Re: Kyrieru's new game!
Let's try and get this thread away from discussing impatience and backseat devmanagement, and back on track to something positive, shall we?
So, last friday's blogpost was talking about currency models. What are your thoughts?
Personally, I often dislike currency-as-an-unlock, because it's tough to balance:
- If you give the player exactly as much currency as everything costs, you might spend a long time near the end finding those last 3 coins you missed.
- If you give them more currency than total cost, eventually it becomes meaningless because you already have everything.
- If you give them less currency, you get most RPG talent systems: You have to pick a build path, and because costs often ramp up, many combo low-tier builds just aren't viable.
I figure unless you're balancing the entire game around currency (like RPGs often do with XP), I don't like limited currency.
Also, I'm not sure I like picking between progression-unlocking skills via purchasing.
I'm fine if I can pick between doing boss A or boss B first, but doing that in a shop just feels odd.
I'd rather have a single, well-defined path there, but then doing that via currency feels farm-y. Helloo, free-to-play business model ;P
So that means you can place bits wherever as breadcrumbs (the famed donkey kong bananas pointing at a secret), and players can farm enemies if they want.
As for spending it, I think my favourite is having a few high-priced permanent unlockables to look forward to:
They shouldn't be game-breaking or progression-unlocking, just helpful. Say, a shield that recharges if you didn't get hit for 10s, more spread-y shots, mark treasures on map...
That way, if you're having trouble with a level, you can farm/buy an optional item and you might have an easier time.
Hard-core players can still ignore the shop and go for a min% clear.
And if some optional unlockable would be game-breaking early, can always add it to the shop later as "restock" once the player got past a point.
That said, I figure if you're going to do infinite currency, there should be something non-permanent you can sink it into,
to prevent it becoming completely irrelevant once you've bought out all the optionals.
Healing potions are the obvious one, but having them affects balance in strange ways (your hp bar effectively becomes whatever max_carry potions can do).
Other helpful-but-nonessential consumable ideas:
- A "quicksave ward" you can drop in an area - if you die, you'll get transported back to where you entered, rather than to savepoint. Wasted if you don't die.
(For a more forgiving variant, automatically activates on death, acting as "lives")
- timed double damage
- slows all game-time by 50% for 10sec
- Places a teleport marker at the current location, may teleport back to it anytime until you leave the area.
- Become invisible (but not invincible) for 5s
- Teleport to player-selected savepoint
I suppose for balance, you might want to make these unusable in boss battles.
Anyhow, what do y'all think about gameplay, rather than the game maker?
