When BlastPoints went live we received some interesting feedback: for every feature people loved, other things would hold users back. A few things had gotten in the way of a clean development process with the foremost issue being ironically the most simple; our team had never before independently developed a project from scratch through to completion. People presumed that some features would work and others would not; a lot of the time we agreed. For the times we didn’t agree, it seemed to show in our initial release. A lack of early and constant testing didn’t help our cause either. When we did test, it was with a fairly refined target audience with similar tastes and perceptions to ours. Part of this is being hamstrung by Apple’s 100-device limit for development builds, but part was also simply not knowing enough people who were capable of forming reasonable feedback after playing the game. So many of the design decisions we didn’t agree on weren’t detected as being problematic early enough.
So a post outlining some of the gameplay lessons learned seemed like a good move.
User feedback is an interesting concept because on the surface it’s obvious: When you shoot a wall, you need feedback. When you get shot, you need feedback. When the user purchases a new weapon, they need to feel like it’s an upgrade, not just a variant. While we nailed it on a few things we certainly made a few screw-ups. Explosions: When you hit an enemy we needed there to be some kind of feedback and I think we got this half right: The explosions looked good and early on one of our tests eally proved beneficial and made it into the game - the concept of hit pauses. A hit pause is a visual kick that is activated when you’re trying to demonstrate the impact of an event. In our case we drew inspiration from God of War, Infinity Blade and Street Fighter, three games that implement hit pause effects very well. For BlastPoints we wanted explosions to feel as awesome as they could and we found that throwing in an occasional slow motion effect on a particularly cool explosion really helped players feel powerful. In fact, it made them feel bloody awesome every now and then, and it was one of those features that we felt didn’t need explaining. We screwed the pooch in two ways though. We got so caught up in what happens when enemies go boom that we didn’t really focus on the half dead enemies. In fact, if it wasn’t for the health indicator on enemy ships you wouldn’t even realise they were half dead. The effects focus was always on what makes things look better dead and while this is great for the early stages in the game, it meant that at higher difficulty levels, when enemy ships don’t immediately go boom, you really just felt weak as a result.
The difficulty system was a mechanic to which we’d all agreed on an approach. The core of it was an ELO rating system that was based on player wins and losses. When players played the game, they were presented with 4 difficulty levels: Easy (enemies with difficulty scaled lower than the players ELO), Medium (same scaling) and Hard (higher scaling). This presentation of different difficulty level and map combinations is similar to Death Rally, a game we were inspired by while designing BlastPoints. Our logic behind this was that players could choose a match to play that was more appropriate to their skill level and equipment.
It surprised us when we received some fairly negative feedback about this system. A lot of reviewers felt like the system didn’t offer them enough choice and that they never felt like they were progressing, as there was no representation of the difficulty level of the enemies aside from Easy, Medium or Hard.
In V2, we’ve worked to rectify this in several ways. Firstly, we’ve done away with the Easy/Medium/Hard difficulty levels in favour of a consistent difficulty across all 4 choices in the Play menu. Enemies also now “level up” as the player wins more matches, and this level is visible to the player. Enemies never “level down” - they simply hit a floor in their current level. The testing we’ve done so far has shown that this is a far more consistent approach to difficulty and players can feel the game getting difficult, and see where they are at. Its easier to compare to your friends, too - you can tell each other what enemy level you’re at.
A comparison between the old and new Mission Selection screens
Being able to put hard numbers and values on your progress is a really important aspect that we’re pushing very strongly with V2, as per the “Achievement” pillar we discussed in the first blog post. The biggest new gameplay element in V2 is the introduction of a Ranks & Objective system. This was something we wanted in place from day 1, but didn’t make it into our initial version. It’s probably the most important feature in the evolution of BlastPoints. The Objective system was strongly inspired by Jetpack Joyride’s Challenges. It’s something additional for players to work towards, while being rewarded in the process. We’re also using the Objective system to encourage players to try new methods and styles of play: there are objectives for using a variety of specials, weapons, and much more. Completing these Objectives earns you Ranking Points, which contribute to your overall Rank.
And then there are the enemies. We actually thought we had a lid on this one during the design phase but it was one of those times when a cut feature really, really affected gameplay more than we’d have liked. When we were working through the game we had the following units in play: Chasers, Heavy Fighters, Cross-Cutters, Siders, Defenders, Kamikazes and Breakers. The idea was that each unit has specific mechanics that the player would have to play against.
- Chasers are your standard pleb laser-firing unit. They’re really the standard units that are meant for ripping apart. Medium armour, medium damage.
- Heavy Fighters are armed with missiles and heavier armour and are a step up from the standard chasers.
- Cross-Cutters are an interesting unit. We wanted something fast that encouraged dodging. We ended up with the idea of a cross cutter: a unit that, when it finds a partner, connects and fires through the level at high speed with a high powered beam between the two ships. The Cross cutter then makes high speed runs at the player.
- Siders were brought in to cut back on one of the main things that could keep players alive beyond armour: safety through speed. If a Sider goes near an enemy player, they’re able to suck energy from the players engine and cut off their speed for a short period of time, making the player a sitting duck.
- Defenders are small, hard to hit units that are capable of shooting down player projectiles. A couple of these guys in the mix of a high number of enemy units can really cause some problems.
- Kamikaze ships are simple: when in range they target the player and hurl themselves at them at high speed. When they’re close they detonate and deal a high amount of damage.
- Breakers are slow moving units with an extremely high amount of health, a powerful cannon and, when destroyed, would break into lightly armoured fast moving units to cause more problems.
As we were approaching the release date we’d set for ourselves it became apparent that one of these would have to be cut for launch. The Breaker was the unit that was cut because it was next in line to be developed. In hindsight, this was a bad move. A really, really bad move. The Breaker was the toughest and most conceptually identifiable unit in the game. Cutting it meant that the shipped gameplay just never really felt complete because all of our enemies were medium to low end. You could defeat any of them in a single, focussed, pass. There was nothing that required the player to really go “Oh, I should spend some time taking that thing out”. And we cut it because of time. To us, this was completely logical at the time. We went “Oh, we’re cutting a unit” but we did it without even properly testing out what kind of difference it would make to the gameplay first. Since starting on the latest update we’ve had the breaker in for a while now and it really makes things feel different. People originally cried out for a “boss fight” and while this isn’t quite there, it’s certainly a lot closer. We're very enthusiastic to see what people think when the next update rolls out and the Breaker as a gameplay element is definitely one of the main reasons why.