
This is the version that I made in 48 hours for Ludum Dare. I’ve covered the main mechanic before: you can turn into a fairy, which makes you drop your sword. When you change back into a human the sword is pulled back to you, killing any enemy in its path.
Due to the short time, I implemented this mechanic in the simplest way I could think. You move back and forth along a flat level and random enemies spawn.
If you kill them, the spawn frequency and maximum number of enemies slowly increases. If they touch you, then you die and it all starts again. There was no score and no time limit. The only additional mechanic was that the colour slowly faded from the world, and you also lost if the colour faded completely. The colour could be restored also by killing the enemies.
There were 3 enemy types: a charging devil/bull, a leaping frog dressed as a roman legionnaire (because why not) and a flying devil guy in a waistcoat (because why not – this is a great design philosophy huh)
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business guy didn't make it into the game)
As I noted in the previous post, this version of the game was well received. Obviously there’s different expectations placed on a jam game and the Ludum Dare community is generally positive and constructive, but it’s always good to know when you could be on to something good.
Mable The Journey – Indiecade Submission Version
I wasn’t considering submitting to Indiecade, but I’m a sucker for sales and the discount for Ludum Dare games pulled me in. To summarise my thoughts on my decision to submit to Indiecade, I’d say that it was a mistake.
While the feedback I got was very helpful, I had rushed expanding the scope of the game in an attempt to have a more full game to show as an example, but that could still be developed into the longer form game that I actually wanted to turn it into.
I tried to come up with the easiest way to expand the game that could hint at something bigger. In hindsight, keeping it as more of an arena combat thing, perhaps even a versus thing with enemies and environmental hazards in there to spice it up – that kind of thing might have been better suited to a festival submission, but I wanted to make a game that took you on a journey and told the story that I had in mind.
In the end I decided to lift the mechanics exactly as they were in the Ludum Dare version and stuff them into a side scrolling platformer – kind of like Super Ghouls and Ghosts but with flying and the cool sword/shapeshifting thing. That was pretty much how I was selling the game to myself. The problem with this was that somehow it felt worse than the original jam version.
I’ve discussed the various ways that it felt a bit rubbish throughout this devlog, but I think the issues can all be traced straight back to one issue:
the mechanics that worked in the game jam version didn’t work in the Indiecade version.
Mable & The Wood
This brings us to now, so I’ll quickly talk about some of the changes that I’ve made to those original mechanics.
The change that has had the biggest impact on the way the game works is the changes I’ve made to the colour fading mechanic. In the jam version, the fading colour worked well. The ambiguous feedback of how much colour was left serve to increase the tension of making sure you lined up your next kill. This was good. Unfortunately, it was exactly this ambiguity that DIDN’T WORK AT ALL in the Indiecade version of the game.
I tried to fix this by adding in UI, the heart that you can see in the screenshot above. This was not a fix. It was the equivalent of trying to plug a hole in the dam with chewing gum. As a player, your focus is on the action and not on the edge of the screen.
For things like health or points and such, it’s a reasonable solution to show this in the corner of the screen as that is the kind of information that you can take in at a glance when there’s a break in the action. However, the colour state changes all of the time and is of most important right when the action is at its most frantic. To make matters worse, you often wouldn’t even realise that the colour had any kind of effect because, even if you’re flying fast through the level, you tended to kill an enemy just by travelling and thus refilling the colour.
This led to the colour fading mechanic being irrelevant for roughly 80% of the time and frustrating for the other 20% of the time.
I’ve always found that the best way to fix something that’s broken in your design is to simply get rid of it.
If this doesn’t break anything else, and your game feels better without it, then you’re sorted. Unfortunately, in the case of Mable, it DID break something – namely the flying mechanic. Without the fading colour you could essentially fly forever (previously the colour faded faster when you were flying), which removed any kind of challenge to the movement (making it pretty boring) and made combat pointless (because it was MUCH easier to just avoid everything – even though that was more boring than stopping to fight).
I briefly implemented the barriers that I’ve shown in earlier posts as an attempt to combat this and force you to fight, but this system on its own just felt like exactly what it was – a makeshift solution. I mean, those barriers are good for having contained challenges so they’ll still be used, but to make them work with how things were I’d have had to basically have one barrier after another. Not particularly great level design there (particularly in a game where the way the combat and movement mechanics work together were a big part of what made it fun in the first place).
This was the solution I settled on:
You now have a limited amount of magic, which you use to sustain the fairy form which allows you to fly. This magic is recharged when you land or when you kill an enemy. This is already a massive post (particularly by my standards), so I'll expand on this further in a later post and cover how it fixes the issues as well as the new opportunities it presents for interesting gameplay - although I'm sure you can already think up some fun level bits using these mechanics
(oh and you can probably see that I added in health too but I’ve already gone on too long to go into the reasons for that - I will let you know).
I also managed to tweak the old colour fading shader to add a cool effect that helps to communicate the difference between the forms and the magic use:
Cool huh?
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