Battleroyale was a bad idea..
-Here lies Battlerite
The gravestones are funny :D
Its a fun game with a cool boss battle, it took me way too long to understand the mechanic with the blood stains tho. In the beginning i was just guessing, maybe a hint towards the existence of that mechanics could help a bit.
Overall a good submission, congratz!
Thanks for playing, and I hoped you enjoyed it!
I do feel that there were many factors that led to the poor execution of the mechanic, and needing to make decisions and compromises in a time limit during the design phase led me to not having the game exactly the way i wanted it to be.
Originally, I intended to make players solve the puzzle through trail and error, getting lost and slowly finding your bearings by remembering directions and landmarks. The text mechanic was supposed to reward players with a guaranteed right answer for uncovering a secret. You may have noticed that there were two types of secret text that may appear: directional text and “lore” text. The directional text were supposed to be randomly spawned in fixed locations, and lore text were supposed to be spawned in a randomly selected position selected from the ground’s “walkable” mesh.
We got some friends to playtest the game on the last day and they ended up being too distracted when accidentally uncovering a lore text, and was completely misguided by it and thought that the entire game was just the first map you spawn in. I do feel that the map ended up being too big for the “trail and error” design to be intuitive, but after over 20 hours spent on making the maps, it was kinda too late to revert back to smaller maps. We ended up just making the random text spawn adjusted according to the difficulty scaling, so at earlier stages there is more direction text and less lore text, at later stages there is less direction text and more lore text. This made it so that players wouldnt lose sight of the objective of the game if they uncovered a lore text in the earlier stages of the game before learning that they should be advancing through different doorways to progress. Honestly, the entire mechanic of random text spawning in walkable areas could have been scrapped to make a clearer, understandable game. But so much effort was put into making it that we really wanted it to be in the game.
In the end, it was just another case of overscoping and not having enough time to refine the game. Im still extremely glad that players are still able to go through the entire game on their own, though with some confusing moments. I guess keeping to the design philosophy of “show not tell” was harder that I thought.
