Feature Recipe for Level ExtractionEvery level begins in a ‘safe room’.
Here you can refresh your HP and goof around with your equipment.
(Safe room. AKA Sentinel Statue.)This safe room also serves as a bank.
Reach it and your loot is safe.
But die and you lose everything.
You have to start from the beginning.
To make things interesting, every level is
stuffed with triggers that refresh the enemies.
Grab a treasure. Beat a boss. Enter a room.
Any of these things can replace the old enemies with
new spawns. Some familiar. Others completely new.
Get in, get the loot, and get out.I thought this was such a great idea.
Then I put the game in front of some playtesters.
It was a disaster.
The game wasn’t telling them where to go,
and they had no reason to take any
initiative beyond stumbling around the level.
Even after collecting most of the loot players
would continue exploring until they died.
At this point I guess I could’ve removed the
insertion/extraction feature, but why remove
a feature when you can (theoretically) save it
by slathering a dozen more on top?
First, the player’s gotta want to escape the level.
They needed an incentive.
So how about something bad happens to them
after grabbing a major item?
Feature One: Mana Drain
Max MP slowly begins to decrease.
Once MP runs out, HP goes next.
That should've motivated players to escape,
but nobody even knew it was happening.
The game needed visual cues.
Feature Two: Purple Stuff
A purple vignette, plus some purple particles because why not.
Feature Three: Music Distortion
Fun fact: Slowly increasing the pitch of a song
is extremely unsettling.
At this point about a third of the playtesters
were catching on, but it was still too subtle.
Feature Four: Big Message
Not very subtle.
This sort of got the job done.
Feature Five: The Timer
This definitely got the job done, and then some.
So now the game is pretty good at motivating and
informing players to escape after they've picked up
a major item, but there’s a much larger problem:
Losing everything after you’ve beaten a boss is way too frustrating.The game needed a softer touch when dealing with defeated players.
Feature Six: Teleporters
A one-way shortcut that unlocks once you reach
the room right before the boss.
I thought this was the answer to all of my problems,
but the teleporter almost never got used.
When players respawned they'd run right past the statue.
The shortcut wasn't obvious enough.
Feature Seven: Teleport Reminder
If the player dies during or after a boss fight, this screen gets shoved in their face.
So the teleporter kind of helps, but it'd be nice if
levels grew slightly less difficult over time.
Feature Eight: Rank Ups
Essentially, an XP meter that increases by collecting loot.
Fill up the meter and your rank increases, boosting projectile damage/speed.
Everyone loves grinding XP, right?
Maybe not, because while the rank-ups
certainly made boss battles easier, they
did little to mitigate frustration.
Feature Nine: Loot Salvage
Players keep half of their gems, but nothing else.
This
consolation prize worked fairly well.
(Probably should've started with this one.)Now that players have salvage it's time to give
them somewhere to spend it all before they get
the chance to stash it in the bank.
Feature Ten: Heart Shop
Upon death the player can spend their salvage on a temporary HP bonus.
I like this one, although playtester response was lukewarm.
And that’s the recipe for level extraction.
Truly, a hot mess of a feature list.
Did it work? Sort of. I guess. There’s still room for improvement.
If I'm being honest, a well-placed HP bonus at a crucial point
or moving an enemy just a few pixels to the left often plays a
larger role in the player's experience than all of these
features combined.
Community
