Hi everyone! New Oddinary TV: dev update has landed on YouTube. Check the video or read transcript below! 📺
Today I want to talk about some general improvements in the game and the first results of playtesting.
As I mentioned before, we received tons of feedback during Steam Game Festival and Indie Arena Booth. Some of the feedback is related to one of the core mechanics of the game — level modifier or how we call it “Weirdonium leaks”.
We have included a bunch of level modifiers in the demo and tried to understand, what’s working well and what’s not. After checking feedback, we decided to redesign some of them and adjust design principles for items, that are still on the paper.
For example, we have level modifier Ricochet. This modifier adds the probability of being deflected to the player’s bullets. Originally, we designed it to make deflected bullets dangerous for the player, not only for enemies. As you expect, this requires changing how the bullet looks like. The bullet should stand out on the screen because it’s different from player’s and enemies’ bullets.
Unfortunately, it is still hard to grasp, what is happening to the deflected bullet. We decided to take one step back and rethink this level modifier. After some brainstorming, we came up with small adjustments to it. But it makes the level modifier more player-friendly.
The main change is to disable friendly fire for the deflected bullet, so the player couldn’t get damage from it. Since the bullet remains the same, the player shouldn’t try to avoid it as well. I have also adjusted values for speed and how much damage the enemy gets at the first collision.
As I mentioned in the previous dev update, we started playtesting sessions via Steam. For today we have done two sessions with different focuses and a small group of people. The first build was focused on testing changes in weapons. For more details check the previous video. In the end, it was a great exercise, we received extra feedback, which made weapons even better!
For example, Missiles Launcher is fine-tuned more to improve the look and feel of missiles flight. I’m considering applying similar changes to all rockets in the game.
Right now we are testing already changed and new level modifiers. Test build includes only one level to have a baseline between different play sessions. This helps us to gather analytics and compare how different level modifiers are affecting gameplay. There are three level modifiers available to test, one of them Ricochet.
We are almost at the end of this playtesting session, but we have more changes to verify. We are going to have more playtesting sessions soon!
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