During the last two weeks we have been hard working in doing some major reworks of the core color system. Therefore, to start off we thought it would be interesting to discuss some of the underlying issues with the previous system which lead to making the reworks.
First of all the game is a mechanically complicated game that requires new players to learn a lot in the beginning to be able to play the game at all. This often overwhelmed new players which understandably caused frustration. The second issue was that many of the mechanics felt clunky in practice, even though they could be interesting in theory. This was especially true in how the player casts spells and needs to pick up colors from enemies. The third issue is that the game is currently too difficult, especially in the beginning. The difficulty comes both from the scaling and placement of enemies but also from the core mechanics itself. It is hard to think about color theory, battle enemies, and keep track of the amount of paint you have all at the same time.
To address these issues we broke down the rework of the core color system to three main fixes. First of all we have added the ability to cast spells with empty bottles. These colorless spells only deal a bit of damage and do not have any other effects that the colors have. This makes it less punishing when a bottle runs out of color and it allows us to simplify the start of the tutorial by only introducing bottles first.
The second major change we have made is to completely remove the ability to pick up color from enemies. Instead we have added a few color shrines in each level where the player can pick up color. In addition to this we have significantly increased both the maximum capacity of bottles and how much paint you get when picking up colors. This separates the color pickup decision from combat itself, which gives more time when making the decision of what colors to use. This also allows us to introduce colors even slower to the player, meaning that the player doesn’t need to learn all colors at the same time and can instead introduce them one at a time. Increasing the amount of color the player has does also increase the time in between when the player needs to pick up more color. This change is something that we are currently testing, meaning that it is not out on the closed beta yet.
The third fix that we will start working on next week is a rework to the color combat controls to make them less clunky. We will update you more on this in the future. In addition to these three main fixes to the color combat system we will also look more into updating the tutorial and making level and enemy balances to address the final underlying issues we are currently tackling.
But that is all for this time.
Test and learn!
MP Team