Balance And Testing
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So this week as we continue to improve upon our game Trowl i have put all of my focus and attention towards balancing the game, because one of the changes we did this week was to make the game autoscrolling which made it so that i had to rework alot of the leveldesign in the game. But we did this change because of feedback we have gotten from playtesters that did not know that they are suppose to move forward and assumed that the enemies would come towards them, which was reasonable and we fixed it by implemented the autoscrolling in the game. This change made the game feel more alive and it also forces the play to take action when the player starts the game. So one of the issues we have had in the game is that it is too hard which i had a hard time noticing because i have been playing this game for i don’t know maybe 20 hours for testing. So to say the least i am well aware of what enemies are coming and how everything works, not only because i implemented where the enemies will be but also the fact that i have to play through the game whenever i test to implement a new enemy at the end, in hindsight maybe we should make a way to teleport in the game for testing. so i called up friends and families and more or less anyone i could find that wanted to test, in particular i wanted children to test the game because the target audience for the game is children. so i called my sister and got my nieces to try the game which has helped alot with balancing because the game has to be easy to understand and to play for children around the age of 6-12. so while having that in mind i have tuned the game down a bit, and might make it a little easier in the future. We have also implemented a screen before the game starts that shows the controls which we seriously think about naming controwls, it also shows what you should be doing in the game as in save the owlets and also avoid the enemies or you can shoot them down.
Here in this picture you can see one of my headaches when it comes to balancing, i had to make sure that the branch and the lightning cloud that comes flying at you dont come at the same time and also that if you get hit by the branch you dont get hit by the lighting cloud, i also had to make sure that the enemies were reasonable and easy to avoid so to help with that we made it so that one of the enemies would get hit by the branch as soon as it popped up. not just to make it easier but also to make it so that the player knows that it can use the enviroment against the enemy to gain advantage. we also put a slow time power up just before so everything would be easier to avoid. We also have a problem with the owlets because we have decided that we should only use around 4 owlets but we want to make the level alot longer than what we have it right now which makes the game hard because the owlets work like a much needed stress reduce for the owl mother in the parts of the game where there are alot of enemies. if we use more than 4 owlets the 5 owlet that is then display in a snake like line behind the player would not be displayed because that is outside of the screen. And really how many owlets can a owl have before it gets silly. Thanks for reading this week! Wish us luck for our continued work!  |
