Hi everyone, welcome to the next update of our game process, more prototyping!

These last few weeks have shown us that there's a lot of trial and error required in the prototyping process (and a lot of playtesting), today we'll share some of the good things and some of the things we had to change to make our game more fun.

Level layout

We increased the size of the playing field because we found in playtesting that everything felt a little claustrophobic to move around in.

The level geometry was increased a little in complexity, allowing for multiple different escape paths throughout the level.

Bullet time

Now every time you steal the crown from someone you enter a short epic bullet time so every knows who's the new king and who to hunt next.

Trampolines

We also added an entirely new feature to our level which are trampolines. Players can use these to traverse the level faster by bouncing immediately off them. This makes our level more interactive and traversal more tactical.

Abilities
Last week we found out during the playtesting sessions that some abilities are not all that fun.
We have revisited all the abilities and changed them according to the feedback we received from players.

Quickly read on ahead to see what has changed!!

The new shuriken

Our improved shuriken ability now fires 3 smaller shurikens that bounce around the level a couple of times and they are a lot faster than before.

Improved squid ability

We changed the squids ink ability to the feedback we received from players. Now he can shoot 3 ink spots and they are much faster.

The new hedgehog ability

We also completely reworked the hedgehog's ability, now it's a bit more like the previous version of the shuriken.

If the hedgehog activates their ability they will turn into a ball and fly into the direction they were aiming at.
Then they will fly through the level and bounce on platforms for a while, damage all player that they touch.
This also makes the hedgehog invincible for a short amount of time after activating the ability.
So this is a great defensive ability, quickly flying away from the other players while invincible,
and then bouncing a bit more through the map until they're safe, all the while stunning other players on collision.

Improved frog ability

The frogs ability also has seen some changes to it working. Now he can bounce his tongue onto walls and hit enemies from where they couldn't even see him.

Environment

We went through a design process to make our level more playable. The first designs were way too simple. After some team feedback, the design became too complex with overly complex shapes as our platforms. We realized during playtesting,
the players could get 'stuck', meaning that the players had only one way to jump to,  defeating the intended design of our game.

from this

----------------->

to this

Thanks to our rapid development process we found the good shape size for our platforms, and thus made the game way more fun to play.