My feedback in super short: - one death "pop" animation for all enemies is good, this one looks kinda boring and oversized for most early enemies. If you only use one animation, it should look and feel rewarding - like in your example from the other game. Also, the "boom" animation, especially the last bit how it vanishes looks great. Get something with that quality and fluidity of animation, and you're set. - having a sniper rifle in a game, where the room is 10 x 30 meters feels unwieldy and misplaced. I'd go for Revolver (High damage, precise on all distances, medium firerate), Shotgun (High Damage, good for short distance, low fire rate), Assault Rifle (Low Damage, great on all distances, high fire rate). That's it. If you want to add another gun, add a Grenade Launcher for AOE, something that's a spectacle in a small room. Or add a "skill based" weapon, like the "Shock Rifle" from Unreal Tournament back in the day. It had one projectile slow and big, one fast and precise, and if you hit the slow one with the precise one, it exploded into an AOE. Great fun in small rooms. - enemies - do both. you start with adding more enemies, so people know how many hits they need to take them out, and it's a bigger challenge to handle the higher enemy count. but also introduce more fierce enemy variants, that make "obviously" more damage. e.g. a green round slime does 1 damage. a spiked, slightly faster red slime does 2. an icredibly slow but giant orange slime on fire does 4. always go duplicates, it's easiest to anticipate and wrap your head around. maybe even go for a "global logic", like enemytype normal = 1 dmg. enemytipe spiked = 2x. enemytype elemental(e.g. on fire) = 4x. - gun dudette being able to teleport several times sounds FUN. teleporting once sounds boring. i'd love for the skill to deplete the bar, once you activate it. Basically, once you filled the bar, you can activate the skill and use it 4x. each activation depletes the bar by 25%. you can only fill the bar up again once it's empty. now it becomes not only fun, but something to consider and plan ahead. also you could add items to allow for more jumps, or effects on landing, e.g. AOE fire damage after teleport. Basically, make the things fun and overpowered to use, so I can't wait to play again. Also, love the progress you've made with the game, it really looks drastically different. Looking forward to your next vid.
9:14 - to get around the thing of players counting shots, you could just have each bullet sound out an increase in pitch. That way, even if you were to increase the amount of bullets in a clip, you'd still know how long until you hit the big round.
I was thinking about that. I actually tried a few different pitch shifts as you get closer to the bullet firing, but they all felt weird. Especially since you're firing constantly, it got a little annoying. I might end up just throwing my hands in the air and adding a UI element above the player's heads to show the bullet count. But I'll wait for a round of playtesting before I actually do anything, it might not be an issue at all. 🤔
This is the first devlog of yours that I have watched, and I thought the game looked really cool, so I thought, "Wow! This looks so nice and polished, and the mechanics look complicated, It must be made with Unity or Godot or something like that." And then I saw the Gdevelop code. A fellow Gdev! This gives me more confidence about my own game that I'm making with Gdevelop.
Well thanks, the game has a long way to go, but it's getting there. If you want more motivation, check out a developer name "Sleeper_Games" on twitter. They're always making something different with GDevelop, but also the games page on the GDevelop website has a bunch of cool games. gdevelop.io/games
@@HelperWesley I checked it out. It looks SO polished! By the way. I checked out some of your other devlogs, and saw you have an object for each bullet. If you don't think it would be to tedious, I would recommend having one bullet object, and then an animation or two for each bullet. I think it would make it easier to add more bullets, and find other objects, (the bullets take up space). Of course, I don't know your game dev flow, but I just thought it might be easier.
Could've just titled the video "Fixing the MANY bugs in my game" and no one would have a problem, but gotta get that ad rev I guess. This isn't even lying. That's called marketing, or showing the best of your product.
It felt like a lie of omission, hiding all of the bugs I knew were in the game, but just kept ignoring to make it seem like the game was better put together than it actually was. 😅 (There were a bunch of other bugs I fixed that weren't included in the video because the editing was getting pretty long.)
@@matute08 Some would consider that a type of deception, not that I personally think it was that deep, but still worth considering that it somewhat falls under the same classification.
Honestly, I'm just glad to see a video on Spent Shells again lol For feedback on difficulty: > In The Binding of Isaac, some enemies have a chance to be a champion enemy, which gives them a minor "quirk," such as extra health, more damage, exploding on death, shooting stray bullets, moving faster, being hard to see, leaving creep on the ground, etc. The chance for an enemy to be a champion should scale with the difficulty. > That being said, champions in Isaac also have a chance to drop a pickup upon death. Similarly, jammed enemies in Enter the Gungeon (Triple health and double damage bullets) drop twice as much money upon death. I think that champions should drop an extra point or something, adding a risk VS reward mechanic to the game. The harder the game gets, the more rewards you earn, something that rewards good play. > Also in Isaac, some enemies have a chance to be replaced by a variant of themselves, either stronger, or a slightly different behavior. Same with champions, maybe enemies have a chance to be replaced by these stronger variants as the game goes on. For example, the ghosts being replaced by more aggressive spectres that shoot bullets in a different way?
Ooooh. 🤔 That could be a good way to do it, turning a normal enemy in to a special one wouldn't be hard to do. 🤔 A solid maybe for this idea.(Once I get all of the stuff I'm working on now finished up. 😅)
So far all of my games feel like they are held together by duct tape. As long as it works and it's fun, then the players won't care if your code is a pile of spaghetti. Anyways, cheers and thanks for sharing :)
What if instead of the jarring bouncing off the doors, the player instead gets teleported out of one of the other three doors. You might not want to do that since it might be an easier escape route or way to kite enemies. However, it could be another sudo movement mechanic and lean into the idea of the doors being magical teleporters.
2:34 about the wall clipping thing. Wouldn't it be easy to just put colliders in those doors? it would enable when you enter a stage and once you have completed it it would disable. I think it would make things a lot easier
You should do a rage mode of all enemy if player is takes too long in the room... It will be fun with scaling with enemies. And also you should increase the scale of difficulty linearly. My thought will be to give hybrid means both number of enemy increasing and the damage increasing.
6.14 How about adding "Corrupt Mobs" to game. Imagine a single ghost , tinting its color or adding particles to it and make it far faster then other while also increasing the healt and the damage of it making a kind of mini boss. And over time the games get harder thede corrupts mobs spawn more and more.
Instead of scaling number of enemies with difficulty, I'd take an orthogonal design approach and increase the combinations of different enemies first. So on lower difficulties, the player only faces one enemy type at a time. Then at higher difficulties, they face combinations of 2, 3, 4, etc enemies with highly contrasting attack patterns that force the player to adapt new strategies to survive.
There's already some of that in the game, when you start playing you only face ghosts and spiders, and then you're introduced to new enemies as time goes on. The big thing I'm trying to get rid of with this change is the player dying in one hit because of scaling damage. Dying in one hit was just super unsatisfying, but the game needs to end at some point, so something has to kill eventually the player. 😅
It's not lying. You are just presenting your game in a way that makes it look better. To some extent, everyone does this, as they don't tell you everything they did in a day, for brevity, but also because it may not be something they want to share. Also, just because you mentioned an idea, it doesn't mean that you have to actually go through with it and implement it / fix it. Also, relying on an old version of something, and just ignoring deprecation warnings is a common thing in the industry. (I see a lot of deprecation warnings on the daily at work, but I can't really fix it as the dependencies we have rely on older versions of some other dependency.) Also, games often aren't completely bug free, completely done, etc, until launch, and even then it may even be missing some things if the project was over scoped, or they were rushed. (at least that is what I have heard a lot of people say) Fun fact, if hiding the implementation details or bugs is lying, then Doom (1993) is a game of lies. It's not real 3D.
For the ennemies scaling, what about doing a bit of both? A bit more enemies, a bit more damage, and then more enemies, more damage, more enemies... I like diversity, it makes the game more rich :) Not sure about the sniper, it doesn't make much sense in such a small area. OR it could be kind of a loaded shoot. It slows you down while loading, takes a couple of seconds, maybe a couple more, but when you unload it it deals more damage AND pierces through enemies. So, it is still useful and rewarding when they are many enemies on the screen. Like a sniper you must placement is important.
The big thing I'm trying to get rid of in the game is people eventually getting one shot, so that's why I want to avoid scaling damage from the enemies. I'm hoping that players will find it more satisfying to get whittled down to 0 HP by a dozen enemies in the room than a single stray shot. 🤔 ___ I'll wait to see what playtesters say before I'll revisit the sniper rifle again, which means I've got to finish up all of the loose ends I have opened right now to get that playtester version ready. 😅
here's my thoughts for the new enemy stuff I think a bit of everything is good (extra damage/health/ numbers of enemies maybe even speed for normal enemies but that would require a cap on the speed bonus imo maybe a cap for each thing as well cuz infinite scaling is a lot to deal with) and then balancing around all of the aspects of enemies being beefed up, because adding just the +X number of enemies as the games goes on could easily overcrows the screen and make the designs feel less special/ more annoying to look at
6:14 Increasing the number of enemies or giving them new abilities with higher difficulties is always better than just stat increases. So many games have “hard mode” which is just a boring slog because all the enemies have an absurd amount of health, which is lazy difficulty scaling. I’m not saying increasing stats is inherently a bad thing, but relying on that entirely is.
i have this idea about the game hard scaling, the enemy will be tankier also each room will have a random spawn of enemies so as the game goes by the enemy will hard to kill and it will be fun because its gonna test the player skill like dodging bullets, picking buffs, and picking guns
My helper wesley fix has been fulfilled. And about the scaling, you could also have some of the harder enemies also do 2 damage instead of 1, kind of like in hollow knight
The problem is that people are losing more health than they thought they would, and randomly losing more health than you thought could result in a confusing and unsatisfying death. Having 1 hp left naturally makes players panicked, and dying when they thought they had 2 hits left would make them confused and a little annoyed.
@@HelperWesley I'm not sure if you have enemies in your game with SFX when they attack. But maybe if you used a different SFX for a heavy attack, or showed a charging visual that it is a heavy attack, then it wouldn't catch players off-guard as much. Unless the issue is that players don't realise they take double damage, in that case, Hollow Knight shows a more extreme visual for being hit and a different SFX to make it obvious double damage was done. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue in HK as you learn quickly that the enemy does double damage and just adapt accordingly from then on, maybe the same could apply here? Also knowing that there are some enemies that do double damage, would then make the player more cautious of potential dangers they haven't learnt about yet and makes them adopt a different playstyle accordingly depending on their confidence that they will or won't get hit by the enemy.
I think maybe instead if just filling rooms with enemies, or just making enemies that one-shot you, you could have it so some rooms are filled with low-damage enemies, and others have less enemies that are stronger. Then as the game goes on, when you come across a rooms with loads of enemies, there's simply more enemies, and when you come across a room with few, high-damage enemies, the enemies do more damage. I also think, you should keep the "pop" particle, but only display it for when you one-shot an enemy.
As far as difficulty is concerned, more enemies would have similar or the same downsides as having their health/ damage increase. A smart approach would be something that changes the way the player approaches an encounter. After 2 bosses, you can start spawning in new enemies and traps, or room layouts with more pillars and chokepoints. The Binding of Isaac does this I believe, they have easy and hard room templates depending on how good your run is. Hope this was constructive somehow
We definitely want to add more variety as players get further in to the game, but our game goes on forever til the player dies. So this change is more about trying to murder the player before they start to get bored on a run. Some people found ways to play for way longer than we expected in playtesting, and in the least fun and boring way possible.😅 This is all about making sure the player is good and dead, but not in an unsatisfying one shot kind of way.(If that makes sense)
@@HelperWesley Ah I see now. That's a pretty tricky problem to solve because like you say, you'd not want to just buff the enemies' stats. Adding more enemies is a decent, if sloppy solution, ideally there would be a more novel solution but alot of that comes down to the specifics of your game. I'll just spitball some ideas below. There could be a big boss enemy that chases you down as you go through the dungeon. Once the player has played 50% of what you want them too, they start being chased. After a few minutes/ rooms the boss spawns. If you beat the boss another, more powerful one starts to chase you, with a shorter spawn time. This could get to the point where there are multiple bosses on screen at a time, so you'd want to set limits for spawn time and # of bosses allowed on screen. You could add a kiss-curse mechanic. These are a little hard to make feel good, but essentially you give the player a cool ability or power-up while also handicapping them in some way. Handicapping the player in general is a good way to shorten runs, as long as they're making the choice to become handicapped. Maybe there's a sword with a vampiric effect, but you constantly take damage when wielding it. You could possibly trade max HP for stat bonuses and etc. The Binding of Isaac does this as well with their "deals with the devil". You'll find something that works out, hope I at least gave you some ideas. Sorry if the last comment was snarky btw it was late for me lol.
@@charlesdilks3267 I could see the boss one being interesting. The part of the change I want to make where most players hopefully die will be the faster boss animations and movement. Ideally the bigger and badder bosses will be what ultimately kills them.
you need to increase the game speed to 1.25 Because it's your project you yourself cannot see that this one change will make the game more fun. I think there was a game dev talk about this somewhere on YT
Game development is essentially smoke and mirrors in getting things top work anyways. Waaaay different than your traditional software development process when creating CRUD apps in a business environment. Thanks for sharing and good luck on getting those bugs squashed!
I think everyone has bugs in their game that we're just ignoring until it's time to fix them. Glad you were able to mitigate a lot of things and hope they weren't causing you to feel guilty.
instead of just adding the number of enemies, or just adding how much damage they make, just do both as more time passes, more enemies will spawn, and then they'll make more damage, then more spawn, then more damage ect...
A lot of people are saying this, and I think I should have mentioned why I'm making the change in the video. 😅 People would eventually get 1 shot with scaling damage, and it was really unsatisfying for them. So I'm hoping more enemies that all deal 1 damage will make death more interesting as they get whittled down to 0 HP by a bunch of enemies, instead of getting 1 shot by a stray bullet.
I am not sure on the difficutly scaling idea, isn't it going to make it near impossible to stay alive late game due to the high number of enemies and projectiles? Not only that but isnt performance going to also take a hit? Maybe you could have it where enemies health or damage increase by a random value, like 1-3. So they either have a chance to do more damage on top of the chance to gain that benefit in the first place or they just get a random health increase.Kind of like elite enemies in other games. Maybe interesting to have some buffs to affect these odds too.
Man gotta say one thing Its because of yours and artmanoils arts that i luterally only draw using endesga 64 idk why but i just fixated on this collor pallet
I'm not sure what you mean. Currently the player does stay in front of the portal until it gets more than half way through, and then goes behind the portal.
Hit frame? They have a hit animation that plays when they get hurt. I could maybe force them to play their hit animation before dying, but that could add a weird delay between when they get hit with a bullet and when they actually die. 🤔
@@HelperWesley with hit frame I mean when you pause the time scale for a very small amount of time to make an impact feel more powerful, it's used a lot in fighting games
@@ArnoneWilliam Ah, yeah I have that added in for when the player gets hit. I think that makes more sense when punching than shooting, so I don't think that applies for the death of an enemy in a shooter.
Excellent progress! It always feels weird hiding things from videos but very satisfying to fix, even if you think the viewers won't appreciate it.
My feedback in super short:
- one death "pop" animation for all enemies is good, this one looks kinda boring and oversized for most early enemies. If you only use one animation, it should look and feel rewarding - like in your example from the other game. Also, the "boom" animation, especially the last bit how it vanishes looks great. Get something with that quality and fluidity of animation, and you're set.
- having a sniper rifle in a game, where the room is 10 x 30 meters feels unwieldy and misplaced. I'd go for Revolver (High damage, precise on all distances, medium firerate), Shotgun (High Damage, good for short distance, low fire rate), Assault Rifle (Low Damage, great on all distances, high fire rate). That's it. If you want to add another gun, add a Grenade Launcher for AOE, something that's a spectacle in a small room. Or add a "skill based" weapon, like the "Shock Rifle" from Unreal Tournament back in the day. It had one projectile slow and big, one fast and precise, and if you hit the slow one with the precise one, it exploded into an AOE. Great fun in small rooms.
- enemies - do both. you start with adding more enemies, so people know how many hits they need to take them out, and it's a bigger challenge to handle the higher enemy count. but also introduce more fierce enemy variants, that make "obviously" more damage. e.g. a green round slime does 1 damage. a spiked, slightly faster red slime does 2. an icredibly slow but giant orange slime on fire does 4. always go duplicates, it's easiest to anticipate and wrap your head around. maybe even go for a "global logic", like enemytype normal = 1 dmg. enemytipe spiked = 2x. enemytype elemental(e.g. on fire) = 4x.
- gun dudette being able to teleport several times sounds FUN. teleporting once sounds boring. i'd love for the skill to deplete the bar, once you activate it. Basically, once you filled the bar, you can activate the skill and use it 4x. each activation depletes the bar by 25%. you can only fill the bar up again once it's empty. now it becomes not only fun, but something to consider and plan ahead. also you could add items to allow for more jumps, or effects on landing, e.g. AOE fire damage after teleport.
Basically, make the things fun and overpowered to use, so I can't wait to play again.
Also, love the progress you've made with the game, it really looks drastically different. Looking forward to your next vid.
After a gazillion years there is now a video
3 months isn't that long when we speaking about game development
Someone understand me! 😌
We spent that time inventing time travel. We took a gazillion years, and jumped back to 6 months after the last video. ⌛
After at least 1 silksongillion years the video is out
@@astral_randomness silksong will come out it has to
Thats not lying
1. You want to make your product look good
2. Things get scrapped, thata happens all the time
I guess it's mostly a lie of omission, not letting folks see what is actually going on. 😅
@@HelperWesley I guess you could say that
@@HelperWesley nice video i will join ur discord land
Oh my gosh the explosion animation at 4:28 is AWESOME DUDE!
Oh, and the new death animation could use some more impact (adding a bit of screenshake for exemple)
Yeah, art doesn't like it either, and is already thinking of a new one to add.
But I added it like I said I was going to! lol.
Yeah, ArtManOil is awesome.
Even though I’m not in the GDevelop community anymore, I think it’s safe to say that everyone forgives you :D
9:14 - to get around the thing of players counting shots, you could just have each bullet sound out an increase in pitch. That way, even if you were to increase the amount of bullets in a clip, you'd still know how long until you hit the big round.
I was thinking about that. I actually tried a few different pitch shifts as you get closer to the bullet firing, but they all felt weird. Especially since you're firing constantly, it got a little annoying.
I might end up just throwing my hands in the air and adding a UI element above the player's heads to show the bullet count. But I'll wait for a round of playtesting before I actually do anything, it might not be an issue at all. 🤔
This is the first devlog of yours that I have watched, and I thought the game looked really cool, so I thought, "Wow! This looks so nice and polished, and the mechanics look complicated, It must be made with Unity or Godot or something like that." And then I saw the Gdevelop code. A fellow Gdev! This gives me more confidence about my own game that I'm making with Gdevelop.
Well thanks, the game has a long way to go, but it's getting there.
If you want more motivation, check out a developer name "Sleeper_Games" on twitter. They're always making something different with GDevelop, but also the games page on the GDevelop website has a bunch of cool games. gdevelop.io/games
@@HelperWesley I checked it out. It looks SO polished!
By the way. I checked out some of your other devlogs, and saw you have an object for each bullet.
If you don't think it would be to tedious, I would recommend having one bullet object, and then an animation or two for each bullet. I think it would make it easier to add more bullets, and find other objects, (the bullets take up space).
Of course, I don't know your game dev flow, but I just thought it might be easier.
Thank you. My thirst for a new Helper Wesley video has been quenched.
Yo is this the Scratch guy from One Game, Many Hands?
@@epicgeometro yep
@@-8bitsOfAwesome- cool! I participated too. I love your games BTW :)
9:20 You need to add more feedback to the player that there is a big bullet coming the is diferint color , more shiny , and does explodeble 3x damage!
Right now I'm focused on the major parts of the game, I'll do at least one video(or more) on those sorts of things when I get those finished.
Could've just titled the video "Fixing the MANY bugs in my game" and no one would have a problem, but gotta get that ad rev I guess. This isn't even lying. That's called marketing, or showing the best of your product.
It felt like a lie of omission, hiding all of the bugs I knew were in the game, but just kept ignoring to make it seem like the game was better put together than it actually was. 😅 (There were a bunch of other bugs I fixed that weren't included in the video because the editing was getting pretty long.)
@@HelperWesleyits called omiting information, you technically didnt lie, just not clarify things
@@matute08 Some would consider that a type of deception, not that I personally think it was that deep, but still worth considering that it somewhat falls under the same classification.
@@HelperWesley add online multiplayer
Honestly, I'm just glad to see a video on Spent Shells again lol
For feedback on difficulty:
> In The Binding of Isaac, some enemies have a chance to be a champion enemy, which gives them a minor "quirk," such as extra health, more damage, exploding on death, shooting stray bullets, moving faster, being hard to see, leaving creep on the ground, etc. The chance for an enemy to be a champion should scale with the difficulty.
> That being said, champions in Isaac also have a chance to drop a pickup upon death. Similarly, jammed enemies in Enter the Gungeon (Triple health and double damage bullets) drop twice as much money upon death. I think that champions should drop an extra point or something, adding a risk VS reward mechanic to the game. The harder the game gets, the more rewards you earn, something that rewards good play.
> Also in Isaac, some enemies have a chance to be replaced by a variant of themselves, either stronger, or a slightly different behavior. Same with champions, maybe enemies have a chance to be replaced by these stronger variants as the game goes on. For example, the ghosts being replaced by more aggressive spectres that shoot bullets in a different way?
Ooooh. 🤔
That could be a good way to do it, turning a normal enemy in to a special one wouldn't be hard to do. 🤔
A solid maybe for this idea.(Once I get all of the stuff I'm working on now finished up. 😅)
So far all of my games feel like they are held together by duct tape. As long as it works and it's fun, then the players won't care if your code is a pile of spaghetti. Anyways, cheers and thanks for sharing :)
Cheers fellow spaghetti maker. 🍻
What if instead of the jarring bouncing off the doors, the player instead gets teleported out of one of the other three doors. You might not want to do that since it might be an easier escape route or way to kite enemies. However, it could be another sudo movement mechanic and lean into the idea of the doors being magical teleporters.
2:34 about the wall clipping thing. Wouldn't it be easy to just put colliders in those doors? it would enable when you enter a stage and once you have completed it it would disable. I think it would make things a lot easier
The courage it takes to do this to oneself, let alone to an audience, it's pretty daunting. Good on ya, bud.
You should do a rage mode of all enemy if player is takes too long in the room... It will be fun with scaling with enemies. And also you should increase the scale of difficulty linearly. My thought will be to give hybrid means both number of enemy increasing and the damage increasing.
if you fix an issue, when you see an issue, there is no more issue
-the great helper wesley
We're right there with you man. You've got this!
😌
6.14 How about adding "Corrupt Mobs" to game. Imagine a single ghost , tinting its color or adding particles to it and make it far faster then other while also increasing the healt and the damage of it making a kind of mini boss. And over time the games get harder thede corrupts mobs spawn more and more.
Instead of scaling number of enemies with difficulty, I'd take an orthogonal design approach and increase the combinations of different enemies first. So on lower difficulties, the player only faces one enemy type at a time. Then at higher difficulties, they face combinations of 2, 3, 4, etc enemies with highly contrasting attack patterns that force the player to adapt new strategies to survive.
There's already some of that in the game, when you start playing you only face ghosts and spiders, and then you're introduced to new enemies as time goes on.
The big thing I'm trying to get rid of with this change is the player dying in one hit because of scaling damage. Dying in one hit was just super unsatisfying, but the game needs to end at some point, so something has to kill eventually the player. 😅
It's not lying. You are just presenting your game in a way that makes it look better.
To some extent, everyone does this, as they don't tell you everything they did in a day, for brevity, but also because it may not be something they want to share.
Also, just because you mentioned an idea, it doesn't mean that you have to actually go through with it and implement it / fix it.
Also, relying on an old version of something, and just ignoring deprecation warnings is a common thing in the industry.
(I see a lot of deprecation warnings on the daily at work, but I can't really fix it as the dependencies we have rely on older versions of some other dependency.)
Also, games often aren't completely bug free, completely done, etc, until launch, and even then it may even be missing some things if the project was over scoped, or they were rushed. (at least that is what I have heard a lot of people say)
Fun fact, if hiding the implementation details or bugs is lying, then Doom (1993) is a game of lies. It's not real 3D.
For the ennemies scaling, what about doing a bit of both? A bit more enemies, a bit more damage, and then more enemies, more damage, more enemies... I like diversity, it makes the game more rich :)
Not sure about the sniper, it doesn't make much sense in such a small area. OR it could be kind of a loaded shoot. It slows you down while loading, takes a couple of seconds, maybe a couple more, but when you unload it it deals more damage AND pierces through enemies. So, it is still useful and rewarding when they are many enemies on the screen. Like a sniper you must placement is important.
The big thing I'm trying to get rid of in the game is people eventually getting one shot, so that's why I want to avoid scaling damage from the enemies. I'm hoping that players will find it more satisfying to get whittled down to 0 HP by a dozen enemies in the room than a single stray shot. 🤔
___
I'll wait to see what playtesters say before I'll revisit the sniper rifle again, which means I've got to finish up all of the loose ends I have opened right now to get that playtester version ready. 😅
here's my thoughts for the new enemy stuff I think a bit of everything is good (extra damage/health/ numbers of enemies maybe even speed for normal enemies but that would require a cap on the speed bonus imo maybe a cap for each thing as well cuz infinite scaling is a lot to deal with) and then balancing around all of the aspects of enemies being beefed up, because adding just the +X number of enemies as the games goes on could easily overcrows the screen and make the designs feel less special/ more annoying to look at
That's true, it might make rooms look awful if the player gets too far in to the game. 🤔 The hope is that they'll die well before that point. 😅
Glad that you didn't keep doing what you were doing! Its great that no one's mad at you!
The game looks really cool so far, and there’s some polish, but I think some screen shake would help A TON.
Right now I'm just getting the game put together, there will be at least 1 or 2 videos dedicated solely to that sort of thing.
@@HelperWesley alright, cool
6:14 Increasing the number of enemies or giving them new abilities with higher difficulties is always better than just stat increases.
So many games have “hard mode” which is just a boring slog because all the enemies have an absurd amount of health, which is lazy difficulty scaling. I’m not saying increasing stats is inherently a bad thing, but relying on that entirely is.
i have this idea about the game hard scaling, the enemy will be tankier also each room will have a random spawn of enemies so as the game goes by the enemy will hard to kill and it will be fun because its gonna test the player skill like dodging bullets, picking buffs, and picking guns
My helper wesley fix has been fulfilled.
And about the scaling, you could also have some of the harder enemies also do 2 damage instead of 1, kind of like in hollow knight
The problem is that people are losing more health than they thought they would, and randomly losing more health than you thought could result in a confusing and unsatisfying death. Having 1 hp left naturally makes players panicked, and dying when they thought they had 2 hits left would make them confused and a little annoyed.
I'm the recreational substance of choice. 🤣
@@HelperWesley I'm not sure if you have enemies in your game with SFX when they attack. But maybe if you used a different SFX for a heavy attack, or showed a charging visual that it is a heavy attack, then it wouldn't catch players off-guard as much. Unless the issue is that players don't realise they take double damage, in that case, Hollow Knight shows a more extreme visual for being hit and a different SFX to make it obvious double damage was done. It doesn't seem to be that big of an issue in HK as you learn quickly that the enemy does double damage and just adapt accordingly from then on, maybe the same could apply here? Also knowing that there are some enemies that do double damage, would then make the player more cautious of potential dangers they haven't learnt about yet and makes them adopt a different playstyle accordingly depending on their confidence that they will or won't get hit by the enemy.
I think maybe instead if just filling rooms with enemies, or just making enemies that one-shot you, you could have it so some rooms are filled with low-damage enemies, and others have less enemies that are stronger. Then as the game goes on, when you come across a rooms with loads of enemies, there's simply more enemies, and when you come across a room with few, high-damage enemies, the enemies do more damage. I also think, you should keep the "pop" particle, but only display it for when you one-shot an enemy.
A different death animation for one shots is a fun idea. 🤔
As far as difficulty is concerned, more enemies would have similar or the same downsides as having their health/ damage increase. A smart approach would be something that changes the way the player approaches an encounter. After 2 bosses, you can start spawning in new enemies and traps, or room layouts with more pillars and chokepoints. The Binding of Isaac does this I believe, they have easy and hard room templates depending on how good your run is. Hope this was constructive somehow
We definitely want to add more variety as players get further in to the game, but our game goes on forever til the player dies. So this change is more about trying to murder the player before they start to get bored on a run. Some people found ways to play for way longer than we expected in playtesting, and in the least fun and boring way possible.😅
This is all about making sure the player is good and dead, but not in an unsatisfying one shot kind of way.(If that makes sense)
@@HelperWesley Ah I see now. That's a pretty tricky problem to solve because like you say, you'd not want to just buff the enemies' stats. Adding more enemies is a decent, if sloppy solution, ideally there would be a more novel solution but alot of that comes down to the specifics of your game. I'll just spitball some ideas below.
There could be a big boss enemy that chases you down as you go through the dungeon. Once the player has played 50% of what you want them too, they start being chased. After a few minutes/ rooms the boss spawns. If you beat the boss another, more powerful one starts to chase you, with a shorter spawn time. This could get to the point where there are multiple bosses on screen at a time, so you'd want to set limits for spawn time and # of bosses allowed on screen.
You could add a kiss-curse mechanic. These are a little hard to make feel good, but essentially you give the player a cool ability or power-up while also handicapping them in some way. Handicapping the player in general is a good way to shorten runs, as long as they're making the choice to become handicapped. Maybe there's a sword with a vampiric effect, but you constantly take damage when wielding it. You could possibly trade max HP for stat bonuses and etc. The Binding of Isaac does this as well with their "deals with the devil".
You'll find something that works out, hope I at least gave you some ideas. Sorry if the last comment was snarky btw it was late for me lol.
@@charlesdilks3267 I could see the boss one being interesting.
The part of the change I want to make where most players hopefully die will be the faster boss animations and movement. Ideally the bigger and badder bosses will be what ultimately kills them.
Actually just the most relatable game dev
you might want to try multiplying all fire rate and all enemy health by like 1.3
you need to increase the game speed to 1.25 Because it's your project you yourself cannot see that this one change will make the game more fun. I think there was a game dev talk about this somewhere on YT
Game development is essentially smoke and mirrors in getting things top work anyways. Waaaay different than your traditional software development process when creating CRUD apps in a business environment. Thanks for sharing and good luck on getting those bugs squashed!
We need a video of how to add cheat codes into your game
4th shot change color, add camera shake as well.
I think everyone has bugs in their game that we're just ignoring until it's time to fix them. Glad you were able to mitigate a lot of things and hope they weren't causing you to feel guilty.
I felt guiltier about not posting a video in 6 months than I did about the bugs, but I did feel a little guilty about hiding them. 🤏😅
instead of just adding the number of enemies, or just adding how much damage they make, just do both
as more time passes, more enemies will spawn, and then they'll make more damage, then more spawn, then more damage
ect...
A lot of people are saying this, and I think I should have mentioned why I'm making the change in the video. 😅
People would eventually get 1 shot with scaling damage, and it was really unsatisfying for them. So I'm hoping more enemies that all deal 1 damage will make death more interesting as they get whittled down to 0 HP by a bunch of enemies, instead of getting 1 shot by a stray bullet.
I am not sure on the difficutly scaling idea, isn't it going to make it near impossible to stay alive late game due to the high number of enemies and projectiles? Not only that but isnt performance going to also take a hit?
Maybe you could have it where enemies health or damage increase by a random value, like 1-3. So they either have a chance to do more damage on top of the chance to gain that benefit in the first place or they just get a random health increase.Kind of like elite enemies in other games. Maybe interesting to have some buffs to affect these odds too.
FOUR!!!!
I don't like the new scaling idea cause then it become super hard to doge + more ennemi = more lag even if you optimize it like crazy
The warnings in game engines are weird cause more often than not they don’t do shit 😂 You did good muting the hell out of them 😂
what if multiple minibosses start spawning after you get very far in the game
You'll have to wait til the next video to see. 😉
WAKE UP BABE NEW HELPER WESLEY DEVLOG JUST DROPPED
[Skips forward to the clip in the video where somebody wakes up.] 👀
Be careful with performance issues with adding more enemies hehe
that's not lying...that's procrastinating :D of which I am king!
I'm pretty good at too, if I'm not the prince, I'm at least the court jester. 🤡
Fixing the procrastinated tasks XD
Yup, I've put them off for so long. 😅
Man gotta say one thing
Its because of yours and artmanoils arts that i luterally only draw using endesga 64 idk why but i just fixated on this collor pallet
It's a really good palette. It's colorful, but not too intense.
And the limited options help to reduce the decision time when picking colors.
Hmm i think that damage per hit would be better❤
Another video! Let's go! (By the way I know your secrets, this whole video was animated and all the other videos too, this game doesn't even exist!)
🤫
"The raycast used" ... LOL. The complexity developers add for a simple 2D game is funny. Old school SNES games didn't have ray casting
More like "I fixed my lies about my game..." But I didn't make the video. You did. Happy to hear you're back to developing this game.
For the portal on the top, can't you put the player on a higher layer so he doesn't disapear behind too soon ?
I'm not sure what you mean. Currently the player does stay in front of the portal until it gets more than half way through, and then goes behind the portal.
@@HelperWesley it feels glitchy. It's like it needs an animation or keeping the player in front of the portal longer.
@@Ryöken17 Hmnm. It is pretty sudden. 🤔
Is it hard to add an hit frame in gdevelop? I think it would add a lot to the enemy death animation
Hit frame? They have a hit animation that plays when they get hurt. I could maybe force them to play their hit animation before dying, but that could add a weird delay between when they get hit with a bullet and when they actually die. 🤔
@@HelperWesley with hit frame I mean when you pause the time scale for a very small amount of time to make an impact feel more powerful, it's used a lot in fighting games
@@ArnoneWilliam Ah, yeah I have that added in for when the player gets hit. I think that makes more sense when punching than shooting, so I don't think that applies for the death of an enemy in a shooter.
@@HelperWesley Ok got it, by the way I'm very happy to see all the progress you've made with the game! Keep going!
your artirs just go full on good job !
Always, Art is the best.
U should try to add online
ok. now make it multiplayer
Don't you tempt me!
@@HelperWesley and after u have added multiplayer make it 3D VR
If you finish this game you will be the second person to ever release a game made in GDevelop
😅There are games released all of the time with GDevelop. But I will be part of the smaller number of games that made it to Steam.
I'm in the video XD
Hey Wesley, do you still in the Gdevelop team?
I am.
it's cool man, you're dope.
You made me lose the game :(
hello
hi
o
I am your biggest fan can you make this game for mobile
Gotta release it on steam first, and then maybe I can do other things with it. But I gotta get it on steam or I'll feel like I failed.😅
@@HelperWesley can you make a 3D game because I have to see Can you make a game with so little development gdevelop 3d material?
@@Playsomegames19 Check out the cubic world game template. 🤷♂
@@HelperWesley ok you have to add 3d real time shadow in gdevelop
@HelperWesly ADD MULTIPLAYER