• She/Her

I'm Luna! 26y/o Trans kobold/puppy in Michigan, this is my Personal page so be prepared for NSFW content, minors fuck off -certified good pet-

also @SapphicScribe for my writing work, although there isn't much to see there at the moment ;p



love
@love

I've been wanting to post more for a while, but I haven't really had much going on to actually talk about other than work, if I'm being honest. So fuck it! I'm just gonna talk about work! I'm really proud of it, after all!

Last September we released our lesbian road trip RPG Get in the Car, Loser! (Steam and Itch) after having been in development for four years. It's been a really exhausting project to work on, but also a really fun one that's been a really big learning experience for me. I'd never worked on any kind of game with combat in it, let alone a full RPG-ass RPG, so I ended up learning a lot of lessons about things like balance, progression, but most importantly, how to make "pressing a button and watching something happen" feel satisfying.


I keep wanting to say that we've spent the past year working on DLC, but that's not quite right—in the months after release, we ended up having a ton of bugfixes and balance patches. Some of these were just very unlikely edge cases that slipped through the cracks of user playtesting, like what if you successfully kill an enemy that's already being killed by Zantetsuken; technically possible, but the timing on this is really hard to do! And of course, lots of small balance changes, tweaks to the encounter rate, and so forth.

Here's an example of a pretty big change that we ended up shipping post-launch. GITCL has the ability to use items in battle at any time for free, which I thought was pretty well-balanced given that you have to use up the item in the process. However, some playtesters ended up grinding way more than I thought and accumulated huge stores of items—which is great, that's something you can do in RPGs! But there were two problems here. First off, we originally didn't have any item stacking, so it ended up being a UI nightmare if you had pages upon pages of items. That was an easy fix, at least.

The second problem was a lot harder, though! It turns out, if players have a huge stockpile of items that they got from grinding... they feel kinda bad about using them? Like it's just cheap or overpowered to pile them on? So the player's got this hard-earned reward I hadn't considered they'd go so hard on, and they're not even feeling good about it.

(Final Fantasy XIII: Lightning Returns, 2013. Incidentally, one of my favourite games of all time. Ask me how I feel about it sometime! I can talk about its design decisions FOREVER.)

During development, I had considered having a Lightning Returns style inventory system, where you only have a small number of item slots... but using items in battle is still free.

Ultimately it felt too complicated for an unnecessary restriction! But I came back to the idea after watching streamers with too many items feel uncertain about using them up, and decided that actually, if you had just a little bit of a restriction on it—you can only use six items per battle, and you gotta pick them ahead of time—then it wouldn't quite feel like cheating, since the game's clearly kept in mind! In practice, six items in battle is actually kind of a huge number. But I think it's the feeling of it that makes the biggest difference.

Anyway, that's just one of the bigger features we added into the game over the past year. But most of our time has been spent working on a new piece of DLC, a story chapter called The Fate of Another World that's about a quarter of the length of the full game, that synthesizes a lot of the design lessons we've learned over the past five years of working on GITCL, and also delves deeper into some of the themes I thought were most interesting during development. I'm gonna talk about it more soon, but you can also learn more now on its pages on Steam and Itch. If it sounds cool to you, it would really mean a lot to me if you wishlisted it! And if you've got any questions about either the DLC or the past year's worth of patches, I'm happy to answer them in the comments!


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in reply to @love's post:

lmao the thing is that the first phase of the final boss will detonate one of your items for 99 damage instead of attacking if you've got any items left, so this change actually made this part of the fight EASIER

Even though I'm not in gamedev, I love reading this sort of retrospective.

I love the non-intuitive solution you found, and it's nice to hear about fixing things for psychological comfort reasons.

The item limit system is a really cool solution! It's something I see here and again in JRPGs and it always feels like it adds an extra touch of strategy. I'm excited for the new DLC, it looks like it's going to explore some really cool parts of the world & characters that I wasn't expecting at all.

If I recall the reason why I stopped using items is that it seemed I could only use any amount of items, once, and then the game would never pause again for the rest of the battle.

From screenshots of the upcoming DLC it seems that everyone's HP is very different now. Is there some new kind of progression for The Fate of Another World and does this mean we can only start this chapter at the endgame?

I don't believe that's currently a known bug, but uh, if you can ever replicate that, please do let me know and I'll take a look right away!

You are indeed correct on both counts—this chapter continues the story after the end of the game, so you can only start it from an endgame save. (Although you don't need to have DLC1 completed.) And yes, it does have a new progression system exclusive to this chapter, the Adversarial Zodiac! I wanted to recontextualize the party members and have a sense of progression across the chapter, but not mess up endgame builds too much, hence the new system!

you can only use six items per battle, and you gotta pick them ahead of time

Ah I love this. How did you settle on six specifically, did you have to tune that number at all?

Ha ha, this was definitely an instance of it being driven by vibes-based decision-making. I put in six in the initial design sketch for the new menu just because it fit the first visual layout I tried out... and it passed an initial gut check by virtue of being the same as the Lightning Returns inventory size.

I did some playtests of a single chapter just to make sure it felt right, of course, using some underpowered builds that forced me to use items relatively frequently, and it seemed to apply just enough pressure to feel right. Catching myself in a boss fight realizing that I needed to change my item layout if I wanted to win, then doing it successfully on the second try, felt like good proof that it had created the situation I was hoping for. If it hadn't worked out on that test, I probably would have had to go back to the drawing board with the layout, I wouldn't have committed hard, of course! But ultimately I think the actual number could have been anything in a pretty wide range, because the ultimate impact is just the feeling of pressure, rather than any particularly finely balanced economy.

I made this joke on Twitter a while back but it's also basically true: "Game design is typing 120 points as an arbitrary placeholder value that 'feels right', then finally months later actually breaking down the average rate, picking a firm range for how many fights you want the player to do, doing all the math... and replacing it with 130 instead." It's important to test, but honestly, a lot of the time the initial gut feeling turns out to be correct!