Hi I’m Tom, programmer/game designer on Ex-Fraktion, that you can play here
What is Ex-Fraktion ? Imagine Inception, except you control all the characters. I’d like to know how to pitch it without this reference but its the easiest way, since Inception is a heavy inspiration.
I started this project with Flex Roman, a very talented friend who made all the art and also helped with the design, and Lucas Maupin who did all the funky music and gave a crazy mood to the game (that fits the flashing colors !)
Here’s my post-mortem, mostly about the game design itself.
What went right ?
The game was ambitious, but we managed to make something I’m very proud of. This is my most polished ludum dare made on Unity yet. It’s fast paced and flashy.
I had that concept in my drawer for some time, except it was a local multiplayer game (the four players start on the same screen, then the screen splits while one player stays back to look for the others, etc…). However since we were all in differents cities/countries, we decided we’d make it a solo game, since we couldn’t have tested it together, and there aren’t that many people that could have rated the entry if it needed 4 controllers.
I’m happy because this is like a nice prototype, and I feel like it’s working, so maybe if someday I want to add controller and multiplayer support, it won’t take much time. Maybe we can provide a very INTENSE multiplayer experience.
Going from multiplayer to solo induced many changes :
- The game cannot be too complex, since you’ll have a hard time following four screens simultaneously. In the extended concept, I thought about players give each other ressources through dimensions, like for instance you had limited ammo and needed to always provide your “guardian” with some. That could work with 4 players, but here, it’d just be impossible to follow.
- Going from one screen to another can be frustrating, especially if there are too many monsters everywhere preventing you from really moving forward. First, switching screens is very fluid since all you have to do is hover with your mouse upon them. Second, we reduced the number of ennemies a lot to make it easier.
- Since you can only play one one screens, all the others were inactive, and it didn’t really give an impression of simultaneous action. We added pills, that if you pickup, will transform your “upper self” into a temporary turret. This way you can play more peacefully on one screen while the monsters are automatically killed in another.
- Flex came up with the ideas of “teleporter cuves” that you have to pick up and gather to activate the teleporter. I think it works very well because it gives you a mission in each level other than just shooting. Also since you have less characters each time, it’ll be faster and faster, and the first screen really feels more complete with it.
Flex made a cool shader that allowed us to easily switch colors for each dimension, and give its own identity to the game. Lucas’s music helped us build something a bit weird, and also induced the title, which is a combination of private joke/reference/theme of the game.
Maybe you won’t notice it as first, but the timescale is different in each Screen They’re divided by 2 each time you go “deeper”.
What could be better ?
Feature-wise, I thought of adding a “hardcore mode” where you’d have a time limit to extract from each screen. It’d be a time-attack mise en abyme, and could add a lot more intensity, especially if you rushed out of every zone just in time !
I think the game’s already hard enough for someone who has never played it, so I won’t add that feature yet.
I’m happy with the project, but the only thing that bothers me is that it’s “just” another shooter and we could probably have grasped something better with that concept (Personnally, my goal for the next Ludum Dare is to make a game without shooting/killing at all). As Flex mentionned, the game lacks planification, and defense phases aren’t the most interesting.
But at the same time, I know that we couldn’t have made something too complex since it’s a solo game. Another idea I had was to take inspiration from the game Surround, where each character has a weapon archetype, and if we made 4 archetypes we could have a choice of “which one do I leave here ?” if the challenge was a bit different in each screen.
Well that’s it. I don’t know if many people will read this, but writing this down helps me