I have a game similar to Tower of Hell, but it’s a dropper instead, so the player starts from the top and drops down the tower, dodging obstacles in the way, which will kill you when touched. The problem is that since the player drops down, if they die, they have to restart from the very start, whereas in Tower of Hell there’s a chance to catch yourself when falling down. Restarting from the start wastes a lot of time, which makes it a lot harder to actually beat the dropper, but making the timer longer makes each round more boring. How should I design the game to make it more forgiving but not boring?
Hi there, maybe some ideas are to let them respawn like 2 parts/stages above where they died and/or give them something like lives. also maybe a fun thing to add is a bar to see who is where and who already won the round. Maybe you also could add something where the player ends up falling faster over time and adjust the FieldOfView to make it seem like you are getting more speed.
This might change the game mechanics quite a bit, but have you considered inverting the gravity of the player? This would make it functionally the same as Tower of Hell, but you may need to reimplement some other elements or change them to make it work.
If not, you can do what is stated above (the FOV thing I agree with).
I’ve played the game for a bit, I think the checkpoint system that was added is fine, but if u want to make it more forgiving a chance system can also work. Just damage the player with a cooldown when they hit a kill brick.
I think I’ll just keep the checkpoint, I was considering adding damaging the player a little bit instead of instakilling them but it might cause some problems with how big the parts actually are.
Do you have any other suggestions to make the game feel more polished?
The aerial movement speed is too low, if a player is caught off guard or has a slower reaction speed, they will not have enough speed to actually move out of the way of larger obstacles.
The teleporting back up is a bit buggy, when I finished, it spawned me directly ontop of a obstacle.
Don’t make parts insta kill, make them partially damage the player, increase the damage incase you want it to still be challenging but dont instant one shot them.
Raycast below the character and add a shadow if the raycast hits so that the player better knows exactly where in space they are when above an obstacle and can avoid it when they see the shadow overlapping the part. (This is basically what they do in alot of platformers)
If the player dies to an obstacle, you can choose to remove the obstacle immediately OR remove it if they die to it a certain amount of times.
The speed of falling is somewhat slow and feels dragged out most of the time, either increase OR give the option for the player to increase it themselves and keep the base speed (similar to the option to sprint) - I’d recommend this more tbh since it allows players who need time to react to play slow and players who prefer speed or want to catch back up to where they were to move faster.
Another option rather than damaging them is to “bounce” them back up a certain amount, no checkpoint system needed but also not free of punishment if the player screws up.
Make sure the hitbox detection of the player is done on the central part, I know alot of games that also check if the legs/arms hit but personally, I think that feels really bad gameplay wise if just a small part of your hand touches and obstacle and you die/get hurt.
Inversely, make the hitbox of the obstacles smaller than they appear, check out Celeste’s spike hitboxes or geometry dash’s spike hitbox, they don’t actually cover the entire spike. Makes gameplay more forgiving and makes slight glances/touches not kill the player ouright.
Have you thought of giving the player a specific amount of lives at the start(such as 3) and with each obstacle they hit they lose one? Basically a custom health system with heart UIs and such.