A Money Problem

So I had been showing my game to Xen and BadTV and Bubbles and Moxie and I had it to a pretty playable point.  There was a town (which consisted of your room and a store) and cave (which had a couple of wizards).  You could go into the cave and wizards would drop green orbs, which I decided would be the currency of the game.

The only things you could purchase with the orbs at the time were escape ropes and potions.  Escape ropes were obviously very important.  Once you had gone down a level in the cave you couldn't get out without one.  Potions were less important.  They behave like fairies in Zelda games.  They are more useful now, but at the time the wizards in the cave had a hard time killing you.

So at this point everyone was pretty much telling me they didn't feel attached to their money.  One of the money mechanics is that if you die in the cave you lose all your money.  So since they didn't feel attached to their money, they didn't care if they died either.  Severe problem.

It was then the second major mechanic was introduced to the game:  A furniture shop.  The idea came about when I was trying to figure out what your room should look like.  It was empty at the time (save for a bed and piggy bank) which reminded me of Harvest Moon 64.  So I decided instead of pre-populating the room the player should do it manually.  It was then I took a look at a few games:

Animal Crossing
Azure Dream
Dark Cloud

All pretty awesome games in my opinion.  So I had a money problem and a furniture idea.  Animal Crossing is an excellent example of a game where players are attached and rewarded by money.  The two major reasons for this I think are you can choose what to buy, and what you buy has a physical presence.

My game at this point could easily incorporate a furniture store where you buy different furniture that could appear in your room, but I felt the idea wasn't complete.  The idea of the game was to crawl through a dungeon, and try to get farther and farther in while eradicating wizards.  The furniture store would "fix" the money issue, but as is wouldn't fold into the direction of the game.

That is where Azure Dream and Dark Cloud came in.  Both games involve the player trekking in and out of a dungeon, and managing a town on the outside.  These two mechanics meshed really well because they were interlinked.  In Dark Cloud, while in a dungeon you would find buildings that could be placed in town and you wanted to exit the dungeon to do so.  When you got in town and placed the building you might find a new weapon in that building that made you want to dive back into the dungeon.  So I wanted to fold the furniture store and dungeon together, and I decided in the end on the simple idea of having each piece of furniture do something that would help in the dungeon or in the game in general. ( A bed that lets you recover faster, a piggy bank that accrues interest).  The furniture quirkiness has also added a bit more charm to the game as well.

Basics of the Basics (Controls)

I'm a stickler for horrible controls.  Wizards Love Caves is a pretty simple game so I needed stupid easy controls.

My initial control scheme was:
WASD/arrow keys for directional movement
Left-click/spacebar to fire an arrow

So as soon as a I had a wizard to defeat I sat this in front of Xen.

His feedback:
Why in the hell can the wizards shoot in all directions but I can only shoot in four directions?
I want to aim with mouse.
I hate your stupid game.

What I got from it:
Don't! have mouse controls, if they shoot with left-click they want to aim with the cursor.

Moxie:

The spacebar is too close WASD and the arrows.  Use Z  and X for changing spells (this was before the change to shooting arrows).

What I got from it:
Pretty much exactly what Moxie said.  He pinned down the control issue I was having with my general (and unnamed, uncredited) playtesters.  I switched the control scheme to arrow keys and Z.  It has worked out swimmingly.

Scoping Down

So over the course of two weeks (the amount of time I have been developing this game) one of the major things that play-testing has forced me to do is scope down.  Credit also has to be given to BadTV because after I had described to him all the mechanics in the game he looked me straight in the eye and asked me if I was gonna be able to implement all of that, and balance it, in the time-frame I was working in.  The answer was a resounding "No".

So before I get into the nitty-gritty of how this game has developed, I want to go over where this game started.

It had some pretty humble beginnings.  In fact, it was never meant to be a game at all.  I was putting together some pixel art sprite animations for a different class when I realized 2D sprite animation was The Shit.  One little animated dude walking around was way more fun than my current game, and that is pretty sad I guess.  So I decided to roll with it.

It was at this point I decided it would be a simple dungeon crawler, and wizards would be involved (since I wanted to do a dragon warrior-esque wizard animation).  I came up with this idea of a cave infested with wizards all-of-the-sudden, and you would have to kill them.  Also there was a town.  BadTV helped me come up with the name.  He asked me why wizards would "infest" a cave and just chill there.  I answered him and the rest is history.

If you've been following along, and have played the game (that seems like a non-intersecting Venn diagram to me) you might have realized I haven't developed the idea very much past this point.  Well the reason I'm writing this post is because I had.  In the original design the player can shoot spells like the wizards (in the current game he shoots arrows) and he had to upgrade his spells at the spell shop, and he could shoot three spells because there were three wizard types (now there are only two) and there would be a rock-paper-scissor system for how effective the spells were.  Bah.

I had the spells partially implemented as well.  The player was shooting ice spells just like the blue wizards.  It was Xen and BadTV who punched me in the face with reality.  Xen said he couldn't tell the difference between the player spells and the wizard spells, he pouted a bit (haha, Xen).  He wanted to be different and cooler than the wizards.  BadTV laughed in the face of the scope of my game.

Awesome Playtesters get Awesome Code-Names

So, I probably won't get around to asking all of my play-testers if they mind me using their name on this blog, so I'm going to come up with some code names for my best testers.

Here are some folks I will be talking about quite a bit:

Xen - doesn't generally like Super Nintendo style games in general, so is an awesome tester for general playability and he is totally willing to tell me how crappy my game is, an awesome quality in a tester.

BadTV - a self-proclaimed game designer, he will lay down why my game sucks and give me hard data to back it up.

Bubbles - won't give me the harshest review, but can tell me whether my game is fun overall and if it isn't can point out the biggest reasons why not.

Moxie - plays my game because I won't take no for an answer.  Resentfully gives me (pretty good) feedback.

Wizards Love Caves, they seriously do.

Wizards Love Caves is the name of the game I am developing currently, using Unity 3D.  It is a top-down mystery dungeon game where you can decorate your house!

You can play it here : www.amylynnprice.com/wizards.html

I will be using this blog to post play-testing data, as well as any development notes.