Day Seventy Seven
This week has started well - over the weekend I had a LOT of feedback from some of the people who have been playing for a couple of years now. There were a couple of complaints with how the game works in general, you might not even have noticed yourself.
The big one is an issue of randomness. Broadly, the game has three types of randomness:
Randomly selecting attacks
Randomly altering attacks
Randomly changing things that don’t affect gameplay
The aim of randomness, generally, is to change up the gameplay. People who play a lot will see the same thing over and over again, and that gets boring.
In my head, that also extended to people who don’t play a lot, too, so boss attacks were selected randomly. That meant that other than the intro and phase change animations, you never really knew which attack was going to come next. On paper, this sounds great! It keeps you on your toes, it makes playing for score different every time, that’s good right?
Wrong. Well, mostly! Variety is good, and bosses in most other genres pick their attacks randomly to keep the player guessing. But in a game like this, where playing for score means optimising every single movement, that randomness gets frustrating fast. It becomes a game of “can I get the order of attacks that means I can get the highest score”, which isn’t controllable at all. If it isn’t controllable, it isn’t enjoyable for people who really play for score.
Randomly altering attacks, on the other hand, doesn’t affect things on that large a scale. I don’t actually use true random in many of the patterns in Polyfury. I actually just mash the player’s position up (the trigonometry functions are great for this) so there’s still a degree of… not control perhaps, but definitely repeatability, which is good.
All that to say, now the order of patterns is set. That update should be live at some point today, so hopefully it makes playing for score a bit more skill-based and a bit less “RNGsus hates me”!
Oh, and I did some more Heptagon today.
What’s next?
More Heptagon, and I need to put the triangles and heptagon into beta ASAP.
I hope you enjoyed reading about my Polyfury progress. If you have any questions or thoughts, please feel free to leave a comment below. Thanks for reading, and maybe check out the demo:
