Making one’s great ideas actually noticeable
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As the name suggests, the core aesthetic of Friendship Down is friendship and comradery. In pursuit of this goal, the game was designed around a specific core mechanic: the player is given an activated ability that produces a shield with which the player can ward off enemy projectiles, potentially protecting both themselves and the Friends (allied NPCs that fight alongside the player. Within the context of the game these are referred to as the Friends). From this core design choice, other ideas sprung that were considered to be positively reinforcing the aesthetic goal. One of these ideas – that could realistically be implemented in terms of workload – was to have the enemies occasionally fire a homing, deadly projectile (Friends are unharmed by regular bullets) that would target and move in specifically on your Friends. This, we reasoned, would create a player behaviour in which they would have to dash to their Friend’s aid, blocking the projectile, and, hopefully, as a result, achieving some form emotional reward in having saved their friend, in turn contributing to the aesthetic goal. This was implemented prior to the last playtesting session, and, unfortunately, results would largely appear this way:
And this is not particularly surprising when considering the following screen capture:
Essentially, the mechanic is lost amidst the other bullets. In addressing this, we explained the mechanic through character dialogue, and added a text box above the targeted Friend’s head, stating “Help!” when the projectile was fired in game. This, we are aware, is a relatively cheap approach to the issue, but, due to time constraints, was one of the few viable options we had.
The learning outcome of the playtesting was how the process would ideally have been designed for maximum impact in terms of achieving the aesthetic goal. Naturally, the player should be given clear, stand-out audio and visual signals that a major game event is occurring. I quickly sketched out my ideas for how I thought the step-by-step process could have been, see below.
First, the enemy sprite powers up the attack, where clear, attention-grabbing effects both visual and auditory.
Then the projectile is unleashed onto the map, travelling somewhat slowly and with an indicator showing its location as well as its direction (moving towards the Friend in question)
Finally, the targeted Friend has distinguishable crosshairs placed on top of their sprite, so to make it visually clear to the player which NPC is targeted, even if the player only sees it in their peripheral vision.
In short, I reason that this setup would create a game situation in which the player’s attention is steered towards this in-game event, encouraging action. Ideally, showing the trajectory of the projectile all the way to the targeted Friend may strengthen the sense in the player that they are intercepting a predetermined fate, hopefully also inspiring some sense of heroism.  |
