This post contains the final build and changes summary (final presentation overview) for the Telegraph Investigation project.
The most important changes for this week were of two kinds: overall polish (title screen, sound effects, music, variety of attack animations), and responding to feedback from the previous playtest. The latter affected the mechanics more, so I’ll focus on those notes for this post.
I’ve changed controls from QWAS to WASD as requested by players, and done away with making players lose balance for holding an attack too long – now it just automatically does the action, with the downside of attack holding being extended vulnerability.
Playtest Notes • First some things people liked: particles from successful hits, hover movement, increase in enemies as player succeeds, feel of speed from lines underway (will be adding wireframe foreground and background objects to add to this effect), stickman/vector aesthetic, “this is awesome.” • Confusion about why losing balance. Doesn’t expect hard hit to […]
Keeping to my goal all 4 aspects of the game (hover feel, press-time-as-force, telegraphing action/vulnerability, and recoverable grapple) are at first pass, ready to test. I also made the planned improvement to the core functionality (“Phase 1” from the design doc) in having animation poses shared from a common parent, and in refactoring out common […]
Game Log for first week, ending on Oct 27: What I planned to do by the end of the previous week (from my design document): “Submit this project design document. Add functionality to engine to visualize stick figure pose(s) in-editor while not in Play, as well as feedback in that visualization to hint at when any […]
Building upon the pitch slides for Brave Courier shown earlier this week, this new submissions contents are in the Brave Courier Project Design document. (That link goes to another public Google Doc, a local export of which I’ve also uploaded on T-Square.) Copy of that document: Brave Courier By Telegraph Investigation The central details […]
Game Name: Brave Courier Target Experience: “Jason Bourne meets Road Rash” Gameplay Concept: You play as a messenger fending off marauders while surfing atop your hoverboard. Finding the Fun: Satisfying drifting of hoverboard in both mechanical implications (predictable trajectories for learnable timing) and polish feedback (tilting and drifting like a Wipeout anti-gravity jet vehicle). Exploring […]
Employ hand-to-hand combat as an ambushed hoverboard messenger to fend off attackers until you can deliver the package to its intended destination.
For assignment 3 we needed to combine an animal (from a list of 4 options) with an emotion (from a list of 4). I decided on the Monkey as my animal and Scared as my emotion. I wanted to create a situation in which the player character could be scared in some situations and not […]
For assignment 2 our objective was to make 2 types of character control, a light nimble character and a heavy metallic character, in the same minimal platforming environment. Our emphasis is as always on the game feel aspects: real-time control, spatial simulation, and polish. I stuck close to the literal, common instructions of the assignment, […]
Super Mario Crossover by exploding rabbit is a great study/illustration of game feel!
I set out to make something that was a balance between organic and mechanical – organic so it could feel relatable like a cartoon animation, and mechanical to manage expectations by not suggesting intelligence or complex biological locomotion. My compromise looks and moves mostly like a rocket, with a slight impression of sea creature […]