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Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors

Dev Log: Bullet Reflectors
One of the quick ideas I dropped into Super Sky Sisters after PAX was two big ole glass looking reflector orbs in the arena.

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I'm still trying to solve the issue of one player being "left out" of certain events in the game. Boss fights are the worst offenders of this still, but I think this is going to help fix that issue a little bit. Again my ideal scenario is that players make the conscious effort to switch out who is attacking, but usually that ends up not happening. With these reflector things on the edge of the arena the players can then try to line up with the boss in a way that lets both players attack at the same time. I'm excited to see if this actually makes any difference in my next play test.
sky sisters design
Posted September 26th 2016 10:32 PM (General)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted September 26th 2016 10:06 PM (Doodle)
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Dev Log: Progression Progress

Dev Log: Progression Progress
One of the big ideas I had from PAX was changing out the unlockable system in Super Sky Sisters to something a little bit more straight forward. Before PAX the system would unlock things like special abilities and game modes based on achieving certain goals. Like beating the second boss would unlock something, or passing 100 game events would unlock another thing. Although I thought this idea was cool, I decided to scrap it to go for something way more obvious.

I want the points in Sky Sisters to feel like they're contributing to some sort of larger goal, so the new progression system uses the player's total score to unlock new stuff. I even made this fancy new menu screen that shows how far the players are getting.

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I'm still trying to figure out how many points will be needed to get every level. For me right now it seems pretty well balanced but that usually means it's going to be way too difficult for the average player. I don't want unlocking things to take 50 hours of gameplay, but I do want the player to strive to improve their average score per session to unlock stuff faster.

For a long time I had no unlockables in Sky Sisters -- everything was available from the start, but over the past year I got a lot of feedback that suggested I should have some sort of unlocking system for two main reasons: One is that limiting the options of new players can be good for guiding them into the game, and the other is that players do really want that feeling of accomplishment of unlocking stuff even if it does feel like arbitrarily gating content. I am worried about the leaderboards feeling unfair to new players since they wont have all the options of long time players, but hopefully it wont take too long to unlock the same options.
sky sisters dev log design
Posted September 23rd 2016 1:03 PM (General)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted September 22nd 2016 11:57 PM (Doodle)
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Dev Log: Super Star Effects

Dev Log: Super Star Effects
One of the main issues with Super Sky Sisters was the "star pad." I added this feature to the game to try and solve the problem of one player having "nothing" to do. How it works is every so often an energy circle will appear on the arena. If one player is inside of it, the other player will get a big boost to their attacks. This seemed like the perfect thing to add so that one player could try and help their ally by taking a position in the star pad, but the problem is that nobody understood what was going on.

A few people at PAX picked up on it, but overall I'd say about 90% of players didn't understand the use of the star pad, and even worse some confused it for something else (like healing.) To try and message it better I went back and added some more effects to the star pad. I have yet to actually test this so I'm not sure if it will work, but it does seem pretty dang better than before.

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It should be pretty hard to miss what is happening here now, or at least I hope!
sky sisters dev log art
Posted September 21st 2016 5:45 PM (General)
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Doodle Post

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doodles
Posted September 21st 2016 1:15 AM (Doodle)
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