My next game's arcade mode is (just about) fully playable!
Hello! I’ve had a surprisingly relaxing time these last couple of weeks, tinkering with my new game’s arcade mode.
All of the gameplay content is pretty much complete, so at this point I’m just playtesting it and improving it. This is always a strange feeling; on the one hand it feels like I’m not really doing any work because I’m not adding any new features, but on the other hand the game is so much more fun and balanced than it used to be.
There’s a video of the current state of arcade mode further down, but it’s easier if I can explain the changes I made to it first. So let’s start with…
The memorization-improvisation scale and static enemy spawns
As much as I love my new game’s arcade mode, I had one big problem with it: other than the boss fights, everything felt a bit too samey. I love the designs and behaviors of all the different enemy types and I could happily spend hours replaying the same stages over and over again, but the game's structure kind of felt like the worst of arcade games and the worst of action roguelikes combined; there wasn't as much variety between runs as an action roguelike, but there weren't any static arcade-style setpieces that players could learn and plan around either.
I wrote about this a bit on my blog, or you can just see my diagram here:
The first thing that I did to try and add some arcade-style static challenge to my game was to tone down the random enemy spawns. By this I mean I went through every single room in every single stage and manually placed down where each enemy in the first wave should spawn. So now if you’re struggling with a specific room in arcade mode, you have the option of coming up with a plan to help you survive. That plan will almost always fall apart a few seconds later when the enemies’ dynamic movement comes into play, but even just having a few seconds of predictability goes a long way towards giving each room its own identity and giving you a way to quickly improve if you get stuck.
I wanted another way to quickly add some interesting setpieces so I added some exploding barrels too! Check them out:
You can detonate them as soon as you enter a room, save them for the more unpredictable later parts of a room, or even launch enemies into them from a distance. I love them!
Arcade mode is (just about) fully playable
I finished up the final stage of my game’s arcade mode and split the basic straightforward stage I made a couple of weeks ago in half, so it’s now both stage 1 and stage 2. That way I didn’t have to make people play a boring drawn-out tutorial stage at the start of every arcade run, but the first two stages are so extremely short that you’ll hopefully still feel like you’ve progressed decently far into the game even if you die five minutes into a run. I got to sneak in a standard boss fight at the end of stage 1 too, so the strange four-chickens-in-towers fight in stage 2 is no longer the first boss I subject new players to.
At this point the game’s arcade mode is still missing a few things like a final boss (and music and sound effects and environment art…) but aside from that, it’s pretty much done!
I’d like arcade mode to have branching paths but I haven’t coded that yet, so I just duct-taped a single path together to see how it felt to play. I just finished programming this today so I’ve only had the time to play it once, but I’m pretty happy with how it feels.
Here’s my first attempt at playing a full run of my game’s arcade mode on Very Hard difficulty:
The exact score values and the HUD still need tweaking but I love the general scoring system! Each individual stage is going to have its own ranks and high scores, so hopefully people will enjoy going for S ranks on their favorite stages.
Anything else?
My friend Alex released their game Witching Stone! It's a roguelike deckbuilder mixed with a puzzle game and I love it. Your mana determines the length of the line that you can draw on the puzzle board, and your different moves' inputs are allowed to overlap so you can come up with all sorts of strategies for squeezing as much juice as possible out of a small amount of mana. I've only cleared it with the starting character so far but I’m having a great time.
Speaking of friends' games, Boghog's upcoming hybrid shoot em up / beat em up ARMED DECOBOT has a Steam page now! Lots of my new game's best design ideas came from Boghog, including the idea to make enemies explode when you launch them into walls, and I loved his work on Gunvein too. I've even been obsessed with shoot em up / beat em up hybrids ever since I played Sol Divide a few weeks ago, so I can't wait to try ARMED DECOBOT when I get the chance!
I’ve been playing way too much UFO 50 recently too, which is a collection of 50 brand new pixel art games with game designs reminiscent of the 2000s TIGSource freeware era and earlier console/arcade games. My favorites so far are the snake-style high score game Magic Garden, the Taito-style single screen soccer platformer Kick Club, the Ducky's Delivery Service-like flying UFO platformer Campanella and its various spinoffs and sequels, and the Ghouls n Ghosts-like arcade platformer Rakshasa. I'm sure there are some more future favorites lurking in there but I haven't even scratched the surface of it yet. How did they make 50 entire games...
That’s all I’ve been up to recently. I’m going to spend next week finishing up my game’s arcade mode so I can release a playable build to my patrons and then I’m going to take a well-overdue vacation. I hope you have a great couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!