Bit Battles: August in Review

[Asking yourself, "What's Bit Battles?" Find out more at: Fanatical Games]

Another busy month gone with many more on the horizon. Here's a quick summary of what's been happening at Fanatical Games:
-player feedback implemented to solidfy the gameplay experience and generally make things easier to play (and harder to master, hopefully!)
-substantial game design changes leading Bit Battles further into the "vehicular combat" genre and away from "bumpercars... in TRON!" genre (does that even exist?)
-revision of art content; everything from geometry textures to HUD images were tweaked/cleaned up
-level design went into full swing; Power Failure, the next map, went from an initial design in the design doc to a completed (first version) map

At the beginning of the month, I continued the process of reviewing player feedback and implementing important suggestions. During this, I realized that player vs. player combat in Bit Battles wasn't quite living up to expectations. Previously, the game had a "bumpercar" feel in that there was no concept of health/lives and, as such, there was no way to destroy or kill an enemy hovertank. The game was more about staying in position and not being "punted" out of the way by an opponent. Such a system worked fine back in the early prototype days when Bit Battles was meant to be a futuristic bumpercar game but the game had progressed since then and no longer fit that description. In short, not being able to destroy enemy hovertanks was just going against the grain of what players expected.

The remedy was to remove the punting and "no health/no death" systems. This ultimately moved Bit Battles closer to the what it was already becoming: a vehicular combat game. Early playtests are showing this was definitely the right decision; the game meets player expectations. I talked about this in detail here and here.

In conjunction with the design changes, some much-needed quality of life changes were added. Namely, capture "auras" for powerups denoting which team has access to them and a revamping of the waypoint HUD to allow for dynamically creating waypoints to specific players, objects, etc. This was discussed in detail here.

As the month continued, things were progressing on the art revision and level design fronts. The tweaking of interface/HUD graphics resulted in a much neater, cleaner look that fit better with the digital theme of the game. The next map, Power Failure, went through a rough draft and two revisions before finally reaching the (tentative) "complete" status. I go into much more detail about this here and here and here.

And finally, a couple screenshots from the Capture & Hold version of Power Failure. [Click images for high-res versions.]

Assaulting a failing Power Supply Unit.


Trying to recapture the middle Capture Pylon. Reinforcements... please?!