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Dev Log: Procrastination and Anxities

Dev Log: Procrastination and Anxities
Wow this has been a month, hasn't it?

I kinda dropped off the face of the planet again. I had a dangerous combo of a little bit of anxiety followed by a visit from my family. This full combo took out about two weeks of time. Whenever I take a long break from something it always takes me forever to get back into it, and that's what happened here. I took a long break from my dev stream and didn't really touch any Sky Sisters stuff. I get this build up of really bad anxiety that does everything in its power to stop me from working on stuff again.

I'm climbing back in the saddle now though at least. I started on some bug fixes in Sky Sisters and started working on some last lingering tasks. I've started to dig more into distribution options for the game as well.

So, yeah, sorry. This happens in my brain sometime and it takes awhile to get over, but making this post should be a good lead into working again. I have a small trip coming up this weekend but hopefully that wont derail me too hard. I'm dreading the holiday season coming up though as that usually means total destruction of my work habits. I just hate how every time I fall off the rails at all it takes me forever to climb back on. I'm probably not the only one with this issue though!
dev log
Posted October 19th 2016 12:05 AM (General)
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Dev Log: Upgrade Queued

Dev Log: Upgrade Queued
One of the main pieces of feedback I recieved about Sky Sisters was something like "it would be nice if the players had a proactive goal instead of just reactive goals." Meaning that instead of just dodging things all the time it would be cool if the players could work toward some goal.

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Right now the idea is to have some sort of outline of a shape in the arena. The players can use the orb to trace that shape. Whenever a lap is completed the shape will change into something more complicated. Right now I have this tied to getting upgrades, which I'm still a little unsure of. The first time you complete a lap you unlock an upgrade. The second upgrade requires two laps, and every upgrade after that requires three laps. I have yet to try this out with two players though. I kind of like the upgrades always coming every 3 or so events, but it also seems like the most worthwhile reward that this shape tracing thing can give you.

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This might have to go through a lot of refinement as right now even I find it tough to find time to complete laps around this thing during all the madness of the gameplay. Having a proactive goal though also introduces the problem of cheesing certain events so I have to come up with ways to address that as well. Basically I don't want the optimal strategy to be to leave events running as long as possible to get more upgrades. We'll see how this turns out through play testing, and this might have to be something I possibly address or change after the first release of the game.
sky sisters dev log design gamedev
Posted September 30th 2016 2:50 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Enemy Shields

Dev Log: Enemy Shields
I keep mentioning ways to keep both players involved in the gameplay of Super Sky Sisters in my recent posts. Here's yet another way I've tried to address this issue!

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I've introduced the ability for enemies to spawn with shields that can be either red or blue. These shields operate in the same way that the Orb shield does just placed on enemies instead of the Orb. It's a pretty straight forward challenge: red shields can be destroyed by player 1 and blue shields by player 2. This means that situations will develop in the game where you are forced to switch who is doing the shooting at times.

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Another scenario that can arise as the game goes on is stacked enemy shields. Enemies can have more than one shield on them! So this makes switching who is doing the shooting even more important as now players will have to trade off multiple times in order to take down a single enemy.

So far I'm pretty happy how this change has effected the game, but I've yet to see it in an actual two player situation. I'm looking forward to my next play test opportunity as there's now a load of new things to test!
gamedev dev log sky sisters
Posted September 29th 2016 7:13 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors

Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors
One of the quick ideas I dropped into Super Sky Sisters after PAX was two big ole glass looking reflector orbs in the arena.

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I'm still trying to solve the issue of one player being "left out" of certain events in the game. Boss fights are the worst offenders of this still, but I think this is going to help fix that issue a little bit. Again my ideal scenario is that players make the conscious effort to switch out who is attacking, but usually that ends up not happening. With these reflector things on the edge of the arena the players can then try to line up with the boss in a way that lets both players attack at the same time. I'm excited to see if this actually makes any difference in my next play test.
sky sisters design
Posted September 26th 2016 10:32 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Progression Progress

Dev Log: Progression Progress
One of the big ideas I had from PAX was changing out the unlockable system in Super Sky Sisters to something a little bit more straight forward. Before PAX the system would unlock things like special abilities and game modes based on achieving certain goals. Like beating the second boss would unlock something, or passing 100 game events would unlock another thing. Although I thought this idea was cool, I decided to scrap it to go for something way more obvious.

I want the points in Sky Sisters to feel like they're contributing to some sort of larger goal, so the new progression system uses the player's total score to unlock new stuff. I even made this fancy new menu screen that shows how far the players are getting.

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I'm still trying to figure out how many points will be needed to get every level. For me right now it seems pretty well balanced but that usually means it's going to be way too difficult for the average player. I don't want unlocking things to take 50 hours of gameplay, but I do want the player to strive to improve their average score per session to unlock stuff faster.

For a long time I had no unlockables in Sky Sisters -- everything was available from the start, but over the past year I got a lot of feedback that suggested I should have some sort of unlocking system for two main reasons: One is that limiting the options of new players can be good for guiding them into the game, and the other is that players do really want that feeling of accomplishment of unlocking stuff even if it does feel like arbitrarily gating content. I am worried about the leaderboards feeling unfair to new players since they wont have all the options of long time players, but hopefully it wont take too long to unlock the same options.
sky sisters dev log design
Posted September 23rd 2016 1:03 PM (General)
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Dev Log: Super Star Effects

Dev Log: Super Star Effects
One of the main issues with Super Sky Sisters was the "star pad." I added this feature to the game to try and solve the problem of one player having "nothing" to do. How it works is every so often an energy circle will appear on the arena. If one player is inside of it, the other player will get a big boost to their attacks. This seemed like the perfect thing to add so that one player could try and help their ally by taking a position in the star pad, but the problem is that nobody understood what was going on.

A few people at PAX picked up on it, but overall I'd say about 90% of players didn't understand the use of the star pad, and even worse some confused it for something else (like healing.) To try and message it better I went back and added some more effects to the star pad. I have yet to actually test this so I'm not sure if it will work, but it does seem pretty dang better than before.

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It should be pretty hard to miss what is happening here now, or at least I hope!
sky sisters dev log art
Posted September 21st 2016 5:45 PM (General)
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