Trout Priest - Final Stretch

A fair amount of Life™ has happened over the last few months, so development on this initially short project has been stretched very thin over a much longer amount of time than expected. The project is at about 80 hours, now,  which works out to a couple weeks' work. I'm very pleased with what I've managed to achieve in that time, but I have unfortunately gone over my initial deadline. Thank goodness this is a personal project and I sort of expected this would happen from day 1.  Good experience.

The good news is, the game is in the final revisions & polish stage - basically getting things rounded off and tidied up. The bad news is, the last 5% of game development is also the last 95%. A good rule of thumb is to spend the first half making the game, and the second half making the game great. 

So on that note, here's the final steps before I kick Trout Priest out into the world!

Final revisions

After quite a few rounds of playtesting (thank you everyone who has helped so far) there are some aspects of the game that just aren't clear. Oboarding and tutorials are vital for a player to pick up and immerse themselves in the game as quickly as possible. Trout Priest is a fairly standard 3rd person hit-things-with-stick game, but the upgrades and health system is a little unorthodox I suppose.

Heart

First thing, the player character does not "die" when their "HP" (in this game, called Heart) gets to 0. Instead, Wallace loses hope and gives up, unable to swing his weapon. I was inspired by how, in an interview, the developers of Bloodborne said (paraphrasing)
"Your HP in the game is not your physical strength, but your resolve to carry on."
And I loved that. It still, effectively, functions as a regular HP bar, but giving it a new framing helps sell the themes. However, The Chapel and Wallace share the Heart meter - so when either Wallace or The Chapel take damage, the Heart meter goes down.

In that spirit, when Heart reaches 0 Wallace can still move around, he just cannot defend himself. If Heart reaches 0, and The Chapel takes damage, then the game is over.

Players now need to spend the Worrystone they find in the river to recover Heart/repair The Chapel. This fixes a big gameplay issue I have had so far, where players can just camp up at The Chapel while the fish come to them. Now players must return to the river between waves to gather more stones.

Grace

Players have a yellow bar which is essentially their Grace "ammo" - and a buffed weapon is necessary to properly defeat the undead fish. Fish can be temporarily defeated by hitting them when not buffed, but they dissolve into slime and respawn from the river shortly after.

Similar to Heart, Grace recovery now also costs materials.

UI update

This information needs to be made clearer to for the player, too. I like the original idea of splitting the Heart and Grace into different sides of the screen, but I am going to try something closer to "standard" UI.

I used an invaluable resource for research, The Game UI Database. I took inspiration from some of my favourite games, but mostly Bloodborne. Another Crab's Treasure has brilliant UI and UX, so I used a similar layout for the Heart/Grace bars and the materials. It would be nice to have a more novel and interesting UI layout, but given the minimal time left, I opted for something tried and tested.

Altars

These small Chapel-like structures are dotted around the map, and were always intended to have some support role. At first, they acted as short-term distractions when activated by a Grace attack, drawing the fish away from The Chapel for a short time before fizzling out.
These felt a bit underwhelming. 
Since getting some playtest feedback, I have changed their behaviour to act more like a Bug Zapper - drawing the fish in and dealing damage to them. Altars have three "charges" before fizzling out - indicated by the speed of the circlet inside.

Given more dev time, these altars could be built, damaged, repaired and even upgraded.

The game is coming along nicely, and releasing soon!