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This week I have primarily balanced the game, as well as cleaned up the design document for a second hand in.
Above you can see the image from the game design document that explains the game state and UI, with the final map. Below is an excerpt from the game document explaining the level design.
The three lanes are there to funnel the enemies towards the life tree, and helps establish that the life tree is where you should keep your focus, since most movement is directed towards it. The seeds and the warden are spawned at the life tree to also keep the attention there.
There are small paths going vertically to allow the player more mobility on the map. The lanes have some areas that are wider than the rest, designed to allow the player some room to experiment.
If you read the previous blog posts on the level design, you may notice that the map is a lot more linear than before. This is due to the pathfinding we created was not able fit the maps with open spaces, we had to simplify the map down to lanes.
To allow the player to maneuver the map more easily I added small paths between the lanes.
However, in play testing, the players found that they felt more like a forest spirit when they could travel through the forest directly, rather than only be able to walk the paths like a normal human.
As such, we were thinking that maybe we could slow the player down when they walk in the forest, but have a higher general movement speed, so that the player gets some feedback when they are on a forest tile and not just walking over a regular space with a tree sprite on top of it.
On the play testing and balancing end of things, I let anyone of my fellow students that wanted to try the game try it. It resulted in some valuable and some less valuable feedback. Among the most important was finding a balance of enemy spawn rate, where the game starts becoming very challenging in the fourth minute, and usually ends around the sixth. The reason for the short game time is that since we had to cut three of enemy types from the original planned six, where the game would have been around ten minutes long, had slower enemies spawn rate and generally had a lot smoother difficulty curve. As it stands, the game difficulty curve is more spiky, where the game increases every minute with a hard spike. However, we are to late in to production to change this.
About Pontus Hassis
2014 Graphics
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