Pope Amole II
Nerd Commando Game Studios
- Joined
- Mar 1, 2012
- Messages
- 2,052
So it's january 30th and we're not as close to the greenlight demo as we would like to. Well, we have just 1 coder and he's plagued by various life issues so, while his work is really fast & efficient, that's only when he's actually able to work. Out of past three weeks, two were consumed by IRL crap so yeah. At least that means that, two week tops, but we'll be there.
And this gives me plenty of time to work on the balance. Not the codex's most favorite word recently, but my take on balance is pretty different, I guess. I guess I'll take the long way to explain that.
Caelum is meant to be both very difficult and rather easy at the same time. It is, what I would like to call it, a knowledge-based game. Knowledge of a game's system, that is. The enemies are pretty strong, their damage dealing capability is high and so, first of your builds are bound to get blasted to shreds. In my own case, I, despite being the game's designer, spent an hour and a half before actually killing one wave successfully. And that wasn't the toughest wave, mind you. Of course, the balance was raw then, but you get the point.
However, different enemy wave combinations & setups have different weaknesses & blind spots. And, by utilizing the tools that the game offers to you in a proper manner, you can overcome them more or less easily. Not effortlessly as the game can punish even one mistake quite harshly (I like it that way), but play your cards right and you won't have to suffer that much.
Another thing - and I guess it can be rather important for the Codex - is that our game is not really twitch-based. You have to dodge incoming projectiles, of course, but flawless dodging is hardly required and not that possible. There are some twitch-based rewards (Genesis Power i.e. cannon can be quite skill-intensive; Rosary Power rewards good distribution of its shots; many guns can hit two enemies at once if you position them rather precisely; Messiah Throne i.e. ship is quite survivable if you have nimble fingers) but the majority of it are really not about being that quick. You can easily build around taking lots of shots. I've even borrowed the Pkunk ship mechanic for one of the Acts (traits) - you have a chance to be instantly reborn with full hp & energy when you die. So you can absolutely play in the Tony Montana "I'm taking your bullets" style.
So, returning to the balance. The game is knowledge based. Since you can adjust your ship on a constant basis, you can adapt to any problem. But, of course, initially you don't know how. And, to prevent you from using the one and the same combo over and over - there are some incredibly powerful ones and I'm not going to nerf them because doing so would kill the pleasure of learning the system - we're going to implement the Chaos mode further on (not in the demo).
The game has 12 guns, 5 ships, 5 shields, 10 traits. May not look like much, but as they're all pretty decent & unique (and all of the guns have rather strongly varying alt-modes so it's more like 24 guns), the amount of combinations is rather vast. I've been doing a map of builds this week and I've found 32 main archetypes, some of which had sub-builds, so that totaled in 42 builds total. And that's with the room for slight adjustments in many of the builds.
But, to nudge the player to actually discover that, the Chaos mode (it will be on by default but it will be optional) will give access only to the 4 guns, 2 ships, 2 shield and 3 traits at any given level. Chosen randomly and changing with each level. So, even if you find that mega-powered combo, it's not like you'll be able to use it continuously. You'll have to adapt each time. Which is probably fun (at least I'm having fun with my game, lol, because there are lots of interactions I wasn't actually planning for and that's pretty cool). So the game will keep asking you new questions and you'll have to invent fresh answers (at least to a certain point - I'm not promising endless playtime here, but hey, I hope that each build will take at least 20 mins to discover and that's already not that horrible of a length).
And so, since this system destroys the need for the guns to be that close to each other and prevents degeneracy, I'm free to focus on making them as different from each other as possible. This is different for me to describe with words as I'm going more on the feelings here, but I've tinkered with each piece of equipment until it felt "right" to me. There's still better and worse stuff, of course, more used & less used stuff but each thingie has something special going about it that's worth exploring.
I'm not sure how many players will want to explore that deep, but with our shitty graphics it's not like we're gonna attract a lot of the casual crowd so it's probably fine to expect more or less hardcore audience. I'm also not sure if we're too much on the edge of the genres or not (because lots of RPG fans will feel iffy about shmup stuff and vice versa), but the time will tell, I guess.
And this gives me plenty of time to work on the balance. Not the codex's most favorite word recently, but my take on balance is pretty different, I guess. I guess I'll take the long way to explain that.
Caelum is meant to be both very difficult and rather easy at the same time. It is, what I would like to call it, a knowledge-based game. Knowledge of a game's system, that is. The enemies are pretty strong, their damage dealing capability is high and so, first of your builds are bound to get blasted to shreds. In my own case, I, despite being the game's designer, spent an hour and a half before actually killing one wave successfully. And that wasn't the toughest wave, mind you. Of course, the balance was raw then, but you get the point.
However, different enemy wave combinations & setups have different weaknesses & blind spots. And, by utilizing the tools that the game offers to you in a proper manner, you can overcome them more or less easily. Not effortlessly as the game can punish even one mistake quite harshly (I like it that way), but play your cards right and you won't have to suffer that much.
Another thing - and I guess it can be rather important for the Codex - is that our game is not really twitch-based. You have to dodge incoming projectiles, of course, but flawless dodging is hardly required and not that possible. There are some twitch-based rewards (Genesis Power i.e. cannon can be quite skill-intensive; Rosary Power rewards good distribution of its shots; many guns can hit two enemies at once if you position them rather precisely; Messiah Throne i.e. ship is quite survivable if you have nimble fingers) but the majority of it are really not about being that quick. You can easily build around taking lots of shots. I've even borrowed the Pkunk ship mechanic for one of the Acts (traits) - you have a chance to be instantly reborn with full hp & energy when you die. So you can absolutely play in the Tony Montana "I'm taking your bullets" style.
So, returning to the balance. The game is knowledge based. Since you can adjust your ship on a constant basis, you can adapt to any problem. But, of course, initially you don't know how. And, to prevent you from using the one and the same combo over and over - there are some incredibly powerful ones and I'm not going to nerf them because doing so would kill the pleasure of learning the system - we're going to implement the Chaos mode further on (not in the demo).
The game has 12 guns, 5 ships, 5 shields, 10 traits. May not look like much, but as they're all pretty decent & unique (and all of the guns have rather strongly varying alt-modes so it's more like 24 guns), the amount of combinations is rather vast. I've been doing a map of builds this week and I've found 32 main archetypes, some of which had sub-builds, so that totaled in 42 builds total. And that's with the room for slight adjustments in many of the builds.
But, to nudge the player to actually discover that, the Chaos mode (it will be on by default but it will be optional) will give access only to the 4 guns, 2 ships, 2 shield and 3 traits at any given level. Chosen randomly and changing with each level. So, even if you find that mega-powered combo, it's not like you'll be able to use it continuously. You'll have to adapt each time. Which is probably fun (at least I'm having fun with my game, lol, because there are lots of interactions I wasn't actually planning for and that's pretty cool). So the game will keep asking you new questions and you'll have to invent fresh answers (at least to a certain point - I'm not promising endless playtime here, but hey, I hope that each build will take at least 20 mins to discover and that's already not that horrible of a length).
And so, since this system destroys the need for the guns to be that close to each other and prevents degeneracy, I'm free to focus on making them as different from each other as possible. This is different for me to describe with words as I'm going more on the feelings here, but I've tinkered with each piece of equipment until it felt "right" to me. There's still better and worse stuff, of course, more used & less used stuff but each thingie has something special going about it that's worth exploring.
I'm not sure how many players will want to explore that deep, but with our shitty graphics it's not like we're gonna attract a lot of the casual crowd so it's probably fine to expect more or less hardcore audience. I'm also not sure if we're too much on the edge of the genres or not (because lots of RPG fans will feel iffy about shmup stuff and vice versa), but the time will tell, I guess.