Welcome back to another week of development fun!
This week I continued refining the garage building experience, focusing on rotating parts and attaching them correctly. This is a key element to creating more advanced MAV builds, something that I feel is very important for the more experienced players.
So here are the design goals I am looking to achieve:
I want the system to be easy to use
While most of the features of the build system are aimed at advanced users (it’s possible to build using just drag and drop, or the Auto generation) I want them to be easy to use so the learning curve from beginner to advanced builder is not to steep. I try to consider everything from the right keyboard combinations and the UI to make it as approachable as possible, without getting in the way.
It has to allow freedom
Player freedom always come with the cost of complexity. People are amazing and will always try things you never even thought about. There are many cases that I could have reduced the complexity of the code or the system but it would have limited the players freedom. Some of these trades make sense, but I always want to default to freedom.
It has to be predictable
This one is important, because I can’t predict what the player will do. So, I have to make sure the system at least gives them predictable results. If the player drags to attach points together, how they snap needs to be predictable. The behavior when removing parts, needs to be predictable. This means that even if the results are not ‘ideal’ at least the result can be predicted and accounted for by the player.
I know I have said it before, but getting the garage right is very important and I don’t want to move on until I have it final. I feel I have done a good job proving the actual combat is fun, so now I want to start back at the beginning and polish over everything in the game.
Consider this the official march to beta release, haha.
In reference to the polishing the garage, I have also started getting some additional artwork to help bring up the visuals of the garage. While the new backdrop helped a lot, I think the minor details need to be added in to help with the sense of scale and to break up some of the empty spaces.
Well, that is all I have for this week. Continue to look out for the next stable release, or if you are on the snapshot builds you can expect them to start picking up pace (1 released yesterday and at least 1 more planned for this week!).