Dev Blogs

Free time has been quite scarce recently. Deciding whether to write up a blog or to just work on games is always a conflict. The Monster Siege game has been overhauled with a sleeker, minimalist interface. When I first started working on the game, I wanted to make it complex and give the player tons of options. Good in theory, but in practice it becomes much more difficult to balance and more difficult to learn.

Too many options mean too many buttons, and it overwhelms a tester. They just looked at the screen and didn't know what to do. Rather than try to explain or make a tutorial I had to drastically simplify the interface. It would mean losing some key features and mechanics, but they can be worked in.

For a start, the turret control panel has been streamlined to a single screen instead of two. The large clunky graph replaced with smalled radial images along with icons and less text. Work on the new combat system is progressing, some code for abilities / attacks was adapted. The buttons themselves were decoupled from the old processes, and worked in with a card library. The first iteration of this combat was to allow the player to build out their base, choose their weapons and then inherit cards (abilities). It was interesting to develop that instead, and rewarding to see it work in the end. However, after some testing I found that giving the player total control over what cards were accessible would mean a highly predictable and repeatable style of game play.

Just with the previous style of cooldown / resource gameplay which suffered from being overly static, I decided to use a hybrid approach. Allow the player to unlock potential cards depending on base configuration, and allow the player to accept a new card upon victory, or to remove one. Possibly. There is the limitation of a mobile screen and real estate, this has to be planned out.