Killing your babies

After a few rounds of successful prototyping I started to think about other things I might be able to incorporate into the game. One such idea was the ability to execute special moves. In order to enhance the strategy component of the game I had always pictured being able to string a list of commands in order to execute something much more powerful.

Fully committed to implementing this feature, I started to think about how exactly these moves would be used. How many moves would be required to execute such a move? What would be the effect of such a move? Would moves combo between rounds or matches? In order to answer a few of these questions I decided to look at the critical path for my game. I figured that special moves wouldn’t be used if another player could win before it was executed. With this in mind, I tried to find out what was the smallest number of moves that I needed to make before winning (given that I wasn’t worried about my opponent killing me). The answer turned out to be 4 (though it rarely happened).

I decided to see if I could add special moves, Given only 4 actions. I came up with double attacks, speed boosts, scramblers but I couldn’t really justify the addition. The game also changed drastically as a result of adding special moves, which in this case didn’t really help the game out. With this is mind, I removed special abilities.

Recently, a change to the way attacks work has made me reconsider the decision to remove special attacks. Instead of hitting everything in a one block radius, which lead to stalemates, players now have to choose between diagonal and horizontal/vertical attacks. With this change the turtling problem that I described earlier disappeared. This also gave rise to a game type where players can attack each other without going after coins. Finally, this change meant that the critical path is no longer 4, players could now use special moves that were more than 4 actions long without forfeiting a point. However, I know the allure of feature creep so, for now, I will stick to my initial decision… at least until the core game is completed.