Hey Suckers!
I’m Gavin, and welcome back to Water Cooler Diaries, where we share development updates on Suck It Up and what we’ve been working on behind the scenes. Today I also want to introduce Hunter, our tech lead, who’s been a huge part of shaping how these ideas come to life in-game. Today, he will be going over our new projectile VFX and the lessons we've learned since our first game jam.
The Original Idea
"Since day 1, Suck It Up was a game about using your coworkers' insults against them in order to climb the corporate ladder. To portray this, we made the projectiles take the form of speech bubbles with insults on them so it looks like actual words are being shot back at your coworkers. On paper, this made a lot of sense, but when we actually started to test this in-game, we ran into one big problem: readability.
Readability vs. Gameplay
Due to how fast the projectiles would move across the screen, the insults were impossible to make out during gameplay. We tried things like moving the camera closer to the player, making the insults shorter, and increasing the size of the text, but once we got to the point that you could actually read the insults, our gameplay suffered since the projectiles were super slow and awkward.
The Temporary Fix
For a period of time, we got rid of the words entirely and relied purely on context for the players to know these were insults. And though this did make our gameplay feel better since we were no longer restricted by having to show words on the speech bubbles, we felt it took away so much personality from the game.
The Solution
So what was the solution? Instead of having the words on the speech bubbles, we added them to the death effect on our enemies! Since these effects are stationary, we no longer have to worry about readability and could just focus on making them look as cool as possible!
Giving Each Projectile Its Own Personality
Each projectile personality has a custom way of displaying insults to the player, as well as its own pool of insults it can pull from! That means our basic projectile can represent very generic insults that aren't super effective, and our acid projectile can represent very toxic phrases you might say to someone in the workplace, giving each projectile in the game a ton of personality!"
Until Next Time
This update lets us keep the personality of the insults without hurting gameplay, and it’s a great example of how the project continues to evolve. Huge shoutout to Hunter for making it work, and we’ll share more development updates soon.
Cheers,
Gavin