Puzzle development log
As my friend in charge sad: “First the game was too hard to play, I was thinking. It wasn’t able to make an impression. Otherwise now it holds players attention. Smart ones would find the way how to hack it, because it is too easy now. It needs an element of randomness, something unpredictable.”
And that’s the point we were today. We were working on the gameplay itself. Sounds easy with this kind of game, but we were thinking how to achieve to make an impression in every gamer person out there. Yup, sounds like what big corporate-like studios are made of, the product for the wide audience. But thinking about it, there is a major difference
I’m the basic development of this game in the early stage, there was a game as the gameplay predecessor. It was and still is a popular game in causal area. And I personally wanted to tweek its gameplay and play with the concept a little. It was just so mathematically easy, that we were able to use it as the testing framework for the game design principles and understanding of the players. So we tried my beloved scientific method. We found the extremes and operate on them
First gameplay derivatives were set to be incredibly hard to play. Gameplay was fast and tester player had to learn how to break those barriers. We find out, that it means unbalanced challenges for the player, and we needed to test the patience of the player. We were looking for the balanced formula for the constant stream of playability on the extreme we were thinking is ok in for every player
Tomorrow we are going to build the 1.1004 version of the game, where we switched to the new version of the overall gameplay. It is too easy to play now. But we switched more.
Newcomers to the game are going to find out pretty soon, and by themselves, that classic gameplay in similar games is somehow fluid away, and they found the new core concept of this game, combos. It is so simple, you are just going to shoot them as much as you can. And from kinda misery bounded gameplay, you have something easy to play with all the unicorns
Where is a problem with that? Well, sometimes tester just miss the old version of gameplay. Sometimes some people like to play different. So, we decided to have a functional based generative formulas in all aspects of our games. We are going to play with the player a little, a game about the game actually. We can generate the gameplay predictions based on your preference. And guess what, we find out how to break it 🙂
Is is a small step in overall gameplay features we want as our standard. Not just making a constant streams of low resolution sequences of difficulties presets made by hand. Even if talented. We decide that it is a time to move into the more general changed principles.
Generate it and learn from it
I bin working on a few projects before, we’re predictions plays a big role. And yup, also in the game industry, but let’s say like those with the not so white hats. Recording of the played progress is old and not so perfect technique how to tune the gameplay change. But, recording a lot of gameplay progresses and using those sets rebalanced and re-reacted onto the various circumstances, and finally used as the learning sets for the RNNs sounds like an idea. A specially when you want to balance a gameplay, spice it with the optimal difficulties, following the area disposition, time, day, environment.. And here we are specify a few important functions. Core gameplay, social services in the game, yup we called the sharing of the score and achievements a social event. Then visual feel itself, even when it is simple k.i.s.s. made visual. I am pretty curious what the analysis are goging to tell us then. Let’s see 🙂
So we are trying to find our the creative way how to solve the issues and task we have. And just form internal proposition, ways and ideologies we want to find, just to make those successful projects in the future. We are going to learn how to learn better I hope.
