Version 2.11 - Speed adjustment and game rebalance

Game Updates:

• Increased the player speed.
• Rebalanced the gift size tier values and minimum points required.
• Lowered the maximum amount the game can zoom out.
• Fixed a few smaller bugs.

Dev Notes:

I received some very helpful observation from a user today about the game. They thought the player was more sluggish than in the original version. I looked more into it and they were right! I had tried to match speeds when I created this new version, but I must not have been careful.

So... I went in the other direction and made the player a little faster! Since there were more gifts in this version, maybe the player should be faster to compensate.

But it wasn't that simple. This was a good learning experience as it learned how balancing a game can be tricky.

Let's talk about what I want the player to experience in the game. I want them to have fun with the game, but be challenged if they want to be. They can try see how many gifts they can pick up. Or see what their highest score is. Or try to discover all the endings. But one goal that I hoped the player would discover and try to achieve was to pick up the largest item, which was the bed. I placed it by itself in a way to make it look a bit different from the rest of the gifts.

So the gift progression I had planned was for the first few gift size tiers to be very easy to work through. I placed many of them everywhere, with a focus around the player. You need 5 first tier gifts to unlock the second tier. So I tried to make it so that if the player moved in any of the 8 major directions, they should stumble upon 5 first tier gifts fairly quickly. The player should be able to find many early tier gifts easily in any new area they travel.

It is the last three tiers that are difficult. There are fewer of them and may require some strategy to progress through them. The player would need to find an efficient path from the beginning to have enough points to pick up the bed. I didn't build the game to have any "golden path". I think there are lots of options for what are good paths to take.

So the idea I was hoping for was that the player would first play with the intent on discovering and figuring out what this game was about. Try to understand the structure and rules for the game. It's pretty simple, so hopefully that first run will be enough. Unless they are very lucky, they might not break into the last 2 tiers. It may be because it took time to understand what they are doing, reading the gift descriptions and not following any efficient path. Hopefully, the player may have seen a few gifts that they may have wanted to pickup, but couldn't or they found the game amusing. Ideally, they had some experience that pushed them to play again. And they should do better, but not enough to get the bed. And they'll play a few more times until they do get the bed. But I wanted the bed to be out of reach until the last handful of seconds and so the player would have to rush to get it. And when they do, it would feel like a great sense of accomplishment.

So with my intent on the game experience out of the way, I found that by making the player a little faster, the game progression I wanted was messed up. The player would pickup gifts a little quicker, but that meant that the bed was a lot easier to get as it deemphasized being efficient in gift gathering. I found that I could get the bed with more than 30 secs left on the clock. Much too soon.  So I had to change the points requirements for the gift size tiers. This was a new experience for me to go through all the numbers and find new values to make the game balanced. The first time I set the numbers for the first version of the game, I really got lucky. It just kinda worked out. Even when I made this new version, I added new gifts and I did tweak a few numbers, but I got lucky again and it worked out. This time, it took longer and I had to put more thought into it. I could have moved some gifts around or removed some, but I really wanted to leave it and see if I could find the right numbers to make it work. It took some time and lots of play testing, but I think I got it. Though I might be giving away too much info, the new values for the gift tiers are:

1. Worth 10 pts, requires at least 0 points
2. Worth 15 pts, requires at least 50 points
   
3. Worth 20 pts, requires at least 125 points
   
4. Worth 25 pts, requires at least 350 points
   
5. Worth 30 pts, requires at least 500 points
   
6. Worth 50 pts, requires at least 850 points
   
7. Worth 75 pts, requires at least 1750 points
   
8. Worth 150 pts, requires at least 2750 points
   

For whatever the next game I make, I will try to challenge myself and try to find a more systematic method of game balancing. Though guessing at numbers is easy, I'd imagine there must be a better  way to approach this.

Anyhow, thanks for reading and playing.