Improving that user experience

Not long ago the critterrupters pre-alpha demo was sent out to content creators to try out and that revealed there was still more work to be done.

There were obviously some bugs to sort out but the 2 main points of contention were that the tutorial was too wordy, and the second is that information in battle happened all at once.

Tutorial Improvements

The biggest issue was with Sami Swaps explaining how interrupting worked, its the core system of the game, and there's requirements to pull it off but he spoke for too long and it was a lot of reading. So the first change is that his dialog has been shrunk down a lot and it's now been put into a battle. The training dummy requires you to meet its download conditions, which include interrupting, and download it.

I had noticed that some players just immediately left the tutorial area and got ruined by the tougher trainers as they only had one critterbyte and no idea what to do (see the red line, red circle being start point). So I've had to put measures in place where you now have to battle Sami to get out of the first area, then defeat the other 3 tutorial characters to leave the school (the blue line). Hopefully this eases players into the experience .

Battle Improvements

Generally all the battle improvements come down to spacing out all the effects so everything doesn't happen at once. If the current critterbyte suffers shock, that happens before the attack. If burn, soak or thorns trigger from the attack, that now happens after the main attack is done. Skills in general were rewritten as someone uncovered an extremely specific issue but in addition to sorting that skills can now hit multiple times with correct spacing between them all.

The other main problems were not understanding when an enemy dodged, was immune to a status effect or was marked (you can only target marked enemies). These 4 have been made obvious, as you can see from the Interrupted text in the gif above. Dodge has its own animation and Mark is always visible when choosing a target. There's also a new NPC to point to where to find this information.

Another change I made recently was removing the element based status effect from Interrupting. eg: If a blaze Critterbyte interrupters someone, it inflicts burn, regardless of skill used. However the same effect happens when you hit an enemy's weakness, except the effect is dependent on the skill's element.

So, to me, it seemed confusing that the same effects were activated in 2 different ways and this has now been simplified that the Interrupted debuff also increases negative status effects gained by 1. It already increased attack damage taken by 2, so now it benefits attacks and statuses alike. This makes Interrupting a general weakening debuff, and keeps the additional effects just on hitting a weakness.

Playtest

I'm hoping to have this out towards the end of June for everyone to get their hands on. Could've been sooner but Next Fest is right in that spot so I have to wait. However I'll open invites for that soon, so stay tuned for the next update!

Critterrupters