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.
Tag: Development
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: Two Development Weeks Remaining
Last weekend, I made a 3-week plan to finish this game. So far I’m on track with week 1 behind me. I have a draft of the game that includes about half the levels I need, and the game mechanics have been solidified. I made a lot of changes along the way to get things to this point. I wish I could go into detail here, but it’ll spoil the surprise, and the changes will have to be enumerated in a future postmortem-style article.
So what’s left?
- Music
- Some of the sound effects
- Graphics touch-up work
- Some level design
- Editor user-friendliness
Over the last week, my list of “done” tasks is about twice as long as the “to complete” tasks I built at the start of the week. This is because while making levels, I uncovered a few glitches (even in my squish detection logic) and reworked the design of some of the gadgets to allow for more interesting puzzles. This week I will keep the code and design reworks to a minimum and just focus on content. Praying for no major bugs to appear.