Adding difficulty levels to Yokai Madness after feedback

A lot of time had passed between the game and my update, but such is life. Still, it gave me no peace, so I had to implement the idea I had after reading all the feedback way back when.

1. Added healthbar
2. Added difficulties
3. Fixed enemy spawns
4. Added new animations

During the game jam, I didn’t have time to playtest Yokai Madness, so I accidentally made the game too difficult. Probably what happened is that as I got better at the game, it started to feel too easy and I kept cranking up the difficulty. This resulted in an insanely difficult game, which is why I put Madness in the title.

It was very hard because it one-shot killed you. If you grazed one of the yokai, it was immediately over, which was quite frustrating. Though there’s a point to be made that it worked as a rage game because players felt defiance, it wasn’t very accessible.

After reading the feedback, I added a healthbar that gets depleted as you stay in contact with a yokai. It’s a bit more fair, but you also don’t have a lot of life. That is, you have about 3 seconds of contact in total.

I also added difficulty levels to Yokai Madness to keep it fun. If you get bored on the lowest difficulty, you can press a button and game settings change on the fly. Specifically, score increases faster, but there’s more yokai; and boxes stay slightly longer, you get more points if you defuse, or punish you less if you don’t defuse them. Hopefully, this means you can stay in the zone. Don’t worry, I think the highest difficulty is hard enough.

Anyway, these additions definitely make the game better than the jam version, which was all I hoped to achieve.