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Vectorzone --- Development Journal

07 - Game Design is Hard

So, why hasn't there been any public alphas released lately?

Short Answer: Design issues.

Long Answer:

The next public alpha's actually been on the verge of being ready to release for weeks now. However, in order for it to flow properly the beginnings of the adventuring aspects need to be implemented, and this is where the major problems have sprouted up is in the design of the adventuring aspects.

Originally, Vectorzone was going to be a world-building game. When I removed the spinning camera though, I had to make a tough decision: Remove joystick/gamepad support or remove the world-building aspect. I ultimately decided on the latter, which required a huge amount of redesign work to keep the adventuring aspect of the gameplay intact, since I didn't want to make just another arcade-style twin-stick shooter.

However, tiny little problems started sprouting up the more I layed out the design. For instance, the first problem I was faced with was that the design lent itself too easily to module-abuse. People could make about a dozen of the exact same module and get stats that would completely unbalance the game. My initial solution to this problem was to replace the module building system with a module upgrading system. This in turn however made it extremely difficult to get the Plasma Inducer module, something that's rather important early in the game. In fixing this however, I ended up creating a feature that ultimately fell short of what I needed it to do, while at the same time didn't do everything I wanted it to do.

Designing a game like this is a huge challenge because of all of these considerations. If I was making a simple arcade shooter, I wouldn't be in this mess. Instead, I'm trying to design a highly dynamic game and the dynamics are working for 95% of everything I come up with, but the remaining 5% of each iteration completely breaks the other 95%.

So once again I find myself making some hard design decisions. I thought of a way to re-implement the world-building aspect and still have joystick/gamepad support available. (It basically involves being able to switch between "Shoot Mode" and "Block Mode" at the push of a button.) Another option would be to completely overhaul the module system so that there's fewer modules and you can't equip as many at once, but the modules themselves can be upgraded in various ways. There's other potential options too but no matter how you slice it, some major design work is needed to get this thing back on track.

In the interim, here's a couple screenshots of the title screen and the options screen. Yeah, nothing too fancy, and they've actually been implemented for weeks now, but I just wanted to show you guys that I am indeed still working on this thing. ;)