Our sweet and supple Producer, Dant Rambo, tells me that I have a devlog post to write today.
So, I’ll tell y’all what I’m working on at the moment.
You remember the cannon micro-game after you got a Perfect run in Runner2, right?
The anticipation is killing me!
In Runner3, we’re going to be giving this simple and infuriating micro-game a bit more funjuice.
While we all loved the elegant simplicity of the feature the first time around (insert scream here when you miss the bullseye while going for a Perfect+), it could get somewhat repetitive if you were trying to Triple Perfect+ the whole game.
So for Runner3, each playable character is going to have their own distinct target micro-game!
The barfening out of creativity.
The biggest challenge here is to keep the micro-game as simple as it was in Runner2 for each character’s variation while at the same time making them all distinct from one another.
In game design, one often has to work within constraints, but when the constraints are so simplistic, as in this cannon micro-game, and you have to make so many variations, the constraints can feel overly restrictive.
It’s also easy to overdesign while thinking you’re keeping things simple. In fact, one of the designs on the whiteboard above is definitely too complex. Which one do you think it is?
The constraints we ended up settling upon were that the micro-game takes one button press, there’s no on-screen HUD telling you what to do, and there’s only one thing moving in each variation. Once we settled on these constraints and made them explicit, the designs fell into place.
So, when you get your fingerhands on Runner3 next year, and you’re trying for an elusive Perfect+, you’ll get to choose which micro-game you want by playing as a specific character.
Now, who are all these characters…