Project Impulse: Gold
What's New
For this iteration, we’ve focused primarily on visuals and quality of life for the players. We think we’ve got our mechanics pretty much finalized, so now the task is making sure the player can enjoy those mechanics to the fullest potential.
We’ve also made some slight tweaks to the tutorial to make it easier for the players to escape (bugfix).
Music has been finalized!
Motivation
So we’ve finally gotten our mechanics to a satisfying, novel state. How can we improve, and how can we respond to player feedback?
Some players had difficulty tracking which zombie was theirs, so we added an indicator to the zombie to indicate which team the zombie belonged to. Players will hopefully be able to see which zombie is under their control now. An indicator also shows when a zombie has been offered to the altar can can no longer be re-captured.
Also, we’ve allowed the player to move slightly while resurrecting their zombie. Some players indicated that it felt slightly frustrating to not be able to move while doing this action. While we wanted a tradeoff between resurrection and exposing your player to danger (by be unable to move), we thought that giving them a small amount of movement ability would still be ok (similar to ranger shooting mechanic). It is no longer possible to attack while resurrecting, so be careful.
We’ve also tweaked the respawn timers. The game was a little too fast-paced, and we noticed that people tended to cash in their zombies basically all in one batch. This was later correlated by the instructor feedback. By increasing respawn timers, we should be able to both decrease the number of zombies on the field and make it easier for people to score zombies. Gameplay should now be more of a flow of zombies, rather than a huge wave of zombies cashed in at once. Additionally, a new feature has been added to break up the giant zombie clumps; when a zombie’s target dies, the zombies will wander around just a little before their master returns. We’re hoping that this method is a little more healthy for the game.
Direction and Future
This should hopefully be the last iteration of the game! We may make some last-minute, minor tweaks based on internal playtesting but the game is 99% finalized at this point (as it should be).
In the future, I hope we win the showcase :) and if we release on game platforms (Steam or what have you) I hope people will enjoy it!
