DevBlog #9 - Runnin’ Around
As we get deeper into the design of RoR2, we are encountering more and more design decisions that were passable in 2D, but unacceptable in 3D. The one we encountered this month was the feeling of travel and movement.
In 2D, if you saw something on your screen, you were always about 7 seconds away from being able to access it. Chests, monsters, and most importantly the teleporter was only relevant once it came into your screen.
In 3D, you can spot points of interests that are a solid 30 seconds away. When you are traveling to get to a specific location that’s visible, it feels way worse than traveling to get around. It feels like a chore. The feeling of ‘speed’ in travel in a 3D game tends to be proportional to how close the camera is to the ground, and since we have a zoomed out third person camera, traveling felt even slower, even if you were actually running at 20mph. This tiresome travel was especially relevant in the post-teleporter clean up phase of the original game.
While we started cranking up the movement speed of players, this was unsustainable because movement is also defensive in dodging projectiles. To help with this, we’ve added sprinting to the game as something that every class can do(!). This allows you to be able to choose between moving to travel vs moving to dodge and fight in combat. It also gives you a decision as a player to choose to sprint rather than fight (and we also get to cheat a little bit by messing with the FOV to make it feel like you’re moving even faster.) This also gives us a cute avenue for new proc conditions and skills - currently, to keep the feeling of the huntress from RoR1, she is the only class who can attack while sprinting.
We’re also experimenting a bit with the way the teleporter event works. Currently, you do not have to kill every monster on the map to progress to the next stage - you only have to kill the boss. The cleanup phase of the teleporter event was annoying at best and insanely tedious at worst. As a tradeoff, we are experimenting with a charging mechanic to the teleporter - you (and your teammates) must remain in a certain radius of the teleporter to advance the timer. This also has the benefit of making the spawn position of the teleporter more relevant in gameplay - a teleporter that spawns on the middle of a bridge is suddenly much more challenging, and bosses can have a higher focus on area control that actually matters.
This also leads into another topic, which is the feeling of an actual multiplayer experience. In RoR1, there was very little you had to rely on your teammates to do - you were actually encouraged to split up and go different ways. Because the game is 2D, however, you would still end up fighting monsters with your buddies, because you either went left or right. In 3D, it was very common that you never saw your allies at all. The charging mechanic for the teleporter has been a great way for us to encourage players to come together at least once a stage and experience the game together. This also translates directly back into single player without adding any multiplayer specific tricks or requirements. We want to make sure that single player is not a shadow of multiplayer, but that they are both fulfilling on their own.
Our plans for the upcoming months is to get the game to a state where we can have playtesters, since currently there are still many features missing like the Logbook and a polished Character Select. We want to make sure that we can get feedback early enough in development so we can find out if we are taking the overall gameplay in the right direction.
Thanks for reading!
Full res screenshots here
P.S.
We have also been hard at work getting DEADBOLT, our second game, ready for launch on Sony platforms. DEADBOLT is launching on February 20th 2018 for PSVita and PS4. We recently posted a blog post with Sony where you can find out more and check out the new trailer!
Read about it here!
