Hey gang. The Crimson demo is being developed right now as we speak. I've been making tremendous progress with it in recent months. However, after taking a good long look at my game, I realized something important. Something that could be disastrous if left unchecked: the game itself wasn't much fun to play.

This past month, I tried to narrow down the answer, and I landed on the fact that the player's move set that's shared between all colors, as it was, was far too basic. I had running, jumping, and attacking implemented. I had planned for a secondary action to distinguish the two playable characters, Andy getting a slam in the vein of Sonic Adventure 2's bounce, and Claudia getting a dropkick that transitioned into a slide. Once I implemented the slam, I got the immediate idea to combine it with red's dash, giving us the ability of "dash slamming", which carries the dash's momentum after you recoil from the slam. Giving this information to playtesters, that was the most fun they were having. So now, I'm deciding to take that newfound information and run with it in a big way.

Here's what this means in terms of the game:

Dashing will become part of the shared move set

This means you can press the default control bindings of C on your keyboard or the east face button on your gamepad to dash regardless of whether you have red equipped.

The number of paints in the final game will be cut down from 9 to 5

Why? A couple of reasons, but they basically boil down to quality over quantity. Unlike in Mega Man where there are only 8 main levels, 12 including Wily stages. the plan for this game is to have at least 2 levels per area. Keeping the number of paints as 9 would have meant a total of 18 levels at least. While this seems like a good amount of content, it is also content that would not have been very focused, as finding uses for all 9 abilities would have been a terrible level design restriction. Keeping to 2 levels per area and 1 paint per area means that we're looking at 10 levels at minimum, but I have a feeling that with this new direction, level design will be much easier, and we'll get to the other reasons here in a bit. If I can make more quality levels faster, this number is sure to go up. The final game will now only feature 5 paints: White, Red, Yellow, Green, and Blue. The abilities that red and blue have in the current demo may be subject to replacement.

Paints will now give you a new shared movement option and a new weapon

The palette is sticking around. You can use it to change your equipped color as you've always have been. The palette lets you change your equipped weapon, which you can use with the attack button. For each paint you collect, your move set will grow, For example, let's say you acquire the red paint. You'll unlock a flamethrower that you can use when equipping red, and you'll also unlock the dash to be used no matter which color you are.

The 4 colored paints will be elemental

Red for fire, Yellow for air, Green for earth, and Blue for water. This will give some sort of logic to the paints and allow the player to better remember which color applies to which ability.

You will be able to paint level components by attacking them to alter their properties

Maybe you could paint a bouncy platform yellow to let it bounce you even higher (yellow = air). Maybe you could paint a cannon red to be shot out as a fireball (red = fire). I think this new mechanic will add a lot of uniqueness to the game, give it a mechanical hook that is interesting and fun for the player to experiment with, and will yield more creative and varied level design.

The paint bucket progression system will be axed

If momentum is the thing people are having the most fun with when playtesting this game, why bother making them stop, explore, and backtrack? For this reason, your only level completion requirement is to make it to the canvas at the end of the stage. Truth be told, it was also difficult to design levels with a hidden required object whose goal was positioned at the far right of the scene. There's a reason linear and non-linear levels are two very different beasts, and combining them was a challenge I was not prepared for. Levels will now focus on being fun to traverse with your move set first and foremost, being about as linear as a standard 2D platformer.

Levels will be longer

After adding the dash slam, playtesters could clear the levels in about 20 seconds, but I couldn't design more quality level content with the restrictions I had placed on myself. With the elemental paints and additional movement options, I think this issue will be mitigated. Plus, longer levels will compensate for the fact that there won't be as many of them as originally planned.

Phew, that was a lot. I know. But I think this new direction is something that will benefit the game in the long run. Special thanks to Sandman13sq for  his help with this new game design plan. The Crimson Demo is scheduled to release August 7th. If this deadline is met, I may submit Super Palette Swapper to SAGE 2024!

That's all for now, I'm gonna get to work on designing a prototype for all of this stuff, and replacing content if it turns out to be more fun!

Cheers,

Scott / IcyPenguin_