T w e n t y S i d e d

Some other indie developers were nice enough to play the game and send us their feedback. A common theme in the feedback was that things were too chaotic. Or too random. Or unfocused. Or too busy.

Looking at the game, it’s easy to see why, and it’s easy to see how we slipped into this state. We made a system that let you make wildly divergent robots, simply by tweaking a text file. Since creating robots is easy and variety is good, then more robot types = more good, right? Aren’t games always bragging about how many enemy types they have? Isn’t this a selling point? “Fight over 12 different enemy types!” it says on the back of the box.

Only 12, AAA game? Pshaw. We have that many in the first 15 minutes of the game!

It made sense at the time, but when the feedback rolled in it was a forehead-slapping moment for all of us. Of course this will seem like random chaos to someone who hasn’t played the game constantly for 6 months.

It’s like a version of Half-Life 2 where your first fight is against a group of foes with the behaviors of an antlion, a zombie, two soldiers, a metrocop, a strider, and a gunship. It’s not about being “too hard”, really. Even if you lower the hitpoints and damage output on the gunship and the strider to bring them into line with (say) a metrocop, the player still can’t be expected to parse all this chaos. They’re not going to appreciate the differences between the soldier and the zombie when both foes die in the same panicked volley of weapons fire.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Good Robot #39: Teaching Players to Good Robot”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.