Spark: Big Game Project Post #7
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This week has gone primarily towards playtesting the game for the upcoming Gotland Game Conference. We felt we had nailed down everythign essential to the experience and my job was to experiment with different settings including how much health and stamina the player has, how far they can roll and how high they can jump, etc. The game is meant to be quite difficult but fair, and to reward players for being patient with their strikes and making good use of their stamina and it fell upon me to iron out anything that might take away from that experience. The main changes that were made as a result was that the stamina total was lowered, while the stamina regeneration was increased. This means that the player can quickly recuperate after a battle, but is unable to rapidly chain too many attacks after one another, which we wanted to discourage. The enemies are designed to have obvious build-ups on their attack animations and give the player ample time to react and if the player believes they can stand in place and spam attacks without consequence then that design element becomes pointless. Furthermore, most of the enemies leave behind ”pools” of darkness that previously dealt damage to the player if they made contact. Now, they are simply decorative, as if the pools ended up being planted to close together it would be impossible to pass them without taking damage, which when coupled with the fact that they were incredibly hard to spot in the grass, contradicted our attempts to make the game feel fair.
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