Feedback Friday #144 - December 18-21, 2020

Hello everyone,

We all know how bad it is when a game is shipped full of bugs but what if you could do even better, and find out at the very beginning if you've nailed the most important design elements of your game, before you spend a lot of time building them out?

If that sounds like something you could use, you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week. Share a build of your work in progress game to get playtesting and feedback, get new perspectives to help you overcome your biggest obstacles and take advantage of the Unity Community to boost your game development!

What To Show

• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) - Core game play > everything else
• How To Scope Small (Unity tutorial)
• Post a link to a playable game, preferably WebGL. If you don't have a playable game, post something substantial, not just text.

How To Ask For Feedback

• Be concise.
• Specify what you want feedback on and what you don't.
• Resist the urge to write an immediate defense. Take the time to understand their points. Remember that your friends here are taking time out of their busy schedules to help you for free.

How To Give Feedback

• Be positive. There's something of value in every game.
• Focus on the design, not the designer.

Feedback Friday #143 is here.

 

Alrighty, here we are again. https://eternalambiguity.itch.io/ca-shooter

Not a whole lot of explicitly new gameplay features, but hopefully it's more tied together here. There's a new map, and I'm having a couple rooms start out with "environmental hazards" - with power off (so no energy regen), or hot/cold (which damages player, and affects enemy growth). Also added a poison effect for the immobile enemies.

Don't know what I was thinking about reaching out to non-devs, it clearly still needs work. I spent some time doing some de-coupling on the backend so I can reload the simulation, which basically means exiting/loading levels (not as separate Unity scenes). To that end I intend to make an attempt at building this out to a connected world with things like elevators between levels. I also want to incorporate some sort of equipment system, which could be used to protect against environmental hazards or provide weapon/energy upgrades. I also need to figure out some sort of scripting system for "quests" (perhaps I could reach into the Asset bin and try out Quest Machine by the ever fabulous Pixel Crushers). I'd also like to think of more "environmental hazards" for the player to encounter.

One thing I'm still uncertain about: there's a lot of variability. The first two gifs show a run where I encountered one room with enemies, and they were easily dispatched. The third gif shows a run where there were enemies in the central room, and they were pretty much overwhelming. In theory that's cool, but I'm not sure if it's too much to handle.

I can of course change the growth values, but that will affect all enemies, not just those in big rooms. It also quickly gets boring in that video, where I run out of energy to shoot continuously and so I wind up waiting around, shooting slowly. That may simply be a "balance" issue--preventing protracted "encounters of attrition" but maintaining a limit so there's an upper bound on the "size" of encounters a player can deliberately engage in.


I'd appreciate any and all comments on what you see here (or if you play it, even better).

 

You could have something like a recharge station/object in the world, so you could reduce the blob's forces in a fight until you start sputtering out then back out of the room to touch the thing to recharge, have energy meter filling up for a second or two then rush back and try and finish them off.. but take too long they'll have regrouped/grown more than how you left them, so could also open other avenues of strategy - player trying not to get into larger battles except near enough to an energy supply, luring blob out of places you can't easily recharge near enough to win otherwise etc., a story progression mechanic like maybe a recharge point only has a certain amount of "resource to harvest" from it before they'd need to find another source (which would be near enough to another blob-infested layout to be useful/valued).

 

I like it, great idea. Thanks! I wonder if I could fold it back into the power mechanic, where they recharge slowly like the player. A "battery bank."

 

I haven't had a chance to play yet, but as long as there are lots of small rooms, with a goal of making each one an encounter that lasts, say, 20-90 seconds, then it won't matter if a few are population outliers.

 

Perhaps part of the problem is the health of the various enemies. The immobile enemies go down with one shot, but the others take 10. That means that if there are a few roaming enemies the player is stuck waiting around for them to die, even if they're no threat. I can change that of course. I can also possibly extend their range of attack, though that has to be balanced with situations where the player is in a room with no power, and thus the only light they have is their own (which has limited range in "overhead" mode)...

 

It's come a long way since last time I played it, well done! Bear in mind I haven't seen it for a few weeks, so some things you've established might not be obvious to me. I played the new version and here are my thoughts:

Art Style:

• A bit basic (maybe still placeholder?) but I like the camera distance and 2.5d top view, feels just right.

Damage and death:

• It seems to me that the red blocks spawn green dots that can damage you when you shoot them. This is good! But it took several plays shooting tons of these things to realize it. The red blocks just disappear and then some time later mysterious dots appear. This needs more visual connection.
• Speaking of the green dots, they sometimes appear on top of me and kill me instantly, which is not fun.
  
• In the first hallway, I was wondering for a while what the blue/green fullscreen circle effect was. I thought it was some kind of illumination meter at first. And then, after way too long, I realized I was actually losing health in the hallway. Why? I don't see anything there, or any reason for it to be happening. And there was no feedback that I was being damaged. The idea is good, but how about some zaps/clouds of yellow gas/etc?
  
• Overall, I died way too many times without realizing I was in danger. Sometimes it seemed to happen a bit randomly. There needs to be a lot more visual feedback when you're receiving damage so you can figure out its source. I would suggest a pulsing fullscreen red blurry ring effect, some sound effects etc.

Enemies:

• It's not really obvious that enemies are enemies. I spawned next to a group of red blocks and assumed at first they were some kind of wall, even though they were red, because they did nothing, though they multiplied every now and then.
• Sometimes I go up to a crowded room and it's just full of different blocks that don't really do anything while I shoot them. So it can get a bit boring at times. Plus there's the charge issue you already mentioned. I think some more tactical gameplay is needed (interacting with controls that affect the room ahead for example, or having the enemies spill out into the corridor. But the rooms are a bit small for anything except blasting away.
• Have you thought about how enemies might interact and work with eachother? At the moment they all seem to operate on their own objectives.

Level:

• I need to find some kind of diode, but the environment gives me no feedback on where I might find it. There needs to be things that regularly indicate to you that by pressing on you'll find what you need.
  
• The environment isn't particularly electronicky, so it's hard to know why I need the diode, or where its location might fit into the environment and level.
• I would suggest adding breadcrumbs of interesting visual environmental elements to guide the player's attention.
• The rooms are too small for any kind of tactical gameplay.

At this point, I think the game has loads of potential, but currently is extremely limited and like it hasn't gone through the 'playground' phase of development. What I would do is take the enemies, build small set pieces and try to squeeze out more fun. Try 100 different ideas for enemy capabilities, environmental hazards, interacting with the environment during combat, etc. Add lots of kinds of visual and sound effects. Play around with level design and tactical possibilities.

PS I got one crash when I went
1. Up through the first door and along the corridor
2. Up through the first room to the second vertical corridor.
3. Up into the third room and out the right-hand door
4. Turned back to shoot some enemies at the door I came through and it crashed.

Also, please add a 'Loading' indicator when you press 'Start'. I know it's a prototype but it's never fun when you don't realize a scene is loading and none of the UI works. These things help create good first impressions.

 

Thanks, I appreciate all of the feedback.

Still definitely in the prototyping phase, so yeah no real art style yet. The idea is a space station, so something futuristic, but nothing concrete beyond that.

It sounds like I need a lot, lot more feedback. Just to explain a few things:

The green dots are meant to be a "poison" released when the red enemies die. How wide-spread the effect is is dependent upon the temperature of the room, and damage is dependent upon the current amount of poison (it dissipates over time).

The fullscreen effect is meant to indicate a temperature damage effect. There are hot and cold temps, with associated player damage and enemy effects (growth rate). My plan is to have a "heat waves" visual effect for high temps and a "freezing windowpane" visual effect for low temps. I looked around a little but didn't find anything that seemed quick, and I didn't want to spend too much time on it for now (again, still adding features).

Yeah, the enemy visuals are still placeholder too. They're meant to be something organic, which is why they have the weird sounding audio effect when they're created (and I'm also thinking about a "robot" faction as well).

The red type are just immobile and grow fast - they have the poison as their sole source of damage.
The pink type move randomly and shoot the player with a certain range (I mentioned above that I kept this range low for scenarios where the player only has their own light source, but I'm reconsidering that).
The blue type should follow the player and do a sort of melee attack (this one is problematic, due to the speed of the simulation - they don't move fast enough, and I'm not completely sure how I want to resolve it).

The fundamental idea is that the enemies are cellular automaton agents, so "do their own thing" is kind of part of it...semi-recently I made a gas simulation that has each agent's probability of movement be defined by their position on the grid relative to an overall pressure vector, maybe I could do something similar here.

The "quartz diode" thing is 100% just a nonsense McGuffin to provide an excuse to move across the map. Right now I'm working on an elevator type of thing, after which I plan to build a short scenario where the player encounters an NPC who tells the player to do something and return to them. That should be more realistic--something like "turn on the station life support."

I definitely need to work on the level design. This one is kind of annoying because of how I'm building the level: I'm currently using probuilder shapes with a plane defining the CA grid. At runtime start I iterate through all objects on the level and check if they're walls or doorways or doors or interactable objects (the climate and power thingamabobs) and adjust the CA grid based on that. The process of making walls with doors in them is kind of tedious, so for the time being I was just picking a generic level shape to use while I work on other things. It's definitely not very good.

You've given me lots of tips for what to fix. Thanks a ton, seriously.

 

You're welcome, hope I can help!

I definitely think this is the main focus point. I would really enjoy more of a sense of the game world being designed as a puzzle that is designed with micro and meta challenges with definite solutions.

For example, when I was in the first corridor, sometimes a red block would be there and I'd shoot it. The green dots would spawn with a small gap on the right hand side to slip through. That made me think "that was the way, and I found it" and was satisfying. Even though that's a small thing it immediately gave me the sense that the world was a puzzle to be solved.

Are you designing the levels procedurally? If so, I think it's incredibly important to first build a set of handcrafted levels that are super fun, and then try to extract the main design elements and proceduralize them. I have random missions in my game right now, but I have spent (and will spend a lot more) time creating different battle designs and set-piece battles that will add a 'soft' structure within the random elements, enough that the player feels like the game world spawned the event with intention.

The same goes for creating enemy abilities and the responses a player needs to implement to beat them.

 

Right now I'm building the levels by hand. It sounds like I need to work on that a bit more--I haven't spent very much time making the map itself seem interesting (for gameplay purposes). I'll take a stab at that.

 

Looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

I gotta say, for me personally, level design is the main thing I need to get better at, and that demo I put on FF a couple months ago is my first proper go at it. I've always made bits and pieces of things, but stringing it all together into a coherent, complete level is sort of the 'mid-game' part I rarely get to.

 

Heretofore my thought process was that level design came after. After you'd built out the mechanics and perhaps even started balancing them. I guess that's not necessarily the case--it all needs to be considered at once?

 

In this case, I think level design will have a big impact on initially finding the fun because it affects how blobs grow and how often players get to task switch to different rooms.

 

I've added a bunch of audio feedback (a little bit of visual stuff too). I'm gonna hold off on uploading anything until next time, but here's a GIF:

 

@EternalAmbiguity I just saw this great talk on how to reduce ambiguity and lack of clarity when making a game. The speaker says that there was a study done on the main factors of success (not just financial, though obviously it was a big part of it) in the development of a bunch of different games. They apparently found that having a clear vision early on in development, something that could be communicated in a few sentences, was the main deciding factor.

Curious to know, what would be the elevator pitch for your game at this point?

 

I have to go somewhere soon so I can't yet watch the video, but I hadn't really thought about an elevator pitch at all. Something like "Oxygen Not Included meets Metroid Fusion" comes to mind, though I don't know how robust that would be (considering how much smaller I intend my scope to be that the former).

I'll reply properly after watching the video.

 

Okay, so I really like the "pillars" thing, but I'm not completely sure how prescriptive they are. Her first is the player role, second seems to be how the player engages with the game physically which seems weird to me, and the third is about the gameplay itself. But for me:

1. The player is a lone soldier trying to save a research space station with escaped alien lifeforms that will soon self-destruct.
2. The player will manipulate station systems and battle enemies to proceed through and "fix" the station.
3. The player will navigate environmental hazards with upgrades and manipulation of station systems.

I feel like #2 is too vague, and #1 is trying to cram in too much information.

 

Can you reframe #1? Try replacing the gameplay's "why" with "what" and "how". For example, remove why (save a research space station). Add what (destroy alien lifeforms before they consume vital station systems) and the "how" (burn with flamethrower or by set areas' climate controls to higher temperatures).

 

Sure, I was mainly doing it that way because that's how the speaker in the GDC presentation did it.

Something like...

The player will destroy aliens lifeforms infesting the station by shooting them with various projectile weapons and using station systems to make their environments inhospitable with temperature or atmosphere manipulation.

(hadn't thought about a flamethrower)

 

I'm still not quite clear on how the alien lifeforms oppose the player. What's their goal? Kill the player? Destroy certain targets in the station? Simply grow as big as possible? Spawn off as many mobile enemies as possible?

Why not just make the entire environment too hot or too cold for the enemy's comfort? Does it also affect the player? Is there only enough energy to affect the environment in limited parts of the station at any given time?

 

For the first - I'm thinking no real goal, just mindless creatures attacking. Not humanoids. Think Metroid.

Edit: I have a tendency to obsess over narrative so I'm trying to keep from doing that here, but just because that sounded like a question about narrative: The idea is they were pulled from other dimensions and placed on the space station to be studied, and then soon before the player's arrival they escaped confinement, somehow (I have "who/what/when/where/why/how" sitting in a file right now and I'm trying to figure those out).

For the second - both. Damage to the player, and it uses some amount of energy to heat up or cool down rooms, so the player has to pick and choose. Plus, with how I've set things up now, both hot and cold have certain effects for the enemy - in cold the immobile enemies grow very slowly but release a larger amount of poison, and in heat the immobile enemies grow quickly.

Something I was thinking: at the start of a level the player can see the map and pick and choose what effects to apply to the different rooms. Then they would need to navigate to some destination. That might allow for a little bit of puzzle-esque gameplay.

 

That's a pretty cool overview there. So I'm getting that the main mechanics in this game will be direct combat and 'environment manipulation'. If I were you, what I'd do now is create a small amount (e.g. 1 screen's worth) of gameplay for each of these that represents the 'ideal' presentation - the absolute best, most fun scene you can think of.

For example, for the environment manipulation, you might have a room with too many aliens to face, and there's an adjoining room with controls that you have to get to. But when you pull the control, it releases gas into the alien's room plus the control room, and you have to run out and shut an airlock behind you. Or something like that.

So when you play that scene, you'll say "ah this is what this game is all about". And same for the direct combat, which I think needs more tactical elements to have a more lasting sense of fun.

I'm making a 'proof of concept' demo for my game right now, and the two main elements that I'm focusing on right now are ship combat and trading. I'm trying to end up with the minimum amount of stuff I need to make to fully test the concepts out - not just cubes and greyboxing but something that fully captures the end player experience in the minimum scope, something that proves I can do the entire deal.

So the idea is to first imagine 5 minutes of 'ideal' - i.e. pure fun and excitement - combat and build it out like a movie set piece. Then once I've played it and it's definitely fun, I will figure out the principles that make it fun, and create replicable systems from them with ranges of variation that I can use like building blocks to create the levels and entire game world.

Same for the 'ideal' trading run, which has a combination of great UI/mechanics, atmospheric locations to travel between, good music, a snappy and satisfying docking sequence etc.

I think this is the best way to proceed, by starting off at a very small 'ideal' example and working backward, rather than (in my case) multiplying mediocre things and hoping that everything will suddenly harmonize and produce an exceptional experience.

 

Oof, this hits hard.

But great idea, I'll try that out.