In general, though I find VDDs are the best way to communicate an idea to a team, I usually begin personal projects by writing a description of the context of the game and the things the player will be able to do. Sometimes I do this in the form of a pitch, but most of the time it's a few typed up paragraphs full of shorthand. From there, I go straight into prototyping the main mechanic. My intent this time was to introduce an element of faction based warfare, inspired by the movie Yojimbo. The player character's goal is to clean up a Japanese town, killing off all the corrupt factions in the city. But the PC has a tiny health pool, the threat of permadeath, and is up against hundreds of enemies. The player will be forced to ally and manipulate the rival factions to fight each other to thin their ranks as the player stealthly eliminates the factions, one gang at a time.
Taking advice from Vlandeer's GDC talks on Game Feel, I set out making some placeholder animations, adding slow-mo to hits, minor screenshake, and tons of blood etc. And most importantly, I lowered the PC's health, in order to force players to choose their battles carefully.
I constructed two builds at this point. One a combat arena, shown above to test. The other was an AI build, where I began constructing an AI for systems-based faction warfare. We'll go over the specifics of that system in a future update. I put the combat build in front of people and asked some loose questions. to guide me. The largest complaint was the lack of variety in the combat. The lack of a ranged option severely limited the player's tactical options down to cutting. The slowness of the animations and the player's slow movement made the controls feel sluggish. So my next additions were:
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Jed MyersDeveloper Archives
February 2021
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