Despite a rather distracted weekend, there have been quite a few developments on Disc Game here. I want to make a few more visually distinct changes before I take another video (it looks very similar to before) but the gameplay experience is quite different.
First off, I have support for the xbox gamepad! You can still play completely with the keyboard, but the strafe adds a whole new level of control to the game (it handles more like driving a Warthog in Halo than playing Geometry Wars). The gamepad also allowed me to tweak the handling a fair bit – there is a fairly aggressive braking system but in a way that is (hopefully) transparent to the user: if you’re pushing forwards, its retarding your velocity backwards, etc. If you let go of controls or use the boost you still coast very freely – but the result is that the controls feel a lot tighter to the user.
I have also changed how the status rings / power reserve concept works. Previously, the larger your ring the more power you had. Now, the more power you have, the smaller your ring. This is a huge improvement from a gameplay perspective (as your need decreases, it becomes more challenging to harvest) and I think the first pass at the visuals helps sell this to the player… small rings buzz with bright energy and larger rings get thin and weak looking. First playtests have been really encouraging.
I also connected the weapon strength your power system. This is far more intuitive and allows for an interesting dynamic with a super-charge: you can keep collecting power above 100%, but any boost or damage will drop you back to 99%. I’m a little disappointed in that I had high hopes for connecting the weapon power to the intensity / color of the lighting around the player… but this just wasn’t working with my testers. The new ring concept though, and super charge effect, is working quite well though – so while I see a few improvements, I think this settles on the direction.
Now that I have the power dynamic down to a point I’m comfortable with, the next big hurdle is the alternate color spaces. I really want this to be central to the gameplay, but the few options I’ve tried just don’t work well. I’m leaning now to an almost Ikaruga idea where the red-coins (which currently are considered “corrupted” coins made so by the one enemy type) would become positive when the user jumps to the red world… and potentially the red enemies could become vulnerable or the like. Perhaps the ability to switch could be enabled by a pickup as well. This needs to be explored a little more, but if I make any progress on the topic I hope to show it in the next video.
Categories: Design, Development, Pics
