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I’m having a bit of trouble at the moment balancing eye candy and playability. To explain, take for instance, ‘The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai.’ When someone first looks at the game, they say, “Woo, that looks exciting!” I think I was impressed in the same way at first as well (not taking anything away from what Silva has done; I’m still impressed with it). The reason why is that every action in the game is accompanied with a reaction. Attacks have blur effects and filters attached, the camera is constantly zooming in and out, and the entire game basically being grayscale helps the particle effects and blood (which are in color) to stand out more. That was my basic design philosophy behind the Angela Game I was working on, after all (never finished it). 

But I feel that takes away from gameplay as well to a degree. It looks good in video, but it’s hard to focus on things when particles are exploding all over the place and things block your view. Zooming in and out is good to a degree, but you don’t want to obscure someone’s view of the entire stage if at all possible. All those things I consider when designing our game in the long run.

But in contrast, I look at stuff like Braid, which I think is artistically stunning (the hand painted, colorful backgrounds are beautiful, and the effects, while plentiful, never call attention to themselves), and look at the relative lack of “wow” effect that it has on the casual gamer. Yes, us artists like it, and industry insiders find it interesting, but that’s not who keeps us financially afloat. And that makes me worry about the marketing aspect of subtlety in design.

In the end, my design style is basically similar to the Castlevania series, which was one of my stronger influences. I’m putting tons of effects and particles and such in there, but as a highlight or a compliment, and (hopefully), never a distraction. We had an automatically zooming camera similar to Dishwasher or Silhouette Mirage going, but I made the decision to make the camera user controlled so that people can zoom in as close as they like when they’d like. I put some background effects in, but I try to keep them as subtle as possible to hopefully add to the ambience instead of taking away from it. Etc.

I THINK I’m making the right choice, but then again, I look at 12 year old comments on Youtube “WOWIIIEEE-ing” any excess effects, and I think I’m making the wrong choice. Only time will tell, I guess.

God, I hate web design, I really do. That’s why I’m just using a default template for this blog; anything else meant goofing around with the images and css and…it’s not really worth it.

So anyway, I’m pretty much done with this website and soon the blog can focus on actual game development. I’m waiting this week for the big Dream Build Play Announcement that was rumored – hopefully, the template basically follows what last years was. If so, I might focus on polishing what we already have done more than creating new areas and enemies and music and stuff. In fact, for the last week, that’s what I’ve been doing – polishing up the backgrounds and making a few more eye-catching things. Paul just created a new ‘camera’ system in which you can manually zoom in and out of the action at any time, which is cool, but ultimately useless.