Project Speed Main idea & changes

INTRO

Hi! I'm writing this devlog mostly for myself so to anyone reading this, I hope you can find something interesting/useful here. It's going to be a long rant as I'm going to write about my whole experience developing this game up to today. You have been warned.

WHY THIS GAME

My main goals with this project are:

• Create a small game/prototype focused around movement.
• Short levels focused on using a few mechanics.
• Around 15 levels aiming at 10-15 minutes of expected gameplay accounting for retries and replayability.
• Time to work: around 6 weeks.

I'm a big fan of movement shooters and any game that has interesting movement mechanics. For a while, I've been wanting to do something like that and this is basically my first attempt trying to do my own movement game.

Most of the times when I play movement shooters, I find that is hard to strike a balance between going fast and actually shooting. In most games, this leads to me playing in a "sloppy" way and feeling like I'm not really playing like the game expects me to. I'm not having fun because I'm not playing to the real potential that the game has. One exception to this was my experience with Neon White.

Neon White has been my main inspiration for this project. The game is designed in a way that makes it easy to feel like you are doing great. While playing I never had the feeling that I wasn't understanding the game or that I was playing poorly and that has stuck with me.

INITIAL CONCEPT

After some brainstorming, I closed the design with a few key pillars:

• Gaining speed is easy.
• Slowing down should only happen if the player fails.
• Completing a level while going slow it's easy. The challenge lies in doing it fast.

I also decided that my main mechanics were going to be mostly melee weapons to allow for higher speeds without having to aim (In the end I added a long range weapon but I consider it the exception to this rule). The weapons were:

• Sword: Hit a target to jump forwards and slightly upwards.
• Shield: Deflect bullets and dash forward.
• Spear: Dash forward. If a target is hit immediately dash upwards.
• Swift pants: Jump & Wall--run
• Heavy Boots: Slide down going faster on slopes and being able to enter smaller gaps.
• Crossbow: If the bolt hits a target the player is teleported to that location.

After deciding the weapons and the main mechanics I decided that the weapons would need a resource to be use. This resource was "skill charges"  which could be found during the level and store up to three charges. 

The idea was to use these skill charges as a way to reward players that took harder paths allowing them to use skills more frequently to go even faster and traverse certain shortcuts that would be impossible otherwise without enough charges This however didn't last very long.

TOO MUCH CONTROL

After the first two weeks, I already had all the mechanics and 5 levels so I decided to play-test the game with a couple of friends. There were 3 main things that I learned from these playtests:

• The shield wasn't working at all
• The jump skill  needed a bit of rework
• Skill charges made the game boring

I had my mind already set on removing the shield and reworking the other weapons before the playtest but I didn't have a problem with skill charges until this point.  The main reason I implemented skill charges was to allow me to present to the player obvious slower paths that could become fast paths if done differently. The thing I found however was that I was railroading the player and telling them exactly where to go all the time. The game presented no opportunity to the player to express themselves or experiment with the weapons. It was boring and obvious.

My solution was to remove skill charges completely and put the focus on the weapons themselves. Every weapon now has a cooldown when used. This cooldown however is completely reset whenever the weapon hits a target. The game now focuses on hitting the targets to go faster and this became a new pillar for the game:

• Hit & Run. 

With this mindset change I reworked the weapons:

• Sword: Hit a target to jump forwards and slightly upwards.
• Spear: Dash forward. If a target is hit immediately dash forwards again.
• Mighty Gauntlet: Short uppercut in any direction. If a target is hit finish the uppercut jumping incredibly high.
• Heavy Boots: Slide down going faster on slopes and being able to enter smaller gaps.
• Crossbow: If the bolt hits a target the player is teleported to that location.

(The main changes being the removal of the shield and the rework of the spear and the mighty gauntlet)

PERSONAL THOUGHTS

I recently realized that for a while (probably since I was in college) My games always started being very restrictive, giving very little room for the player to explore and try things on their own.  Every time however, later in development all the games ended up changing to remove most of this restrictions.

On one side I think I tend to do this  because I value simplicity and designs that feel "elegant" and well thought. Designs that manage to be deep and engaging while in reality being fairly simple. On the other side, I now realize that I've been too focused on controlling what the player is supposed to do. I was constantly trying to make completely sure that the player would play "the intended way". 

In my mind the job of a designer is not so much creating a game or finding incredible mechanics. The game designer needs to design (duh) the player experience, to guide the player through a path to offer them an experience. Ultimately everything in the game from the visuals, the sound, the mechanics, the way the game plays and feels, the text... everything should push to improve and reinforce this experience. The key however is that all of this should be both self-evident and invisible to the player. The designer is not a puppet master controlling what the player does. A good game should be able to let the player choose and express themselves and still go through the intended experience in their own unique way without being told what to do.

I thought I already knew all of this, but in reality, I didn't really knew it.  It's one thing to know something and a very different thing to really have it so internalized that it comes naturally to you.

NEXT STEPS

My plan now is to spend the next two weeks or so working on the levels. Right now the level progression is a mess as I focused on making hard levels to push a bit further the mechanics and get something more interesting. These past days I did more playtestings and confirmed all of this. Now it's time to work on levels and polish what I can.

I don't think I will have the time to work on the visuals but that was never the goal so I already expected to have a blockout look in the end. In any case that's all for now. If you manage to read all of this I applaud you and hope you have a fantastic day.

Cheers!