Age of Decay: patching pain points

Im new a guy in Gamedev, it's my first devlog. There is never a best time to start, so just let's start today :D

Age of decay is game that was originally made for Godot Wildjam #87

I personally like playing RTS games, just love that idea of mixing strategy with constant action where player must joggling between fight and building up to gain advantage in longer run.

Age of decay is something that is between RTS and slasher, just looking for good gameplay that feel fun. Slashing enemies is fun but I still believe that strategy is something that gives more deep to game. It's all about balancing it, just looking for that sweet spot.

After a jam I got some feedback from generous other participants. In this devlog I would like to go through them and explain problem and how I decided to address it.

I am not any expert, if you disagree with me just feel free to comment how could different approach described problems

We are going through:

• Building system controls is not clear
• No good feedback of taken damage
• Game mechanics are not clear 
• Code architecture is not enough to scale the game

Building system controls is not clear

That was a main pain problem of the game. The problem was created a little by myself because I was motivated to create simple system that will work with keyboard and gamepad out of box. That's still my goal I want to stick to.

The problem was that selecting building was pretty complex: First you must get into building mode by pressing E, then select building by pressing A-D (moving across buildings), pressing again E to select building. During that phase you cannot move or attack with your character. After selecting building you move to choosing spot mode that allow you to move and attack and finally you press E to confirm place and put a building.

Creating system for strategy-like game that is friendly for gamepad seems tricky for me. For ppl on PC that obvious you should use mouse for this. Maybe when we create some AAA game we could just implement mouse handling and gamepad as completely separate modes. That's more tricky when you want to control your scope.

I still decide to keep going creating unite system for keyboard/gamepad.  I would love to have some way to create bigger strategy games that has this kind of foundation.

Eventually I decided to:

• Add new way of selecting a building by just pressing on of buttons, eg. for keyboard just 1, 2 or 3. That allows you instantly jump into choosing spot mode completely omitting previous long select process
  • Above each of building there is hint about keyboard you should use to pick
  • You can easily change buildings by pressing other key anytime (swap buildings)
  • When you selected building UI will slightly increase size to indicate you are in choosing spot mode
  • When you can't pick building (no enough resources) there is extra sound to indicate that
• When you are in choosing spot mode there is extra hint to press E to put building
• In right corner there is small section to remind basic controls

No good feedback of taken damage

Problem occurred from feedback that player didn't know when he died, that he got shot by tower. Just didn't have any clear feedback that he must to retreat to survive.

So what I proposed it to add that simple trick that make character "blink" color to indicate that you got hit, that's not something revolutionary but rather simplest standard, that's great because players understand that effect from other games

I did research and the best way seems is to add shader to do the job, what cool it was possible to parameterize shader to override color it will display on sprite. That allows me to build component that will be useful to indicate health recovery as well. 

Eventually I decided to:

• for damage - red color
• for heal up - green color

Game mechanics are not clear 

That's something related to one person that asked me how to restore health in game. The problem is that I was designing game that Dead Turret have this ability, but there wasn't any in game indicator about it. Only in game description on itch page.

That's pretty tough one. I see this is most common problem when we make games. We as authors are suffering from "knowledge curse", that's mean we know how games works and that's obvious for us, but as we can guess other ppl don't have this knowledge.

Solution for me was just straight forward, just add some popup with description. Just move as much possible description from game site to game itself. I wonder what else we could do?

Code architecture is not enough to scale the game

Finally what is important I just looked on architecture of the game, there was a problem: units and placements (building) have similar logic that is separated, so I must to keep them in to places.

So i refactored code and decide to create scene hierarchy to clean up:

• Entity - shared across all entities nodes and logic
  • Unit - shared across all units and logic
    • Skeleton
    • ...
  • Placement - shared across all placements and logic
    • Turret
      • Dead Turret
        • some unique behaviors
    • ...

Now when I want to add new unit or placement I need to decide where to put it inside hierarchy. What important I still have ability to attach to any unit or structure some individual nodes with behaviors. Here example is Dead Turret that have ability to remain health of allies around them.

So finally I got implementation of template pattern in my code, that's something that should helps me to more easily scale and maintains that kind of game. I still need to scale up game and do next iteration to find out how it works.