Blogs - KatsMakesGames

Enhancers - Crazy passive abilities that have effects on the entire arena, were planned from the start, and it ended up being about two years before they were implemented. The idea behind them is that as you unlock more, you can further customize your arena runs with defensive or high risk level modifiers.

The ones you unlock early lean more towards the defensive side to allow players to have more options if they start to have difficulty, such as guardian angel, which effectively gives you a second life if you die or fall off the arena. This can be compared to vengeful angel, which is unlocked a bit later and is a more risky defensive enhancer. With GA simply giving you full health if you die one time, VA will make you immune on 1 health and rain fire for 10 seconds, forcing you to have to capitalize on the borrowed time or be left with 1 health for the rest of the wave.

Vengeful Angel also regenerates every 10 waves, whereas GA is one time due to it being a more instant defensive bonus. Abilities that directly affect a unit are represented in game with visuals. Such as a halo for guardian angel and flaming wings for vengeful angel. Having the ability to use up to 5 different enhancers allows the player to really customize them as they unlock more, from going with full defensive with the angel enhancers and other defensive bonuses, to insane risk for power with things like Deathwish, which as the name suggests, is pure risk for reward. There are also innate combos which can have some pretty great - and deadly effects, such as the combination of boss slayer which forces bosses to be champions, and legend hunter, which forces all champion enemies to become legendary enemies... Leading to some very, very, scary boss fights.

If you take the risk, you're rewarded throughout your run with loot and passive luck bonuses and with exp. I always factor risk vs reward in these decisions to get the best array of choices for the player. Always factoring in risk vs reward in decisions can increase the outcome for the better in almost all cases.

After about a year and a half, with some time spent working on a few other things with along with a small break I’ve reappeared.

I’ve learnt so much since I started developing Arena Hero, and have developed so many other things over the past year that everything feels so different to look back on. I learnt to cut back on certain things and how to develop certain aspects so much better, and ended up getting Arena Hero to a state that I’m happy with.

I intend to continue working on it and adding more items and arenas, but throwing it online has given me a surge of motivation to get more done on other projects that I’ve had in mind and additions. I changed so many things over the last two years, I still remember when Enhancers were just a concept I had for modifying arenas, now they’re a reality in the game.

I ended up with a huge grid of items in the end, each with archetypes that developed more and more over the course of two years, the primary ones such as high health, the high damage risk reward, to the luck sets, to the specialized speed and boss hunter sets. It feels satisfying to unlock and try out new combinations now, and unlocking unique ability crystals and the souls of past hero’s to gain specific benefits in that arena to make choices meaningful as you progress throughout. I hope to eventually re add co op play as it once had early on, along with a few other features originally planned.

Although its nice seeing a lot of ideas become a reality, I feel that I’ve moved beyond the novelty feeling of it which I think really helps with properly scoping out new ideas, along with managing feature creep as you can better hold back from letting emotions get in the way of project management.

Arena Hero ended up turning into more of a long term learning experience in feature creep, changing plans and learning better techniques on planning out scope, along with coding techniques in general. It’s also been really good for self discipline in setting target dates, and seeing that doing so is a must. I do want to do a proper breakdown on what I learnt from just a development and self discipline side along with starting up with updates on other projects, but that can be saved for another time.