Power To The Power-Ups! | State of Matterless #55
Floorcraft fans, this past week the team has been working hard on new milestones: improving power-ups that will add to the gameplay experience!
Pay-to-party
One of the main challenges the team encountered when designing new powerups was the potential imbalance that could arise when players bring their own abilities into the game. The team recognized that creating a “pay-to-win” scenario was not the direction they wanted to take, as it would detract from the game’s overall fun and fairness. As a solution, the team came up with a new paradigm that Jason referred to as “Pay-to-party.”
The solution involved creating a new game mechanic where players can buy and own a “Powerup Spawn Platform” instead of owning the power-up itself. The Powerup Spawn Platform acts as a spawn point for powerup items that can be equipped by driving over the platform by any player who joined a session. In this way, instead of bringing their own abilities to the game, players add to the overall game session’s fun by enhancing it with the cool abilities they own and want to share.
The benefits of this solution are twofold:
- First, balance becomes less of a strict concern, as everyone has a chance to grab the power-up item when it appears.
- Secondly, having power-up spawn platforms in augmented reality (AR) increases the spatial aspect of the gameplay and can lead to interesting emergent behaviors in the arena layout.
A playground full of powerups
Merlin and Batu have been working on designing new assets for the playground full of power-ups. They’ve been creating a range of assets, from individual powerups like the big laser mount or the flame thrower to the very spawn point players can drive over to collect the abilities in-game.
Marko has been working on implementing the new Powerup Spawn Platform asset, as mentioned above. The platform has a hexagonal base and gems that represent the time counter. As the spawn counter time goes down, the number of gems present decreases until the spawn point is ready, and all the gems are spawned and move in erratic ways.
Charlie has been working on finishing up the UI overhaul designs for the next big release of Floorcraft. This includes a new object placement UI and an improved Store UI allowing users to assign and reallocate their Metamass balance to different in-game powerups.
Getting ready for BLAST-off
Finally, Charlie has also started working on the content for the upcoming release of Floorcraft: Blasters (watch this space!). This includes creating an app icon and branding concepts, along with designing the UI flow for the project. Stay tuned because more updates will be shared on this project in the coming weeks.
The team focuses on increasing the gameplay depth and the variety of Floorcraft. By creating a robust framework that can continue to layer new features and content on top of the existing game mechanics, the team is committed to creating a game that provides a fun and enjoyable experience for all players!
Connect with us and follow the Floorcraft Journey on social media: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Discord!
Download and play #Floorcraft: Arena, and don’t forget to tag us in your gameplay videos!
— Shwetha Suredin
Digital Marketing Manager
