How to Fix Your Game When You Find Out That It Sucks!

hey hey this is Jonas making video games with you and this video is basically part two of the video I did yesterday so we'll watch that first there are absolutely need to address have to spread your creatures on the map always draw little icons on my cards because that makes it very easy to see the entire you don't have to greet everything you don't have to read every little single line of text you can can see the bigger picture way easier just by drawing little icons on your let me

show you begin taking tension much ability so what we could do is for the far I already told you about that those are some pretty massive changes so you prepared for that we could go from a level base system to a rope like system this randomly generates different everytime random stuff is happening you have random upgrades maybe you have a couple of different ones you can choose from random events that can happen that mix things up a little stuff like that can make it a little unfair but in the end if people gain benefits from that who cares a main reason why it's so boring to watch is because the game is so insanely slow especially with the pause function though I think we could do something like if you use the speed-up function that makes the game run with four times the speed you get extra resources that motivates you to be a little quicker and not mess around and then for pausing we could make passing special ability that costs resources to

activate so not a lot of free songs just a couple so that you don't use it all the time you can still use it quite often but something that stops you from hitting pause over and over again because that makes the game just very boring to watch here going to Aloe Blacc system it's probably the most drastic change but I think we could make the game way more interesting what do you think do you think those changes might work I don't know then the next problem is here the popular surge is way too obvious you can't get creative and my favorite thing to do when that happens is I just look at what is the optimal strategy what is to play doing all the time and then I try to encourage players to do exactly the opposite which usually works out pretty well currently the problem is that the optimal strategy is to get as greedy as possible with your eggs to create as many eggs as possible and I have I think I found a way to counteract that we just reward different things with our resources currently we reward detonating units but why don't we reward simply not

turning your units into X so you get resources for every unit that is flying around so you get resources if you neither detonate them nor turn them into X if you have just idle units flying around which is usually what you don't want to have that's what you get resources from and that I think makes everything a little more interesting I don't want to have abilities anymore so abilities that allow you to manipulate the game while is going on but turning the resources into a progress bar like this so you collect resources and resources whenever you have idle units this bar here fills up and when the bar is full then you can select between maybe three four five different upgrades and those upgrades have dressed the impact on everything so that's where a lot of strategic choice comes into play and we can try different builds okay one is like one of them or the others are gone so that should make for an interesting choice I think those two will fix those two problems quite well

there's still the most dominant problem which will be the hardest one to fix and which will require the most redesign probably and that's you don't understand what the hell's going on sure if somebody explains the game to you you get it you can totally understand it but if you just see somebody play you have no idea what's going on that's actually a pretty important factor when you see the game of the first time it's probably not gonna be the case that somebody is there to explain the game to you so you have to figure it out yourself you don't even understand the two factions are fighting each other some people look at it and they have no clue what's going on they don't know what the goal of the player is if you're left lunes that watching isn't any fun and you also don't feel motivated to try the game or learn more about it actually let's let's talk about the solutions I came up with we need to make it look like war because people know our war works two factions fight against each other and the goal is to win the war and

to defeat the enemy another one is you need to know exactly who the good guys are so currently both alien factions kind of look ugly weird creepy and you can't really identify with any one of them the problem with that is you don't really know which side to queue for if you first see the game you have absolutely no true is the player controlling the orange ones is the player controlling the blue ones and it's kind of hard to figure out we need to fix that and I think another good way to differentiate those two faction from each other is make one of them biological and one of them robotic and technical it's a cleeshay but you know they hate each other you know they want to destroy each other and if you just see weird aliens you don't really know where they were together are they feeding each other what the hell is going on and I think people understand the conflict between robots and biological stuff a lot better because it's has been done a lot more often the next problem is you don't really understand what you can do about

that I just need to do a better job explaining it and I've also thought about making a little mini tutorial at the start of each level or whenever you start the level you have a 3 second countdown 3 2 - how time is going on you can have a little tutorial a little Blandon or a little animation that shows you your two main interactions duplicating detonating and this way if you let's play the game or if you stream the game you don't have to constantly explain the game for your viewers but viewers and hopefully just get the main mechanics of the game by watching the game because the game explains that every time you start a new level then another one you don't know why your units explode it's super intuitive why should you make your own units explode and actually I think I have a really good fix for it we just don't make the unit's explode we just turned them into a check mode instead and the way this works is if you swipe over them they don't blow up they just turn into that direction and start shooting for a while and while they're shooting they get

smaller and smaller so they they're using up their energy and essentially it's it does exactly the same thing it deals damage in a certain direction that's exactly what the detonation stood before but I think it's a lot easier to understand a lot more like more things are shooting at each other people understand that okay if they're shooting at each other that I probably don't like each other they just explode and blow up then it's harder to understand what's going on so I think this will be a good change to the understandability then we have you don't know how well the players doing when you watch somebody play this it's really cool to see you oh they're so skilled how can they do that I want to try that as well I think that's probably not something that's gonna happen with my game all that much because yeah it's a strategy game it's hard to see how skilled players are maybe if you have very quick mouse movements I don't know that's probably not that big of a deal though and I also don't have a solution for it so just left it blank this problem we'll see how that goes and then the last one

why can you units touch enemies so those are units and those are enemies you might remember that your units can go over enemies they can touch each other and they don't get hurt from that only your ex get hurt when they touch enemies that as well as a little unintuitive so what we could do is we could just add a shield around units when they're flying around and your ex don't have fields people know what you are they know how she is right so I think that's gonna be a lot more understandable yeah Oh require a lot of redesigns the game's gonna look a lot different when we're done with all of this but I think it's necessary what do you think and I'm actually really happy I found out about them now and not in two months and four months when I'm much further into the development if you make a game I can't recommend it enough to get you after as early as possible get as much feedback as possible try to identify trends what are people having troubles with and then try to think about solutions how can you fix it can you fix it if you can't fix it then maybe it's

not the correct project maybe you have to choose a different project plan and that's why it's important to do that early feedback and get it as early as possible because otherwise I would have never found out about all of these problems and I think those are very serious problems that need to be addressed right away what do you think about the ideas I talked about do you think this can work do you have any ideas how to fix those problems have you had similar problems in your games as well if you struggled with those same things let me know in the comments thanks for watching guys hope this was interesting make the earth your playground and see you in the next one peace