08-03-2018
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Welcome back readers to a new week and of course a new post! This week is supposed to be about playtesting and feedback but since I talked about that last week I’ll just skim it over quickly and then talk about something else. If I would look back to all the feedback I’ve gotten during playtesting there are two main reasons to why I think it’s something very important during game-making. Firstly, you will never ever find all the bugs yourself! No matter if you test thing a hundred times, the playtesters are going to find something in your game that doesn’t work as intended. It’s a universal rule. Secondly, as much as you’ve heard it before and are probably sick of hearing it, it’s always nice with a fresh pair of eyes. Maybe the feature you’ve hyped all the way from the starts simply just isn’t fun for the player, and you’re to obsessed with it to realize that yourself. Or maybe there’s a really really simple solution to how you make your powerups feel rewarding while still not breaking the balance of the game. It happened to me, and it sure is going to happen to you. That’s my final word on playtesting. The rest of this post will be dedicated to the subject of our games scrolling background. I’ve previously posted about how I implemented movement into our game and this is partially a follow-up on that post. You see, we wanted a long level that our player needed to survive until the end, but we felt that making a long level completely by hand would take too long time for our graphic artist. It just wasn’t worth it, we had other more pressing matters that we needed our artists to work on. So in the end, we opted for a scrolling background. Our artist would make a short part of a level and then that short part would loop for a certain amount of time until the player cleared the level. Easy! Well, not so easy as one would expect actually. Having the background to scroll actually messed up another key element of our initial design for the game, and that was the shadow chasing the player. The player needed to constantly move forward in order to evade the shadow. In the end, I solved the problem by introducing a GLOBAL VARIABLE (gasp!) called backwardsSpeed that is set in the games Game Manager. This variable reduces the y-axis movement of every entity in the game, including the background. So if the player stands still they still move backwards, but it’s at the same speed as the background which gives the illusion of that it’s instead the camera, and most importantly, the shadow moving forwards.
Oscar  |