We pivoted our designWe had early planned to have
3 worlds with 9-10 stages in each one.
That works out to be
too much design/artwork and testing for the time frame we have.
When initially also planned to start the player off with no weapons and then after each stage
(about
4- 6min) gameplay, then they
get one weapon.
In a game about many weaspons, that's just too
slow.
When it comes to playtesting weapons we have builds that unlocks all the weapons for the player, which is not how the game is actually played. For better playtesting and
more fun times we decided to have
less emphasis on story and get the player into the action faster, hence why we're pivoting our direction to be
roguelike now.
We're going for a controlled random stage design, having testing 'waves' (like rooms in other dungeon crawlers), we then set the stage to pick an amount of these set rooms. For now we're starting with having rooms defined by enemies, (enemy types are: Ram Cars, Turrets, Bombers).
e.g.
Stage 1: 5 x Ram Car Rooms,2 x Turret Rooms,
Stage 2: 4 x Ram Car Rooms,3 x Turret Rooms,1 x Bomber Room
later we will add more properties to the rooms to (number of enemies, difficulty, direction) so that we can finely tuned the randomness
e.g.
Stage 1: 3 x (easy)Ram Car Rooms, (hard)1 x Turret Rooms,
Stage 2: 2 x (w/ 4 or more enemies)Ram Car Rooms,2 x (w/ 2 or less enemies)Ram Car Rooms, 1 x (from below)Bomber Room