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cassiesdevblog · 7 months

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This is definitely the kind of thing there's lots of disagreement about and I wish I went into that more in the post, because there absolutely are players who want to carefully mull over every decision

I personally have ADHD and I'm sure my perspective on this is very informed by that. My point is not that this approach is right for every game or every player, but that it's an approach that has a lot of unappreciated strengths

Many roguelikes ask you to make loads of decisions every single run, and that can be exhausting depending on the player, their game knowledge, and their mood, so I think Isaac is smart to frame most of its decisions more like picking up a Zelda item (easy, thoughtless, exciting to discover for yourself what it does and how you can use it) than an important , deeply consequential, potentially stressful choice, while leaving the tougher choices (devil deals, angel items, alt path dual item rooms) to players engaged and interested enough to earn them. It allows the experience to flex to fit different players and their changing moods

If the low info approach is the approach you go for, I think that detailed, easily-accessed item descriptions can undermine the strengths of the approach a little

Imo, as a rule of thumb, the player's job is to win, and the designer's job is to make that process fun. Not that players are coldly calculating machines, but it can be hard to pick the more fun option if you know it'll put you at a disadvantage. Pressing the convenient "show description" button for every item is the obvious smartest strategy, so most players will likely use it even if a number of them would have more fun without it

I Don't Wanna Know Anything!!!!!

Don't try to teach me anything!! I don't want to know any of it! ...Why?

Because this terrifies me...

...and this doesn't!!

So don't tell me anything! .....Except what I actually need to know!

I want to zero in on the Binding of Isaac's seemingly lackadaisical approach to teaching players. This is a game loaded with hundreds and hundreds of different items with various effects, and the biggest effort it makes toward explaining what any of them do is never more than one short line of text, which is sometimes more of a catchphrase than an item description

This is enough for some people to call Isaac a "wiki game," and many will say you should just download the mod that puts a detailed description in the corner of the screen before you pick up an item, but I'm here to make the case against that

As a new player trying to get into Dead Cells (the game I pictured above with the detailed item descriptions), I found it overwhelming to try and digest all the information given to me every time I found a new item. The deluge of stats and attributes made it all feel super important, like I was already being expected to carefully consider every morsel of info while I was still trying to get to grips with the basic controls and movement. I'm sure some people are into that kind of thing, but I dropped the game fast

And I think the big question here is: would I need all this information to have fun?

Isaac's answer would be a firm no!!! You can pick the game up, not understand half the items you find, and have a blast anyway. Most of the time though, you'll have enough of an idea of what something does just by the short blurb of a description that you can make effective use of it without needing all the details

I think it would be awful if the game had the item descriptions mod (pictured above) preloaded by default. I'd like to think I'd just say "I'm not reading all that" if I found it overwhelming, but it's hard to ignore juicy, helpful information. After all, the player's job is to win, and it's the designer's job to make that process engaging

Not only that, but Isaac's approach actually removes the decision making from the process entirely for new players, because it doesn't give you any information until you pick the item up. If you waltz into an item room and see something you've never seen before, are you just not gonna pick it up? No, of course you just take it, and if you regret it later, that'll stick in your mind and you'll remember it next time. As you play, you'll gradually build your knowledge of what each item does, and eventually the game will be full of interesting decisions because of it

The short, catchy "item descriptions" are perfect for this purpose. It's easy for them to get stuck in your brain so they can help jog your memory next time you see the item. After playing enough, I've found myself reciting the ones I remember in my head before even picking an item up

It's a system that works great for all kinds of players, because the game is already fun even when you know nothing (plus, it's fun to discover what items do organically!), but you can reach new heights of strategy by naturally building a well of knowledge as you play, usually without even trying to

...Alrighty, so that's all nice and ideal, but what if players just crack open the wiki anyway and drag out the pace and volume of information waaaaaaay more than they would by downloading the item descriptions mod?

Well... I think that's fun too actually! If you're willing to go to the effort to go to the wiki and type in the name of every item you see before you pick it up, it's probably because you're super engaged with the game and you're in the mood to gather knowledge so you can make super informed decisions

Speaking personally, I sometimes do play with the wiki open if I'm in the right mood for it. But even then, I only actually look something up if I really want that extra advantage. The slight inconvenience of having to type into a search bar means I don't overdo it and suck the fun out of it. Rather, I generally only use it when I'm in the sort of mood where I find it fun!

Isaac is able to match so many people's moods and levels of experience by sparing the details and encouraging curiosity, discovery, and long-term accumulation of information, rather than trying to make sure you know everything upfront. I kind of think this is at least half of the game's secret sauce...!!! Seriously!

So if you ask me, the next time you want to tell your player something, you should ask yourself:

Do they need to know this to have fun?

(btw me and my friends just finished a whole ass game go play it)

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cassiesdevblog · 7 months

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Mario 64's Perfect, Beautiful, Pure Control Scheme

(and how later Mario games gunk it all up)

Hello gunky gloopers! Let me take you on a journey. So, Mario 64's controls are like this:

Joystick: Run

A: Jump

Z: Crouch

B: Punch

But in my beautiful, perfect mind palace (and probably yours too, even if you never thought about it), they're actually more like this:

Joystick: Lateral

A: Up

Z: Down

B: Attack

And now, through abstraction, we are beginning to see the light

Part I: Utopia

Each of these main 4 inputs has a consistent association with one of these directions (or attacking). 64 understands that, while a 2D platformer could use just the stick or D-pad to cover both of its axes of movement, a 3D game's joystick is working full time controlling just one plane, so the orphaned up and down inputs were rehoused to A and Z

That's how Mario 64 builds out an intuitive moveset much wider than just 4 basic actions. In fact, essentially every combination of these main 4 inputs creates a logical outcome

Press down in the air and, predictably, Mario will go down via ground pound

Combine some lateral movement with both a down and up input and you get the long jump: a long, low jump that you can think of as resulting from the upward and downward forces cancelling out

Press attack while holding down to do... the crouching breakdancey low kick move thing. It's highly redundant, but it's a monument to Mario 64's dedication to this idea of a complete palette of moves intuitively resulting from combining these fundamental inputs

Even in particular contextual states like climbing poles or hanging on ledges, you can rely on these directional associations to control Mario without even thinking about it. Nobody ever told you you could press Z to drop down off a ledge or tree, but you might have done it anyway without being told

Now, these associations are stretched or broken in some contexts, like when flying or swimming, but I love the wing cap so much you'll never get me to slander it. Future Mario games, however...

Part II: Decay

While 64 flirted with impurity in specific contexts, future games would start to let impurities seep into Mario's core moveset

In Super Mario Sunshine, the L button centers the camera and makes Mario sidestep when on the ground... and it also makes him ground pound when in the air. I am currently doing deep breathing exercises

In Super Mario Odyssey, pressing ZL/ZR in the air and then Y leads to... a forward dive. Now, Y does have a relatively consistent association with forward movement in this game, but down and then forward resulting in a move that only pushes Mario forward is pretty tenuous, especially given how often players will use this move. And, while most of Odyssey Mario's moveset is consistent enough about using ZL/ZR as down buttons... you can't use them to drop off ledges. I try to every time, and every time absolutely nothing happens and a piece of my soul leaves my body to wander the cosmos forever

...well, at least the game is more diligent about keeping these directional associations alive when in the water than Mario 64 is...!

Part III: Change

Now, look. The loss of the purity of the control schemes in 3D Mario games is absolutely devastating and I still have not recovered. But... I do recognize that later games had particular goals with their movesets that couldn't so cleanly just be mashed into the standards of purity that SM64 set. Not without sacrificing some of what their movesets were all about

Sunshine needed a button to help with aiming FLUDD, which wouldn't have really been helpful in the air anyway, so it's understandable it was also used for the ground pound. Odyssey needed a way to disambiguate an aerial Y/"forward" input into either a cap throw or a dive so you could do cool fancy tricks and find those coins everyone lost their minds about on top of that underground building. And if they patched in the ability to drop off ledges with ZL/ZR, then the lost pieces of my soul would return to my body with a newfound wisdom gained from wandering the stars, and I would ascend out of my physical body to a new, heightened mode of existence and lose the ability to touch a controller, and then I'd never get to spend my evenings gleefully, repeatedly dropping off ledges with Z in Mario 64 again :(

(By the way, a game I worked on just came out! It's a tough 2D platformer with a surreal, haunting aesthetic and I'm honored I got to get into all the little crevices and polish them all up because it's such a cool project. It was spearheaded by my friend @zombielesbean. Go play it!!!)

#game design #super mario #super mario 64 #sm64 #mario 64 #super mario odyssey

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cassiesdevblog · 7 months

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I Don't Wanna Know Anything!!!!!

Don't try to teach me anything!! I don't want to know any of it! ...Why?

Because this terrifies me...

...and this doesn't!!

So don't tell me anything! .....Except what I actually need to know!

And I think the big question here is: would I need all this information to have fun?

So if you ask me, the next time you want to tell your player something, you should ask yourself:

Do they need to know this to have fun?

(btw me and my friends just finished a whole ass game go play it)

#gamedev #indiedev #game design #trans game dev

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cassiesdevblog · 8 months

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~Voices~ in Grey Area

Hello slip n' sliders! Today I wanted to talk about the pseudo "voice" every character has in Grey Area

GAME'S OUT BTW!!! PLEASE CHECK IT OUT AND LEAVE US A REVIEW!

Whenever a text box is being typed out, every 4th character typed makes a little noise. I actually used the same sound as Hailey's footsteps, as it just ended up sounding right! It manages to occupy a space somewhere between human speech and the clacking of a keyboard, which is just as abstract as I feel something like this ought to be

Now, I wanted this sound to behave differently for different characters and lines of dialogue and such, but it was relatively late in development already and it would have taken time I could have used elsewhere to go over the entire script and add tone instructions to every text box. Fortunately, there was a much easier approach: tying voices to the character portraits!

I went through every character portrait in the game and attached a few instructions that tell its text sounds how to behave. These instructions are for pitch and range. Pitch is just pitch, but range is the range within which the voice will randomly deviate from that pitch. Low range sounds monotone, and high range sounds scattered and frantic.

Some characters, like Hailey, have different portraits for different emotions, and so I gave those subtly different voices. I'm really proud of the effect this has on several scenes!!

A complete monotone with a range of 0 was reserved for signs and the quiet place dialogue, while characters who are meant to speak in a monotone still have a low range value to keep them feeling alive. I reserved one of the highest range values for one of my favorite characters who you'll probably know when you see :) Also, I gave the highest pitch to a character it really suited... you'll also probably know when you see them >:3

Overall, I'm super proud of this system considering how quickly I was able to put it together. I was able to create a simple, easy to use system to enhance the personality of every character and scene in the game in just a few hours! Nothing in the entire world is more satisfying than creating something so easy to use and then getting such extensive use out of it :)))

NOW GO PLAY THE GAME!!! FOR REAL!!!!

#grey area #indiedev #indie games #gamedev #trans game dev #transgender #queer games

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cassiesdevblog · 8 months

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~Rumble~ in Grey Area

Hey rumblebees! I've got a gnarly headache today so I'm not working on Grey Area (it's painful to take a break but I gotta remind myself if I'm dying to do something I can still do it post-launch..!), but I at least wanted to write a quick, simple blog post about it!

SEPTEMBER 15TH BTW. 5 DAYS. WISHLIST NOW OR YOUR BODY WILL BECOME GREY

Early on in my involvement with Grey Area, I wrote a short, simple script to make controller rumble super extremely easy to implement:

setrumble(left,right)

All I have to do is write this line of code somewhere and input the desired value for the left and right sides of the controller, and the rest is handled invisibly. The possible strengths range from 0 to 1, but higher values can be used to easily keep the rumble at max strength for longer. These values drain back to zero at a rate of .1 per frame, so I don't have to worry about turning the rumble off at any point, and it has a nice, subtle gradient as it tapers off. Further, if you try to set the rumble to something lower than it already is, nothing will happen. This prevents small rumbles like footsteps from cutting off bigger ones like explosions

Thanks in part to this script's massive versatility and ease of use, I was able to litter this game with rumble for basically everything in no time flat

Hailey's footsteps make tiny, subtle rumbles that alternate sides of the controller. When Hailey climbs onto a bench, you can subtly feel her hands and feet making contact. Walking into a wall makes a small rumble on the appropriate side of the controller, and bonking off a wall does the same but much bigger. Whenever a boss does a big attack, you'll feel it

I mainly use rumble to create a more tactile connection between the player and Hailey. My rule of thumb is that you should feel what she feels! This is why abstract actions like using menus don't have rumble

There are still, however, a few places where rumble is used in slightly abstract ways, like the lingering rumble from getting hit that lasts almost as long as the invincibility frames. You're really supposed to ~feel~ that you got hit! Proximity to some powerful forces will also create rumble, as if the energy it gives off resonates throughout your corporeal form

So I think it goes without saying that I strongly recommend playing with a controller and keeping rumble turned on. It really really elevates the whole experience in my opinion!

#grey area #gamedev #indiedev #indie games

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cassiesdevblog · 8 months

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~Shmovement~ in Grey Area

Hello goober goblins! Grey Area comes out ~September 15th~ and I wanna make some posts going over my involvement with the project 👁️👁️

I joined the project back in March because, while playing early builds, there were a million things, big and small, that I wanted to be able to polish up to really make the game shine, and my top priority was Hailey's movement

Grey Area is a game where beginners will mostly play inside a small range of velocities, but, thanks to @bisthefairy, there are ways to build and maintain greater speeds, so Hailey's movement has to be tuned for both small-scale, precision platforming and large-scale, broader movements. Plus, as most of the level design was already finished when I joined, all my changes had to work with, rather than against, the established design

General momentum adjustments

When I first joined, there were a few ways that slow and fast play would clash with one another. For instance, Hailey had low air friction. This was nice at higher speeds, because you should be able to briefly release the d-pad to shave off a little speed without getting rid of all of it, but it didn't mesh with tighter sections where you'd be asked to land precisely on small platforms

Luckily, since the smaller range of speeds Hailey usually stays within is well defined, I was able to just dramatically increase her air friction while not pressing a direction, only while inside that range.

Unfortunately, this led to a small problem: There are lots of spots in the game where you're meant to bonk off a wall and land on a platform. Where you could previously do this without having to hold a direction, you now had to hold back a little or Hailey wouldn't make it. To fix this, I just made her use the old friction during a bonk. That may seem unintuitive, but the bonk is all about Hailey bouncing back off a wall, so it feels natural for her to travel further. In practice, the discrepancy doesn't feel like a discrepancy.

Dive momentum changes

Hailey's main mechanic is her dive: a burst movement option that lets you speed straight forward. You can cancel out of the move at any point, cutting off all your momentum. However, when I first joined, Hailey would keep a small amount of the dive's momentum after a cancel. The intent was to let you keep the flow going even after a cancel, but it led to lots of overshooting in a game with low margins for error. I preserved the original way if the player is holding in the direction of the dive, so you can still keep your flow going, but if you're not pressing a direction, Hailey will instead cancel all the momentum and drop straight down

Release cancel (aka, half the reason I joined the project)

These subtle changes have made Hailey much more reliable to control. It feels much easier to translate your intent onto the screen regardless of how fast you're going (September 15th btw)

Speaking of intent, I've had a big impact on this game's controls! The first time I ever played, the dive could only be canceled by releasing B and then pressing it again. I felt this was really cumbersome and I barely felt in control, so I wanted to cancel by just releasing B

This was controversial though, as everyone else preferred the original way, so I instead suggested being able to cancel by pressing back on the d-pad, as it felt instinctual to hold against the direction of momentum to cancel it. I also suggested being able to press down to cancel, since a player might think of it as dropping Hailey down. Fortunately, both were implemented and the game became a bit more comfortable for me, but I couldn't get the idea of releasing B to cancel out of my head

Later, when I finally got my hands on the project, release cancel was the first thing I added, and it felt just as right and perfect and natural as I imagined it would. I figured, if I just made the other devs play with it, they might see the merits of it and change their minds. Tragically it didn't change any minds, but I was ultimately able to persuade Alayna to make it an option in the options menu. When you play the game, especially if you don't like how cancelling is controlled, please please please try changing "Press to dive" to "Hold to dive" in the options menu and join the church of release cancel. We have plenty of room :')

Other controls

I've made a bunch of other small changes to the controls too! Generally, I like every button on the controller to do something, so I mirrored a lot of functions to previously unused buttons. Hopefully this makes the game feel more responsive and playful, as well as a little more accessible! I also made it so Hailey sits down when you press down :) It's one of only a few graphics I drew for the game! (did I mention September 15th btw)

The Bounce 👁️👁️

I've saved my biggest (and most iterated upon) change for last >:3

When Hailey dives at smaller enemies, she'll bounce off as if she goomba stomped them, which cancels her dive and allows her to dive again. I added this because I thought the sick tricks and possibility for advanced play were too sweet to pass up. Not to mention it just seemed like fun. Plus, it would add exciting counterplay to some previously unexciting enemies. It's a simple mechanic, but it underwent a lot of changes!

Firstly, it used to work on almost every enemy, but it didn't feel right against bigger monsters. We ended up deciding that Hailey should only be able to do this against enemies around her size, so in practice, this mainly comes up with the Golch enemy. When I first played, I found the Golch really annoying, as the best and safest strategy to deal with it was to just stand and wait for it to fly toward you so you could jump on it. Now, you can dive right at it and pull off sweet tricks instead! This has ended up making room for tons of cool skips and it feels great >:3

I even redesigned the Golch's flight path so that it will usually be flying at your exact elevation (it moves faster vertically than it does horizontally to accomplish this) so you can more consistently dive straight into it

I also made it so that bouncing off an enemy clamps your speed within a relatively small range, as otherwise you would carry the momentum of the dive and easily fly off into a pit

Now, in my mind, this all worked perfectly, but then disaster struck

@zombielesbean, who uses press cancel, would try to press B to cancel right before running into an enemy in order to avoid it, but would press a few frames too late and instead the input would happen after Hailey had bounced off the enemy, so she'd dive again and accidentally fly off into a pit. We tried a million different avenues to resolve this, but all of them were significant downgrades to the mechanic

Fortunately, Alayna found that the issue was only happening because of the enemy placements in one or two spots, and after adjusting them, it was no longer an issue, so fortunately the best version of the mechanic got in >:3

So yeah!!

Those are a few of the ways I've cleaned up and improved Hailey's movement since I joined! I've gotten my grubby paws all over every bit of this game in a similar way. Cleaning things up, tuning numbers, adding effects, making things more clear, overhauling things, enhancing the flavor

A huge takeaway from this project for me has been that polish is a full time job!! Every little bit of polish seems small on its own, but when you add them all up they can make the difference between a decent game and a total banger. It just takes a huge amount of time to accrue all those tiny things. I think that's why they say you should triple all your time estimates on gamedev...!!

Fortunately, I have a good eye and a strong passion for all those little things, so I feel like an extremely valuable asset on this project, even though my hand is largely invisible and it takes long-winded posts like this to even explain what I've done

As Bis puts it, "Cass did for Grey Area before release what Sonic modders do for Sonic games after release"

~September 15th you vibrant fools~

#grey area #gamedev #schmovement #programming #trans game dev

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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Custom Contraption Design in Tears of the Kingdom Baby!!!!

Hey guys! Something I wanna use this blog for in addition to talking about my own gamedev work is talking about various design thingies from other games that interest me. I've been thinking a lot about the custom contraptions in the upcoming Zelda game lately and I'd love to share my own ideas for how this system could be designed to maximize creative freedom and the dynamic, emergent interactions BOTW is known for, and minimize fiddly menuing and general tedium

Max emergent interactions!!!!

So, first up, I think these contraptions should behave exactly how you'd expect a bunch of BOTW physics objects glued together to behave. They have weight and can be pushed around, wooden parts can catch fire, metal parts attract lightning and can be moved with magnesis, etc. No fancy cheats to bias physics or chemistry in favor of what the game might assume the player wants. That hovercraft pictured above should be hard to keep upright, and if you can't keep it from flipping over, you're gonna end up falling out of the sky. Maybe that's why you'd choose to build a comparatively slower, less agile hot air balloon: you don't want the challenge of keeping a less stable aircraft upright, or you want to transport some objects and don't want them throwing off your craft's balance. Or maybe you want to forego the downsides of either approach and build a land vehicle. Whatever you're building, you should be able to take advantage of all the normal properties of BOTW physics objects, but on the other side of the coin, you should also have to worry about the downsides of each of said properties

Some contraption parts could even be designed with both upsides and downsides in mind. For instance, maybe you wanna use one of the fans in the aircraft pictured above for blowing things around, rather than for propulsion, so you'll need to come up with a way to stabilize the fan to keep it from propelling itself away. The fan has multiple potential uses, but they can be in conflict with one another

Finding Parts and Building Stuff

In the trailer, we can see Link lifting a wheel out of a swamp using what looks like a Magnesis-esque rune thingy. It's a safe bet to say we'll be gathering up parts from the world to build our contraptions, and considering we have a tool for manipulating parts in space, we'll probably be using it to physically build our contraptions. That's right, no fiddly building menus for us! We're designing an even more fiddly in-game building system.... wish me luck!

Ok, so first, we're not traveling the world every single time we want to gather parts for the same old contraption we've built 100 times. Once you've picked something up with the "Part Mover" rune thingy, it's capital Y Yours forever. While holding something with the Part Mover, you can magically dissolve it by pressing, like, X or whatever, to put it in your parts inventory, and if a part gets far enough away from you that it would unload from the game, it'll instead dissolve and return to your parts inventory, magically cleaning up any parts or contraptions you leave behind. You can even hold X for a few seconds while using the Part Mover (but not while holding any parts) to dissolve all of your currently loaded parts

When you wanna build something, you can enter your parts inventory to choose the parts you want to use and dump them out in front of Link. Then, you can use the Part Mover to move them around, rotate them, and glue them together

Glue

When a part is held close to another part, evenly spaced dots will appear on the surfaces of both parts, including key points like the axle of a wheel, and when you hold, like, A or whatever, the dots on the part you're holding will attract toward the nearest dot on nearby parts until they connect, and then they will snap together, with the weird, gloopy, magic looking green glue seen in the trailer creating a rigid connection where they touch. While attracting toward other dots, parts will also try to align themselves rotationally with the face they're attaching to, snapping to the nearest multiple of 22.5° (half of 45°) relative to it, keeping things rotationally clean as well

To unglue something, just grab it with the Part Mover and press X once, then again if you want to dissolve it. You can hold X while holding a part of a whole contraption to dissolve the whole thing

This system is intended to keep things "on grid" so to speak, making it easier to create symmetrical contraptions, keep things even, and put things where you want them. The intent behind parts attracting together before connecting is to avoid all the wonky collisions that would occur if we just teleported the parts into place. Also, parts should probably have more dots than in the mockup I provided above to allow more creative freedom, but not so many that the point of the dots is defeated

Parts

To maximize creative freedom, Hyrule should be littered with all sorts of basic contraption materials to find--parts good for not just vehicles, but catapults, makeshift bunkers to survive big attacks, traps for enemies to fall into, and whatever else players can come up with. Pistons, rope, wheels, fans, balloons, sails, springs, and cubes, planks, sheets, wedges, orbs, and rods made of metal, wood, stone, etc. We'll also need pressure plates, crystal switches, and that steering wheel rod type thingy Link uses in the trailer so we can control our contraptions

Logic

While using the Part Mover, we can see normally invisible magicky "wire" things coming off of output devices like buttons and switches, mocked up above. We can use the Part Mover to grab these, drag them around, and plug them into an input node on anything that takes an input, like wheels, pistons, and fans. If you've ever played Littlebigplanet, it's exactly like that. Some things that take inputs have multiple input nodes, like wheels, which can take inputs for clockwise and counterclockwise rotation

We can steal some more from Littlebigplanet to create the interface for the direct control device Link can use. Aside from a dedicated dismount button and buttons reserved for things like pausing or the weapon inventories, we can plug any input on a Switch controller, including the accelerometer and gyroscope if Nintendo really wants to let us go wild, into anything we want. This UI can appear within the world, always facing the camera, above the direct control device, making sure to appear high enough that it doesn't overlap with any parts so it doesn't get in our way

While using one of these, the left stick also causes Link to shift his weight a little, which is how the aircraft in the trailer could be steered

Finally, depending on how complex Nintendo wants this to be, we could even attach simple logic gates to our contraptions like AND, OR, and NOT, invisible when not using the Part Mover like the wires. Plug two buttons into an OR gate, plug the gate into a piston, and now either button can activate the piston

Saving stuff

Now, crucially, if you like what you've built and want to use it multiple times, you shouldn't have to painstakingly rebuild it every time, so, while holding a part, you can press, uh, Y or whatever, and a "blueprint" of the whole contraption it's a part of will be saved for you to access later in a tab of the parts inventory. Select it from said tab and, as long as you have all the parts it's made out of, enough space in front of Link, and enough glue (more on that later), the resources are used and your whole contraption will plop down in front of Link, ready to use or be moved where you want it by the Part Mover

Technical considerations

Now, this is obviously a pretty powerful, robust system absolutely ripe for lag and abuse. But its design comes with an important limitation: Once you've collected a part, it's yours forever, and there are only so many wheels, planks, and pistons in Hyrule. Even after collecting everything, you can dump out your whole parts inventory and it won't amount to too many objects for the Switch to handle. You can stress the game a little and lower the framerate if you go ham, but you won't be able to make it unplayable

Or... that's the ideal, anyway. Maybe it would be best to just impose a limit on the number of parts you can have dumped out at once 'w'; Not so fun to reach such a limit, but it would allow Hyrule to be littered with all the parts you could ever want

Btw, I saved the best for last :)

Ok, so thus far, it seems like this is a pretty overpowered system, right? Parts never break, and you can dissolve and re-summon a contraption from its blueprint as many times as you want. Isn't that OP? If weapons break, shouldn't contraptions? You could build one car and it'd pretty easily outclass any horse, right? What's the catch?

Glue! Glue is an additional resource you'll need to collect from the world. It's not just any glue though. It's an ancient, magical resource Ganon has imbued all his minions with, and you'll get some every time you defeat one, addressing BOTW's problem of picking fights with random bokoblins being pretty pointless. You can only hold so much though, so don't hesitate to use it if you've got it!

Glue is used every time you glue things together or summon a glued contraption from its blueprint. Whatever the case, each connection between two parts costs 10 units of glue

And here's why this is my favorite part: Glued connections aren't forever. Anything more than a small amount of stress on a glued connection will start to degrade the glue, causing a particle effect and gradually fading the glue's bright, vibrant green color until it's a dull grey. Shortly before the glue comes apart for good, it'll flash red and then bam! With a particle explosion remiscent of a weapon breaking, your connection is no more and the parts it held together are now two independent physics objects. This will lead to all sorts of spectacular dismantlings, crashes, and disasters. Wheels will roll away mid-drive, cars will split in half, aircraft will fall out of the sky, and plans will go terribly wrong even when machines are otherwise perfectly designed and operated

Now, ideally, the minimum amount of stress to cause glue degradation should be high enough that a medium-weight car just sitting around won't slowly fall apart under its own weight. Generally speaking, connections should degrade with use, not disuse, unless contraptions are really heavy, poorly supported, or stuck under something heavy like a big boulder

When you use the Part Mover to break a connection or dissolve a whole contraption, each glued connection will refund an amount of glue relative to its degradation. Since one connection costs 10 units to make, completely fresh glue refunds 10 units, halfway degraded glue refunds 5 units, and so on. The refund is always rounded down to the nearest integer, so no glue farming funny business

A big advantage of this system that I'm fond of is that it avoids lots of paging through your parts inventory trying to decide how many of each type of part you're willing to spend in order to deploy a contraption from a blueprint. Your parts never break, are easy to retrieve, and will automatically return to your inventory if you leave them behind, so you'll almost always only have to think about how much glue you have on you. Unless you're using lots of contraptions at once, you won't have to worry about whether you have enough parts to place something out

And that's it!

A long post, but I wanted to go into all the intricate design details necessary to realize a system like this. I wanted to come up with something that would slot in well with BOTW's existing design and balance while offering a ton of room for creative freedom, emergent interactions, and beautiful disasters, without skimping on learnability or ease of use

Thanks for reading all that :) I can't wait to see what this system actually ends up being like in the final game! Also, let me know if you would design the system differently!

#botw #totk #zelda #game design #gamedev #tears of the kingdom

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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Rediscovering the ~Joy of Work~ in spite of capitalist BULLSHIT!!!!

Capitalism is deeply woven with my trauma. I felt its inevitable hand more and more with every passing year I went through school, and thanks to a terrifying, abusive stepdad obsessed with turning my autistic ass into a ~functioning member of society,~ home was not a respite from a world that demanded constant work, a world that silently chastised even a moment of rest Rest became my rebellion. For years, especially after finally escaping living with my stepdad, I spent every moment I could doing next to nothing, fearing anything that took effort, had stakes, or could affect the future at all. In my mind, work was overrated, and I would spend the next several years trying to reconcile that belief with my ambitions. I made some progress working on the games I wanted to make, but without fundamentally reshaping my relationship with work, I wasn't destined to get very far. And I didn't. I put out small projects sporadically for a few years, but my more ambitious ideas languished in snail-paced development

Things changed slowly for a while, and I gradually began figuring out habits that would help me work on cool games despite how much I hated work, but eventually, I'd make a sort of breakthrough

The Breakthrough!!!

About a month ago, I played the then-current build of @zombielesbean's upcoming game Grey Area. I'd seen on the Itch page that it'd been slated for March of this year at some point (it's March right now and it's definitely not coming out this month), and given how much more polish I felt the game needed, I felt like there would no way it was getting the polish it deserved in time for March. It's such a cool, weird, unique, unforgettable project, and it would have been a crime if it came out undercooked. I just had to do something about that, so I asked if I could have a copy of the project file so I could help out

I mean, realistically the game would have just come out later than expected to give it time for the polish it needed...

But regardless!! Alayna sent me the project file and off I went! In my mind, every second I spent working on the game would translate to a better final product on launch day, and that's all I really wanted. I began to understand every work of art I've ever loved as the fruits of a whole lot of labor. So many cool things only exist at all because someone wanted them to exist so bad they were willing to put in every last bit of work necessary to make it so. And that makes them cool, it makes them admirable, and it means the world is full of cool, inspiring, sickass art to experience

So, fuck capitalism, but work is alright sometimes

It's pretty fucking cool actually when it's not compulsory. It can be fulfilling, it can lead to absolute bangers, and, fuck, it can even be rewarding in its own right

Grey Area is gonna be a banger because the whole team, now including me, poured in the work necessary to make it so. In the month I've been working on it, it's tangibly improved astronomically, and it'll keep doing so till we're done, all thanks to the work we put in. Every second of work leads to a better, cooler game, and it's worth it because we really want it to exist

The inescapable forces of capitalism wanted me to go one way, and for years, I went in the exact opposite direction: still following capitalism's path, only in reverse, and it wasn't any better a path to take

Now? I'm making my own way

Thx for reading :)

#gamedev #greyarea

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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Pyo as... Adaptation? Homage? Clone? Thing?

Hey paisanos! I've been doin a lot of work lately helping @zombielesbean finish up their project Grey Area, and I wanna write up a big post about my contributions (including a really big exciting secret one!) once that's done, but the original warioware just hit the switch and with that comes Pyoro >:3

If you don't know about Pyoro, you can get the gist by watching a little bit of this epic video:

youtube

Of course, Pyoro on switch means I've got my game Pyo on the mind too. I mean, they are...

...similar games... 'w';

So similar that sometimes I worry Wario is gonna come to my house and beat the tar outta me. Wario, if you're reading this, I can explain

In 2020, when I finally found out you could download DSiware games on the 3DS--not for long tho :')--I immediately remembered a game I had on my DSi as a kid: Bird & Beans, a standalone version of Pyoro (and Pyoro 2!) with 50% more floor space to maneuver in. I bought it and absolutely fell in love with it! It became a sort of hyperfixation of mine for a little while, and so naturally, as one does, I started thinking "alright, but what if this was a platformer?"

See, I think arcade games and platformers mix really well. Platforming is often fun to do all on its own, and a lot of arcade games have sort of non-linear goals. It's a great combination if you wanna break platforming gameplay out of the usual get-from-A-to-B design, which is something I'm always wanting to do. Shoutout to any good boss in a platformer btw

One thing leading to another

So my immediate thought was like, what if you could just jump up there and pop the beans yourself? You could bounce off of them and get a combo going!

And so, if the beans themselves hitting your head is no longer a hazard, naturally the pits they create should be how you lose the game. In Pyoro they're functionally walls, but in a platformer that doesn't even make sense

But wait, if you pop beans just by touching them, can't you stand in one place forever and the ground under your feet will be safe for eternity? Ok, there'll be a special, extra dangerous flavor of bean that sends explosions left and right when it hits the bottom of the screen

As you can see, a lot of the game's design just flowed naturally from solving the problems caused by turning it into a platformer. Just by changing these few things, the game is already pretty distinct from its inspiration, but I took it a little further

Taking advantage of the genre

Beyond just patching holes in the design caused by that one change, I wanted to change other things in order to better take advantage of the focus on platforming

This is where @bisthefairy comes in. While ground in Pyoro is restored by eating a white bean to summon an angel to fill in nearby holes for you, I wanted to encourage the player to use platforming to get high up on the screen. I also wanted ground to be stackable, because that could spice up the platforming and even lead to unique, creative strategies

This led to the idea of having something like the angels from Pyoro flying around up high, so you'd have to bounce up there to get them to drop their block, pit or no pit. I gave the role to my friend Bis since they're small and they fly around

This desire to get the player to bounce up high also led to the creation of the worst feature in the game, the "clear line," which was quickly cut. As you'd rack up a big combo, a horizontal line would start rising up from the bottom of the screen. If you fell below it, it'd kill your combo and clear all the beans off the screen. 0/10. Having to play on half the screen and barely having time to react to incoming beans suckssss

Seriously. One of the worst aspects of Pyoro is that you get huge score for nabbing a bean right as it comes onscreen, so the best strat is to just keep spamming your tongue out hoping to get lucky. No idea why I thought making you play near the top was wise. The best interactions happen near the ground anyway, where you can skid and bonk into blocks

Also, stripes!

Not sure if this counts as a connection between the two games, but I feel like it's also worth mentioning a very indirect source of inspiration: the color banding on the sky in Pyoro. See, in Pyoro, the screen is divided into horizontal slices, and eating a bean from a higher slice gets you more points. I remember thinking the color banding on the sky should indicate the different slices, but it just doesn't! I think that put the idea of stripes conveying information in my head though, and that's probably unconsciously where Pyo's distinctive pit-indicating stripes come from

So, will Wario harm me?

Well, I got pretty bold using a bird and some "beans" in my game. I could have used the classic trope of a horse and some babies. Honestly, I used a bird and beans because I was sketching up ideas for the game and really liked Margie as soon as I drew her, and I liked the beans too much not to use them

"What about the name?" I hear you say, complaining you've not been able to tell which game I'm talking about this whole time. Well, I found the "Pyo" part of "Pyoro" really satisfying to say, so I put it in as a placeholder name, intending to change it later. Then I decided the sound of that syllable was so satisfying that Margie should say it every time she pops a bean, and by then it had grown on me so much I, once again, couldn't resist. It's all ok though, because baby chickens say "pío" in Spanish, and Margie is a chicken!

Well, I've baited some mouse traps with garlic just to be safe, but honestly, I think Pyo stands on its own two talons

Its inspiration is extremely obvious, but I think everyone agrees that, after the first passing glance, it has an identity all its own, in terms of both gameplay and presentation. I might even say it surpasses Pyoro in a few aspec--Oh fuck guys he's here

#pyo #pyoro #warioware #gamedev

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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I've hopped on this project to help out during the final stretch of dev and oughhhh it's a lotta fun :))) I've been focused a lot on refining and juicing up the basic movement, patching up bugs, and generally smoothing stuff out, and the game becomes more of a banger every day!! I'm so excited for ppl to finally play it!!! Alayna's got something weird, wild, funny, gut-wrenching, and unforgettable here and I'm super excited that I get to help make it shine :))))

the trailer for my upcoming game, Grey Area, is here!! It's releasing later this year on itch.io and steam!

Grey Area is a 2D, story-driven platforming game following a little girl named Hailey who finds her way into a mysterious world between worlds...

you can check out the page for it and my other work over here ~

#grey area

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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Dual Purpose Design in...

Hey all! I've been working on something I can't show you yet, but I've been thinking a lot about the design of one of my existing games!

I'm a big fan of dual purpose design and I try to pull it off where possible! I think it's cool for something to have both a downside and an upside. It can mean players will have to make lots of decisions, but it can also just add an interesting texture to a game! Or, if one mechanic has multiple uses, a game can feel more intuitive and "complete," because it makes the most out of every little thing!

If you've not played Pyo, there's a gameplay video on the store page to give you the gist, because I'm about to talk about a bunch of instances of dual purpose design in it!

youtube

Beans!

Much like in Bird & Beans (Pyo's inspiration!), the beans in Pyo are both a hazard and a prize. They're responsible for the destruction of the ground you stand on, but they're also how you score points, how you build and maintain big combos, and how you stay in the air. They can even save you from the very holes in the ground that they create, or help you bounce up to @bisthefairy so you can repair the ground. They're not good or evil, they're just beans!

Because of this dual purpose design, beans were super difficult to balance. If there were too few beans, protecting the ground would be a trivial task and big combos would be impossible to build, but if there were too many beans, it wouldn't be challenging to keep up a big combo, and it would be so easy to stay in the air that you'd never lose the game even after the whole ground was lost. Keeping this balance even as the game speeds up was really tricky!

By the way, beyond just being extra destructive, bombeans solve an important problem! If not for them, you could leave the game running forever and slowly rack up a huge score without even touching the controller

The dive!!

Margie's dive is absolutely loaded with purpose. It's so central to Pyo that it puts Margie's jump to shame. A real virgin vs the chad situation if you ask me

The dive was originally a double jump, but I quickly realized more horizontal control was sorely needed. It's a quick burst of lateral speed to get you over to the next bean, but it's also a way of turning around quickly. Margie's acceleration is very slow to accentuate this. The dive can also delay your fall, because it sets your vertical speed very slightly upward

Of course, it also leads to another important mechanic: the bonk! Diving into a wall will make Margie bounce up and away from it, giving you a little height, letting you stay in the air longer, and giving you a chance to double back in case you dove over or under a bean and missed it. It can even save you if you fall into a pit! It's a lot like a wall jump, but more streamlined, and it solves the problem of one sided wall jumping since you use up your dive in order to bonk.

The dive also leads to the game's most important subtle mechanic: The skid! If you touch the ground while diving, you'll skid off it without losing your combo, getting a very small bounce that affords a little bit more distance so you can bonk or grab a bean and keep your combo going

So, beyond filling several important roles on its own, the dive leads to two more extremely important and useful mechanics!

Ground!!!

For how many mechanics center around it, the ground can feel like an underused aspect of the game. Because the game is all about staying off the ground to get big combos, it's easy to undervalue it, but don't take it for granted!

You're able to drop blocks anywhere to mould the ground however you want it, and there are a few ways to strategically take advantage of this! Blocks jutting out of the ground can be bonked off of to keep a combo alive. The skid is your friend in this situation! It makes it much easier to hit the side of a single block without landing on the ground

Ironically, even a hole in the ground has its uses. You can actually fall pretty far into a pit without losing the game, and you can take advantage of this to chase green beans down into the abyss or bonk into the side of a pit to keep a combo going. That's a pretty sick trick I do a few times in the video on the store page! Block hitboxes actually extend down below the screen to make this easier!

(As a sidenote, this is actually why bombeans blast Margie up into the air if she gets too close when they explode. I kept dying by instinctually trying to chase them into pits even though they go away when they touch the bottom of the screen. Oops!!)

Damb!! That's a whole lotta DPD!!!

It permeates all throughout the game! Bis drops blocks but they also bounce you to help you keep your combo going! The stripes make the game look more interesting, but they also show at a glance where it's safe to land and where you should drop blocks to fill pits. The stomp lets you fall quickly to catch beans before they hit the ground, but stomping into the ground will also make Bis drop her block (at the cost of your combo!) I couldn't talk about Pyo's design without mentioning how many roles everything fills!

By the way, I think the term "dual purpose design" was coined in this GMTK video:

youtube

Thanks for reading :))

#Youtube

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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Output

Hey everyone! I wasn't satisfied at all with my output in 2022. I did a game jam and that was cool and a huge amount of fun, but outside that I barely found myself setting aside the time to work on my games. 2022 was a year of lots of changes for me both good and bad, but I think that was one of the bad ones!!

In the latter half of 2021 I made it a goal to make progress on my games at least a little bit every single day, and that worked out great!! That's how 99% of what's currently done on my roguelike got finished. But toward the end of the year, I missed a day and broke my streak, which totally killed my momentum, and I never quite got it back in all of 2022

So my biggest resolution for 2023 has been to work on my games every single day... but with the mindset that it's about completion, not streaks! If I miss three days this year, that's still 362/365 days. That's pretty good! I think that way it's much less discouraging and demotivating to miss a day, because it doesn't mean I have to start an entire big long streak all over again.

So far I've not missed a day yet! Wish me luck :)

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cassiesdevblog · 1 year

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hey guys this is my game!!! :) for 1 whole dollars you too can be a transgender chicken that says pyo!

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cassiesdevblog · 2 years

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oh yeah, I mentioned a game jam in my last post but I never posted about it here!

I made "Marshmallow on a Roll" for the GMTK game jam 2022 with two friends. I was lead programmer and one half of the design team. I'm super proud of what we whipped up in just 48 hours, and we took 53rd place! There's probably not a type of medal for that (if there is it's probably like, tin or something) but that's out of 6,000+ entries! top 1% baby!!!!!! look our game up on itch.io!

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cassiesdevblog · 2 years

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Sk8ing

Hey all! It’s been a while, but after participating in a game jam and spending a while working on my other game, BOXXLAM, I’ve been itching to get back into my big roguelike

For a long time I’ve really wanted to incorporate skateboarding into this game! I’m a skater irl (sometimes) and the main character, Ollie, is too. I want to have multiple playable characters (aiming for 4-5 at launch, to accommodate 4 players and because those are small numbers with room for lots of variation) with unique base mechanics, and while Ollie is meant to be the most basic, I still want her to have something that makes her stand out

Earlier in development, Ollie could hold a button (the same button would do a unique action for each playable character) to start skating, increasing her top speed and reducing her friction. It was kind of like Mario’s run button, but with a downside. It was more tedious than fun to use optimally, though, since you could just release the skate button and instantly get your full friction back for a quick turnaround. It also didn’t feel intuitive that simply standing on a skateboard would reduce your friction in the air, so I was never very confident in the system’s implementation. I can think of a few solutions for at least the first problem, but that doesn’t change that I just didn’t like that system very much anyway

With the desire to make some cool skating mechanics for a platformer still at the back of my mind, I checked out some other skating games for inspiration, but nothing struck me until recently when I was replaying the shovel knight game “specter of torment.” Specter knight can rail grind on his scythe in that game, and, most interestingly, he can get a suit of armor that lets him rail grind anywhere, activated by holding down on the d-pad when landing on the ground. Once grinding, he’ll move at a consistent speed forward and won’t stop until you hit a wall, push against the direction of the grind, or jump back into the air and land back down without holding down on the d-pad

This immediately caught my interest because not only is the reason to skate really simple and clear--to go fast--it has incredibly interesting ways of entering and exiting the state. Real-life skaters don’t often literally jump on and off their skateboards to transition between running and skating, but doing so is an extremely platformer character thing to do. It also adds depth to the act of changing states in a way that’s natural for a platformer character to do. If you have to jump and land back down to stop skating and thus turn around, there’s a bit of commitment to the action. You won’t be able to turn around right away, so be careful where and when you get on your board!

So today I implemented something similar to specter knight’s rail grind. Like specter knight, to start skating, you have to hold the skate button while landing on the ground. Unlike specter knight, pushing against the direction of movement won’t stop you, it will just make you move a little slower. You can also hold forward to move a little faster. To really stop skating, you have to either hit a wall or jump and then land back down. In addition, if you start holding the skate button while on the ground, Ollie will do a little hop. This makes it easier to discover that you can skate without needing a tutorial, and it makes the execution a little simpler. If you release the button while Ollie is skating on the ground, she will again do a little hop, making it easy to discover how to stop skating too, and creating a more 1:1 relationship between the button you’re pressing. This makes things easier to keep track of--if you’re holding the button, it’s not long before you’ll start skating, and if you’ve released it, it’s not long before you’ll stop!

Now, ok, after all that, I still kind of have a problem with it. It’s a cool mechanic, I think definitely cool enough to at least be an item you can find and use, but maybe not versatile or interesting enough to give Ollie something standout. I’ve felt the whole time like I’m going about things backward--instead of leading her mechanical identity with a mechanical idea, I’m trying to lead with an idea centering flavor instead. Skating is cool! If the main character is skating through hell bashing demon skulls with a baseball bat, that’s cool! Who wouldn’t want to play that?

I only just added it, though, and it may well grow on me. I’ll let my thoughts congeal and play with it some more before I decide what I want to do with it, but don’t be surprised if this mechanic is relegated to an item in the final build!

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cassiesdevblog · 2 years

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hey all! I've not had anything to say about my roguelike lately cause I've switched gears for now to the other project I have going on: a small hand-drawn arcade game in the vein of my last game, Pyo

it involves trash cubes! today I've been working on just managing to draw a good-looking trash cube. the way I draw is usually pretty tidy and orderly so this is a really daunting task for me. I'm looking at lots of references and ended up making a basic trash cube inspo board just to get them all in one place. wish me luck!

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cassiesdevblog · 2 years

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The speed stat and tight vs loose movement

So I'm a really big fan of platformers that feel loose, where you have to build momentum and then overcome it to turn around, like the early super mario bros games or sonic. But I also love games where you can speed up or turn around almost instantly, like celeste or hollow knight

At first I wanted this game to be more like the former. A looser, more slippery game. However, that's not always conducive to the kind of precision you might need to bounce off of multiple dynamic enemies without hitting the ground, and there will be a lot to think about in this game, so I'm wary of overburdening players by making them fight their own momentum in addition to everything else

On the other hand, I really really want this game to facilitate an extremely wide variety of gameplay styles through its many items and stats. I'd love to leave room for players to potentially end up with a build that makes them more slippery by the end of a run

One solution would be to just make an item or two that chang how slippery they are, but it would naturally need to come with an upside to offset that downside

Even so, it would need to be a common item, or else there would need to be multiple items with similar effects, to make sure it was actually as common as I'd want it to be

Honestly, there could be a whole system around trading friction for various benefits (maybe that's an idea I'll end up coming back to?) but the system I've landed on is actually really simple

Basically, alongside stats like HP and damage, you have a max speed stat. However, this stat is directly tied to both friction (which is only applied when you're trying to stop or turn around) and acceleration. I wrote up some formulas tonight to make it so that, as your max speed goes up, friction and acceleration go down. At default max speed, your character is very snappy, comparable to Madeline from Celeste. But at higher speeds, you'll play more like Mario or Sonic.

In this game, after a boss, you'll get a choice between a few different stats to increase, with max speed sometimes being one of them. You can choose to play faster at the cost of also having to play looser, or you can focus on raising other stats and stay slow but steady.

It might be an especially good idea to take a speed increase if you have an item that lets you dash forward or backward. It could help you cover the downside of turning around slowly while letting you play at high speeds, albeit a little more chaotically!

of course, this system may easily change with testing. I can imagine a world where nobody takes speed upgrades because nobody considers them worth the slip when they could just take stat increases that don't include downsides, and speed ups are avoided like the plague... or bob's brain

maybe instead later down the road I'll decide slipperiness should be an inherent, static trait of different playable characters? maybe I'll decide it should be tied to some other systems I have cooking? maybe I'll go to sleep? yeah actually I'm going to bed. goodnight!

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