Feedback Feedback Friday #145 - December 25-28, 2020

Merry Christmas everyone!
As the year comes to its end, let's celebrate by having the last Feedback Friday for this year!

Want free design feedback for your work in progress project?

Then you've found the right thread! Feedback Friday runs from Friday to Monday every week.

What To Show

• Minimally 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 #144 is here.

 

Okay, so here's the latest. https://eternalambiguity.itch.io/ca-shooter

A couple gifs:

In response to Billy's feedback last week, I went through and added audio for a lot of things. Enemy/player shots, enemy/player damage, enemy death, the "gas" effect, the interactable object in the scene, and a background "mechanical" noise (let me know if this is too loud - I had it a little lower in the past - trying to find the perfect level of "unintrusive but always present").

I also moved to a new, much simpler map meant to showcase the main player-enemy interaction without any distractions (see the gif). The first room gives a chance to engage directly with the enemies, but the time spent there allows the second room with enemies to fill up, hopefully to a point that the player concludes that they should find a solution other than combat. That leads to the room with the "modifier," which applies some hazard to any rooms within a range.

The modifiers are all applied to a whole room. They and their effects are:
Heat - damages player, causes the blob to grow faster
Cold - damages player, slows blob growth
Power - prevents player energy regeneration, drastically slows blob growth
Antiseptic - has no effect on player, strongly damages the blob
Poison - damages player, has no effect on the blob

The poison converts to the antiseptic after it dissipates, and the antiseptic just converts to regular air.

Spoiler

Since I'm a chemist nerd, I'll point out that the "poison" is meant to be H2S, which is toxic to most biological organisms apart from some extremephiles. It can react with O2 to produce hydrogen peroxide, or "antiseptic." But labeling it thus in the game itself seems pretentious.

Right now there's a dropdown that allows you to pick when effect you want. I was thinking about having it be randomized, but that would present situations where the player can die without any choices (temp change or poison). I was also thinking about having a moment at the start of a level where a player has to set these for all rooms, and then make it through the level without changing them, but I don't know if that's a good idea. It shifts the "puzzle" side of things to its own separate piece of gameplay, and arguably makes things less dynamic.


Anyway. What's here seems okay to me just in terms of the gameplay itself, but I'd love comments.


One minor problem I see is that door locations aren't obvious if very close to them, and the range of the "modifier" object isn't obvious either. I have a couple ideas but these seem like small problems to be addressed later.

In partially addressing it I've revealed another problem: the lack of clutter in the middle of rooms. This is meaningful because it will start to create pathways through maps for the player and enemies. Furthermore, it implies two different types of obstructions: ones you can't move past but can shoot over, and ones you can't even shoot over. This is something I need to work on; yesterday I started up a bunch of sci-fi games and took screenshots of their environments. I need to go back and start populating these rooms with more realistic clutter, and see how that affects the gameplay.



Anyway, I'd appreciate any comments, especially on the combat and on the "room modification" system.

Edit: since there haven't been any responses yet, I added a couple more objects to the main room and uploaded that build, in the hopes of providing more situations with obstructions.

 

My appologies for a late reply, I didn't have access to my wifi during part of the weekend.
It's very interesting to see how your game has progressed since I last looked at it.
Here are some thoughts I had after trying the current version of the game:
1. I like the general feel of walking around and shooting in the game.
2. Although I noticed the ammo count after a while, I think it might be good to have the ammo be represented with a meter instead of just a number. That way it's easier to keep track of the rough amount of ammo left, while still keeping majority of focus on the gameplay.
3. The idea of having the enemies create green toxic clouds after dying is an interesting idea and I hope to see what you'll do with it in the future. However, one thing that I'm afraid might happen is that the player will find it easier to just run past the enemies than just shooting them.
4. The clouds took quite a long time to disperse, which made it more difficult to traverse through areas when the clouds were in the way of progressing the game. It could perhaps be solved by slightly decreasing the lifetime of the clouds.
5. I really like the idea of the player being able to create clouds at certain locations (I assume this is the "room modification" system that you were talking about). While I didn't find much use of it in my playthrough, I can certainly imagine how it could be used in a more puzzle oriented fashion. At the moment, I kind of like the dropdown for it, but if you try out different methods, you might find that other methods could work just as well.
6. I noticed a bug that after completing the game once, I couldn't play the game again as I kept getting thrown back to the main menu.

Over all, I think the game starts looking more and more promising. I'm looking forward to see how this turns out.

 

No worries, it's the weekend after Christmas after all. I wasn't expecting much traffic anyway, so I'm glad to get this.

1. That's good to hear. I look for all the "this doesn't quite work" comments, but it's good to know what does.

2. I'd planned to put the health in a meter system (again, think metroid fusion), but hadn't really thought about the energy yet. That's a good idea.

3. Yeah, I imagine this can be somewhat rectified by the necessity to backtrack - if one has to come back the same way, one can't simply leave the blob growing.

4. Okay. I actually did want the longevity of the poison clouds to factor into how players navigated and chose paths, but perhaps I need to reconsider that, or at least offer more ways to vary the time (like temperature).

5. Yeah, that's the system. Were you still able to survive with the full second room without using the "room modifier," or was the second room not full? If it's the latter that might not be a problem for bigger maps, but if the player is strong enough already to take on a full group of enemies then maybe I need to tweak things.

6. Okay, thanks, I'll try to get that sorted out.

And thanks again for testing it out. I recognize the additional "cost," however small, of a download vs. a WebGL build.

 

3. That's an interesting idea. And could possibly be fun to play against if it doesn't become too cumbersome to deal with the consequences of leaving enemies alive.

5. When I got to the second room, it was around half full and I managed to deal with the enemies quite well even without the room modifier, but the cloud residue took a long while to disperse, which halted my progress.

I'm glad that you appreciated my feedback. It's true that WebGL is usually preferd considering its ease of use, but I can definitely see the benefit of being able to focus on downloadable builds. Good luck with the development of the game and I hope to see more of the project in the future.

 

That concludes this Feedback Friday.
Come back next Friday for more Feedback!