Huge improvements today with performance, so rooms stacked with exploding and breakable objects won’t destroy the frame rate. Other touch-up work has been done with the control and overall feel. It’s really coming together and playing it on the XBOX today, I can say for the first time it feels like a real game. I’m proud of what I’ve done and am really looking forward to releasing Escape Goat.
Category: Dev Journal
Progress updates on the development of my games.
Escape Goat Update – First Complete Run Through
This evening, my sister-in-law Maxine did a run-through of the whole game, start to finish, for the first time. A couple rooms had glitches that made them impossible, but this was the first time it had been undertaken from intro text to credits.
It took 3 hours. There are too many rooms. I need to get rid of some of the less interesting ones. I didn’t think I had this many. I’m aiming for a solid 90-minute experience. Still lots of touch-up work to do, but it’s really getting close.
Escape Goat Week 2 Mini Testing Party
Week 2 of 3 in the final escape from project Escape Goat is complete. I held a small testing party with some friends tonight, and am holding 3.5 pages of valuable insight into where the game needs to go from here. Most of it is small fixes per level, or things I need to keep in mind when designing levels. There are a few small glitches in there as well, the type of thing that’s bound to surface when people play your game in unexpected ways. Though not all games ship glitch free, and physics and collision are hard to get right, even for the pros.
Overall, one of the biggest problems is that there are too many levels. Depending on the player’s skill at puzzle solving, there are probably 2-4 hours of gameplay here, and I need to get that down to 1-2 hours. Some of the puzzles devolved into joyless trial-and-error, and other ones were just too time consuming during the non-interactive parts, like waiting for a machine to operate and pressing a switch at the right moment.
So there’s tweaking some levels and removing some levels. Not so bad… but…
There are some scary things staring me in the face for this week:
- A crash bug during regular gameplay
- The player actor got destroyed but the game wasn’t detecting the player being gone, so it let the level play and couldn’t restart itself
- The new linear level layout is an improvement over the exploration model I had before, but there are two problems with it. First, the player doesn’t know you can exit the level and return to the hub, retaining progress on that level. And second, getting stuck on a single level sucks. Ideally the player can skip tough levels and come back to complete them later. This would require another rework of the world layout, to a gallery-style stage select, and I don’t know if this is worthwhile, even to experiment with in the next week.
Tomorrow: bug fixing, level fixing, brainstorming improving the world layout, and music composition.
Escape Goat Won’t be Featured at IndieCade
I got an email from the jury this morning informing me of the bad news.
They included feedback and criticism this time, which was hugely appreciated. Since I sent out a very early pre-alpha of Escape Goat as a work in progress, it’s not surprising it was turned down. Also, it just may not be the type of game they are looking for. The positive comments were a nice boost though. (I’ll publish them after the game is done because I don’t want to talk too much about design in the meantime.)
Even though my game’s not in the official lineup, I’ll be going to the show. See you there…