Post by Steventus in R3WiND jam comments

Brackeys Jam 2020.2 » Entries » R3WiND

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This is a mixed bag for me - there are some good things and bad things, lets go through them :

1) Not the worst gunplay, The shotgun feels exceptionally well done here, good sound design adds to that but I think you could benefit from camera shake. I'm not too entirely sure how to make good third-person feel so I think you'd benefit from watching other 3rd person games to study how they do gunplay in those games.

If anything, for additional polish - I'd suggest that you have different reticles for sniper, shotgun and asssault rifle and with every shot - show how much recoil the player is having from rapid fire - infact, I'm not even sure you have recoil implemented in the guns at all. I feel like unless you're going for a manic-high adrenaline gameplay like Devil May Cry or DOOM, then you should integrate some form of recoil in your gunplay.

You also definitely need ammo - ammo plays a crucial part of determining how much downtime a player is forced to especially in a gunfight, and allows the player to alternate between offense and defense, especially if the enemy also needs to reload. I think the lack of ammo makes this 'demo' very mediocore. This is especially true as sniper rifle is quite OP in Guerilla as I just sprint and headshot everyone easy.

2) UI/UX - you have done some good things and some okay things. I like the way you put the ammo on where the reticle is, easy to spot how much ammo I have left. Kudos!

For the next steps, I think you need a reload UI animation, especially for your shotgun as it seems like its a pump-action where you reload by a bullet-per-bullet basis, you should show the ammo counter going up one-by-one. Look up how some third-person shooter games do it.

I did NOT understand what the bars on the bottom left and bottom right were. It only took some time to figure out the green bar was the health bar.. and that's it. I still have no idea what the two other bars were. Your tutorial was quite well done if anything - but you forgot to teach about what the bars mean.

3) Lots of mechanics, on one hand it's pretty cool to be able to do a lot of things. In fact, some of these are quite well executed. The dodge roll feels somewhat smooth, the slow time is pretty cool (but when does it ever run out..,?). Having multiple guns is always a plus. The melee is a plus when enemies get close. It's not bad on passive observation but when I think about it, it's also a bit too much mechanics maybe. Here's what I mean,

Unless you have planned for what these mechanics will add to the gameplay, as of now I think you have too much and half of them don't add to the gameplay at all.

Dodgeroll doesn't really add anything. I also didn't need to slow down time. This comes from an average if not below average FPS player but I could just hold sprint and shoot people down from far away. Even in the boss fight, I wouldn't really get hit if I just hold sprint. The only times I get hit in the boss fight were when I let go of the sprint button - so I kept it held on. Dodgeroll only works when you have large sweeping, telegraphed attacks - look at Furi and Dark Souls for example. Dodgeroll also only works when you have cover to dodge behind - and even in the Guerilla map, the enemies were not threathening enough to force me to cover anyway.

I did not need melee - the only times I did it were for fun, and to test it out. But in hindsight, they do not add anything. This is because you have infinite ammo in the current version - which detracts alot of the experience I feel.

4) Thematically, EH. For such a cool-looking game, it's a bit unfortunate that it wasn't implemented better.

In overall, I sound like I'm bashing a lot. Advance apologies for that. These are my thoughts and by all means - you can accept them however you like. If anything, I accept counter arguments, I'm sure we can both learn from this. And hey, you're off to a good start, you have a lot of functions in place - you really just need to sand out the rough parts, maybe remove a few things, polish up the gunplay, and I think you would then be off to a good start.

Cheerios.

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Winnitude!3 years ago (4 edits) (+1)

Hi! The ammo counter was removed on the feedback of a few testers who said it made the game significantly worse. This was before major balancing changes which would have made it good to re-implement. There's no recoil implemented for the same reason; I had a few people tell me that it made the game worse as it has to be casual enough to pick up and play very quickly without learning compensation patterns and whatnot in a jam. Melee becomes very necessary with the final boss though, although I get that due to the last minute balance changes which made the standard enemies significantly weaker, it becomes redundant.

The yellow bar on the right hand side is the "coolant bar". During development this would be spent by melee, sprinting and slow motion to make the player assess the situation and prioritize damage vs mobility, but this was cut at the request of testers, changed to be only spent by utilizing slow-motion, which runs out when the bar reaches zero.

The blue bar underneath health is the shields bar. This is a 100 damage buffer that regenerates quickly to allow the player to take a few hits before taking health damage, which can not be recovered. It's a way to avoid the player getting BS killed from behind; a volley of rounds from the AI will deplete this bar and only dent the health so long as the player reacts before they can let off another one, and the boss isn't too punishing so long as the player manages their shields well. It's an incentive to play smart and manage their regen without forcing them out of the fight to wait for health to regenerate since it goes very quickly; it's effectively now that the player is punished for taking multiple successive hits extremely rapidly, as it regenerates very fast and has no delay before it starts, so simply dodging out of the way of a hit is enough for it to recover significantly.

Slowing down time allows you to combine it with melee (the intended purpose). This lets you get off melee hits five times as fast relative to the world, so you can execute 5 melee combos on the boss during the stagger period, or take down a full crowd of enemies. It's all about synergizing it with other mechanics.

The dive roll originally innately lowered the accuracy of enemies shooting at the player, but this became incredibly abusable after the overheating mechanic was removed, so now it is just a quick method that is used to open the door for slow motion and cool feeling moments rather than impacting gameplay on its own in gunfights. However, it is still incredibly important to use against melee opponents such as the boss, where it is the only way to move fast enough in a given direction to avoid melee hits, which it is incredibly functional for. It is very difficult if not impossible to survive in combat against the final boss without extensive use of dodge rolling especially as it reaches the second phase, where you have to make split second reactions to the smoke particles to determine a direction and dodge roll away before her attacks land.

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely create a better guide on the HUD and look into ways to implement ammo limits without hurting the experience as testers decided it did. Unfortunately, I had to sacrifice most of the mechanical aspects that added depth and purpose to other mechanics and allowed for creative combinations of different movement and combat techniques together to make it a more casual, easy-going experience that anyone can pick up and have some fun with and not have to grapple with the hardcore elements that were present earlier in the game's life, as testers found that those mechanics added unnecessary complexity and difficulty and that removing them ultimately improved the game for them.

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Steventus3 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

I see, I understand your motive for removing the ammo now. Then your design philosophy actually quite fits with it being accessible for casuals ie. easy to pick up. It's always good if more people can play and enjoy your game! In that case, I think you can consider simplifying/removing some of your functions to cater towards the more casual spectrum.

For the yellow and blue bar, you should just put a section in a tutorial that talks about it. You can include the yellow bar during the slow time section - maybe you have and I'd have missed it. You should also detail about the blue bar. May I suggest:

For UI improvements, what if you overlay the blue bar over the health bar? So it is more closely analogous to a shield, and when the blue bar runs out, the player starts taking real damage. You can also implement different overlay effects such as shield destruction effects on your screen when taking blue damage, and red blood (or robot blood) effects when taking health damage.

Regarding the slow time - I think you really also just need a better tutorial to showcase what the players can do with slow time. Because I typically only use it to slow time, then just fire at enemies. There is a good GDC talk I recall that says something along the lines of: to have your players do the things you want them to do, you must first teach them. When porting this into a full game - consider only letting the players have limited mechanics before introducing other mechanics as power-ups/upgrades - this will smoothen the learning curve better.

The dive roll is still jenky to say the least. I know you said that you 'needed' it in the second phase of the boss but just as I mentioned - I only needed to sprint around and the boss still wouldn't attack me at all. If you plan to keep the dive roll, you definitely need some enemies that demand the player to dodge it. I think your boss design is good on paper but you just need to fine-tune it to force the player to use dodge roll in order to evade the attacks.

You're on the right track, keep it up!

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