The last few days involved a ton of re-shuffling and re-organizing of what Virtue's Heaven (hopefully) will be and that not only involved the level layout, but basically all of it. For example, the game had a charge attack for almost a year now, but I struggled with finding a good place for it. Was it a standalone element? Was it tied that whole "Zeal" power up bar? Was it limited in some other? Will there be more than one kind of charge attack? I tried out different things, but it remained kind of detached from the rest. Also forcing the player to stand still for over a second felt weird, when the rest of it is really fast paced.
Today, I realized that the best way to give this attack a bit more purpose and tie it into the rest of what the player can do, would be to attach it to a combo meter, that charges up when you damage enemies and after certain amount of attacks in a row (right now it's five), you can press a button and unleash a stronger attack.
Now it's not just a thing you can do, if you feel like it. By tying its availability to your normal attacks, it becomes something more similar to a finisher. It now fairly nicely flows from your regular moves, instead of forcing you to stand around and do nothing for a moment. I also don't have to worry about limiting its use, because the attack itself is too powerful, or whatever, because there's a very set interval when players have access to this move.
It's very strange, because I am spinning my wheels with this game a lot, but I also feel that even in all of these dead ends that I run into with its overall structure, it still feels like I'm making progress? Even with this restructuring that I did this week, it's not like all the work I did over the past three Months was for nothing. A lot will just be recontextualized, or used as a jumping off point for something else. At the same time, this was the first big conceptual change I made with this project, where the idea actually got smaller, as weird as it sounds. So I hope I'll be actually making some progress soon.