Harpoon the Goon
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This week I have been working on a few different things, but one of the main things I have done is set a limit on the use of the harpoon. In our game, Umibozu, the player must use their harpoon to kill enemies but should be careful to avoid shooting vital power-ups. We aim to facilitate ‘mystery’ in Umibozu, by forcing the player to use their floodlight to uncover potential enemies/power-ups etc. (which all share the same sprite while covered by the mist!). So far however, the harpoon has had unlimited ammo and could be fired at will, and enemies were destroyed instantly if hit by the harpoon. We came to realize that these mechanics were contradictory to our aesthetic goals since there were no limitations on the harpoon’s use. This meant that the harpoon was simply too powerful and although Umibozu is not supposed to be particularly challenging as such, many of the ‘mysterious’-elements were lost because of it.
This was revealed by our playtests where we noticed that many players preferred to ‘spam’ the harpoon; destroying power-ups and enemies alike. This also rendered the floodlights useless since there was no reason to find power-ups for the floodlight. To combat the issue, our group agreed that restrictions were needed. These included: ammo requirement, reload time and a new “harpoon ammo”-power-up. It is fair to say that we had hoped to have this in place earlier, so that we could check how successful our restrictions on the harpoon were in the playtesting sessions rather than testing mechanics we knew had to be changed quite a lot. This would also have been better in relation to Scrum as it aims for teams to have a MVP product by the end of each sprint, which, with our harpoon mechanics at the time, was not satisfactorily met this time.
– Jeppe Willatzen  |
