As expected in rouge-like titles, at the end of a session the Player is shown their progress to prepare them for another attempt.
As mentioned previously, the feature is two-fold:
The Player collects currency during the session for the Progress Bar to unlocks features to improve the next run (ease's progress to motivate attempts, slow adjustment in difficulty).
The Player ultimately targets the goal item to further a story progression (overall hard challenge) to prompt a long-term intrinsic goal without it being out of reach by raw Level/Stats.
By having this feature the Player knows the game's purpose and what their target is, but the currency allows them to feel progression even on defeat.
To simplify, the features for this motivation system then would be:
Currency
Smaller Unlocks
Goal Target
Over-arching Long-term Goal
Session Progress: Currency and Unlocks
Following this format, if the entire party is wiped out during the Dungeon run or they find a goal I set a widget bar to appear as a visual prompt to trigger a Player response to reattempt the challenge after reading their current Progress even if it wasn't the final goal.
To aid these features, I added a visual Progress Bar upon a session ending to display collected currency towards a feature unlock as seen in Downwell (Ojiro "Moppin" Fumoto, 2015).
A prompt revealing new content appears to let the Player know what has changed, such as a Skill being added to the in-game Skill pickup list to add more opportunities to enemy confrontations.
To be able to clearly review the Progress, I created a basic HUB area for the Main Menu that updates based on Player progress and unlocks.
For example, if you unlock the Mage character to varies the Player's starting equipment (e.g. No Dash, start with a Fireball), the Mage character appears in the HUB area alongside the cast to demonstrate this feature.
Menu Updating
I also used this new area to created an early Trailer (and Gameplay clip) to display the setting of the game from outside of the session, which can be found below.
The trailer helps set the scene to the dungeon-crawling environment, and the plan is to have the Trailer play on the project booting up (akin to my previous team project Raid's startup) to set depict goals prior to aid the overarching Goal/Target and display a visible image of the Gems the Player will be collecting.
Although these features have been added, they're only really being used at a light level here.
Some more in-game directions will be needed to really make motivations feel straight to the player, such as a light Tutorial Dungeon so they feel it, and upgrading the Camera to further focus on these key moment.
Due to the time remaining it'd likely be post-submission as a personal update as I continue to work on the project and give it all the further polish I can. Please look forward to it!
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