Full notes
Full Grenade Madness update
Read the full published notes in a cleaner layout. The original post stays linked below.
Repeated intro
Hello everyone, another week is over and this time we are posting a week a head than ussually, because Jouki(me) has moved his ass and started doing some design reworks!(huraaay!) Besides some new features I had a chance to test the game with real players so I'm starting to see the shortcomings from the players perspective and we have now a few things to be done that are really important for the multiplayer experience. Those are for example the player nicknames above the characters (yeah we know about this for a long time, but this was not a priority yet), a lobby interface for creating games with your friends - yes, it's not very good experience to start the game and then wait until all your friends connect. #8
What changed
- UI and audio
- Balance
Rework of EXP points & madness points system
This topic is a little bit more sofisticated so it's not easy to entitle this. Just after I joined the developer team full-time I started to dig into one problem after another. Let's be honest, it's not a good idea to design a game when you don't have much gaming experience, which is what was happening here before I joined. In such case you basically have no idea what exactly makes the best games so much fun... Surely you heard those stories about corporations making games just to make a profit, and wich are not likely made by gamers for gamers. Yes, I personally sometimes think who the hell designed such a thing while playing such games. But sometimes, however, I am amazed by a genius concept or a very little detail, which is very original and functions perfectly. Probably the simpliest (but not very effective) process to design a game is to ask yourself what exactly you enjoy/hate while playing and what would make the game even more fun or what you are missing. Let's be straight, a lot trouble of game design has been solved already in many different titles so it's just about using the right solution, which fits your concept too. An important suppostition to answer such questions is that I sometimes have to analyze games from different perspectives, and not just trying to complete it. I try to watch what is the important thing that I am enjoying. There's a lot more, but I think it's enough to be able to understand my thought processes. EXP: the experience system had to be rebuilt from the scratch to make it fit the current players needs, but now, with madness mode, we really need this. So we needed to create some kind of an equation, that would be rather experimental, but I’m quite convinced, that it’s going to work as I imagine. What I want is a player motivated to play the game over and over again. One of the aspects why a player likes a certain game is that he sees the progress. The curve of EXP points needed for each individual level is an S function, this means that at the beginning the differences will be much smaller but they will raise exponentially until they reach a linear phase. Moreover, at the end of the second half of the curve, the increasing differences will decrease.
In other words, if you need 80 000, then 90 000 and then 105 000 around level 80 the actual increase is 10 000 points and then 15 000, but anyway you need more experience to get to the next level. At higher levels these values are 80 000, 90 000,
Source
Changelog.gg summarizes and formats this update. How we read updates.