Your cart is currently empty!
Exit 665 Development Update #6 – IMPORTANT: GAMEPLAY PROPOSAL WITHIN
Liked the article? Want to see more content from us? Sign up to our paid news letter for exclusive content: development updates, discounts on merchandise, and development builds of our future projects as they come out.
Premium
$10.00 per Month.
9 responses to “Exit 665 Development Update #6 – IMPORTANT: GAMEPLAY PROPOSAL WITHIN”
With every article I’m more and more excited for it. The witch has unique design so far and I like the pumpkin features she has, but I have to ask. Are the bosses going to have something unique to all of them or something to make them really memorable to the player.
That’s the idea, we’d like every boss to be something memorable. This is going to be accomplished in equal parts by the story/their character and their won designs.
The spotlight mechanic sounds like a fun and engaging system. For spotlight hopping, have you considered experimenting with mouse input to move the spotlight between characters? The arrow key approach works fine, but I’m curious if alternative input methods were tested or discussed during development. Either way, I’m loving the direction you’re taking this. Outside of that, I’m loving where this is going, the enemy designs are unique along with the bosses. Keep on cooking, can’t wait for the next update!
we think of it in terms of hand placement, if the battle system only has ‘some’ mouse involvement selectively then it’s not very ideal for the player to be moving from [zxc + arrow keys] to [zxc + mouse] and back constantly. it’d need to be done all one way or the other. It’s also the case that something more precise as a mouse input would be cumbersome in these battle situations where players can misclick and highlight the wrong character or no character at all, whereas pushing the down arrow would for absolute certain, 100% of the time, highlight one character below.
Good point, it’s better to keep things consistent and reliable.
The spotlight system sounds like a fun way to keep the player engaged when it’s not their turn, one of the worst things about classical turn based RPGs is how often the player has to just sit there and take it when they’re being attacked. Giving the player a bit more control over the game is always a good thing. Besides that it would be interesting to have some enemies be able to block attacks made by the player, although it might be best to reserve that for bosses or mini bosses.
I’m certainly down for things the player can counteract and is aware of like enemies boosting each others’ defenses or working together to stay alive, requiring the player to change up strategies. I recall, although this is a totally different genre, hearing great criticism of the ‘razorback’ item from tf2 for denying another players’ inputs. The same may be true here if enemies can simply block the way you can in an rpg format, but I’m open to experimentation.
The current system does sound interesting. 2 action buttons might be just enough but 1 more would be nice (probably) for a more complex system.
When switching between characters, maybe instead of up and down arrow keys, you could instead press or hold down 1, 2, 3, or 4 to choose which fighter to commit certain actions?
pressing 1234 could indeed be an interesting alternative control scheme, we’ll look into it! I think that making more action buttons than 2 runs the risk of becoming too much to handle at once, but I’m certainly all for experimentation. Thinking on it more, the mario and luigi games I quoted did have two different buttons as well, both bros had one for hammer and one for jumping. It would certainly be interesting as a boss mechanic.