Anon42
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Moving update & Flare Shot postmortem
🕑 Added 2020-07-19 21:47:12 +0000 UTCHey everybody! This is gonna be another "updateless update"; we're deep into the move to Alaska now, and our computer setups have all been dismantled, so nobody on the core team has a way to work on CPE right now. Since there's nothing to share in regards to game development, I'd like to share a quick update on the move itself, along with a lengthy writeup about the Flare Shot's original incarnation, what my intentions for it were, where I believe I went wrong, and how I intend to improve it (and the game's combat as a whole) going forward.
So first up, the move. I won't get into anything too specific, but it's going smoothly; we've shipped something like half our stuff, and all our big furniture is already gone, so we're just sleeping on air mattresses for the rest of our time here. All that's really left is to ship out the rest of what we're keeping, donate the rest, and do some deep cleaning before we leave. It's been an extremely busy move and I'm so ready to be done with it. Our flight is scheduled for the 27th, and I'm extremely anxious to get back to working on CPE, so expect streams to start up again very early August; as soon as my computer arrives and I have everything set up again I'll be doing those regularly again.
Now, the Flare Shot. As our patrons know by now, from the recent polls, the Flare Shot is getting a rework. I decided to take another look at it while reworking the Wire Shot, and decided that, while the Flare Shot isn't nearly as underwhelming as the Wire Shot was, it's also not very interesting or useful outside of a few niche cases, mostly involving the Orbital Flare skill you can purchase. I want to examine why I think it turned out that way, from my perspective as the game's designer.
The starting point to this is actually not related to the Flare Shot, at least not directly; the thing that got me thinking about this was some comments I received recently on a forum. Essentially, the comments boiled down to criticism about the game's enemies being too tanky, and taking too many shots to die, which made playing the game cumbersome; my initial reaction was that I didn't really agree, but rather than brushing it aside, I wanted to think about it more thoroughly, and I think I've discovered a few key reasons why I believe some players feel this way, as well as how I plan to resolve it.
First off, Crisis Point is a Metroidvania, strongly modeled after Metroid, which gives any player going into it expectations of similar gameplay. In Metroid, for most of the game you have two real forms of attacking; your beam weapon, and missiles. Missiles have limited ammo, but ammo is extremely plentiful and meant to be spammed, while your beam has infinite ammo and is constantly upgraded to be more powerful throughout the game.
Now the first question I asked myself was, is it fair for people to judge Crisis Point's combat next to Metroid's? They are different games, after all. Regardless of what your opinion to that is, the reality is that it will undoubtedly happen for many players, and as a designer, I have to be ready to deal with those expectations - whether it's by meeting them, or by dispelling them. Crisis Point's combat is undoubtedly different, but it's in minor ways; you still have an infinite blaster, but you customize upgrades instead of getting one upgrade path. You still have a limited ammo explosive, but it's an area blast with very limited ammo, rather than a higher-damage projectile with nearly limitless ammo. The similarities are TOO similar, which is a failure on my part to bring the player to a place where they can experience the game's combat as its own thing, rather than comparing it to other similar games. I believe that to dispel that initial impression of "Metroid-like" would require a heavy rework of the game's combat design, and that's far outside of a realistic scope at this point, so I'll be focus on minor tweaks to bring the game more in line with the average player's expectations.
The next issue I think CPE's combat has is where the Flare Shot, and its original design goal, comes in: some elements of CPE are designed as if combat is a complex affair, and the main focus of the game. The reality is that combat is mostly just an obstacle in a Metroidvania, not the main focus of the game; it serves to make areas more memorable and interesting to traverse, rather than being the core focus of the experience, with the occasional boss fight as an exception. The Flare Shot (and more extensively, the subweapon system as a whole) is the largest example of where I've so far failed to meet this.
The intention behind the Flare Shot's combat was to make it a support weapon, capable of lighting enemies on fire to make them more susceptible to other forms of damage. After examining this thoroughly, I believe there are three main problems with this:
- The Flare Shot only made enemies more vulnerable after a late Skill Point upgrade, which most players wouldn't even get to as they had little reason to invest in the Flare Shot. Up until that point, it served almost no purpose.
- Switching subweapons is extremely cumbersome, especially because the Wire Shot was included in that set of weapons despite not being a real weapon, and using the Flare Shot meant switching off of the more-immediately-effective Force Shot.
- Lastly, sort of an extension of point 2, enemies just aren't tanky enough for its function to be valuable. The only enemies in the game that have very high HP are the enemies in the Subaquatic Caverns, where you can't use the Flare Shot anyway, so there's never a fight that justifies the effort required to switch subweapons so you can light an enemy on fire and deal more damage.
In an action game where combat is the main focus, of course it makes sense for the player to have complex options in combat - maximizing your ability to fight is the main intention, and having more tools to do that in interesting ways is important. But CPE is a Metroidvania, exploration is the core of the genre, so making exploration smooth and fun should be the goal. Enemies really don't take long to kill in CPE, especially if you utilize all your options in combat - the problem is that many of them take longer than you would expect for the genre, creating a disconnect. To rectify this awkward half-combat-half-exploration focus the game currently has, I believe that Crisis Point's combat shortcomings can all be fixed by making changes to these three key things:
- The control scheme
- How much HP enemies have
- How much damage enemies deal
For the controls, I will be entirely removing subweapon switching as a function; each subweapon will be given its own dedicated button, and the Flare Shot is going to be integrated with the melee attack, along with some improvements to melee in general to make it more responsive. By doing this, all of the game's subweapons will be able to fit much more nicely together with the player's core toolkit, as it won't require much effort at all to use any of them in any given moment.
For enemy HP, I will be lowering the health many enemies have across the board, while keeping the HP of a few key enemy types higher (such as the Crystal Dragon and Alraune), to sort of bring those enemies up to "miniboss" status, while reducing the time you spend fighting other, weaker foes. I won't be changing HP values too dramatically, however, because in the latest demos you can already see an example of how I plan on improving this: Power Orbs, a new collectible that increases the amount of damage you do with ALL of your weapons, permanently. Most of Crisis Point's upgrades subscribe to the design concept of "horizontal progression" rather than "vertical progression"; essentially "more/new options" instead of directly giving the player more power. Horizontal progression is often more difficult to design, but more interesting; in a Metroidvania, I believe there's room for both. Vertical progression gives more incentive to explore for upgrades even once you've found a set of tools you like fighting with, as well as giving you that satisfying feeling of returning to earlier areas and being able to completely stomp weaker enemies. I also plan on adding visible damage numbers to the game, so you can more clearly see the damage you're doing to foes, and what kind of impact your blaster chip choices are having on your damage output.
For the damage enemies deal, I will likely be raising it across the board. Reducing enemy HP will naturally make enemies less threatening since you can off them quicker; however, I really like where Crisis Point's difficulty is at right now, so I want to counter the reduced HP by making each enemy more threatening. The main way you heal in Crisis Point is by killing enemies; running from them is always an option, but unless you're great at dodging while running, you'll need to fight to heal eventually, which I think makes the choice to fight or flee much more interesting if enemies pose a serious threat.
My general intention with this balancing act is to keep the general difficulty about the same as it is now, while making combat quicker, more varied, and less cumbersome. Some enemies should pose a larger threat than before (creating those miniboss-like encounters I mentioned), but the average enemy should be easier to put down than before, without removing their ability to be a threat if you get complacent.
Wew.. that was a long one, but I hope you enjoyed reading it! The planned changes are mostly simple/numerical things, so I don't expect it to take long to implement, but there will naturally be a lot of tweaking to get things feeling just right. In a future post I'll detail my exact plans for the Flare Shot + Melee integration, but in the meantime, feel free to leave any ideas if you have them. Feedback is king in game development, and I want to make sure these changes are done right. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read, and thank you so much to our patrons for being so patient with the lack of development work - this move is taking a lot out of me, but I'm excited to get back to work on CPE as soon as I possibly can!
Comments
Broderick Black
I not trying to get banned so let's get talking what's the problem you see with me I have been known to be problematic so let's just have a discussion like adults
Anon42
Thank you for the feedback, I appreciate the honesty! I get this complaint a lot, but at the moment I'm sorry, I don't have any intention of revising attacks/movement of enemies like slimes, tentacles, lurkers, etc. Maybe it's because I'm intimately familiar with the enemy AI and behaviors, but I quite simply disagree that you have no good options for dealing with them. Slimes (and tentacles) are intended to be an early game "natural tutorial" to help you learn how to aim, especially with using the Aim button to aim diagonally; slimes have a fairly long period after landing from a jump before they can act again, and it's a perfect opening to stand next to them, use the Aim button to aim diagonally down, and usually instantly kill them with a few shots before they can move again. Their attack patterns are extremely simple, but they're intentionally very hard to hit with simple forward shots, with the intention being to help the player learn how to utilize a combination of positioning and aiming to hit trickier enemies. Then, the other early-game enemies (Warped Soldiers) juxtapose them by being extremely easy to hit, but having a more threatening attack pattern. Once you get to the point where you're fighting enemies that are hard to hit AND have more difficult attack patterns, like Lurkers, you're much more prepared for the challenge because you've already faced enemies that are harder to hit, with much worse weaponry than you have now. Once you get the Force Shot, better blaster chips, the melee dash attack, the Flare Shot, etc, you have loads of more effective options to dealing with trickier early enemies and (in my opinion) they cease to be much of a threat at all, so I'm personally very happy with where they're at, and I think they fit their intended role perfectly - an enemy that's difficult to hit at first, gets easier as you acclimate to the limited 8-directional aiming, and then becomes trivial as you gain more abilities.
LewdBog
One point of feedback I have, separate from the points you have discussed; would be if you have any plans to revise attack/movement to all previous enemies. I feel most of the early/mid enemies are difficult to fight because they are unintuitive. There isn’t any good strategy against i.e slimes, they never move in a predictable trajectory, and when they land they difficult to actually shoot. And because it doesn’t feel like you have a good choice in fighting them. Same problem exists for the Stalkers. A healthbar addition, and changes to health might well improve this. My own thoughts go as follows; ”How does it behave? And how do I counter it? Does my strategy matter if the best one is to tank their attacks and hope to kill them before they hurt me embarrasingly much?” Perhaps sliding attacks and straighter jumps would be a nice addition?
LewdBog
I absolutely like the idea of having a midair melee, and combining that with extra functions. I feel melee could be such a strength for the combat encounters and enemy design.
Anon42
As awesome as that would be, nah, it won't be a kick :p I don't think there will be a HUGE overhaul with melee, but at the very least I want to move it onto its own button, give Alicia a midair melee attack, and maybe some other minor tweaks. Possibly some extra functions once you have the Flare Shot too, since it'll act as an upgrade to melee
Nathan Phoenix
I'm a fan of having the sub weapons changed to a dedicated key. Will make the wire shot much less clunky. Interested in seeing what you do with the melee to. Does this mean we get a fiery falconkick for the dash lol?
Anon42
Please don't refer to it as "the china virus", that's incredibly disrespectful to chinese people. I'm going to Alaska to be with my family, because that's where I grew up, not because of COVID. I've been planning to move back there for years.
Broderick Black
You moving to Alaska to escape the china virus let me know how it goes They tried that in Resident Evil Code Veronica and it didn't work but maybe your luck stat is high enough. Uh I can't wait till the streams start back up use lot's of hand sanitizer on what ever transportation you go can't have the leading role get infected the polls were a great choice thanks for that.
