Wading Through the Jungle

Phew!

We are making good progress!

There have been a lot of challenges over the last two months. We've battled with a diverse array of crashes, both on the server and in the client. We've spent days investigating and solving unusually long compile times.

We've had to expand our back-end tools to track down some of the more elusive issues, and come up with tricks to get abilities and features to function without spending more time building whole systems for them.

It has been hard work, but it's paying off. The game's never been in a better place, and even though we're light on content I don't worry about that. The tools are good. Iteration time is pretty fast. Fleshing out gameplay will follow.

During all this fixing, we've also been iterating the game mechanics to explore what fun looks like. Here's one example that I'd like to share...

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Setting Up Camps

During the various tests we've been running, I noticed that the jungle was not a fun experience.

Maybe that shouldn't have surprised me. I placed camps to test their features: respawning, aggro, leashing, and rewarding players who cleared them. I wasn't yet thinking about "designing a fun experience" in the jungle, and it showed.

So what went wrong? My approach to making camps was:

1. Pick a unit type for each camp
2. Place three or four copies of that unit in a clearing, spaced nice and evenly.

I had to reflect for a while on why this doesn't work. It's because there is no technique for players to apply.

It doesn't matter which unit you hit first, or the order in which you attack the creeps if they're all the same. It doesn't matter from which direction the camp gets approached if the units are evenly spaced.

These symmetric camps were unengaging because they didn't let players express themselves.

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Natural Variation

The solution, of course, is to break the symmetry.

This lesson dates back to Warcraft III (or prior), where the design team must have realised the same thing. Having a variety of unit types in each creep camp gives the player some (simple) choices to make when approaching it. Alternatively, having a single creep to simplify the scenario can also work.

Most lane-pushing games with jungles already do this, and now we do as well.

This might seem like a really simple game design problem and solution, but it's always good to question the way things are done. If we understand this solution, we can understand alternatives!

One alternative is having creep camps with area attacks that can be dodged. Indeed, it might be better to not vary the unit types in this case as the player is already being offered a challenge.

Also, we love knockback and environmental damage, so here's a variation we might try during alpha:

I started coding it a little after having that idea, but figured I should get the blog updated before diving into experimental features. As always, if you have questions or want to chat our discord is the place!

Softmints