Reducing Your Game's Scale: Save It For The Sequel!

It seemingly happens to almost every designer, novice or veteran, AAA and indie. You have that grand game idea. When you close your eyes, you can see it being played before you. The expansive levels, the fancy weapons, the beautiful graphics and audio, all of the little polished details. Then you snap back to reality and (hopefully) quickly realize the scale of your dream game is simply too large.

Time to start cutting!

This may seem terrible and disappointing, but just because you're cutting features and making compromises doesn't mean the initial vision is completely lost. Firstly, you're helping to ensure that you actually get to release your game. This is the ultimate goal, and everything should be done to ensure this (oh, but do make sure you provide a great experience!). Take the ideas you're cutting, write them down somewhere, as they are not lost forever.

Save them for the sequel!

Obviously, Overtime had a much grander scale when I first started designing compared to what it's been boiled down to now. Even after I write this, I'm sure more things will be cut. Being a solo developer working on his first actual commercial release, the scale needs to be small to ensure I actually release something. However, everything that I am cutting I do want to see come to fruition, so it's being saved for a sequel game, which I hope I get to work on given that the first title is received well enough to warrant it. 

So don't fret, don't fear! Cut, cut cut. You'll see an amazing thing happen, something that you probably couldn't imagine be happening. Your game becomes better for it, and you actually increase your chances of releasing. Not a bad trade off at all. 

The Importance of Player Feedback & Subgoals: Playtest Results - 03/14/2014

I had a quick playtest session with some close friends the other day. I've been making good progress on the game (which is yet to be titled, but lets refer to it by its working name, Overtime). I'd just added vertical axis shooting which I wanted to playtest and I also needed to get some real world QA done as testing a local multiplayer only game is proving difficult.

Here is a clip from one of the recordings I took.

Importance of Feedback

My biggest initial take away is the importance of player feedback for even the smallest actions. From jumping to obtaining a frag, there needs to be feedback provided. The player not only needs to be given feedback to assure his actions are executed, but to be rewarded for the things he does and make them worth doing again. Feedback can be provided in numerous ways, from elegant sprite animations, to subtle or acute particle effects. A small, brief dramatic sequence to a frag can make the frag all the more rewarding, thrilling and special as so awesomely done in Samurai Gunn.

A player swats back another players bullet for a kill in Samurai Gunn.

I quickly added some rudimentary blood splatter particles the day before the playtest to help provide feedback, but I feel it wasn't enough and lost its novelty very quickly. I've since tweaked the blood splatter to project based on the direction of the fatal projectile, tiles around the player corpse become bloody, added  flying gibs and even created dramatic John Woo like slow motion effect when the player is killed. All of these small layers of feedback will hopefully make obtaining player frags more rewarding beyond just increasing a frag score. Simply firing projectiles at other players may be fun at first, but if the overall presentation of the actions is bland and boring, player won't be interested in playing for long.

Fragging a demon with a shotgun in Overtime

Importance of Subgoals

Currently, Overtime has only one goal, kill all other players. There is very little else the player needs to focus on or worry about. This is a problem, as the game gets boring quickly. Once you've killed the other players a handful of times, you've experienced all that there is to offer and lose interest in playing any further.

It could be argued that platforming (successfully negotiating jumps to make your desired mark) and ammo management (collecting ammo packs to ensure you always have ammo) are also subgoals, but I feel they are too subtle. This just may be the nature of simple deathmatch mode in general; I do plan to add other game modes which will add more exciting subgoals for the player I'm sure.

Samurai Gunn has environmental hazards and destructibles. This give players more subgoals, avoid accidental deaths and shape your environment to your advantage (you can destroy certain tiles to the point where they become hazards). Players in Samurai Gunn can also engage in defensive actions, engaging in mini sword fights to parry player attacks and swatting back player bullets. This not only gives players a grander sense of control over their ultimate fate, but an entirely different set of actions and required skills.

This was a great round of playtesting and really highlighted serious gaps in Overtime's design, which I'll need to address. The above GIF of Samurai Gunn does such an incredible job of summing up the entire game, its mechanics, the level of polish and feedback, goals and dimensions in just under a second of gameplay. If you need longer than a second to capture the total essence of your game, you should step back and start rethinking your design.

Demon with a shotgun

Addendum: 2D Platformer Collision Detection in Unity

NOTE: Please see Yet Another Addendum to this solution for important bug fixes. 

This is an addendum to my original post, 2D Platformer Collision Detection in Unity. The solution explained in that post was a great "start", but ultimately had problems which I'd like to go over and correct in this post, so that I don't lead anyone too astray!

The Problem

To summarize, entities could fall through collision layers under the right conditions. The most notable use case was corner collisions at low framerates (< 30FPS). 

In the picture above, the white lines represent the raycasts. The green box is the box collider. As you can see, that small corner gap is enough to cause the player to slip through the collision layer. As noted before, this issue was highly prevalent when the frame rate was < 30FPS (I capped the frame rate using a small script to take into consideration people with slower hardware). For the more astute Unity users, I can hear the screams of "FixedUpdate! FixedUpdate!" Just trust me that using FixedUpdate had no effect on this issue. I tried, in several different manners, and all resulted in the same problem.

The Solution

Originally, the rays were being casted from the edges of the box colliders instead from within the box collider. Why is this important? I'm going to borrow a diagram from Yoann's Pignole Gamasutra article.

Source: Gamasutra: The hobbyist coder #1: 2D platformer controller by Yoann Pignole

This makes sense, but why would I only have an issue at slow frame rates? To be honest, I still don't know. I'm guessing it had to do with the speed in which raycasts were executed (which you would think calling within FixedUpdate would fix, but didn't). 

Ultimately, I rewrote the system completely, ensuring the rays were casted from the center of the box collider, and when resolving the collisions, moving the entity to the point of collision. This solution completely removed all issues I noticed. 

This provides a much cleaner, robust solution. I can also more easily adjust the number of rays I cast, as well as allowing to cast the rays outside of a margin, if need be.