Is originality always good?
When designing a game there are always choices to make between following the beaten path or trying to explore new ideas and mechanics. It can range from new takes on core mechanics that permeate the whole game, to singular “simple” innovations. The bad ones are sometimes called gimmicks. Balancing between being original enough to stand out and still doing what players expect from your game and genre, that is a tricky thing. In Just Read The Instructions we are taking a big step into mechanics that is completely new, at least for us. Some might say too big of a step, but we hope to be convincing in our execution!
The death of a Crawler
The primary enemy in the game is the crawlers, we have talked about them in previous blog posts. They don’t hurt the player directly, instead when they come near the player they explode into particles. These particles are what hurts the player, it’s not the only thing that does damage, but the primary thing. These particles behave like you would expect particles to behave, they explode out from the crawler and come to rest in the air. Then if you walk into a cloud of particles you take damage. When a lot of crawlers run you down and explode, it quickly gets out of hand with particles flying everywhere, it looks pretty but it’s quite dangerous.
Watch on YouTube
The player walking into some particles and losing HP
The fun counterplay
How is the player supposed to handle this then? First of all, if the crawler gets shot, the particles coming out of it quickly fades away. But if the crawler gets too close, explodes and the particles get everywhere, the player can still fire away with their weapon and use the “air puff” from the discharge to blow the particles away. That means that when the player is firing, the weapon discharge will make particles everywhere move and generally fly away. We think this is kind of a novel and fun way to deal with the crawlers and their tendency to explode. We are still experimenting with different mechanics that can enhance and make interactions with particles more fun. But so far the particles and their behavior feels both novel to play with and pleasing to look at, and that is a good start!
Watch on YouTube
Blowing away the particles looks kind of pretty!
We hope we will bring something new and exciting to the FPS table!
So don't forget to sign up for our beta!
www.Knackelibang.com
/ The Knackelibang Team