FIFTH POST, FISH GAME
|
Hi. I am the designer in team shadhavar. Today I will be talking about the audio visual feedback and cues in our game. Our game has lacked feedback for a really long time, in fact it was perhaps the most criticized part of the game. When we set out making our game we decided to focus on the most important features first, as you should when you are creating a game. Naturally focusing on the more important parts such as the controls and gameplay, will mean that things such as visual feedback and audio feedback will fall behind. However it is very important to remember that audio and visual feedback are very necessary. Audio and visual cues are both very effective ways to communicate to the player in a subconscious way, meaning that the player does not actively have to think or be aware of changes, because the cues are supposed to tell the player when something has happened. In great executions of audio and visual feedback such as the player changing color to red and making a grunt sound after being hit by an attack, there should be no need to think. Your brain will automatically make the connection that being hit is bad, red is the colour of blood and you usually make a noise when you hurt yourself, thus you are supposed to immediately understand that whatever just happened to you in game was not a positive thing.
With that short insight into audio and visual cues, I will now proceed to explain some of the cues I was responsible for and my decisions when it came to those cues. Something that was a real tricky thing to communicate, was the amount of shots a power up weapon had. Usually players would feel like they were cheated whenever they lost their powerup weapon, since they were not aware of how much ammo they had expended nor did they actively look at the ammo counter, since they were to focused on the gameplay. Since we were in the later stages of the project at this point we wanted a solution to the ammo awareness problem that would not require a huge change to the placement of the UI. The solution I came up with was actually quite simple. Whenever the player was running low on ammo we would now play a clicking sound in addition to the gun firing, this almost completely eliminated the need to look at the ammo counter, thus allowing the player to focus more on the gameplay.
The second feedback que I was in charge of was more for aesthetic purposes. Originally whenever an enemy would die they would simply plop out of existence, which was not very satisfying and left the player a bit confused since there was no clear indication that the enemy had actually been killed. We did not want the game to be too bloody, since we felt that it would work against the cartoony aesthetic we had established. The solution was therefore to have a particle effect appear whenever an enemy died, and instead of spewing out blood, it would spew out some fish bones. The first version of the fish bone particle effect got some critique in the ways of it looking like toenail clippings, so the bones were therefore changed to look more like skeleton bones. With the new particles implemented, the particle effect felt more satisfying whenever an enemy died. Now it should be mentioned that most of these changes have not been tested on people outside of the team, so we can not know with certainty if the solutions were good or not. The changes were however based on the feedback we had gotten throughout the project, so hopefully things are better now than they were before. Hope this was a good read and gave you some insight into audio and visual cues.  |
