Day 20: Iterations, Belated Blog Posts and "Wow That Was Quick."
Hello! Team Unorthobox here!
Well, this is awkward. The initial devblog post titled, "Day 1ish" gave the idea our blogposts would be daily, if not at least weekly. What gives? Blog posts normally take some time to type up, stack on top of that proof reading our terrible sense of humour and that time skyrockets. Last Monday (23rd) saw a major change in the design of AllY, based for the majority on the playtesting the weekend before. An educated decision was made, and with these new changes (more on this later) we believe AllY has changed for the better. The themes of cooperation are still heavily present absolutely, we wouldn't still be calling it AllY if that were the case, but the systems we were previously avoiding which we believed placed self-preservation ahead of group or a single item's are now standing centre stage, and for good reason.
The playtesting session previously mentioned brought to light a few issues with the initial design. As you may or may not know in our 4 player game players throw one object amongst themselves to suit an underlying end goal. The first problem; the player holding onto the star obtained some form of "buff". It was made clear by the testers they didn't want to be the little guy, they wanted to be the player with the "higher state of being" in the game state. So trying to be the one player of a higher contrasting tier of being not only encouraged selfish tactics by the player holding the object, but the obtaining of the object stole the other player's focus over any objective presented.
The second problem; "what do we do?" While the one player holding the object had the task of survival, the others had to gather. A "fuel" system introduced early in the design several months ago gave the players something to do in the game space while at the same time neatly tying together an overall objective we could implement. The problem was, we felt it wasn't enough. It created a fetch exercise we were questioning whether or not players would enjoy at all, and while enemies filling the space posed a threat forcing the players to understand the space and navigate around said threat, giving the one player holding onto the object the only form of attack while leaving the others “weak” was a contrived method of keeping gameplay interesting.
With that, this leaves the big question; where are we now?
The game is currently moving into the newest iteration with leaps in progress being made daily. While we’re confident we can still create an enjoyable well-polished piece by the end, the current test build doesn’t fully hold together the new systems in place as we’re just catching up with more recent changes made earlier this week. In another blog post we’ll go into depth what these changes were and how they contribute to AllY in a positive way enabling us to further steer AllY in the right direction. We’ve been hard at work these past 2 weeks pushing our initial expectations of what we want this game to encompass, which conveniently also plays into our excuse for why a blog post wasn’t made any sooner.
Thank you for reading! Quite a lengthy post I know, but thank you for sticking with it to the end!
Have a lovely Sunday evening,
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