Week 2 of 3 in the final escape from project Escape Goat is complete. I held a small testing party with some friends tonight, and am holding 3.5 pages of valuable insight into where the game needs to go from here. Most of it is small fixes per level, or things I need to keep in mind when designing levels. There are a few small glitches in there as well, the type of thing that’s bound to surface when people play your game in unexpected ways. Though not all games ship glitch free, and physics and collision are hard to get right, even for the pros.
Overall, one of the biggest problems is that there are too many levels. Depending on the player’s skill at puzzle solving, there are probably 2-4 hours of gameplay here, and I need to get that down to 1-2 hours. Some of the puzzles devolved into joyless trial-and-error, and other ones were just too time consuming during the non-interactive parts, like waiting for a machine to operate and pressing a switch at the right moment.
So there’s tweaking some levels and removing some levels. Not so bad… but…
There are some scary things staring me in the face for this week:
- A crash bug during regular gameplay
- The player actor got destroyed but the game wasn’t detecting the player being gone, so it let the level play and couldn’t restart itself
- The new linear level layout is an improvement over the exploration model I had before, but there are two problems with it. First, the player doesn’t know you can exit the level and return to the hub, retaining progress on that level. And second, getting stuck on a single level sucks. Ideally the player can skip tough levels and come back to complete them later. This would require another rework of the world layout, to a gallery-style stage select, and I don’t know if this is worthwhile, even to experiment with in the next week.