Starting last episode, we returned from making new stages back to player mechanics and ways to improve the core game experience. We started by giving the player a moving dodge, changing the choice from whether to dodge now or later to dodge now, dodge later, and dodge where? Of course the player can still dodge in place, because we want to keep the controls simple for players who don’t want to deal with directions in dodging, but we wanted to give players more choices, and though being able to dodge in a direction gives them more power to avoid bullets, it also gives them more power to run into them. At least for Project Spaghetti, the feature shouldn’t change the difficulty much, but it’ll help players feel more in control of the cowboy character.
Some other ways we’re thinking we can give the player more choice are:
* Wailing on buttons to end the hurt state early? Or waiting in hopes of avoiding an incoming bullet…
* A fast reloading mechanic? With a risk of malfunction…
* Forcing the player to collect points from fallen enemies within a time limit rather than just earning them when an enemy dies?
And this coming episode, we’ll focus on a more visual component: showing how much life the player has left through the sprite rather than information in the corner of the screen. One classic game that used this to great effect was Capcom’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins, which had an armored knight who was stripped down to his boxer shorts when he took a hit. No one needed to warn you what would happen when that next hit landed on the half-naked hero. And we’re going to take a similar approach with the cowboy character in Project Spaghetti so players don’t have to check the corner of the screen to see how many lives they have left. Because we represent a player losing a life as being “hurt” anyway, it makes more sense to keep that information on the player, rather than in a corner of the screen, which tends to be more appropriate for checking at the start or end of a stage.