A lot of what I write about is my attempt to steer my own thoughts in the right direction while working on my games. I think, as a creator, you need strong beliefs to guide you because otherwise you will be lost in a grey sea. Gamedev and art in general are such vast, complicated things that they will swallow you up if you don't have conceptual buoys.
One such buoy I've been developing is the concept of staging in games. Now that I've kinda gotten a more solid idea of what it is, I've been thinking about how to apply it to my own game.
The central problem that I keep running into over, and over, and over again, and the problem I need to solve is the fact that you CANNOT TURN AROUND.
Mechanical implications aside, I think this is a very bizarre quirk of the game from an outsider's perspective. My prediction is that, once people play it, almost everyone will get annoyed by this random and seemingly abitrary limitation. The game they will see in their heads will clash with the game in front of them and they just will just assume that this limitation is some kind of mistake. Some kinda stupid quirk that I should have addressed.
So the question is, what do I do about this? Thinking a lot about staging and the idea of fostering a more intimate dev-player connection, I've decided that the only real chance I have of warming players up to this idea is to carry players though my design & thought process step-by-step as they play the game.
I need players to experience the direction lock in an environment they are comfortable with, then I need to gradually move away from that environment and introduce more and more unfamiliar elements. My delusionally optimistic hope is that by the time the game takes its final form as a top down beat em up/shmup hybrid, questions like "why can't I turn around?" won't even cross the player's mind, because they will internalize the reasons that lead to this design choice themselves.
So here is my idea :
- Since the direction lock comes from shmups, I should start the game off as a shmup.
- As the players go through the game, the shmuplikeness will give way to something more akin to a run n gun - there will be lots of shooting, but now against more dynamic enemies and with occasional Metal Slug esque melee.
- Once the players are comfortable and settled into a shmup/run n gun, I can start ramping up the beat 'em up elements until eventually they overwhelm the shmup stuff.
This will, hopefully, create a smooth gradient of playstyles so that by the time we reach phase 3, players will know that it's a shmup with beat em up elements, not a beat em up with shooting. That isn't quite true, but it's the state of mind I want players to be in because it will make them more charitable to my design choices. (A fun side note I realized : Alien vs Predator arcade takes the opposite approach)
Thankfully since the game is a hybrid of the 3 playstyles from conception, doing this comes fairly naturally. Especially recently, since I've added an ammo system. Really all that needs to change is level design, scrolling type and the types of enemies I throw at the player - the player mechanics will remain identical with the only changes being how much ammo the player gets, and what types of ammo.
So ideally, it'll feel as smooth as the genre transitions in Sin & Punishment 2, while conveying my intent. It does help that shifting gameplay modes through ammo and level/enemy design is something I enjoy. Something like Resident Evil 4's campaign is an excellent example of that - its a bunch of different games stuck together so tightly and smoothly that people don't even notice any transitions.
The only way to find out if any of this works is to finish the game, because there is always a risk that I might make something for nobody.
