Game Development Update #3

Welcome back my beloved followers in search of entertainment and knowledge!
It’s been one exciting week as we move closer and closer to the actual finished product.

Get to it Teddy! Tell us what you’ve been fiddling with this week.
Take a chill pill, relax and enjoy. This week the team was faced with a lot of different challenges. Most of them consisted of assets in need of polish. A lot of work has also been done in order to add remaining assets previously left out of the game for the alpha. As the beta moves closer we want to add the remaining enemies, powers and make all necessary tweaks for the game to be the best it possibly can.

One of the most discussed assets this week has been the game’s boss. Early on in pre-production we felt that we wanted a boss in the game. During our alpha presentation we also expressed our commitment in having a functional, challenging and meaningful boss in the game. Despite our ambitious plans we finally came to the conclusion that the boss had to be cut. We had a vision on how we wanted the boss to utilise the rebirth mechanic as the player did. The boss would’ve had almost identical health orbs as the player to effectively make use of the player’s ability to see connections and patterns. The health orbs would’ve been the indicators of the boss’ health as well as where the player should attack.

This genuinely sounds neat, why did you cut the boss?
We cut the boss not because of a lack of ideas but because of the time not being sufficient. With the available time we want to polish already implemented features and assets while also adding more essential assets such as more enemy types to improve variety. The boss simply had to take a backseat because of the huge amount of art and animations required to make it of any value to the game and the player.

So what did you do when you lost the boss?
Well, I had to find a suitable alternative climax to the game with the already available assets. I conceived a few concepts; the first being to make a mini boss of an already implemented enemy. The idea was to take an ordinary enemy and assign various projectile patterns to it. By doing this it turned inte à puzzle and coordination-type of challenge for the player where he/she has to shoot the mini boss’ health orbs, protected by the projectiles effectively doubling as a shield, in order to deve at the mini boss.

Another more simple approach to the problem was to simply implement a high score counter. This counter would award points based on completion time, kills, powers absorbed etcetera. This feature could of course co-exist with the other feature but here it was thought as a part of an endless game where only a permanent death would trigger the end state of the game.

A third and final solution to this dilemma involved tying the end together with the introduction of the game. The game would begin with teaching the player how to absorb powers and making sure they have it equipped. This would be done by introducing a basic elemental enemy on its own which would equip the player with a power upon being defeated. The next step would be to have the player getting overwhelmed by a large number of enemies to make sure the player dies and teaches him/her that death isn’t the end. The player will get an increase in power and the remaining enemies will scatter. In the later stages of the game they will return but by then the player will be better equiped and more skilled to deal with what will be a wave based end challenge. These enemies need to compromise of the already implemented enemies but to make them stand out they need to be slightly altered in terms of appearance. They need to easily signal the player that they’re the ones from the first stage of the game.

Summary.
These ideas may prove useful next week when we’ll get a chance to assess them and potentially implement them. At least they will function as a springboard for future ideas regarding the level design in the early and late stages of the game.

Thank you all for following me on yet another week of fascinating and absurd ideas. I wish you all had a pleasant read and please stay tuned for the coming weeks’ madness as we’re crawling toward GOLD status.

See you all next week!

Sincerely,
Ted Fristedt
Lead Designer
Team Elf

About Ted Fristedt

2016 Game Design

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