Behind the scenes

Most of the work in a game takes place behind the scenes, and we don’t have anything to show for it… The internal systems are often neglected when one considers game development, but they’re crucial to get the system up and running in a timely fashion and without any problems…

And that’s what we’ve been doing lately: working on the game design (all boss fights are designed, albeit subject to lots of changes depending on gameplay tests), working on internal systems of the engine (started development on a new data-driven effect system, but only laid the groundwork yet, but more on this on another post), and some technical work on the models in terms of optimizing, etc.

So, nothing visible, hence no screenshot for this post…

Anyway, some comments on boss design: it’s very hard coming up with mechanics that mesh up nicely with the existing game framework, while not have been overused in the past by other games… Doing that while considering that we’re on building an episodic game, with limited content, while still catering for the human need of “rollercoasters” is a nightmare; fortunately, everyone pitched in with their own ideas on the boss fights, and so we’ve managed to build 5 boss fights that are quite different from each other (and some from everything I’ve seen in the past in other RPGs), that have multiple (theoretical) tactics to being overcome. Hopefully, we won’t have to change too much in the final version, because they’re quite interesting as they are (well, a father should be proud of his children!)

One other part of boss design that’s hard is trying to keep looking at the fight from fresh angles, without being boxed by tactics that we came up with when we were thinking about that… We need to be able to think like our players, with multiple play styles; for example, what if the player likes going “imp overkill+zerg” on the boss? Is the possible still doable/too easy? And what if it is a tactical player that just positions few units and maximizes his control over them?

All of these keeps us on our toes, terrified that we forget one option… of course, that’s what playtesting will help us with, but even so we can miss something, detracting from the game experience for those players that feel that they should be able to overcome the challenge in a specific way, and the game’s “unfairness” is preventing them… Complicated stuff to balance out!

Anyway, next week hopefully we’ll have more stuff to put on the blog…