Change of plan
Now that I have finally received a bit more feedback on gameplay in Lockdown Protocol, I have learned that fighting the guards is not fun. It's actually a frustrating chore. The worst part is that there's nothing but guards in the first levels, so majority of the few people who have actually played the game have probably gotten frustrated and given up. I should have realized this a long time ago, but I guess its better late than never.
Because of this, I have changed the plan for next alpha release. Instead of working on high score related features, I will focus on making the gameplay more enjoyable.
Fortunately I have several ideas for bigger and smaller changes to try and see how they affect the gameplay. I will likely make the guards easier to kill and less effective in killing the player. To compensate for this I could add more of them. This would lead to a more run-and-gun type of gameplay than I originally intended, but based on initial testing, it's a lot more fun and suits the game's high score focused nature better.
I have also started to experiment with a deployable shield device (in the screenshot above) that could eventually replace the force fields. If it proves to work well enough, it would allow creating temporary cover to hide behind and should make open corridor gunfights less suicidal.
Posted on 2014-06-28