Game Update
Lot’s of good work done this week, and I have to say it’s mostly thanks to my girlfriend being supportive and helping me focus. It also helped that I did an embarrassing play test last weekend, and one this weekend. I probably spent close to 15 hours working on various problems. I made a lot of content changes to the troops in the game fixing a lot of the issues from last week.
Fixing the XP curve, the upgrade for some troops, and the money issues were pretty easy. I also stepped up the speed at which the squads move on the map which helped to speed up game play as well. I also spent a lot of time going through all the animations in the game. There are probably 50 different animators to go through when I do a scrub like this. Luckily groups of troops with different colors use the same animator. I standardized animations that used to be “Cast Fireball” to “castMagic” in order to allow the same animation to be used whenever magic is happening, not solely when a fireball is being used etc…
The force organization screen issues are more pronounced and it will probably primarily be something I will need to work through with my mentor. It’s strange how buttons are trying to do the last action that’s being pressed right now. It’s really screwing with functionality.
A problem that plagued combat for some time was the way that enemies were maintaining temp healing from fight to fight. I made some changes to fix this issue but another exact issue I didn’t want cropped up. I ended up with some combats in which troops weren’t taking enough damage and healing was keeping battles running over and over again. Due to that I reduced defense and increased damage output. I will need to start a new save to understand if it’s doing what I need to happen. Healing shouldn’t be as strong as it is, that goes against our level speed pillar of keeping stages around 15 minutes. It might be ok to break this for a final boss stage, but otherwise it feels pretty bad.
Personal Update
I’ve always said that game development isn’t just making games, or selling them it’s a lot of other things as well. This week I managed to put in my new business licence in Florida and with that an exciting new thing happened. The name of my LLC changed from Lancer Games to Lancer Entertainment.
The end of the month will see the return of my kids which will limit my time again. Due to that I really need to keep working hard on the game to get it out the door. The next big steps will be re-visiting steam to see what steps I need to take there. Getting the artwork set and my new business information updated will be an important step. Again it’s game development, but it’s the business side.
Game Development Insight - Dark Patterns
This week I want to talk about the Dark Pattern - Badges/Endowed Progress. According to darkpattern.games giving badges/achievements etc… gives the player a sense of “Endowed Progress. It’s called the Zeigarnik Effect which simply means that people are more likely to remember uncompleted tasks than ones finished. Often the tasks are on timers which give players a sense of FOMO (Fear of missing out).
On the plus side there are times when I play board games like the new Dune game, or one of my favorites Agricola and I have no focus or idea where to go. Having a quest or something can be very helpful. Ticket to Ride also does this in a way with it’s ticket system to complete routes. I would say that any time the player needs guidance, endowed progress items like quests can be helpful.
The problem is when they take away agency from the player. The player may feel like they are chained to complete certain actions. Some of the daily quests in Arena of Valor are a bit to demanding for instance. With the average match taking around 20 minutes doing 2-4 matches a day is pretty doable. However there was a time in which they pushed players to play 10 games in one day for maximum rewards. On top of that they created some quests for modes that require other players and are to unpopular to get enough players to launch. It’s frustrating to open up a menu and see uncompleted tasks. The psychological pressure really works.
All that said, I’ve thought for some time about how I want to build in some achievements for Six Aspects to integrate into Steam. This is a pretty exciting thought for me. I kind of want to set a bunch of goals in the game and then complete them. Even without prompting when I was younger I remember working through Chrono Trigger to get all the endings.
Just like most of these dark patterns there are good and bad parts to it. The important thing to think about as a company is how to make the patterns work well for the games I release to take care of the player, instead of making them into cages. Just like most things we need to make sure that things are dialed in properly.