Week 7 – Tamarrion – Post-Beta

The world of Tamarrion, created by the talented Måns Löf

Post-Beta

We’ve been so.insanely.god.damn.busy this last week. We’ve crunched 4 out of 7 days this week. On the upside, A LOT of things have happened with the game. It looks gorgeous now!

The game is basically finished in the sense of being a vertical slice. This means that all features we want to be in the game is done and ready to be tested on a large audience. What we’ve got left is polishing, iterating on the already implemented features, balancing and play testing. Oh and bug testing (easier said than done).

This week we’ve been able to finish the trailer, we’ve added all of our currently finished art assets, we’ve created a presentation and we’ve had massive play testing from outside sources (i.e. people who had not tested it before).

A person even spent the entire weekend just to beat the boss on brutal (the hardest difficulty). Which he did – after about 50-60 tries. It was streamed as well, and I was glued to my screen, watching, taking notes on bugs and tactics. I love creating games.

My work

I took it on myself to create a audiovisual script for our trailer, which I did. Me and my coworker Mikaela then sat down and juggled ideas around, worked out camera angles and created a specific build with special Camera Angels. We wanted the trailer to mainly focus on Combat with a cinematic intro. The result can be seen below!

Other than that, I’ve been hard pressed to balance, play test, tweaking and generally finding bugs in our game. It takes A LOT of time to get everything to feel “just right”. The abilities has to be tuned, the spells has to feel right, all spells has to have a purpose, there can’t be any glaring over powered abilities and god powers. This takes time, and it takes iteration. Mostly, we’ve come to a stage in development where rather going off of numbers and statistics (as I did earlier), I’m trying to work a “feel” angle. It has to feeeeeeel right, not just be statistically balanced.

I’m still working on finishing the balancing of the God powers, and we’ve got a working version of all god powers except the support god power, which is tricky. I’ve also had to change a few game design decisions to make the combat feel smoother to play, and visually more impactful (or, just HEAVIER in general). I’ve worked closely with the Programmers to make sure that I’ve been given all the tools needed for small level tweaking.

The game is shaping up to be what I envisioned it in the beginning of the project, yet it’s taken a lot of strange, but wonderful new twists and turns. It’s exactly what it set out to be; a mish-mash of RPG’s such as Dark Souls and the mechanical heavy World of Warcraft raid bosses, with the nose-down-to-the-grindstone replayability that Super Meat boy offers. But then again, I could be wrong, and we’ve gone the entirely wrong route, and should’ve separated ourselves more from the other genres. Time will tell.

I’m also going to present the game infront of an audience at the GGC. This takes a ridiculous amount of time that I’d rather spend on the game. But, It’s going steadily forward, so hopefully our presentation won’t be shit.

That’s about it for this week! See you at the GGC!

Our new effect for the holy god power