Yokai Madness

For Yokai Madness I had no time to make art. Up till then, I had always made all the assets myself, and while it consumes a lot of time, one does have complete control over the outcome. The challenge with using assets is making them fit together into a cohesive whole.

I searched until I had enough similar material, so I ended up using a few different asset packs, slightly editing them in Aseprite to make them match. It turned out to be a samurai demon-hunter inspired game. I completed the set with a CRT shader from the Godot asset store to hide any slight inconsistencies between the assets. Based on that samurai vibe, I found a song that fit both the aesthetics and the gameplay.

The game ranked 9th for audio and 25th for visuals out of the hundred submissions, so I think it was a success.

I started off with a game where the score rose with time as the player dodged enemies to stay alive, and I didn't want the exploding boxes to be just another loss-condition. So the boxes became the reward for better play: defusing a box by standing next to it earned you points, while letting it explode lost you points.

Looking back now, I'd probably leave out minus points, as I believe punishment never works but to frustrate. Theme and object implementation were definitely unsuccessful judging by their scores, but the gameplay and fun factor were acceptable.

When I completed the Godot tutorial that Yokai Madness grew out of, I noticed the teacher added a lot of pauses everywhere. For example, once you died, the game over screen was delayed by a couple of seconds, and after that a few more to see the start again button.

This can be a stylistic choice to create the effect of calm and reflection, but in a highscore chaser this was misplaced. The loop needed to be tighter, death to restart should be instant, and I made it so. Here's a review: "I think the game is pretty fun. It gets you to the action fast, you can do one run after another, it's pretty addicting."

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.

When I completed the Godot tutorial that Yokai Madness grew out of, I noticed the teacher added a lot of pauses everywhere. For example, once you died, the game over screen was delayed by a couple of seconds, and after that a few more to see the start again button.

This can be a stylistic choice to create the effect of calm and reflection, but in a highscore chaser this was misplaced. The loop needed to be tighter, death to restart should be instant, and I made it so. Here's a review: "I think the game is pretty fun. It gets you to the action fast, you can do one run after another, it's pretty addicting."

Where does fun come from? Does it come purely from the gameplay experience or from being good at the game? For a high score chaser, obviously the latter. The basic psychological need for competence, i.e. feeling effective and mastering our environment, is that which drives us to try again and again.

It is the designer's job to make the fulfillment of this need possible and obvious by providing feedback, e.g. with a high score. However, if players only have their own score to judge against, eventually they'll reach a plateau. They might think they've reached the peak and stop playing.

A simple way to show players how far they could go is a leaderboard. Here's a comment from the submission page: "I really like this game haha. How is someone able to get 60 points?! It was very hard to get to the high score board at all :D"

Two things stand out. First, they saw that there are higher heights and second they tried hard to get onto the scoreboard. Both in combination led them to put in more effort = more time. A review that makes this explicit by another player: "Adding leaderboard was a great idea, it motivated me to play more."

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.

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.