Vinyl: Score Design

After much deliberation, we finally decided that Vinyl needed some kind of scoring system.  We resisted this idea for a long time, because we didn't want to enforce a "right way" to play our game and scoring systems naturally imply a proper method of play.  However, without one we kept running into the problem that playtesters didn't understand what to do in our game.

The biggest issue we had with a scoring system is the game has always been about audio manipulation, and if people want to make their songs sound weird and silly, we didn't want to stop them.  We had all but abandoned that notion, until JJ and our professor came up with an idea of "genre changers" which allow the player to have some more agency over the type of manipulation that is happening.  This system has no impact on the score, so the player is still free too play with the sound while still trying for a high score.

We tried a few scoring solutions, all revolving around the idea of a streak.  We initially tried basing everything on that one number, but it got confusing when your streak would suddenly go up 15% for hitting a filter since your streak no longer meant how long you've gone without hitting an obstacle.

We have since decoupled the score and the streak, so the streak adds to your score, and other things like filters also add to your score, but the streak is always how many obstacles you've passed since the last one you hit.  It works well, but we've struggled with the growth curves, since certain actions are more beneficial to you once you already have a big score since they are percentage based, and others are just linear.  Since all of this math is hidden from the player, it's probably not a good idea to make boosting worth tons of points near the end of the song, but have it be essentially worthless at the beginning.

I ended up coding several options for growth curves and score bases into the system so that we can play test quickly with different combinations of options that can be quickly tweaked from within the Unity editor.  I think the system is well designed, we just need to find the right balance to make it feel right.

Vinyl : IGF Edition!

We have officially submitted our game to the IGF Student Competition!  Actually, we officially did on Halloween... and then a couple more times after that, but I'm bad about updating my blog.  The key things of note since submitting was our post mortem required of us by the professors and general team grooviness.

I've said for awhile now that the engineering team generally works fine, we get all our tasks done and are typically all on the same page.  The same can't really be said for the team as a whole, and we've been making some pretty serious strides to remedy that.  The post mortem focused generally on us having entirely too many meetings where nothing useful is accomplished and general communication and team morale problems.

I think my favorite remedy to come out of the post mortem is our new policy of putting everyone's contributions to the game in regardless of quality, and not replacing them until we have something better.  Before we would either not put something in the whole team didn't like it, or we would take it out fairly quickly.  This discouraged the artists and left the game looking the same (programmery) for so long that actually refining an art style became incredibly difficult.

Since then, the art team have collaborated with the programs other thesis project art guys to come up with an art style we can seriously push forward with.  This probably should have been done six months ago, since we will ideally content lock in less than a month, but its refreshing to see the rest of the team have the enthusiasm that we all had when we started again.  I think with a bit of minor crunching, and maybe leaking a few weeks passed our deadline we'll have a much better looking game.

The engineers are almost entirely working on simple implementation changes, UI stuff and minor design tweaks, so while we have our hands pretty full, it's not with the kind of things that are difficult.

Aside from that, we've also become a bit more agreeable with design changes.  Largely, I think that is due to the fact that the game is in a state that we like, so changes are very minor.  Additionally, we are trying harder to take a "implementor gets creative authority of how a feature works" approach.  Which I thought we were kind of doing before, but I guess some people thought otherwise, once again due to communication issues.

All in all, I'm excited to see what Vinyl looks like in the next month.  Check out the current IGF build at www.thevinylgame.com