This week has been something of a mixed bag in terms of how well it’s gone. One one hand, we have a much clearer picture of what projects we’re excited about, and what we’d need to do to get them up and running. We’ve had some productive (albeit long) meetings in which we’ve really hashed out the necessary steps for moving forward. Unfortunately, we’ve also had a number of unforeseen roadblocks that have given us a bit of trouble with hitting our estimated goals this week. I’m confident that we can pull it together and move into the next phase next week, but for right now we’ve still got a little bit to pull together before that happens.

I finally managed to get some testing in on the Enforcers prototype, and results have been somewhat mixed. The overall loop seems to work pretty well, most people find it entertaining right off the bat (plus putting little hats on pistachios to promote them to a higher rank has its own appeal). I have had to make a couple of adjustments to get people into the clue/investigation system. Since I gave the option to sell the intel, people tend to just choose that, unless I thoroughly explain the mechanic beforehand. They tend to be a little more interested when I show the missions that require them, i.e. the “investigations. Their interest works pretty similarly to their interest in promoting units/buying higher rank units, as in when they see a mission that requires a higher rank unit, they understand the need for that unit and will alter their actions in game to try and get it.

The most interesting part about this is that their interest in the mechanic transcends their interest in the reward, since I’ve made all rewards only be revealed after the mission is completed.  They want the better unit not because of the promise of better rewards, but because of the increased options they’ll have. I think this speaks pretty well to how well this particular mechanic is getting people interested. Either that, or their motivation is the reward and I’ve just balanced rewards well enough that players are confident enough that their rewards will increase appropriately. Either way, I’m learning a lot about how to guide players.

I didn’t touch Repulsive a whole lot this week, except for some minor level design work. It really is a pretty interesting movement mechanic, but I think the biggest issue with it right now is that players can’t look where they’re going when they jump, they just kind of have to trust. It’s sort of hard to build around that lack of precision, but it sort of overlaps with the challenge of building early game content, in that you count on players not really having a firm grasp of the controls yet.

The Shock game has weirdly had the most work done on it this week, and yet is the least complete. We’ve done a lot of really good pre-production work on it, and we’ve pretty solidly nailed down the setting and theme, as well as the actual abilities that we want the player to have. I really think the stuff we’ve chosen works well together and will make for some interesting gameplay once we get it working. The trouble is, we’ve had a bit of a rough start getting it going. One of the main mechanics has something of a critical exploit. The idea is that it allows the player to absorb all incoming forces and convert them to stored energy. This means that since physics actually work, if the player activates the ability and moves against a large stationary object, Newton’s third law pushes all that equal and opposite reaction straight into the player’s stored energy, allowing them to build it up infinitely.

So we’ve got a few more fixes to make before we move on, but we’ve definitely learned a lot from the process this week anyway. We’ll probably need to do more than the remaining stuff to catch up, but I’m confident we can get it done. We’ve done a lot of good ground work.