Games Prototyping

So over the past two weeks, I have been getting people to play my game and then submit a review form. Overall, the feedback is great! People say that they like the vibes of the game and that the platforming and puzzle solving are satisfying once you figure them out. In my observation while they were playing the game, I did notice that some people got a bit confused/stuck when I was trying to reveal the Mind Mode mechanic, but once they knew how it worked, all was good. It seems the main issue was not knowing that reading minds can cause stickers to spawn, so I might need to add a billboard to say that reading some minds causes stickers to spawn.

So I had a bit of an issue in my game that I'm sure many games will have: how do I tell the player what they need to do? I personally believe that tutorials that just tell you all of the controls at the start, or ones that don't even tell you at all and expect the player to look at the control scheme in the settings menu, are frustrating to play, so I wanted to avoid these as much as possible. I also think that the ones that display a popup when the player needs to use a new mechanic are a bit lazy too and I'd prefer them to be embedded into the game as that wouldn't ruin the immersion. So this is what I came up with: This is a billboard that displays exactly what a player needs to do and they are placed directly into the environment. Now while some would say that this would ruin the immersion as there's no reason for these billboards to exist if it weren't for the fact that this is a game, I'd argue it's much less egregious than the examples I mentioned...

Up until this point, I hadn't really thought about how I wanted the game to look. I knew that I wanted the looks to fit the abstract nature of the game, but I didn't know what exactly that would look like. At first I thought about doing a similar art style to Stick It To The Man, but since I'm already basing my gameplay off of it and I'm not nearly artistic enough to do that style justice, I scrapped that idea. So I tried to think of something easier and my mind went to Parappa the Rapper. It's a simple 2D flat colour style and it looks really good in the Parappa games, but I think it's a little bit too vibrant for this game as it may make it harder to see brains or stickers. So eventually, I settled on this: Based off of the Fancy Pants Adventures games, I decided to go with a simple stickman style as I think that it is quite abstract, especially with the blank background, it's easy even for someone like me who has as much artistic ability as a 4 year old a...

  I already talked about this in my last post, but I felt the need to add coyote time, so here it is! I think it was probably slightly harder to get working than the jump buffer was, but in all honesty it was pretty easy as well as it only took me an hour/hour and a half to complete it. The coyote time duration as of right now is 0.15 seconds which is noticeable, but not absurd to the point where the player actively wants to fall off platforms.

So before this point, I haven't really been mention resources or research that much as I was mainly just building up my own idea. Obviously I have been using Stick It To The Man as my main reference point since my game is based off of it, but I haven't felt extensive research to be necessary yet. This is where that changes as I was sort at a loss as to what to do in order to make the platforming side of the game more fun. I added the dash which definitely helped, but it didn't feel quite there yet, it still felt slightly clunky. So I went and read articles about elements that contribute to good 2D platformers and an article by Matthew Dogherby that gave me some insight:  https://game-designers.net/complete-platformer-game-design-guide-2025-physics-level-design My main takeaway from this article was the various quality of life changes that can be applied to a 2D platform in order to make it feel smoother. The 2 I took note of were a Jump Buffer and Coyote Time. A jump buffer...

So first of all, I looked at other games that I liked to look for how they made movement fun and what I found is that I don't really play a lot of movement-centred games as a lot of the time, the movement is incredibly basic, but in the few that paid more attention to movement, one thing became clear. I needed a dash. So then I went and made the dash. At first I simply launched the character in whatever direction they were facing, but it didn't feel quite right. It didn't feel like a traditional dash as the character started falling as soon as the dash started, sending them down at a ~45 degree angle as opposed to a horizontal trajectory. Obviously, this is being caused by gravity, but of course I need gravity for the rest of the game, so my solution was to launch the character and then turn off gravity for a short time and then turn it back on again. This solution, despite sounding messy, actually works a treat and I haven't yet found any bugs that this causes.

So now I know what I need to do: make the movement more fun. And my first idea wasn't directly movement related, it was one that would help make the platforming more engaging as opposed to just making it smoother.  My plan was to allow the player to use 'Mind Mode' to place a 'Mind Platform' anywhere on-screen. This could potentially make platforming more dynamic as the player could occasionally solve their own problems. I didn't think it sounded that hard, but I was very, very wrong. So everything worked just fine, the platform could spawn, there was an indicator of where the platform would be before it was placed, pretty much everything that I could want. But there was one, seemingly unavoidable issue. Due to the fact that the camera zooms in when entering Mind Mode, the platform placement became skewed and wouldn't spawn where the player clicked. I tried for hours to search for someone else having a similar issue so that I could find a solution, but it se...

So I had to give a presentation about my progress and my plans so far. And for my effort, I'll get feedback in return. I'll not go into too much detail about the presentation itself, but making the presentation is actually the thing in this process that taught me the most as by the time I went and gave the presentation, i already knew what the feedback would be. Namely, it isn't that fun to play. Interesting, sure. Funny at times, yeah, But not fun to play. And that largely comes down to the fact that I haven't expanded on my very basic movement from the very beginning of this project which makes the gameplay feel quite sluggish, despite the main appeal of the game (the puzzly side), being quite good. So this process actually taught me a lot and I'll be sure to do things like this even if I don't need to present it as I believe it gives me a more holistic and realistic view of how my project is.