Moving update & Flare Shot postmortem (Patreon)

Hey everybody! This is gonna be another "updateless update"; we're deep into the move to Alaska now, and our computer setups have all been dismantled, so nobody on the core team has a way to work on CPE right now. Since there's nothing to share in regards to game development, I'd like to share a quick update on the move itself, along with a lengthy writeup about the Flare Shot's original incarnation, what my intentions for it were, where I believe I went wrong, and how I intend to improve it (and the game's combat as a whole) going forward.

So first up, the move. I won't get into anything too specific, but it's going smoothly; we've shipped something like half our stuff, and all our big furniture is already gone, so we're just sleeping on air mattresses for the rest of our time here. All that's really left is to ship out the rest of what we're keeping, donate the rest, and do some deep cleaning before we leave. It's been an extremely busy move and I'm so ready to be done with it. Our flight is scheduled for the 27th, and I'm extremely anxious to get back to working on CPE, so expect streams to start up again very early August; as soon as my computer arrives and I have everything set up again I'll be doing those regularly again.

Now, the Flare Shot. As our patrons know by now, from the recent polls, the Flare Shot is getting a rework. I decided to take another look at it while reworking the Wire Shot, and decided that, while the Flare Shot isn't nearly as underwhelming as the Wire Shot was, it's also not very interesting or useful outside of a few niche cases, mostly involving the Orbital Flare skill you can purchase. I want to examine why I think it turned out that way, from my perspective as the game's designer.

The starting point to this is actually not related to the Flare Shot, at least not directly; the thing that got me thinking about this was some comments I received recently on a forum. Essentially, the comments boiled down to criticism about the game's enemies being too tanky, and taking too many shots to die, which made playing the game cumbersome; my initial reaction was that I didn't really agree, but rather than brushing it aside, I wanted to think about it more thoroughly, and I think I've discovered a few key reasons why I believe some players feel this way, as well as how I plan to resolve it.

First off, Crisis Point is a Metroidvania, strongly modeled after Metroid, which gives any player going into it expectations of similar gameplay. In Metroid, for most of the game you have two real forms of attacking; your beam weapon, and missiles. Missiles have limited ammo, but ammo is extremely plentiful and meant to be spammed, while your beam has infinite ammo and is constantly upgraded to be more powerful throughout the game.

Now the first question I asked myself was, is it fair for people to judge Crisis Point's combat next to Metroid's? They are different games, after all. Regardless of what your opinion to that is, the reality is that it will undoubtedly happen for many players, and as a designer, I have to be ready to deal with those expectations - whether it's by meeting them, or by dispelling them. Crisis Point's combat is undoubtedly different, but it's in minor ways; you still have an infinite blaster, but you customize upgrades instead of getting one upgrade path. You still have a limited ammo explosive, but it's an area blast with very limited ammo, rather than a higher-damage projectile with nearly limitless ammo. The similarities are TOO similar, which is a failure on my part to bring the player to a place where they can experience the game's combat as its own thing, rather than comparing it to other similar games. I believe that to dispel that initial impression of "Metroid-like" would require a heavy rework of the game's combat design, and that's far outside of a realistic scope at this point, so I'll be focus on minor tweaks to bring the game more in line with the average player's expectations.

The next issue I think CPE's combat has is where the Flare Shot, and its original design goal, comes in: some elements of CPE are designed as if combat is a complex affair, and the main focus of the game. The reality is that combat is mostly just an obstacle in a Metroidvania, not the main focus of the game; it serves to make areas more memorable and interesting to traverse, rather than being the core focus of the experience, with the occasional boss fight as an exception. The Flare Shot (and more extensively, the subweapon system as a whole) is the largest example of where I've so far failed to meet this.

The intention behind the Flare Shot's combat was to make it a support weapon, capable of lighting enemies on fire to make them more susceptible to other forms of damage. After examining this thoroughly, I believe there are three main problems with this:

• The Flare Shot only made enemies more vulnerable after a late Skill Point upgrade, which most players wouldn't even get to as they had little reason to invest in the Flare Shot. Up until that point, it served almost no purpose.
• Switching subweapons is extremely cumbersome, especially because the Wire Shot was included in that set of weapons despite not being a real weapon, and using the Flare Shot meant switching off of the more-immediately-effective Force Shot.
• Lastly, sort of an extension of point 2, enemies just aren't tanky enough for its function to be valuable. The only enemies in the game that have very high HP are the enemies in the Subaquatic Caverns, where you can't use the Flare Shot anyway, so there's never a fight that justifies the effort required to switch subweapons so you can light an enemy on fire and deal more damage.
  

In an action game where combat is the main focus, of course it makes sense for the player to have complex options in combat - maximizing your ability to fight is the main intention, and having more tools to do that in interesting ways is important. But CPE is a Metroidvania, exploration is the core of the genre, so making exploration smooth and fun should be the goal. Enemies really don't take long to kill in CPE, especially if you utilize all your options in combat - the problem is that many of them take longer than you would expect for the genre, creating a disconnect. To rectify this awkward half-combat-half-exploration focus the game currently has, I believe that Crisis Point's combat shortcomings can all be fixed by making changes to these three key things:

• The control scheme
• How much HP enemies have
• How much damage enemies deal

For the controls, I will be entirely removing subweapon switching as a function; each subweapon will be given its own dedicated button, and the Flare Shot is going to be integrated with the melee attack, along with some improvements to melee in general to make it more responsive. By doing this, all of the game's subweapons will be able to fit much more nicely together with the player's core toolkit, as it won't require much effort at all to use any of them in any given moment.

For enemy HP, I will be lowering the health many enemies have across the board, while keeping the HP of a few key enemy types higher (such as the Crystal Dragon and Alraune), to sort of bring those enemies up to "miniboss" status, while reducing the time you spend fighting other, weaker foes. I won't be changing HP values too dramatically, however, because in the latest demos you can already see an example of how I plan on improving this: Power Orbs, a new collectible that increases the amount of damage you do with ALL of your weapons, permanently. Most of Crisis Point's upgrades subscribe to the design concept of "horizontal progression" rather than "vertical progression"; essentially "more/new options" instead of directly giving the player more power. Horizontal progression is often more difficult to design, but more interesting; in a Metroidvania, I believe there's room for both. Vertical progression gives more incentive to explore for upgrades even once you've found a set of tools you like fighting with, as well as giving you that satisfying feeling of returning to earlier areas and being able to completely stomp weaker enemies. I also plan on adding visible damage numbers to the game, so you can more clearly see the damage you're doing to foes, and what kind of impact your blaster chip choices are having on your damage output.

For the damage enemies deal, I will likely be raising it across the board. Reducing enemy HP will naturally make enemies less threatening since you can off them quicker; however, I really like where Crisis Point's difficulty is at right now, so I want to counter the reduced HP by making each enemy more threatening. The main way you heal in Crisis Point is by killing enemies; running from them is always an option, but unless you're great at dodging while running, you'll need to fight to heal eventually, which I think makes the choice to fight or flee much more interesting if enemies pose a serious threat.

My general intention with this balancing act is to keep the general difficulty about the same as it is now, while making combat quicker, more varied, and less cumbersome. Some enemies should pose a larger threat than before (creating those miniboss-like encounters I mentioned), but the average enemy should be easier to put down than before, without removing their ability to be a threat if you get complacent.

Wew.. that was a long one, but I hope you enjoyed reading it! The planned changes are mostly simple/numerical things, so I don't expect it to take long to implement, but there will naturally be a lot of tweaking to get things feeling just right. In a future post I'll detail my exact plans for the Flare Shot + Melee integration, but in the meantime, feel free to leave any ideas if you have them. Feedback is king in game development, and I want to make sure these changes are done right. Thank you all so much for taking the time to read, and thank you so much to our patrons for being so patient with the lack of development work - this move is taking a lot out of me, but I'm excited to get back to work on CPE as soon as I possibly can!