Post-Critique Reflection

Today we had our critiques for the games and some pretty cool projects are on their way. As far as my own work goes there were some good suggestions on where I could take it. First of all I had to play the on-line game Hexagon to see how a game that functions similarly to my concept works with a high difficulty. It is a highly addictive game for a number of reasons;

- The music is great for the epileptic-inducing game-play and can be used to get the player's timing (sort of). It also acts as an incentive to play in a continuous stream so you are able to hear more of the music without it being broken up by re-spawning.

- Almost instantaneous re-spawning means that if you make a mistake (which you will over and over and over...) you don't have to wait long until you're back in the psychedelic action.

- It has a clearly established goal and is simple enough that the player learns how to play relatively quickly.
From this I can take that the levels I put into my game could be rapid and short, but slowly increasing in length/difficulty and players can infinitely re-spawn from the start of each level. However, this would contradict a suggestion Kah made that the player could have three lives based off how close they were running to the furnace (front of the screen being 3 lives, just ahead of the fire being 1). Another thing I learned from Hexagon is having the set position on each path would be better than having an area in which the player can strafe. Too many times in Hexagon did I get caught by a glancing wall as I over/undershot a gap.
As far as aesthetics go the HUD of my paper prototype looks too awkward on a rectangle background around a circular focus. Kah suggested I incorporate the elements in a similarly round fashion. On this note the soul counter does not need to exist, it just needs to be clear that rescuing souls makes the fuel gauge degrade faster. It would also be redundant to have them count as some kind of score because there is nothing stopping a player from deliberately delaying their succession of the level to collect more souls, which defeats the character's narrative purpose.
I also made a realisation today when describing my idea to the class. My game pits the player against the environment as the try to save the environment. Ha.