mardi 20 août 2013

Bastonnade : The first failure

Hello everyone ! Here's a quick note to talk about my latest game : Bastonnade, for the OUYA.

This game isn't good. It isn't terrible, or unfinished, but it has a lot of problems, and they mostly come from the same source : the Game Design.

When we started thinking about the game, we put on the table every single idea, wrote them down, during about a week. Then, we chose the good ones an struck out the bad ones.

And we were done. There has litteraly been no more game design for the game. If you can try the game (it is available for free) I suggest you do by wondering "What is fun in this game ? What did the developers do to make this level unique ?".

You'll quickly notice that the answer is always the same. And that's the problem, the game is more than repetitive, because we made the same level over and over with different assets.

Sure, there are some programming problems (a precise enemy tend to fall through the ground) and a bad difficulty flow (the first level is harder than the final boss) but it all comes up to the same problem.

We had a basic idea of what the game was about. We made a prototype and it was good. Not "good enough", it was really good. We had fun, it had everything we wanted. And we added levels, but that's it.
No new gameplay, no cutscenes, no originality.

The Game Design Document is a pain to do, but a game simply can NOT be done without it. It's like making a movie without a storyboard, or even a script !

You can have fun with the game, mostly with friends, but it won't feel different than the other games, and you'll quickly forget about it. What it misses is a soul.



Anyways, if you are playing the game, here's a tip : to unlock levels, you have to do certain special actions in the previous level.

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