CAGD 495 Design blog #4

Hey, how's it going.

My name is Jen Davalos And I'm the game designer for MARRED.

This past Sprint we’ve worked on a bunch of cool stuff. But if you want to hear about that, go take a look over at my producer’s posts. We’ll be covering new design changes made by looking at the last round of Playtests. After reviewing each section will be discussing any design changes that have been or will be made  from these findings. As a reminder, our three pillars of design are Shootin’, Lootin’, and Scootin’

Playtest Data

This was an even better playtest for MARRED. We got a total of 27 playtest responses and a wide variety of responses.

Demographics

This time we still got a large variety of playtesters in terms of their background, but we also got two people in the industry to also play the game!

We were able to find this out by cross referencing the emails that people submitted to the list of emails linked in the GDC slack channel.

On top of the people demographics, we finally had one person play the game on Mac!

Surely this was worth the extra 3 hours to implement a working Mac build.

Shootin’

After making tweaks from the last playtest and increasing the number of questions related to Shooting. Instead of just asking about the general fire rate, we expanded it to talk about the damage and fire rate of each individual gun. Let's go over that.

Nailgun

On Scales from one to six, we choose to mostly ignore options three and four. We see these to be within standard deviation of the ideal experience. We do this to focus more on the extremes, especially if the distribution heavily leans to one side or the other.

Based on the feedback from the players, we can see that they feel that the nail gun fires too slowly and does a little too low of damage. The Nailgun is in a complicated spot where it acts too much and too little like a pistol. Compared to the amount of feedback that they get from firing it, they aren’t too much of a fan

Shotgun

Looking at the top chart, we can see that the shotgun's fire rate is fine and currently doesn’t need to be adjusted. 

The bottom graph tells a different story with the distribution of the graph hugging the right side. Right now, the Shotgun shreds anything that it comes into contact with. We’re trying to find a solution that makes the shotgun still powerful to lower level enemies but not a “get out of jail free” card.

SMG

People VERY much enjoyed the speed at which the SMG threw bullets down range. Seeing the flickering hitmarker on the screen made a lot of people happy. 

What’s weird is that the SMG damage is so close to being right. Some people think it’s fine, but a large enough majority of them think it’s too low. Currently it takes 15 bullets from the SMG to kill a Miner. We’ll have to lower it to 12 or 13.

Railgun

The railgun was not included in this playtest

Rockpick

The Rockpick is also in an interesting spot. During this playtesters players said that they liked the Rockpick the least out of the four weapons available.

This might be because the rockpicks main gimmick (mining cracked walls) isn’t in the game yet. I did see that players liked mining the rocks with gems in them, even though it didn’t do anything. Something to take note of later.

The other big reason why I can see that players didn’t like the rockpick was that the combat for it was unrewarding and dangerous. Currently, playing with the rockpick is dangerous and unrewarding. The enemies don’t stop attacking when hit, and they don’t stop trying to chase the player. 

For melee design, we are making changes to added knockback to the rockpick as well as adding a stun feature so that the player can be on equal footing with the monsters.

Additionally, I’m going to be pitching the idea that the player is guaranteed some larger amount of loot if they use the Rockpick. 

So the Laundry list of changes that we have is…

• Re-increase Nail Gun fire rate, this should help with damage concerns too
• Increase SMG damage slightly
• Increase Shotgun pellet speed (again)
• Instate individual ammo capacities (still

Lootin’

We were still unable to get the loot system into the last playtest, however the players did get very happy at seeing a bunch of loot on the ground after slaughtering a room full of enemies.

In a meeting with the executive producers, they wanted us to “give them the juice” of loot spouting out of dead enemies.

So, we’re deciding to add particle effects onto the loot to make it more “borderlands-y” you know what I mean, fun colorful auras and satisfying pickup sounds.

On top of this, we’re adjusting the scrap system to a base 10 system rather than a base 1 system. That way players will be spending 150 scrap on an item instead of 15. It just sound better. 

Scootin’

Unfortunately, we’re still dealing with the issue of players getting stuck on walls and floors. We’ve narrowed this down to an issue with the Raycasting and the Wall colliders. But we haven’t fixed it yet. 

Upon reviewing playtest data and videos. We’ve confirmed that the slide feature is not being used enough. The combination of needing to be sprinting with Left shift and crouching hurts the fingers and is too hard to use without removing the fingers from the WASD.

As a response to this, crouch is being removed to be replaced with slide, which can be activated with Crtl at any time, walking or running. 

Playtest conclusions

We’re happy to report that people are having more fun than before!

People are responding well to the Art being added, but are really itching for fully working mechanics!

I'll catch you in another couple of weeks after our fourth round playtests. We’re steadily running out of time, but thankfully we’re running out of game to make at the same time! Things are going well!

See ya!

Jen Davalos Game Designer