Admittedly, nearly this entire year hasn't really gone to plan. We've made some stumbles, changed some core design, and ran into several things we weren't really expecting.
I'm going to talk a bit about some of the problems we've run into and the decisions we've made. Its a little bit of reflection as well as lessons learned.
Also some of these screenshots will include old/temp art and definitely not final.
Core Changes
We were originally aiming for an Early Access release much earlier in the year, as well as a split screen only demo. Several things changed this, the art change being a big one, but this resulted in several changes being made across the entire design.
Most of these changes are good, but as we quickly learned, once you change one mechanic, you're going to end up tweaking/changing the rest.
Magic
Magic was originally a little odd: You consumed an item (like a potion) and would gain temporary magic abilities. Some were powerful, others were fairly mild and nearly passive.
While this worked, it made you reliant on items and was too temporary to make a long term difference. You could also only really have one magic 'active' at a time, which felt weak considering you're supposed to be part-mage.
The new system is much simpler: Aim at an object, and press the magic key. You draw the element of whatever you're looking at and can now hurl it at foes. (Or other players)
Even better, if you hold the magic key down, you'll manipulate that material in some way:
Cover all wood objects in spikey wooden branches? Sure, then maybe kick someone into them.
The game was originally balanced from what we saw at the Expo last year. With the magic changes and more flexibility designed with the grapple hook, most enemies are now pretty much pushovers in difficulty, even more so in co-op. Unfortunately this is the impact of making significant core changes but its something we can overcome.
Right now we'll probably leave the enemies as is and keep them in the early game, but make some more advanced enemies for have some better mobility to combat the player.
Levels
This has influenced many of the levels we have built out, unfortunately causing many to be reworked entirely.
The combination of magic and the grapplehook caused a lot of sections to be easily bypassed. Combined with now much more powerful players, and you could beat levels quick.
We also felt a lot of levels didn't utilize gameplay strengths, or focused on an unusual aspect of the game that didn't quite work out well as an entire level. (Looking at you, desert ghosts)
On the plus side, a lot of the online play is mostly working, aside from a few obvious issues. I don't want to call it out too soon but I'm hoping we can have something out there sooner than later. Well we'll see.
Anyways that's all the notes for now. Until then, here is a picture of Morrison and his (to be filled) item shop:
Post Private Beta Thoughts
A few weeks ago we sent out about a dozen private beta keys to start gathering some feedback for the project. This seemed like a good time to get thoughts on the current direction and the best steps to move forward.
I feel its also relevant to note that this is the first (?) private beta we've ran, so I feel we stumbled on a few steps, but all in all it worked. The beta included roughly 20% of the game, but had enough of the core mechanics to have a strong idea for how the remainder of the game worked.
We've done a lot of review of the feedback and it's given us quite a bit to think about.
In no particular order, here are some various observations from our notes:
Originally we had a lot of manually piloting the airship around. While a neat novelty, it became kind of a chore, and left other players in co-op with not much to do.
We're considering making the airship more of a 'safe house' that you can access whenever you need it in certain levels, and potentially be able to pilot it around in areas (where it would make sense).
Keeping the deck cluttered with stuff is cool right...?
Every single beta tester we got feedback from struggled with the combat difficulty.
We've concluded there are several reasons for this that were external to the actual AI: UI Feedback, level design, the player's animations, and the lack of a proper combat tutorial.
That being said, I'm looking at making weaker variants of the current enemy types to create a better learning curve. Fortunately this private beta didn't have any of the bosses, which may have been way more problematic.
Simple ghost who lobs magic, or the harbinger of death?
On the up side, a lot of players found they liked the grapple hook. Some so much so that they effectively stopped walking altogether.
There are a handful of tools you can equip to your left arm, but at the minute none of them really quite measure up with the grapple hook. I predict this might lead to some problems down the road so I think its a good time to reevaluate the other tools.
Not shown: Swinging into this tree.
There is a lot of thoughts on the UI - which I think at this point needs an overhaul as well as some notable changes. I don't think I am going to discuss that at the minute as that may need to be its own topic.
Lastly, we've still been overhauling the art style. This is definitely incomplete but I think the vibe is probably going to stay the same:
Thanks for reading.
April Updates
First things first, the team has grown somewhat. We have brought on:
- Adrian as a 3D artist. - Josh as an art director and level designer. - Hampus as a composer.
This has had some unusual side effects...
Adrian has taken up the daunting task of overhauling the art. Since we are already somewhat late into development, you'll likely see a slow transition from my simple art style to a much more cohesive one. I'm currently undecided, but its possible we'll have at least one beta(?) build with a mixed and/or incomplete art style.
Similarly, each level is undergoing an overhaul as well. Josh will be redoing/finishing the main chapters. We're also adding some optional challenges and mini-dungeons but its really too early to say how many of these there will actually be, and how extensive they will be.
A lot of these are challenges we thought it would be fun to add or areas that didn't quite make it into other levels.
Combat changes!
We've run into some unusual balance problems that kind of go into the core of our stat system. I'd love to go into a lot of depth over the flaws, but that might be too much for this particular article.
To summarize, the player was too fast, and once you hit certain combat levels, gained far too much of an advantage over most enemies. Unfortunately for the stats, this means a good deal will need to be reworked, but it will be all for the better in the long run.
Combat is still being tweaked but here is a small clip of it if you're interested:
[previewyoutube="9HDtDKofXw4;full"]
Unfortunately we're going to push everything further back until some of these overhauls are in a better state. I personally have several things on my to-do list that I really want polished up and/or fixed before the project sees any public beta or early access status.
November Updates!
The weeks leading up into the holidays always get kind of crazy. I actually intended to have an update sometime during the first week of November but that just did not pan out.
So what's the current status of the game?
Well technically playable. Single player works, and splitscreen (+ Steam Remote Play) work but not without some issues. Admittedly the online play via Steam has given us some unusual issues which has been a lot of our focus right now.
Some quirky issues came up that we didn't anticipate but we probably should have.
Originally, during dialogue, you would select what you want to say to an NPC and they would immediately reply. Well we added a step in-between where your character actually asks the question.
This is entirely for other players who may be listening into the conversation. This doesn't add much to single player other than having the character slightly expand on the question/answer when they state it.
The original character editor, although interesting, wasn't quite the right tone, so we went with something much more traditional.
Admittedly the editor is pretty basic right now and eventually should have more, but it's been an usual design issue/challenge for both online play and splitscreen, and needs to work 100% before we do much else to it.
After we get Steam online (and a couple of notable bugs) hammered out, we're going to send out a handful of Alpha keys for largely performance and some bug squashing. How we are going to choose the testers, I'm really not sure.
Once things seems to be functional online and local, and some rough edges smoothed out, I think we'll be set for early access, which will be largely focusing on adding content.
Expo follow-up
We got a lot of feedback from demoing the project and having anyone who wanted to come up and play it. There were definitely bugs that are being ironed out so I won't talk about those, but I will write about some notable topics people brought up, as well as observations from me.
Level design: This one is 100% on me. I created this coastal city with some winding paths, bridges, and shortcuts. As you progress through the level, you slowly fight new varieties and larger numbers of enemies. A player progressing normally will have decent equipment and few levels to deal with the challenge.
What I did not expect was players to take windy side routes and avoid most conflicts and gear, resulting in them getting into difficult fights with little to no gear.
Respawning: Throughout the level was about 4-5 of these 'markers'.
They are the equivalent of 'check points' in that you respawn at them, but you need to walk up and touch them to activate them. Most players skipped these entirely. My theory is that don't look particularly interesting so it was easy to skip.
Another idea would be to have them auto-activate if you get near them. Maybe an NPC can point them out but that feels cheap.
Regardless this system will definitely get tuned up.
Art: I got some praise and some confusion on the art style. Players generally seemed to like the simpler style as it was pretty easy to tell what's going on. What was not liked was a lot of items use the same color palettes as other objects, making some items fairly difficult to see if you weren't looking directly at it.
This was amplified by the fact some items are hard to aim at and pick up, due to them being small or oddly shaped.
This should be pretty easily fixable.
Other:
As it stands the inventory 'book' system is a little too slow to use and will likely be getting some slight design changes.
Several players asked for more destructible objects and things to interact with. Specifically, brute forcing doors.
Wall jumping works on some objects that it probably shouldn't work on, which was more confusing to players than anything.
The player's death animation takes too long. This is actually a bug, but the AI adds insult to injury and will kick you on the ground as you die and that came off as kind of mean.
There are other minor gameplay and UI elements we're going to re-evaluate or refine, though most of the core elements I believe will stay the same. That being said I was hoping to prepare for an early access or beta release as the next major thing post-expo, but I don't think the game is quite there yet.
Name Your Game Expo!
We have been invited to showcase our game at the Name Your Game Expo in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Should you happen to be in the area October 5th/6th, you should swing by and check out what we got.
(If all goes according to plan 😬) We'll be showcasing splitscreen and one of the newer areas for anyone to play, as well as a newer trailer we'll be showing and uploading here to Steam.
This is our first expo so it will be a rough build, but there will be a follow-up post here as well as discussion over feedback on our Discord...
Which is to note, we're also finally opening up a Discord server. Feel free to join us here: https://discord.gg/sFDJZ7R
August Updates!
So there has been like a whole lot of changes that I haven't been talking about much. The last few months have been crazy and I suspect that will continue for a while.
Here is the inventory notebook. (Some of the art in it is placeholder.)
Not only is it diegetic, but can be used with a bunch of different screensizes and splitscreen, which is cool.
More weapons and stuff. The art has been changed around quite a bit, and will likely change a bit more.
As requested by various people, an option for 3rd person.
I'd love to talk about the grapplehook next but it still needs a few adjustments before I can really show it off.
There are also a handful of graphical changes that will be done and I may also talk about that. Not as exciting, sure, but it is interesting to see how the art developers over time.
