Some times you need to step back from development, play your game, and deeply scrutinize everything about it. Not only that, play other games using the same engine. Or even hand your game off to a friend who you KNOW will show you no mercy! This is constant feedback necessary for the development process. Are you doing something wrong? Change it, and change it early!
Story time: After taking a small break and picking up development again earlier this month, I found myself focusing pretty heavily on the menu system. In fact, my menu.lua file is now over 1000 lines of code because of all the work done (Granted, if I had to do it over again it would probably be much shorter, but that’s another story!). Pretty soon, I had a dynamic, fun interface for the user to navigate through. I became satisfied that I had a semi-professional looking menu system, so I moved back to focus on gameplay.
After playing the game and listing the features I could add or fix, something hit me. I couldn’t lie to myself.
The gameplay sucked! It wasn’t fun. Period. The objects that the player had to destroy moved too slow, my collision was wonky, and having to melee each object was cumbersome and, after a while, predictable and redundant. Even if I upped the challenge, I didn’t see any way I could make this more fun. It felt like Superman 64, arguably one of the worst games ever released on a Nintendo console.That said, I knew I had to add to adjust the way the game was played. I made some major changes:
- Introduced GUNS. Oh yeaaaah! This definitely means I’ll have to change the name from Hack ‘n Slash to something else. Oops!
- More physics! Players like physics, so I tried to adjust my collision handling to work with the physics built into the Corona engine. This especially works well with objects that are deflected when hit. By the way, deflecting an object with a bullet feels oh-so good!
- Difficulty. Not saying my girlfriend is bad at video games, but if she was able to beat 12 levels fairly easily, something must be done. Speed of objects were increased and guns, which became the primary method of attack, now need to hit certain objects multiple times before exploding. Basically, a player shouldn’t be able to destroy every object coming at them, which made dodging all the more important.
- Sound effects make you more engrossed in the game. Something I’ve always planned, but adding them just made the game more satisfying.
Will soon be starting on stage bosses. T-minus 2 weeks for beta! Wish me luck!