Lonnies Fishtank
Check out my Devlog post on the Fish Head Games website here!
Check out the video on my updates to the gameplay mechanics below:
Skeleton Hell 2
The Triple Calavera team has also been discussing what we’d like to see in a Skeleton Hell 2 game. In general there are two major changes proposed: using a sonic engine as the basis of the game mechanics and
Sonic Engine Mechanics
Evan proposed shifting to a 3rd person perspective and using mechanics inspired by precoded sonic engines. The concept is that sonic games have a lot of features that we were interested in bringing into Skeleton Hell. In our adaptation of the engine, we can view the rings as bones, Sonic’s rolling state as the skull rolling state, and many other parallels.
User Generated Levels
One thing I observed from previous community engage with Skeleton Hell was (1) the speed running culture that emerged from it, and (2) the completionism culture that emerged from it. Speed runners competed to see who could find their heart and escape the dungeon the fastest, while completionist sought to earn every achievement that was added to the game. I believe that these two mentalities towards playing the game can be supported even more by the introduction of user generated levels.
One of the major issues I had with Skeleton Hell was a lack of content. Although we had some slight procedural generation in the game, it was very much underutilized and many of the runs / dungeons often looked the same. To improve upon this, I propose adding user generated levels to the game.
Upon opening a level editor found within the game, users can create and customize their own Skeleton Hell levels, much in the same vein as Mario Maker. Players can edit the level in a 3D space. Players would then have to prove that the level could be beaten before it would show up in the level browser.
As far as the community goes, players would have the ability to vote on their favorite levels and reward those players with reputation based on who designed the best levels. This in game rewarding could even translate to some in game bonuses or cosmetics to incentivize people to make the best levels and keep them coming back to the game. Really I think there’s a lot of potential that can be explored with this idea.
This idea is unique because it’d be the first co-op survival horror game with built in user generated content and level editing capabilities. To my knowledge, no other game has attempted to do this. I believe that this ideas is even strong when you add the unique bone mechanics and multiplayer gameplay that Skeleton Hell introduced.
To summarize these thoughts, the user generated levels would:
- Reward User Level Creation: Provide unlimited gameplay with new and unique levels every day. Users would rank the levels and well designed levels would be incentivized and rewarded for in game content (cosmetics), steam achievements, and steam leaderboard positions.
- Incentivize and Reward Speed Running: Reward speed runners on levels by showcasing an in game leaderboard of their performance and how well they did against other people in the community.
- Reward completion of a certain number of developer approved levels: these levels would be deemed by us the developers to be verified and could be used towards gaining new cosmetics and working towards achievements. This idea is very rough, but the idea is that I’d like to reward people for just completing certain levels, while avoiding a situation where dummy levels are generated just to earn the achievement.
Misc Thoughts
- Fleabag: I finished watching Fleabag this week. While the ending of the show was very sad, the writing was very good and I appreciate all of the humor! Claire is definitely my favorite character from the show and I will miss going on the journey with those characters.
- TTRPGs: I haven’t done any reading about the Root RPG, Mothership, or Mork Borg in a while. I really did enjoy learning about and running those sessions, so I hope to get that started again and run a game near me in the New River Valley.
- NRV Game Dev: I would like to start a local game developer meetup in the New River Valley. Hopefully this week I have the energy to draft up a completed interest post and post it to Reddit and meetup. It would even be wise to advertise it on the next 3 days website.
- Dead Game Video Project Series: I should start a dead projects mini series for all the games I started but never finished. I could answer the following questions:
- What was the game?
- What was the state of the game?
- Why did it fail? Why did you drop it off?
- Will you ever go back to the game?
- Dead Games: The games that I’ve started but never finished include:
- Stagehand
- Hell Roulette
- Synthicate
- Whimsical Wizards
- Tombsweeper
- Primordial