Mancakes Final Presentation (G6)
Game Pitch:
As you descend alongside a building, you, a bear with an umbrella, have to dodge spikes and rockets in an effort to get the highest score you can!
What is fun about that:
Navigation with the umbrella – skillfully dodging spikes and rockets within an inch of danger.
What worked
– Players wanted to play our game many times consecutively – that was sort of a design goal, to sort of make it a Flappy Bird style game; mildly rage-inducing, but mildly adddictive
– Movement with the umbrella – the intended “game feel” piece, seemed to be fluid to most players and definitely required a certain amount of mastery to get better at. We watched players get better at the game over time and some players were much more advanced than others – it’s a skill game.
– We implemented all but one piece of our mid-bar We shot for our mid-bar, so that’s pretty good. The only missing piece is a score screen. With just a little more time I’m certain that we could get that done – the game is almost complete!
What didn’t work
– One of the main ways we tried to incentivize the player using our game mechanics was by making the game very hard. You HAD to use the umbrella or you are dead in no time at all. This was frustrating to a lot of players and made them sort of “shut out” our game. I guess, ideally, the umbrella usage would just be so much fun that the game wouldn’t even need to be hard.
– We were challenged by what, in retrospect, may not have been the best design of a game. By having the building on just one side of the screen, it forces players to want to go hard left to avoid rockets, which travel in by the right. If we could do it all over again… we’d have “buildings” on both sides.
– Conveying to the player what each thing does. Our rockets can’t hit you until they explode, for example. The umbrella cooldown mechanic isn’t SUPER obvious unless the sound is on or we told you how it works. Giving instruction/feedback to the player is paramount to them being able to play our game. We did well in some respects for that, but not so well on other elements.
What We Learned
– So many things! The balance between game feel/game difficulty was one dynamic we learned a lot about.
– Balancing and designing mechanics that are fun to play with (with Game Feel in mind).
– The feels of being a game designer and watching someone play your game and just… to have it not work at all.
– The feels of being a game designer and watching someone “get” your game and be better at the game than you.
– A ton about Unity.
– Perspective of the developer is so much different than the perspetive of a “fresh” player that, for future game projects, early and often play of the game by “fresh” people is paramount.
What We Changed/Adjusted
– Our Rockets were glitchy in our build. We were supposed to have a reticle appear where the rocket would land. As such, you could just dodge the reticle. We fixed that broken reticle and some other random bugs.
Here is our video:
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