Monday Meeting: Arcade Mode Testing

Now, back to Arcade Mode for a bit. As you know there are a bunch of changes we've been wanting to make to Arcade Mode, among them a rebalancing and removal of the dual floors per area. We've decided to take some time to focus on Arcade things for now, and so today as part of our meeting we spend a couple hours playtesting the changes that have been made so far.

To start off with, there's now just one floor per area instead of the usual two. Some floors are slightly longer to make up for it (such as the first, where you battle Pillar Mountains enemies). The earlier floors have had their difficulty slightly adjusted as well, since we want it to be possible for players to get further - at least in terms of areas, compared to before.

Some gauntlet style rooms have been added, meaning new enemies will spawn as you defeat the ones already in the room when you enter. We've tried it out both with an indicator for such rooms (meaning you will know before hand that the room you enter will spawn more enemies), and without. Which one we will go for in the end depends on how common and normalized we want these rooms to be: either they will be rare, special occurrences, meaning an indicator might be fitting, or they will be so common that it makes no sense to indicate them as anything special.

For now, to make it easier to see what is happening, we have a special spawn indicator for which enemy will spawn right before it does, to avoid any unpleasant surprises for the player. Whether this will still be the case or whether the new enemy will simply appear in a puff or smoke is still something we will need to test further.



Right now it feels somewhat odd to have cut down the floors this much, but we do feel like the overall length of a run will be a lot better compared to having to battle through twice the amount of floors to get to the end. We don't want the player to have to fight his or her way through floor after floor for hours to finish a run! More testing will need to be done, though.
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1 comment:

  1. I know the arcade mode is supposed to be rougelike...but will there ever be an option to save and continue a run? I think that would also help with the length. But if it's being cut down, that might not be a problem.
    -Shimoru

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