Finetuning

First I am apologizing for this late devlog. These past few weeks were a little busy, with BiG Festival going on and later on BRING (wich is an indie showcase event from ouw town), so I didn’t get much time to do these before now.

During this BRING I’ve talked with some ppl about finetuning the game.

2 years ago, on the 6th or like 8th edition of BRING, me and Thiago decided
to show up with 3 games on the festival. Those 3 were Rat Trap, Snake Scape
and Dogurai. Those two first games needed only a few modifications. Dogurai needed
a complete remake, mostly because the version we had was from GBJam 2014 and that
was not even close to the quality of the games we had at the time.

So during a week I had to remake everything, with Guax at my side
telling me to do something here and there, to increase/reduce the animation time of some things.
Some were completely… how do I say… had to be perfect, like: “move 1 pixel left
and decrease the collision box with 2 pixels. Also activate immunity only during frame 5”
or “during frames 1-3 he have to reduce the speed, then on frame 4 the damage is done, but
the others he wont deal damage and do something else.”

See, its not real hard to put it to work, but there’s so many small things here and there
that it becomes a enormous load of work.

The game was “ready” and we went to the festival. On the first hours, people really liked the game,
but not that much. The game was still raw. Can you tell when a beef is cooked? Like, can you
really say 1 second ago it was raw, now its cooked? Its not something you tweak here or there
and the game become nice.

The game was preety raw (or rare?), and all the awesome pepopple playing and giving a feedback about
the controls is what cooked the game in high fire on the oven. I say that because as peopple gave the
feedback, I fixed right away during the festival. Many small issues where like

• when you fall from a block, you already fall on full speed. Not accelerating from 0 to full speed

• when jumping, if you touch the ceiling, you stay in the air until the gravity pulls you back again
  And so on.
  This made the game a little more enjoyable.

During the next weeks, we’ve been doing the finetune. Increase from 8 pixels per second the player speed
to 8,5. The gravity form 3 to 3,8. The animation speed of a given frame was 100 ms, we changed to 85ms
Adding a small block near a big jump, so it wont kill the player, but shows the path or where a enemy stands.
Removing the hability of a flying enemy to shoot during some plataforms, it’s a way to make it easier without
making it trivial.

And this made the game feel so good. Small changes. Decimal values were added/removed. Those were
enought.

Past BRING, we met a guy who said on the first time he played the game he did not like it. He said now he
really enjoyed the game and loved it. He was playing the first level and then went playing the whole game
(even the unfinished levels). And he was playing that with a huge smile.

It doesn’t matter that much if the game have a cool mechanic (the quick time event combo), or cool boss fights… If the gameplay
feels a little clunky that can make a nice game be a medium-low game.

The process of creating any level in Dogurai takes so long because every enemy, every new thing we add
has to be really well thought out and tested lots of times to make sure it fits nice there and feels nice too.