Game Title: My Way! Dev Blog #1

The challenges of making combining both beat em up and adventure genre

What's the game about?

My Way! is a survial adventure beat em up game where you play as the muscle man where he don't want to be a muscle man anymore and encounter a mysterious voice who offer to grant him any wish he wants if he survived. The muscle man now goes on a journey on trying to figure out who he wants to be while killing any obstacles that stand before him. The player needs to survive the time limit where enemies will keep spawning until the time limit have reached 0. Not only that, the player need to punch certain amount of enemies in order to win. Only meeting thse 2 requirements, you're the victor for the first level and the player needs to select a door to go through and fufill that level requirement in order to win.

My Way! Gameplay( 2nd room route and girl ending)

My Way! Gameplay(1st room route and man ending)

Challenges while making the game

Heat Gauge system but defence mode

Before implementing the defence mode of the heat gauge, I have tried to implement a heat gauge system that can one shot any mob enemies that the player punches. However I decided to scrap the idea because the game already have a level up system where everytime the player level up so does the attack and I fear that this would make the game too easy and too busted, therefore the defence mode have been introduced where each mob enemy have been killed, the gauge will filled up and once it has been maxed out, player health will regain to full and gain 8 seconds of invincibility. I think the balance how many seconds of invincibility is hard as too little the player won't feel like using it and too high will make it too busted. So after keep playtesting the game, 8 seconds is the magic number.

How the gauge being filled up and the benefits of the heat gauge

Level Up system

Level up and exp point system may sound simple at first but the amount of balancing and readjusting number is way challenging than expected as on paper you thought that the numbers sounds balancing, but if you take into other factors in such as health point system balance and enemy health point taken by the punch, it makes it 10 times harder, but fortunately with playtesting and seeing other people play my game, I can quickly identify the numbers needed for the exp points and how much damage should be put out by the player if using the punch

Level Up system

Two endings

From a normal beat em up game until an adventure survival beat em up game, for me I think it's hard to implement an interesting story without changing the assets for the game but I managed to come out with an idea where the muscle man can be whoever he wants to be whether to be muscle man or a girl with super power, it's up to him because this is the player and his journey and with the introduction of 2 endings, the player have a freedom of choices to be whatever he wants which can also immerse the player into and giving a sense of closure for the character on whatever path he choses to go . This would satisfy the player in a narrative stand point.

Boy Ending

Girl Ending

Conclusion

Balancing level up system is harder than I expected but thankfully I managed to pull it off and having limited resources and time really gave me a test on how can I ultilise the limited source to it's fullest potential whether its game balancing, design and narrative. Thank you for reading.