A postmortem of the development of the first iteration of For The Empire a tactical game of escort the payload.
Overall based on user feedback the game preformed admirably in most regards. despite this there where several key points of contention brought up by multiple play testers.
This was a major issue, users where often un-able to identify interactions which where occurring, key ones being:
the gain / loss of energy
this was as many interactions where not explicit of exceptionally clear, with health not being displayed and no text in any UI, using only abstract icons to represent ideas.
The leading issues that gave rise to this identification where death of the core and the subsequent game, along with confusion about how to kill enemies and the value of different turrets relative to their cost.
In our testing we found that another key issue was the out of touch balance of units, vs enemies vs cost and difficulty scaling. This manifested in the following ways:
testers only using one turret
testers winning to easily
These issues can be largely attributed to poor balancing which making recovery after losing one or two turrets near impossible, and constantly placing the base turret too good a strategy.
The final major issue is bugs, unfortunately the build of the game tested contained a number of bugs, many of which where helpfully identified by testers. the main ones being:
placing a turret on another, deletes both turrets and refunds of one of them
turret hit boxes are wrong
energy dosn’t always spawn on kill
click-drag from the shop is possible in a 2 sec window, but was never intended
With the right timing of placing a turret it is possible to get stuck in ‘place mode’
The first issue is as both turrets are from the same group, the selection of ‘a turret that is colliding with a turret’ is more than one item, as such the correct target for refunding and deletion cannot be determined. the click drag ability is likely to do with a denouncing function used to prevent the user from registering multiple ‘buy turret’ events in the shop. the final bug may also be related to state management but can’t currently be determined.
To solve state visualization issues, all Items have been given a stats window, displaying health, range, speed and damage.
Along with visual markers of range for turret placement
The issue of game balance can be solved though testing a wide range of values and seeing what sticks, though further user and internal testing.
The Issue of refunds can be solved by giving turrets to be placed a flag that alows for them to be identified.
The click drag and ’stuck in place mode’ issues require state management to be checked and modified.
The hit box detection can be solved by refining the hit-boxes.
If This project was to be undertaken again, I would perhaps focus less on the extensibility of the game and more on static elements, as with the scope of the project the extensible approach only leads to un-nessessary head-ache in the early development process, while the project did not last long enough of the benefits to become significant enough to justify that initial investment. Though given more time invested or potentially a larger team, I believe that the taken direction of the project could have been expanded to much greater heights, with new and exciting enemies and expanded lore. In reflection the choice of simple graphics also greatly benefited the speed at which the product was able to be developed.
Overall I think that the design and aim was solid, with only more time and resources required to make it into a true product.
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