Freedom Planet (v. 1.4)

[Serephim]

With your new system, does a single keystone give you a shield? If so, i think that would be a much better incentive for searching for them. Then it becomes a reward for both not getting hit and consecutively finding keystones.

But the main thing about the shields is that they're a bit too difficult to obtain for the function they grant. But if finding one gave you a shield, and then finding more had compounded benefits, it would be like a constant reason to continue searching. Especially if different shields have different benefits.

like 1 keystone = Shield, 2 = Stronger shield, 3 = Shield + Crystal on kill, 4 = some little extra attack, 5 = powerup on extra attack. These are purely just speculative ideas though. The other issue with this idea though is balancing the benefits so that the player feels compelled to actually search. it's really about how much you weigh the ability to negate damage.

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i'd also think about the possibility of removing the "stronger shield" concept altogether, and instead maybe focus on giving the player a reason to maintain it. I personally wouldn't go for the idea of obtaining a shield with a timed functionality; that's what the invincibility powerup is for.

On the other hand...here's another system:

- 1 keystone = Shield

- All subsequent keystones add to a meter with a max (maybe 3 or 4)

- * By pressing a button, you consume all of that meter for an effect that scales in proportion to how many keystones you have.

1 - An extra hit on the shield

2 - some sort of extended attack range for limited time + #1

3 - Maybe a projectile (like a wave) added to your range for limited time + #1

4 - Full invincibility + Projectile added to your range for limited time

5 - Full invincibility + Projectile + max meter for limited time

(Or + Acceleration or + max speed + energy gain or whatnotwhatever the effect would work best for cost)

Getting hit before activating will remove the shield. You can consume a charge to reactivate it.

Edit: (Actually, with that skillset getting hit should probably remove a charge as well as remove the shield. That way reactivating with max keystones will start you off at Effect #3 instead of #4.)

This way, you will ALWAYS have an incentive for searching for keystones, an incentive for keeping them (not getting hit), and an incentive for finding more than one, and you keep the control of the effects within the player's hand. This can be compounded on even further if you change the effects per-element. But it would work even if the element didn't matter.

I think it also would scale well into endgame, where getting hit is more common and enemies may become more troublesome. And it also would add benefit for the Speedrunning player, giving them more ways to complete the stage faster by weighing the option of speeding through the stage or actually getting powerups.

[AldenT]

I'm with Sereph on this one. With the new shield system, it was way too easy to do a no-damage run in Hard mode and I couldn't even keep track of how many hits the shield could take. What's more, getting a different shield from a keystone rather than an orb reset the hits of the previous shield, so all that build-up didn't amount to anything in the end. It's more discouraging than it sounds.

Of course, making shields too easy to get would make the health redundant (in fact, I play in Hard mode because otherwise there's no real reason to dodge) so reducing the health of the player to compensate might throw people off. At this rate you might as well make shields the real portion of health if they're gonna be that important and their effects will be central to the gameplay.

You could consider Super Mario Galaxy too. In that game, health was a simple 3 HP counter and a star mushroom added another 3. The effect disappeared as soon as those extra 3 HP were lost but otherwise it worked like real health. That made it an incentive to not get hit (to conserve it) and rewarding to find (since it's a bit too easy to die otherwise and it takes serious skill to avoid that in several late stages).

In the end, perhaps the beef with the shields is that they're balanced around immunity in a game that doesn't really need it. I'm willing to believe the full game may have that many traps and/or more aggressive enemies to compensate, but from what's available here it's not really showing that. I know Dragon Valley's the first level and so it needs to start off lax, but the case is that it deals in occasional hits rather than constant assaults by enemies. Since there's so much health, you just take hits and go. Is it a fear of making the game too hard that caused this?

[AldenT]

By the way, not really glitches but some things people might notice when playing:

- If Lilac is going too fast in this section, she'll stick to the ceiling and run in the other direction, breaking up the flow of the moment. This doesn't happen to Carol, even on the bike, and she's unlockable so chances are players may run into this earlier than it seems.

- It's strange that players can't leave Carol's bike on platforms. I understand it's because of the lack of physics and this is the workaround until then, but I predict people being forced to ride the bike when they meant to leave it behind. Personally, I hope this workaround doesn't make it to the final game.

- Due to the shape of the second slope in the boulder chase, it's too easy to get behind the boulder and so the "chase" sorta inverts. This could be solved by sending several boulders at once (so it might be more of an avalanche) or simply changing the second slope so the player can't stall it. I honestly found it clever that letting the boulder run offscreen simply sends another one into the scene, but I don't know how the Kickstarter viewers might take that.

I still need to check what's fixed and what's not in this update, but it's okay. It's still nice to see the project come so far.

[Duckboy]

The motorcycle powerup rules

[Strife]

I'm having trouble figuring out how much of what you said about the shielding is based around the fact that you can probably clear DV with your eyes closed since you've played through it so many times. xD; In later stages, there are hazards that would act as fairly effective shield breakers, such as flamethrowers and the like, since they're constantly overlapping the player.

Perhaps keystones should offer a different benefit - something a little more passive so that the player doesn't have to remind themselves that they have an ability they can use from it. I for one know that even if there's some special ability I can use from collecting them, I would forgot to use it most of the time. That, and I'd have to find another button to map. <.<

- Maybe the player's maximum number of petals begins at 3, and collecting a keystone adds another petal up to a maximum of 7 - but, like the Mario Galaxy example mentioned, the extra petal slots could not be recovered if hit.

- Maybe each keystone collected up to 5 would add a multiplier to the number of crystals and petals obtained from an item box. Smashing one of these item boxes would remove one of your keystones as a result.

- The chests scattered around the stages are locked and require a keystone to open. Opening them rewards you with a powerup.

- Collecting 5 keystones subtracts a certain number of seconds from the timer.

Also, I fixed that troublesome ceiling. Should be okay in the next update. ^^

[Strife]

I've had some time to think about this, and I have another idea that I'll crosspost from Sonic Retro.

How about this: When a keystone is collected, it acts like a temporary powerup that briefly gives you the same benefits as the shield it represents. For example, collecting an Earth keystone would pull crystals towards you for 10 seconds. Collecting two keystones of the same color in a row would give you the power for 20 seconds.

So how is this any different from the shield powerups? With shields, you have a permanent effect that disappears if you are hit. With the keystones, you have a temporary effect, but it stays with you even if you are attacked.

This could make keystones feel more valueble since the player is given an immediate benefit instead of having to wait to collect 5 of them in a row. Consequentially, shield crystals would also feel a little more rewarding since they would become the only way to collect shields.

I have a few more ideas that might work, but this one would involve the least amount of work to implement. xD Does it at least seem better than the current system?

[AldenT]

Okay, you got me with that! Yeah, I've been all over DV by now, seriously need to record a run sometime. 8D; Though this does confirm overlapping as the main form of damage calculation in Freedom Planet. Great to know it works against the players too, that kind of consistency is rare.

Speaking from experience, loading a game with passive effects makes it harder to remember what a player can do and even more complicated to balance the difficulty around them. Players may or may not have them, keeping track of it all in a menu tends to break the pace of the main action and the more passives there are in a game, the less useful each of them tends to be. So they usually need to be stacked together for some mindless game-breaking combo and that's even worse for balance's sake so yeah, I say stick with actives.

For that matter, of your listed ideas I think the third one is the best. I mean, what else would open a chest than a KEYstone? That would be an incentive for beating enemies and could expand on chests as a mechanic, since some chests may need specific keystones while others could change their contents based on what the player has on hand. Of course, that crystal booster sounds great too and even the second shaver thing could be useful if record unlocks like Carol's will be common in the full game.

As for health, I think it's great to go with a small base value that increases as the adventure continues. MegaMan X's heart tanks are an amazing example of a steady boost in health while Super Mario Galaxy's approach as a temporary boost works because the star mushrooms appear in the right spots. Both examples build these into their stages so perhaps DV needs more shields and/or less petals to make health more valuable. There's another example but I'll get to that soon enough.

[AldenT]

Temporary shield effects? This could actually be better in the long run if they're built into the stage design, adding them right when they're needed. One of the older ideas you mentioned (that the shields are self-demonstrating when left alone) could be merged with that too, adding a decision between taking cover behind a permanent effect, or breaking it and using it yourself for a while.

But from keystones? That might happen a bit too much for it to feel valuable. Shield crystals aren't common enough in DV as is so maybe that just needs more of them in place but if every keystone resulted in a shield effect (even a temporary one), they might as well be the standard for the game and that's not rewarding anymore.

Frankly, shields as power-ups are better off removed from Freedom Planet. The effects are worth keeping but the idea of power-ups is another parallel haters could use to bash the game as a "Sonic clone". What better way to show it's not than using a new format for an old concept? I know I liked the Sonic shields until I realized the added effects made it that much more discouraging to get hit, even without the ring loss.

All in all, I say go for it.

[SonicWind]

That sounds like a good idea.

But what would happen if you collected a keystone other than the first one?

[Serephim]

Frankly, shields as power-ups are better off removed from Freedom Planet. The effects are worth keeping but the idea of power-ups is another parallel haters could use to bash the game as a "Sonic clone". What better way to show it's not than using a new format for an old concept? I know I liked the Sonic shields until I realized the added effects made it that much more discouraging to get hit, even without the ring loss.

All in all, I say go for it.

I sort of agree, although for a completely different reason. A shield is a pretty generic, staple powerup in any platformer. I don't think there is very much Strife can do at this point to outright avoid a comparison to Sonic the Hedgehog. The game is obviously inspired by Sonic and anyone who's played both will immediately notice this. Haters gonna hate regardless.

My reason would be, from what ive played through anyway, Shields just don't seem like they matter that much. Rather, the concept of absorbing damage doesn't matter as much in Freedom Planet because the characters already have a health bar.

Like i said before, in Sonic getting hit removes all of your rings and sets you up for immediate death if you don't collect them. So having a shield (in 1 and 2) had clear, compound benefits. It helped keep you alive, it saved your score, and it saved your rings, which were required to enter the Special Stages. You could even make parallels to Mario if you count the Mushroom -> Fire Flower as an increasingly powerful shield. They are worth searching for because running around small is potentially fatal, and the Fire Flower is worth keeping because it makes the stage much easier to complete. Super Mario Bros. 3 takes this farther by adding many different types with abilities. Sonic 3 removed the Ring requirement for entering the special stage (which in turn made the shield less important for completion) but also gave special functions (sound familiar?) to different shields. With Tails and Knuckles, you had environmental hazard protection, and they enhanced Sonic's gameplay in response to the superior maneuverability of the new characters.

Another example that just came to me was Crash Bandicoot. Once again, being hit once instantly kills you in Crash. This gives the masks a high priority for the player, since they allow you to make a mistake once without dying. 2 masks save you twice, and doing well enough to obtain a third eventually gives Crash added speed and invulnerability for a short amount of time, allowing you to ignore obstacles and complete the stage much easier. Just like with Sonic3 and the Marios, the player is rewarded for not taking damage. But the initial incentive behind this is that taking damage otherwise is somewhat unforgiving.

....Which brings me back to Freedom Planet. Unless enemies and hazards in later stages begin taking more health than usual, shields just don't mean that much. This is why i suggested that, on top of simply keeping the characters alive, they should also augment their abilities in some way. You are not penalized nearly as hard for being hit in FP as in any of those other games. So instead of making them primarily a defensive option, it could give you more offensive options for completing the stage, doubling as a reward for not getting hit anyway.

But i've only played dragon valley, which is the first stage, so there's really no way for me to make any useful suggestions on this.

[Strife]

Ah, that makes sense. ^^ I suppose, then, that what I should really be doing is looking at how other action games with health bars deal with powerups, such as the Megaman series. In a typical Megaman game, there are really only four types of pickups: Health, energy, extra lives, and E-Tanks. I already have the first three in FP, and the player already has enough health that E-Tanks wouldn't be very useful until the final stages.

Action games with health instead tend to offer powerups that provide extra weapons or abilities for the player, but since every character in FP already has their own unique attacks, adding more attacks on top of that would be a headache and something I'd rather save for the sequel when I can think about it from the moment of conception.

This begs the question of whether or not there is a place for keystones in this game - or, at least, if they should be spawned by enemies in the first place. Perhaps I would be able to give them a more powerful effect if they were exclusive to treasure chests.

As far as the shields go, I will at least keep the shield crystals in the game, because they do have the additional benefit of protecting the player from recoil for one attack. This can be a boon to speedrunners because it allows them to tank through a single hit without slowing down. There are also a couple of stages that are centered around a specific element type (i.e. a fire/lava stage) and keeping a shield for these would have a massive benefit, rending the player immune to some of the stage's more dangerous sections.

[Strife]

Since I'd rather not risk any significant changes breaking the current build of the game, I have officially released version 1.3 to the public. It's available on our download page as always:

http://freedomplanet.galaxytrail.com/download.htm

For those of you who have already tested it, the only significant changes are a fix to one of the ceilings that players could get hung up on, a tweak to Lilac's swimming in which she cannot use the Dragon Cyclone for 0.5 seconds after jumping out of the water, and altered graphics for the keystones.

I'm just waiting on one of my VAs to send me their lines, and after that, I'll be submitting our Kickstarter video for review. I hope I can get that done later tonight.

[AldenT]

The thing about MegaMan's health system is that it's huge because of the loads of damage you take from all sorts of sources, most of which you can't get rid of before they have a chance to hurt you. On top of that, health pick-ups are relatively rare, health drops are random (so enemies aren't worth killing sometimes) and even when considering E-Tanks, there's always the fear of spikes and bottomless pits to worry about.

In my experience, I find Megaman lends itself to too much farming in desperate situations because there are few checkpoints and it's very easy to die on the way back. Stages with early E-Tanks (or bolts, in games that have them) are a blessing for this, since you can just get them and kill yourself over and over, but I don't see this as a good quality for Freedom Planet.

Perhaps the health system in Freedom Planet is a problem because enemies aren't aggressive enough. MegaMan mooks work because they have a specific role that becomes annoying in the right spots. Some are actually spaced in order to bust a player who gets predictable, which is itself possible to design because of the linear feel of the stages.

Freedom Planet has some fairly linear design to it, so I think it could use more enemies that attack more quickly. DV already has pretty good examples with the green cannon enemies, especially the one placed right above the second set of handlebars. That guy will nail you if you just wait for the platform to come down, so it teaches you to not do that next time. If you're ever considering these changes but fear you might butcher the difficulty, just experiment with Hard mode. That would help to set a clear difference.

By the way, great to hear about the update. Not sure when Kickstarter will really, well, start, but I hope to find you a bit more info before then.

[Serephim]

About MM's health system...Megaman teaches you very early on that the game is out to kill you, and are usually so ruthless in their methods of teaching you that you eventually become desensitized and start expecting the worse. Which (eventually) makes the game possible to actually complete without running your face through a cheese grater. If you dont quit first.

Megaman is...well, it could be a good way to look at things. Megaman doesn't really rely on the health bar to murder you; every other bottomless pit in classical megaman has some asshole who's gonna manage to knock you into it one way or another. Megaman X was alot more forgiving though, and the game did focus alot more on its action elements as difficulty rather then its platforming elements.

As for more attacks, I can definitley attest to the annoyance of making more animations, which is why i suggested that you could just add an extra effect to the current animations. In my experience this is always a rewarding feeling, even if the effect is kind of trivial (like added fire or sparkles). A good example of that (in platforming) is Rocket Knight 2. An even better example (not as related though) was Phantasy Star Online (or any classical JRPG really), which pretty much live and breathe by this rule when it comes to milking the most out of your animations. The funny part is that it actually works. That's just a thought though.

If you want to keep the shields thats good, i think you should keep them. I think we (or just I) might be jumping the gun a bit when it comes to entirely new suggestions on the system itself. I think an equally effective solution to all of this is to just simplify the system. The only reason I mentioned it is because of how disproportionate the reward was for the trouble -- if you just alter that, there isn't really a problem anymore.

[Strife]

That last bit is true, and that's why I've contemplated removing keystones altogether. Afterall, if they don't have a unique function and aren't very desirable as a collectable, then why keep them?

Though, again, their usefulness may increase as the game gets harder, and there's also the fact that Dragon Valley is made to be super easy and it's as simple as breathing for most of the testers by now. xD So I'll wait on making a decision until later down the road when I get a better feel for which players will need them.

In the meantime, I could remove keystones from Hard mode. I think I'll do that, actually.

As far as elemental attack go, that seems like something I could experiment with, so long as it doesn't cause too much imbalance. Afterall, one of the most appealing things about Streak's Mecha Madness fangame was the various elements Sonic could harness - even though each element revolved around the same concept of throwing enemies across the room, they still felt different and varied.

Maybe elemental attacks cause the same damage as normal ones, but inflict double damage on the opposing element and do half damage to enemies of the same element. In addition, there could be different types of breakable walls that could only be destroyed with the correct elemental attack.

[AldenT]

That difficulty tweak would be a great experiment, especially at this point. It may just be that keystones don't play a big part in Dragon Valley, but could still factor into more advanced stages. If anything, if later levels have a certain element to define them, making certain enemies drop the proper keystones would reinforce the identity of each level AND make each effect more useful as they'd be more likely to appear when they matter.

If you need more examples to borrow from, I can think of Super Mario World where one of the early features that stood out were colored "!" blocks. They had to be unlocked by reaching secret switches hat, once triggered, would spread the blocks all over the game world. You could potentially run into stages with hollow spaces that would only fill out after the correct switch was hit, hinting at the mystery to solve. And let's face it, Avalice will have its own mysteries, right?

About elemental attacks, I'd recommend granting such properties to the characters themselves for the sake of identity. There's a good start in Lilac breathing for so long and swimming because she's a water dragon, but actually having a water element in her attacks could work to define her even more. Shields would be much more valuable in this case, to counter the weaknesses of characters that need them. Perhaps getting the character a shield of their element could give them a unique boost tailored to their strengths.

Of course, if every attack became elemental, that could cause a problem unless some moves are deliberately left neutral. And then, without effects or new animations, it might be hard to tell players what's elemental and what's not. Really, there's just so much that could come from this that it could help to turn keystones and shield crystals into the central mechanic they seemed to be.

[AldenT]

By the way, right now, I got some more things to report. It's real quick this time, but I suppose I dumped most of today's info in my previous post. 83; In any case, here's what I got:

- Clearing DV with a multi-level shield then playing again starts the player off with 4 keystones. What's more, getting the last one to activate the shield gives you all the hits you'd stored in your previous run. I haven't tested just how many hits it's possible to stack this way, but it could potentially trip up players that test DV with one girl then the other.

- More noticeably, Carol's energy gauge reverts to the old design when she runs out of petals. For that matter, her energy gauge being red but her keystone slots being yellow seems a bit inconsistent. Either thing could stand out to anyone who plays Carol long enough.

- The bike parking workaround might not be enough to stop all those floating bike glitches. I got this to happen by parking it on the grey block before the weight switch. I'm pretty sure it's possible to do it with any platform that can give way underneath the bike. It may be especially notable with the breakable blocks or the bridges near the end of DV.

That's it for now. Hopefully these will be easy fixes just in time for Kickstarter like the ceiling thing.

[Strife]

Bada bing bada boom:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/galaxytrail/freedom-planet-high-speed-platform-game

I should also mention that our Kickstarter video reveals Milla as a playable character. Go ahead and watch it if you want to see some of her abilities.

[GSF]

Oh yes. Gimme a couple weeks and I'll back you up. Need to get the $$$ first. <3

Just one thing - how will Steam integrate with an MMF2 application? Is it possible? I'm not particularly a big fan of steam because it tends to run like shit on linux, but I'll give it a try regardless. MMF2 apps are quite linux friendly.

[AldenT]

So Milla won the poll! I knew it! 8D And the video... okay, wow, WHERE DO I START? It looks very well done, even taking time with jokes and everything. You guys totally hit it out of the park! X3 b But now I'm gonna have to take a loan or something, because that closed beta could come in real handy. Maybe even closed alpha... I mean, wow, $1000 for a boss? That is SO out of my reach. . _ .

In any case, congrats on the Kickstarter plan! A month should be more than enough time to reach that goal.

[Strife]

Sweet! Thanks guys!

Oh yes. Gimme a couple weeks and I'll back you up. Need to get the $$$ first. <3

Just one thing - how will Steam integrate with an MMF2 application? Is it possible? I'm not particularly a big fan of steam because it tends to run like shit on linux, but I'll give it a try regardless. MMF2 apps are quite linux friendly.

There is actually a Steam object for MMF2, but it requires the Steam developer's kit, which they don't give you unless your game is Greenlit. So, Clickteam doesn't pass it out unless you meet that condition.

[SonicWind]

Great work on the video, Strife! Nice to know even the game's characters themselves want to support it.

I'd definitely pay to help you, but I can't...

[XeroNazoBlaze]

<3 Lord Brevon's voice. Good luck with everything Strife!

[Duckboy]

You only need $2000? You'll get that really quickly. I hope you have some more stretch goals in mind!

edit: You're at $1,775 as of this post. Yeah. You're gonna funded and more by tomorrow.

[ila]

Congrats on the successful Kickstarter launch. I'll throw some money your way when I get the chance too. I do think you should be a little more open about your stretch goals though.