Gameplay Day - Let's Keep Improving!

today is gameplay rebirthday that means I will take you with me and talk you through everything I do with my game everything I change on my prototype so hopefully you can learn something from that let's get started let's make this prototype absolutely amazing I gave the game to a couple of my game design friends and they absolutely did not like the fact that it takes longer and longer now for these X to hatch you see at the beginning they hatch extremely quickly and then the longer you play the longer it takes them to hatch out of their eggs I did to counteract exponential growth and also to make it more difficult and more exciting as level goes on but as it turns out it did not make the level more climatic it made it more anti-climatic the game slows down further and further the further you go which is absolutely not what I intended there are really long waiting times you have to wait

really long until you can do something again we do not want that in our game there should always be something to do and also we find need to find a different way to raise the tension maybe increasing the speed of the enemies wasn't that bad of an idea after all that's how it was in the very first prototype I changed that later so maybe we'll just change that back so let's see here's what I changed so far firstly you start with more creatures so the beginning is even a little bit quicker secondly the ex slowly grow so you can roughly estimate how long it will take them to hatch also they always take exactly the same amount of time to hatch which in some way feels better but it causes a lot of problems as you can see the number of creatures gets out of hand really quickly this exponential growth can just get really really really crazy which is not good for the performance and it will also be really hard to

balance to do the balancing with this kind of exponential growth because losing a couple of creatures early on could really snowball out of control we definitely need a way to limit the population of creatures otherwise both balancing and performance will just be incredibly huge issues so yeah how do we limit this exponential growth my idea was one let's changed here X that overlap each other don't grow so now you can see here are a couple of X that overlap with different ones and only the X that are on top are actually growing and hatching new creatures that forces you to spread them out a lot more which is cool it feels like there's a lot more to do but sometimes it feels really hard to guess whether they're going to overlap or not

and it feels frustrating when they're too close to each other even though it looked like they were far enough apart I really like this solution but the way it is now it's still far from perfect it's really frustrating when you accidentally get something like this with a lot of X on top of each other what I'm thinking is maybe they will just hatch slower when they're close to each other so let's try to prototype that okay here we go okay bugs are just part of the process this is very normal okay as you can see the ones that are a little transparent roll more slowly and if they're far enough apart from each other they should grow a little more quickly they're really close to each other so they should be really transparent I think we need some better feedback to how close they are to each

other let me show you how this looks now so green means they have enough space to grow they hatch relatively quickly now when I hatch them too close to each other you can see they turn a little more orange and they hatch a lot more slowly that's a nice strategical element because it forces you to spread your creatures and egg out even more plus it limits the exponential growth because once you have X all over the screen all X will start hatching more slowly as they are pretty close to each other but I mean it's still viable to do this you can still hatch them really close to each other another interesting decision you can take whether you want to do that or not you can still have some advantages especially if you have no space one thing I don't like about the beginning is that it takes so long until you can turn them into X because when you do it right at the beginning it's really super optimal they are way too close to each other this is just unnecessary waiting

time right at the beginning of the match we don't want that let's just start them a little further out this is the start formation I decided on because now you can you have four creatures you can turn into X right at the beginning and then four more a little bit later this way there's the minimum amount of down time there's always something to do there's a bit of a down time but I think at the beginning of the level that's okay it gets more and more stressful the further we go anyway so let's see if I can beat this level really cool now you have really have to pay attention that you spread them out properly one thing I want to check now is how crazy I can explode my population so I'm gonna try building the creature farm on the right hand side and distracting the monster on

the left side so far so good now I think I need to be careful not to place them too close to each other because that makes them turn red and they will hatch really really slowly you can still grow a pretty big farm but it definitely doesn't go into the thousands which is good this looks pretty pretty promising obviously if you spread the farm out on a larger area you can growing more creatures come here come your little creature I will kill you it's just an endless circle of testing and changing and testing and changing whenever something feels off you just change it problem is sometimes you don't realize yourself when something is off that's why you need a lot of play testers no I created this cute little

graphic let's add this into game maker direct this yes we can now when we start the game we have a beautiful arrow now if we start the game we have a beautiful ugly Start screen one of the next thing things I definitely need to fix is there need to be some more interesting enemies so let me create the normal enemy dude there's going to be the very first level just a handful of these normal enemies let's see how difficult this is okay pretty easy oh my god let's delete all of this crap right here with boring repetitive enemies we're gonna build that from ground up so now I created

this cool little Normie spawner I just need to make a new level now we should have a normal spawn pretty much in the center of the room let's see can that's definitely interesting but they are so extremely slow that I'm not really worried at all we need to make them faster and we need to make the spawner more slowly so one thing I did with the spawner is that it spawns enemies faster and faster and this way hopefully I get the climax that I want it sounded wrong yeah tension is rising I have more and more creatures but there are also more and more enemies exiting

this vortex luckily they are still extremely extremely slow now the vortex scan the spawner and all of the enemies are out okay so I think this is super easy but obviously I don't know what new players think let's make another level where there are two of these owners and hopefully this will be a challenge for me but I think it won't [Music] Oh No I'm running out of creatures this is

awesome let me reorder this Normie level because I think in this configuration it's too frustrating or too close so here's what I'm thinking firstly we need even easier enemies because I think new players would have a little bit too much trouble with these right here they are led too fast they can take a little bit too much damage even though they're super easy to defeat for me I think new players would have quite a bit of problems another thing is that exploring these creatures trades way too much clutter on the screen it doesn't really look all that nice and clean when there's a lot going on on the screen and then those little projectiles are flying around all over the place so I think I will remove the bounds and replace it with something different the

purpose of the bounds is to make the projectiles hit more enemies so it doesn't matter that much where you detonate your little creatures will find a different way to achieve the same thing without creating that much clutter I think so I can see those little triangles they hit enemies as well ok there we go maybe I can give them a slightly different color now they should be yellow okay still pretty clattery but it makes the game a little easier which is good mmm I think we would probably have way less

clutter if the bullets moved faster so feels a bit weird because the bullets are too round I think I need to make them a little more like X yeah that looks way way way better nice I think the heat-seeking missile projectiles can deal a little more damage just a tiny bit more damage no that's way too much damage oh my god maybe should even be less bang nice I really really like how this turned out but the seeking muscles also need to be faster way faster let's make them three

times as fast nice maybe we should make these projectiles yellow as well maybe this makes it look a little cleaner well yes I think it makes it look cleaner bang yes let's try the hardcore level ha with the new settings obviously this level should not be given to beginners now I have to decide if I want to make even easier enemies huh let

me let me pretend like I'm really stupid and let's play the first level hmm okay what is happening why are these things moving okay no okay okay this is I can already feel this is not suitable for a first of all I I don't feel it like let's make another enemy let's say they have only 1/4 of the HP and half the movement speed so this is the first level now this should be really SuperDuper easy yeah basically I've already won you know what the arrows deal too much damage let's actually cut that in half let me show you in this

very first level when you let them explode right here see what the difference between the first and the second impact wave is it's huge actually think it's pretty good like this now this is level 2 there are two faster ones in the mix probably not a good idea they're too difficult now finally I created a little bit of a pause this is obviously the same as in the last version but now it should start out a little more slowly and then speed up over time come to Papa mr. boss Oh

my dad tried it earlier and it was way too hard for him now I reduced the spawn rate and less enemies spawn out of this spawner in total let's make some stupid moves just like a beginner would bang how about doesn't increase its speed so much huh how about that what the thing about that wouldn't that be nice let's see yep yep yep yep yep oops I accidentally make them explode oh what a pity

well I hope this is okay okay fantastic so now we have a pretty good foundation to continue with the art style so stay tuned for that [Music]