Devlog Update: 27/06/2018

Tonight I am going to update everyone on where GR:GO is at. First of all lets start by saying a massive thank you to everyone who participated in the E3 Demo. This Demo has now been taken offline and your feedback has been gathered.

From this feedback I was able to determine 3 things which players had which were the following. 

• Android Players when tabbed out could still hear the game playing
• There was no feedback when players shot enemies or were hit
• The game looked to easy in the demo video

I am going to go through each of these points and talk about the steps I have taken to ensure these issues are bopped on the head early. So without anymore waffle lets talk about that

Android Players when tabbed out could still hear the game playing

This is an issue I did not encounter during testing as I've been testing and developing on iOS. Part of putting the game out on Android was to chum the waters and learn if the game would run on Android and what the minimum specs would be.  This was a good result and I was very happy to announce that unless you were using a phone which could be reverse engineered as a poker cheater the game ran fine. So what I did was make it so the game now detects 'ACTIVATE' and 'DEACTIVATE' events. 

When DEACTIVATE is triggered the game realizes you have tabbed the app using the home button. I added a rule in which automatically activates the games pause menu if you are in the middle of a mission as well

When ACTIVATE is triggered the game realizes you have tabbed the app using the home button.  The game will cue back music if you are in the home screen or activate the light tape deck hiss in the pause screen

So with that out of the way I think we can cross that issue off as FIXED 

There was no feedback when players shot enemies or were hit

This was something I wished to avoid because it had been done to death in my opinion in other games. So my take was to create a red color shift which would appear when the player shot ghosts. Unfortunately I am gonna have to cede my pride here and admit 'the enemies just look like floating stickers'. Well with that I decided to add the following changes to the hit() function of the enemy base class.

• Enemies emit small chunks of flesh
• Enemies now have a bounce effect when they are hit. The enemies scaleY variable increases to 1.1 momentarily and then goes back down during a 0.1s tween. This is done to conserve memory on mobile devices
• Enemies now have a brief slowing effect which makes the bullet hit

Here is some gifs I made while testing

The game looked to easy in the demo video

So this is kind of a learn by doing thing and makes me realize why people play games badly or like Chip Cheezum in demo videos. Its because if you are really good people don't realize whats going on. This is partially me but also one of the items I used in the demo. The Ghost Ranger outfit. The Ghost Ranger outfit adds invincibility frames after each jump. This was done to ease new players into the game. This was actually the original intended way to play but was removed from the other uniforms as a way of making the game easier for new players as this would be the first thing they unlock. 

But after that response I started to think. 

Does that actually make the game fun?

Well my response to that made me channel my inner Kamiya and decided. Fine I am gonna make it do something else. No crutch for you. 

This lead to the GhostRanger outfit now doing a different ability: 

 Smaller frame

This makes Lucky have a 20% smaller hitbox in general. I am not a fan of percentage based gameplay changes so perhaps I will find another way around making smaller frame do something else.

This made me also consider how I am going to get audio feedback for when Lucky (the main character) gets hit. So I hit up one of my voice actor friends Mega Moeka (https://twitter.com/MegaMoeka) about doing some oof noises. She said she is cool to do it. So that's good.  Expect grunting to be shown off in the next gameplay demonstration.

Other small changes

Stinger now only does less damage with slugs overall. This means that choosing stinger has a downside.

Closing thoughts

GhostRanger:GO benefited greatly from your feedback. This demo was a great time for me to finally get this game off my chest. Critics of the game were extremely valuable and fans who were just happy to see me follow this path put a huge smile on my face. 

Thanks everyone. And don't forget your gas mask on the next update because you will need it.