Assessment 3 Crabsplosion Postmortem
I really enjoyed working on this final prototype. Our group's game was a 2d platformer inspired by games like Megaman and classic Castlevania. I mostly worked on the coding, parts of the level design and the final boss design for our game. I think our game turned out really good.
Chapter 5 of the Game Design Workshop books describes games as systems designed to entertain players. These systems are made up of objects that have unique properties and behaviors that allow them to interact with each other (Fullerton, 2018, p130).
I think our game was set up to be a really good system. Our system was made up of all of the player's weapons and the different enemy types. Each enemy and weapon behaved differently creating relationships between weapons and enemies where different weapons would be more effective at taking out different enemies. For example, the rail-gun weapon created an area of damage in front of the player, damaging all enemies standing in front of the player. This made it helpful against the shield enemy since it would pierce through the enemy shield and therefore was able to do damage to the front of the enemy.
Later, Fullerton explains that "Also, a system’s components must typically be arranged in a specific way for it to carry out its purpose, that is, to provide the intended challenge to the players. If that arrangement is changed, the results of the interaction will change." (Fullerton, 2018, p133). Our system was very deliberately coded so that health and damage values were set up to encourage players to use the best weapon for each situation. For example, the shotgun didn't do any extra damage to the bomber fish, it was just more effective because the bomber fish would run up to the player and be in closer range; plus the bomb fish had the exact amount of health where it could be killed in one shotgun blast if all the pellets hit. The flying fish has just enough health where it can be killed in one hit from a homing missile, and the shield and regular fish have health slightly above the homing missile's damage to encourage players to save their missiles for the flying fish.
On page 148, Fullerton talks about the importance of giving the right about of information to the player about your system, and sometimes games want to fully explain their systems from the start with an open system (Fullerton 2018, p148). We made our system very open for players with a clear tutorial we iterated on multiple times, hoping that they would understand the best weapons for each enemy from the start. We wanted our game to be more about giving the player all the tools they needed to fully engage with our game in the best way possible rather than have the game be about experimenting and slowly learning about our systems.
If I was going to develop this prototype again, I would develop it with the upgrades system in mind and planned out from the start so that it could be a more core part of the game. Originally we wanted to have an upgrade system in our game but we had to cut it because of time and because we didn't have many ideas for it that we felt needed to be in the game for it to fully function. If I was doing this from the start again I would come up with big upgrades for weapons that would really change how they worked for upgrades from the start, designing the game with the upgrades in mind.
If I was going to redesign this prototype, I would try and re-balance the challenge to offer a better difficulty curve with a higher difficulty by the end. Chapter 4 of Game Design Workshop talks about the theory of flow, and how games need to find the perfect middle between being so easy that they're boring or so hard that they're frustrating (Fullerton, 2018, p97-98). I don't think our play testing put enough emphasis on asking about difficulty. I feel like our game was generally a little too easy, especially because checkpoints were very common and there was no punishment for dying other than going back to the last checkpoint. I also think the second level was a little easier than the first level which isn't good. I would redesign the game to gradually go from being easy as players get used to the controls and weapons to being much harder by the end, with a higher density of bomb and shield fish enemies.
Fullerton, T. (2018). Game design workshop : A playcentric approach to creating innovative games, fourth edition. CRC Press LLC.
