Without giving too much away, the primary characters are rather fleshed out, including the protagonist, antagonists, and the world is slowly being expanded upon. Normally, we would focus more on polishing the scripts and build out the world before wrapping a narrative to it, but in this case, the themes of each antagonist and their levels makes determining how the narrative plays out a higher priority.
We've also decided to scope down a bit on the deliverable, since we lost a good month or so of actual building. Instead of spreading out over four or so levels and a tutorial, we're now focusing on a tutorial and two levels. With this smaller scope, we are hoping that we can focus on and polish the three levels to a higher standard.
A bit of recap on what was decided:
1. Main protagonist is Life Witch.
2. She is going around defeating other witches and draining their apprentices.
3. Draining their apprentices will allow the protagonist to upgrade their abilities/shots.
4. Each witch has a theme and their dungeons will revolve around that theme.
I am very honored to have one of my theme proposals chosen as one of the levels.
Allow me to (re)introduce the Time Witch. A very shy and awkward child, her magic makes her rather tricky to fight. She also seems to know the Life Witch and perhaps several other secrets.
She's gone through a few design passes, and I'm a bit sad to see the pendulum extending from her cloak go (I'm a big fan of Shin Megami Tensei and the Persona series, so mechanical parts integrated with humanoid subjects are cool and interesting to me). Nevertheless, we've come to a compromise on her design reflecting her character personality.
The idea of the orbs floating around her is as much an aesthetic design choice as it is a gameplay mechanics choice. Centering around the theme of timing, we wanted to make her only vulnerable at certain times. Extending this, make her vulnerable at certain times of the day and allowing the player to manipulate a large clock, literally changing the time of day to fight her. With the orbs, we'll be able to show the player what time it needs to be to fight her with the caveat of glowing different colors to show day and night cycles.
Her dungeon is, of course, timing based, so there are various moving parts and ways to get around them. Following in line with her childish personality, the enemies in her dungeon are reminiscent of toys, including the alarm clock amphibian and tin toy soldiers.
We'll see how far we can get with this. Though I would like to work on this dungeon, I think our priority should focus on the tutorial first and foremost. Once we can establish a good pace and tone for tutorial, we can start going crazy on this and our other designs.
In other news, we've also been planning for an upgrade tree. In my previous post, I talked about the different shot types and how extensible they would be. Deciding on the number of upgrades proved a bit difficult as we did not know exactly how long each dungeon will be and the entirety of the game. If we have a ton of upgrades but only four levels, how would the player ever get to every upgrade?
The idea proposed is a branching tree. This will allow the player to customize how they want to play, if they like defensive plays then bigger and better shields will come in handy, and if they like more aggressive plays then upgrading the knives can give more damage output.
One of the ideas I enjoyed was that even with optimal play, the tree will never be fully upgraded. To me, this reflects life much more realistically, no one can be the best at everything. Drawing from games such as Dragon Age, the player is presented with only a limited amount of points to upgrade themselves and this forces hard decisions as to which path the player wants to play. The choices then have more meaning than if the player can upgrade everything and in that case, no choice really has to be made.
At the same time, too many choices will create choice paralysis, where the player won't know which choice to make and hesitate on choosing at all. A compromise had to be made and a starting number chosen on how many upgrades there will be total and how many available.
Here's the first pass I made with the shots. I went a bit overboard and had a little too much fun with arranging them to look a bit like the shots they come from.
In total, there are 51 upgrades that can be taken. At the time, I believe that the amount of upgrades the player can fully get is around 20-25 which is about half of that.
We discussed how this would influence the game and decided that this is far too many choices to make and is way out of scope considering the time we have.
On to the next proposal.
For this round, we went with only 12 possible upgrades and 13 available upgrades, so essentially the player would be able to max out most of the trees.
Unfortunately, this means little choice in what to upgrade, and there isn't the nice branching that lets the player see that their choices make a difference.
To the final proposal!
This seems about a third of the possible upgrades, which is less than in the first pass. However, half of the first pass is around 25 choices, whereas here two-thirds of the choices is only about 14.
When we make more levels, we can put in more or less upgrades, and this acts as a starting point for us to see what is needed and necessary.
That's it for now. With further development, we'll continue building on the world and in the end, hopefully have something that is fairly polished and fun. See you next time.
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