[2018] Game Mechanics Thoughts

So we play this game every day at work so I've had a lot of face time with it. Just had some thoughts on some of the game mechanics I thought felt off.

- Lava: on levels you can be pushed into the lava it seems like to much punishment that you're being slowed and damaged. I think you should take damage but the fact that your character is now slower makes it even harder for you to get back into the fight without being a sitting duck

- Elevation: The fact that there is elevation in a top down game just seems weird. It's almost impossible to damage a player that is on top of some elevation as the spells do not auto correct to go up ramps, and trying to use your mobility spell to jump up is often a failed attempt. We also get stuck quite a bit on the islands map where there is elevation but it's not apparent.

- Clipping: There are several spots on maps and with rock tomb that you can be right up against a wall and cast a spell through it. This is a bug I would say but kinda gives a nostalgic feeling of older games.

- Volcano Map: This is a bug where the camera can get into a state that players are totally left off screen. Not sure how it happens but the camera can zoom in to far and cut off players overlay or the player all together.

Hey Mr. Narwhal,

You work at Blue Medora I take it?

Lava: The lava doesn't actually slow you down, it just does damage. What you might be seeing is the slowing effects from Hinder (basic water spell) or Tsunami (water ult). Those are the only 2 things that slow.

Elevation: Completely agree. There are a few terrain spots in the new maps that hang up the wizards and I've been meaning to write a tool that find those points for me because they are hard to track down. I do think you are right though, there needs to be a bigger design decision made around elevation and I'm not sure what that is yet. I'm still trying to figure out a balance between interesting level aesthetics and whether or not those ruin the game mechanics.

Clipping: Yes, the spells are spawned above the aimers which have no collision on them so they can be aimed through thin enough walls. If the spells spawned closer to the wizards, they would displace the wizard slightly so I'm not sure there's a good solution for this one. You said it's nostalgic so maybe it's a feature instead of a bug? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Volcano Map: I have attempted to fix this several times. It's caused by the library I'm using for screenshake. It uses the current rotation of the camera as the target rotation to come back to, which normally works great, except for when a player falls into the volcano and it there is a double instance of screenshake (one from death and one from the volcano erupting). I'm going to take another look at fixing this. You'll notice though, that the camera pops back into place once the volcano erupts again.

Thanks for taking the time to put this together!

Brett