Rambling about ESA Tags: Games, ESA, Plans, Article Mushrooms and spores CWOUN thing at Indiestatik! Tags: Games, Excavatorrr, Other Some words about the laser gun in ESA Tags: Games, ESA, Plans, Other, Article ESA 80% done! ESA news + a painting! A small update to CWOUN Tags: Games, Excavatorrr Excavatorrr 2 is out! Tags: Games, ESA, Excavatorrr [Added 2024/07/28]Cloud Realm pics Tags: Games, Cloud Realm Stuff! Tags: Games, ESA, Excavatorrr, Procedural generation Pages
Posted on 2014-01-09 07:11
Turned out that writing ‘articles’ about problems in my own games was fun and seemed to get a positive response and actually really nice feedback, so let’s have ESA design problem huffery-puffery #2!
I just played around in the temple area to test some stuff (small dust particles as you walk in the aream yay!), and man is the area horrendous. I could really feel my disinterest in working on the game as I walked around there. I had planned for the area to be mainly about puzzles and traps, and there were those (especially the latter), but they were almost universally obtuse, unfun and often very player-unfriendly, designed mostly without thinking of how a player first seeing them might react. To list some of the horrible things:
- Insta-kill traps
- Another trap that deals 10 damage at a time where the player might have 15
- A puzzle with the only hint located on another room’s wall, said room being also hidden and the hint being partially blocked by tiles
- Two bosses being literally one room from each other
- A boss having insta-kill traps between it and the next save point, so that the player might instantly die after beating the boss but before saving
I felt really disappointed at myself. At the moment I feel that the only way to really approach this problem is to actually redo most of the temple. Redesigning the area shouldn’t be that difficult, considering that I know where the area starts and ends, and all the things that should be found within. Still, it might be quite a large undertaking, although it’d probably pay off very well.
I have some ideas on how this might be improved; it’d probably require redoing some of the enemies and most of the area itself, but all in all I think it could be worth it. I’ll probably finish the penultimate area first, though!
(To be honest, the temple tileset is also quite ugly.)
Posted on 2014-01-05 20:58
Posted on 2014-01-03 20:19
Indiestatik did a really nice and kind writeup of CWOUN. Thanks, guys! It seems that the game didn’t really rouse much interest, but I suppose that was to be expected… I’ll update some stuff later when I feel less like working on ESA.
Read the article here!
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Posted on 2013-12-30 00:49
I’ve been thinking about some design issues in ESA over the past few days, and due to reasons unknown it felt like a good idea to share these thoughts with the world, so here we go:
In ESA, the player’s tool of the trade is the laser gun. It shoots simple, teal lines in rapid succession, and later on can also charge up the gun to shoot a larger, more powerful teal line. I’m quite sure several of the GIFs I’ve posted show this in action (yay for animated screenshots!)
However, there’s one problem I’ve had with the laser gun since (almost) the beginning of the game. It’s boring. At first I blamed this on the fact that there was no rapidfire option; the player had to keep pressing the ‘shoot’ button to get more teal lines flying across the air. However, quite recently I did an exprimental overhaul of the control system, implementing said rapidfire and tweaking (and/or breaking) other control-related stuff. It turns out that the shooting feels even more boring this way; the bullets don’t feel very impactful in that you just hold down a button to shoot them, yet it’s a tad harder to perform some more precise shooting due to the player very easily accidentally shooting an extra two or three bullets.
So, after focusing on other things for some time, a possible solution struck me – the laser gun clearly needed something to make it less of a mindless “just hold the button” -action and more of a strategic one, and what was also needed was some extra oomph (as they say, I think) to make those bullets feel like they actually do something. What if the gun was changed from Your Generic Laser Weapon to a shortranged, almost melee-range Laser Burst Thing? At least it’d solve the problem of it being ‘too easy’ to use and spam; the short-rangedness (while not having to be that short) would require the player to think more. Also, the bullets (or bursts, whatever) could be more powerful, since it’d be somewhat harder to hit enemies (or at least the enemies would be able to get closer to the player before being in range). (Obviously some stuff would need to be reworked to support this change, but I think it might be worth it!)
Here’s a handy image to explain what I mean:
Option A. is what the game uses now, a rather fast, spammy laser gun, and option B. is what I have in mind currently, a shorter-range, less spammy but more powerful burst attack. The charged shot of the burst could still be as long-range as needed, since that’d only increase the feeling of “hey, this charged shot is actually more powerful!” To further increase the feeling of impact, I think I’ll (finally) implement some kind of a ‘flash’ for enemies that take damage, even though that might slightly break the 32-colour palette.
I’m not sure if I posted this to get feedback on the idea or just to talk about the design process out loud, but feel free to leave any feedback or stuff you feel might be (or not be) relevant.
EDIT: Looks like this:
Posted on 2013-12-27 01:09
Whoo!
Posted on 2013-12-26 15:30
Work on ESA has been steady; I’ll soon be working on the penultimate boss! There has been quite a bit of behind-the-scenes reworking going on, though; I’ve been replacing some old, clunky stuff with more advanced coding. At the moment I’m thinking of reworking the player’s abilities a bit due to the current ones feeling kind of samey. I guess I’ll try to create all the content and then just go through everything a couple times more and edit everything I’m not happy with!
I made a mistake with some numbers today, and for a moment ESA was a bullethell shooter:
Also made a painting as a christmas present:
Merry thursday!!!
Posted on 2013-12-23 00:27
– No mean flowers, at least for now
– Ghosts redistributed
– Snails reduced
GET IT
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Posted on 2013-12-09 19:56
Yeah! Yay. Even though I should feel bad for not spending this time to work on ESA, I’m quite happy to be able to put out a game after a long long time without any “serious” releases. Since I’m in a kind of a hurry, I’ll just drop the download link here and let you figure out the rest. Hopefully it’s not too frustrating! I think I’ll make some patches as problems occur.
GET THE GAME!
As for ESA, I’ve been fixing some ages-old bugs and problems with it, and seeing some real nuisances squished out is really invigorating my interest in working on that one. So good news, I suppose!
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Posted on 2013-11-01 15:26
Found these pics in the Wordpress files for this month - let's put them here for posterity!
18th November, 2013 - Snake design
18th November, 2013 - Trying to make the basic gameplay work
Posted on 2013-09-16 21:35
Yes, that is Stuff.
Also ESA is being made, don’t worry!
…And since apparently I didn’t mention it here, ESA will probably be 100% free. Yeah, yay.
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