Hello,

I’ve been in crunch mode this last week to work on the Early Access of my game.

Seeing the changes you make directly affecting your players is an awesome feeling!

Anyway, let’s get to this week’s ideas!

3 Gamedev Ideas

Your players are experts at pinpointing the issues of your game, but they don’t always know the right solutions. It’s your job to find them.

For example, someone might tell you that “the game feels too repetitive, you need to add more enemies”.

This is great feedback. But you could fix this issue in many ways: making enemies work better together with new skills, restructuring how your run unfolds (in the case of a roguelite) or even adding new characters instead.

A lot of times, the solution might be to tweak things that the player isn’t even aware of.

If your game is feeling too hard and frustrating, you could give the player a few frames of invulnerability while colliding with a foe or add half a second before the enemies can attack.

II.

You should spend most of your time working on polishing your early game content.

This is what the majority of people will see. That’s when they’ll decide whether or not they like your game.

Don’t spend 2 months working on an end game boss that only 1% of your playerbase will ever see.

Make sure instead that the basic enemies are fun to fight.

III.

Triple down on what makes your game unique and fun to your biggest players.

You should try to understand why they like to play and try to enhance those aspects of the game.

Watch them play, talk with them and ask them questions. You’ll get invaluable information.

At the same time, you can also ask people why they didn’t like it.

If it doesn’t compromise the core of your game, fixing those issues could help more people enter your playerbase.

But be aware that some of them might just not be part of your audience.

Until next week,

Thomas Gervraud,
Developer of Space Gladiators: Escaping Tartarus