-Matthijs Kramer, Creative Director, Alterego Games.
You turn a street corner and stare straight at the back of a big robot. Right past him, you see a valuable Modification chest, with just the parts you need for your next mission.
You take a look at your bag of metal scrap, barely half full with gears and sprockets you can use to craft something in combat. Is it enough to go toe-to-toe with the robot? Maybe you should try to sneak past it to get to the chest? Run, when he turns left… Best not to take any chances.
Stealthing and combat go hand in hand in City of Springs. Let’s bring you up to speed on City of Springs’ core gameplay!
Phase 1 Stealth
We knew we wanted to implement stealth in this game and were inspired by the mechanics of the metal gear solid games and the more recent persona 5. In CoS, Stealth will not be the main focus of the game, but it does play a tremendously big role.
Early prototypes had us sneak past dangerous looking cylinders in abstract white areas where we tested character speed, detection range, and the shape of area wherein the guards would detect your character.
We tested with more complicated setups, where one guard has multiple collectibles they are safeguarding. We provided the player with several vantage points from which to observe the guards behavior to formulate a plan of attack.
Objects were added which the player could trigger from a distance to distract the guards. Initially these were placeholder items which symbolized ringing a bell or breaking a glass bottle.
Now all of these ideas worked nicely enough in the prototype, but while playtesting with a select part of the community we quickly noticed two issues pop up.
A) Players were using the newly added ‘run’ feature to run past their targets, and get out safely without a scratch on them. They were bull rushing the stealth puzzles to the point that stealthing was rarely the best option. Much of the designed stealthing areas felt bland to our players, seeing as they could simply run past all of it.
B) Visually it was hard to see where the guards were looking. Players who did try to sneak past, ended up being caught time and again even after having made a solid plan of attack.
To remedy this, our design team went through the hundreds of lines of feedback, talked with the dev team about the possibilities, and created a new feature for the Stealth gameplay; Sneak-mode.
Crouching previously made it more difficult to be seen, as your character was now small enough to hide behind crates.
But with this new feature, while you are in stealth mode, all the things you can interact with are highlighted, and the lines of sight of the guards and camera’s is now clearly communicated to the player. This gives the player the tools they need to navigate the guarded streets of Riveton, and it brought back the planning-phase which we liked so much in our earlier prototype.
To top it off, ‘Health’ is no longer a mechanic isolated to combat. If you are spotted by cameras nearby deployment centers will launch bots against you that damage your health. This makes it so that running past some cameras is still an option, but you’ll have to be willing and able to pay the bloody price!
Our devs are finishing up their work on a new playtest build in which we can test, together with our community, just how much the new stealth has improved. We’ll hopefully uncover features that still need tweaking, need to be added (or taken away) for our stealth mechanic to become solid.
People tend to assume that a games’ design is set in stone when a developer is this far into a project. But as you can see, we’ve implemented quite a lot of changed since our playtests! Community feedback is of vital importance to us. If you’ve got any thoughts to share, don’t hesitate to post them here, or even reach out to us.
Join us on discord if you want to chat with us about the game, or check out our other cool projects.