Orb Game 1.3 (Improve My Game Jam 17)

Introduction

It’s been several months since we released Orb Game as part of Eggplant Podcast Game Jam #4. While we were satisfied with our initial release, the game was a bit rough around the edges, and there were several things we didn’t have the chance to implement or refine with the limited time we had. 

In particular, a portion of our players found the game difficult to get a handle on and got frustrated very quickly. While we want the game to be challenging and to some extent punishing, we don’t want the players to be confused about the controls or the central mechanics of the game.  For Improve My Game Jam 17, we focused on making the new player experience a little more friendly. 

Improvements

To make the game more accessible to new players, we made the following improvements to the game:

Controller support

The first addition we made is controller support, which was requested by some who found the keyboard controls confusing. A gamepad is a natural and intuitive fit for our platformer.

Intro levels

In the original version of the game, the player is asked to do a fairly complex maneuver in the first level: shoot an orb at a wall, jump onto it, and ride it to the other side of the screen. While some players with more platformer experience picked this up immediately, we realized that this is too big an ask for players less familiar with the genre. To make this easier, we added several intro levels that introduce the core mechanics one at a time before combining them for that orb riding sequence.

Splash Screen

We also added a splash screen which, in addition to looking more polished, hopefully subtly nudges a new player to consider riding on the orbs. We use orb riding as a central mechanic of the game, but some players needed prompting to make this connection. We hope this screen can help players figure out the orb riding without having to spell it out within the game itself.

Control Prompts

We wanted to include messages within the game that break down the game controls bit by bit. That way, they don’t have to look at our itch.io page to know how to play. One of our later puzzles requires a clever use of an uncommonly used button. We wanted to use these prompts to remind the player of that action so it’s in the back of their minds.

Polish

In addition to making the game a little more accessible for new players, we also updated a few things to make the mechanics tighter and new content more varied.

Add orb decay animation

In the old game, there was no indication of when the orb was about to decay. We added a blinking animation 2 seconds before the orb finally decays to help the player better plan around decay.

Remove corner collisions with player

Some of our levels could be made much easier by standing on a corner piece. This was never intended, so we removed collisions with corners to remove that opportunity to cheat.

Sophisticated logic for switches

We had always planned to have switches that could hold other switches, level goals, etc. However, the way we first coded the switches didn’t allow it. We refactored the switch code to allow for nested switches, which should provide an opportunity for more complex puzzles and level logic in general.

Next steps

Improve My Game Jam #17 provided a great opportunity for us to resume development, and going forward, we intend to continue improving and refining the game. 

New levels

After focusing on polish for this jam, we’re excited to add new content and expand the game further. We believe there’s still a lot to be explored within our existing mechanics, and we’re also looking forward to making new levels that take advantage of the expanded switch logic.

Better level creation

Our current level creation workflow is not ideal. By default, Godot requires any tiles with distinct collision layers to be on separate TileMaps. This means we have several separate tilemaps, one for each standard game element, and so on for each switch. We want to be able to place distinct tiles on the same tilemap and separate them into their distinct layers at compile time.

Polish

While the game is in a better state than ever, there’s still some rough edges we intend to improve. 

In particular we’d like to improve:

• The  menu and pause system
• The player experience when they get stuck and need to reset
• The end of the game
• Collision behavior consistency