Hey everyone,

So since my last update on Samurai Showdown I’ve managed to get a good idea of where I want the game to head in the next few months of development thanks to the awesome people at Playup Perth. The actual showcase of the game went fine —aside from my laptop overheating and shutting down three times during the event, and the shared game mode not working for some reason— and I managed to get a lot of valuable feedback which should help make Samurai Showdown awesome. So, with no more delays, let’s talk about the feedback I received and the changes I’ve made since, and the media that’s talked about Samurai Showdown!

Media Stuff

Thanks to some really cool media people doing write ups and videos about Playup Perth’s latest event, Samurai Showdown existence is now dimly known by over 1000 people! While the article about Playup by the cool people at GameCloud is still upcoming, there is already a video about the event that’s up now!

(talk about Samurai Showdown starts at the 4:15 mark but watch the whole thing, it’s cool).

With any luck, this is just a precursor to Samurai Showdown taking over the internet! 😛

 

 

PlayUp Perth Feedback

playuptestingnotes-txt

 

Viewable through the link above is a PDF copy of the notes I took during the Playup Perth testing event. As you can probably tell, there are a variety of different features and changes that people think would help get Samurai Showdown to the next level in terms of playability and fun, and so it’s been quite a struggle to prioritise what to do first. While I won’t bore you guys with a list of features I plan to add from most feasible to least feasible —after all, most of the requested features and changes are pretty simple things to rig up— I will say that I’m steadily progressing through this list and that I expect the majority of these features to be in the game within the next 1-2 months.

 

New Features

Stopwatch timer

One of the more popular requests that people made at the Playup Perth testing event was for there to be a stopwatch function in the game that would tell players how close the race to the end was. Several times we had matches that were so close that you could miss who finished first in the literal blink of an eye. Because of this —and because it’s a good idea in general— I agreed that adding in a stopwatch to the classic game mode would be a really good way of keeping people competitive as it would drive players to try and decrease (or increase, depending on if they won or not) the time difference them and their competitors.

Thankfully, the way the game is set up to handle victories made it an incredibly simple task for me to add in this feature and so now —when both players finish the game— the time between finishes is displayed at the end screen.

 

 

Multi-round battles

Another feature that was requested several times during the Playup event was for the classic game mode to be modified to include multiple rounds of fighting with the overall winner being determined by who won the most. After speaking with several people who requested this feature, it was determined that a fighting game or multi-round boss battle approach wherein each player has a certain amount of health which is then reduced with each loss would work best. As a result of these request and the determination reached, I quickly implemented a health system that only activates when the game is in the multi-tier battle mode.

In this multi-tier battle mode, each player’s samurai starts with 100 health and every time they lose a round of combat they lose ~33 health. When a samurai reaches 0 health, that samurai ‘dies’ and whoever remains standing is declared the winner. As you can imagine, there can be multiple rounds of this combat as players draw or as they beat each other tit-for-tat.

 

Future Plans

Boasts

Add additional boasts to the boast text file.

 

Difficulty selection

Add difficulty selection where lower difficulty results in there being fewer buttons to hit.

 

Button display and selection system

Another feature requested at the Playup event was for the method of displaying the buttons to hit and the way said buttons prompts are handled to be changed. Testers felt like something more akin to guitar hero’s note system would work better than the current system as, in its current implementation, testers would hit the wrong button, lose a point and get an input delay, and try to move on to the next button in the list without realising that they hit the wrong button the first time around. Testers wanted the game to move onto the next button regardless of whether or not you got the answer right as it didn’t break the flow of the game whereas the current implementation did.

 

Final notes

As you can see from the list of requested features and changes, there’s quite a lot of work left for me to do before the game can be thought of as done. Realistically, I imagine several more testing events like this will need to be conducted before I can even think of shipping Samurai Showdown, however, I think I’m on the right path to making  a great competitive puzzle game for drunk people to play with their friends :P. Until then, I’ll see you people later!

 

Bye!