November 17, 2022
I decided to mostly take a break this week because God of War: Ragnarok was released on Wednesday. Fantastic game— would recommend. Anyways, I still got a few things done and will be ramping up for these last three weeks to the final Gold code (and 1.5 weeks to the Beta code).
One issue that arose from playtesting is that some players would simply run past enemies. To prevent this, each wave of enemies that spawn also creates a barrier that players cannot run past until all enemies in the wave are killed. Pretty standard for a lot of games.
I recently scrapped the inventory item feature from the game (players having things like keys that can open locked chests, etc.). I have also removed the link puzzles from playtesting feedback (and my own observations) that they’re unfun and unengaging.
Due to these two things, I have added a new type of currency, crystals, and I have reworked the inventory UI bar to not show item slots anymore and instead display the counts of gold coins (used to buy runes) and crystals.
Crystals will be used to unlock the boss zone at the end of the level. These will be obtainable through crystal shires (not implemented yet), that will spawn a wave of enemies on its activation. Once the wave is destroyed, players obtain a crystal. These will (hopefully) allow for some interesting strategies where players can split up to tackle shires to save time but risk dying.
Teams playtested each others’ games in lab today, and I’m happy to report that something like 10-12 people tried my game in groups of 2-3, and I have a ton of feedback that I’ll be going over in my playtesting report for the next milestone. I have been making changes to directly address some of the comments from testing.
Two pieces of feedback in particular were echoed by multiple playtesters. The first was that runes were too expensive in shops and they were often forced to purchase the less powerful runes which didn’t feel great. The second was that the placement of the roll cooldown bar above the player health bar was odd, and that below the health bar may be more appropriate.
