Freerunners News

This week I’ve been working on the usual stuff: a mix of polish, bug fixing, balancing, but also something fun I’ve been wanting to do for a while but haven’t got around to, More Fails!


[h2]MORE FAILS![/h2]
One thing that has come up a bunch when people play the game is that they like it when the player and the bad guys get hurt. So this week I took the demo and looked for places I could fit new interesting ways for the player to get hurt (fail state in the game). I have to admit I was chuckling along as I was implementing some of them.

I also added some more audio polish to the fail stuff, giving it a bit more juice. I implemented new bone-cracking sounds and per-material sounds for the object you hit. For example, if you hit a metal dumpster you will make a metal doinnnggg sound, but if you hit the concrete you will make a hard concrete hit sound!

Below is a video of some of the fails I’ve added to the demo so far!
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]EXTRA POLISH[/h2]
Thinking about the audio polish for the fail-states, got me thinking about some other non-fail state related polish things I could add to the game. They are only small things but I think they add to the overall vibe of the game. In the video below you can see:

• Kicking a physics football
  
• Dog and owner looking, with barking at you as you go past
  
• A person spinning and slowing down on a roundabout in a park and a guy smoking in the background
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


[h2]BALANCING CHANGES[/h2]
Even with my recent balancing/flow changes I still felt something was off with the beginning of the game. Originally I wanted the player to feel more noob-y so that as they got new skills by playing through the game, they would be able to feel the contrast. However, as good as this sounds in theory, I think it just wasn’t working in reality. You just felt a bit start - stoppy and didn’t get the flow feeling that parkour should be giving.

So I found a middle ground. I decided to give the player more speed and stamina from the start of the game. You still have less than the first speed and stamina skills give you, but you are a lot closer to that than before. I tested it…. and I think it’s much better, I get a better feeling and representation of what the rest of the game is like from doing this, so I kept this change!

This has been a fun weeks worth of work which I think made the game more fun and interesting to play. I’m going to keep incorporating more fails into the levels as I go through polishing them, as I think this really adds to the vibe of the game. I pushed all these new changes into an updated Demo build on Steam, so you can go play them right now!

[h2]PLAY THE FREE STEAM DEMO HERE[/h2]
[h3]Let me know what you think and give the game a wishlist if you like it![/h3]

I've been continuing to chip away at my parkour game Freerunners and I wanted to show some of the gameplay progress I've been making!

Thanks to Steam Next Fest I had a bunch more people playing the demo and from that, I got a lot more feedback. Thanks to everyone who let me know their thoughts! One of the common feedback trends I picked up on was that the gameplay didn’t align with the marketing message of “finding a flow” through your environment. In particular, using obstacles felt a bit stop, start-y to some people. Aka It didn’t feel as fluid as it should have been.

[h3]OLD NON-SMOOTHED OBSTACLE USING[/h3]
Here is what it used to look like, vaulting an obstacle (First video) and going under an obstacle (Second video).
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

You can see how sometimes it looks okay but other times it seems to snap to the obstacle. This makes sense because, well that’s exactly what I was telling it to do ha. I was using a straight-up teleport to a specific location per obstacle to line up the using animation with the player/obstacle. It worked when you were close to the correct location it needed to be. However, if you were too far when the move was triggered it would give you that snappy feel to it. I wanted to fix this so I came up with a new system which you can see below:

[h3]NEW SMOOTHED OBSTACLE USING[/h3]
Here are similar situations vaulting and going under but using the new smoothing system.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Now instead of instantly teleporting the player to the required location, I simply move them over time to that location. The move takes place over literally 2 milliseconds but it really does make a big difference to the snapping problem. It’s funny this ended up being a lot easier and less buggy to implement than I thought it was going to be.

Playing the two methods back to back, it can be quite subtle at times but you can definitely “feel” the difference, which is cool. I’m super glad I took the time to make this change. It’s definitely taking the game in the direction I want it to go!

I updated the demo build to include these new fluidity changes so, if you enjoyed this break down go check out the Free Steam demo of Freerunners!

I better get back to work!
James

It's that time of year again when we get to play Demos from loads of great games, Steam Next Fest!

This one is special for me because my game Freerunners is taking part in it!


Freerunners is a parkour game, based on my own experiences of doing parkour a couple of years ago. I wanted to try and give the feeling I got of finding a flow and underlying rhythm of movement through an environment. Vaulting, climbing, jumping, ducking, swinging, sliding, doing what it takes to complete a route as fast as possible.

I'd appreciate it if you go play the Demo HERE !

Have fun and remember to wishlist the game if you enjoy it!

Cheers,
James

I launched a demo for Freerunners so you can give it a play today!

I’m making great progress on the full game and it’s pretty much complete. Really now, I’m just listening to feedback, fixing bugs, polishing stuff up and balancing the flow of some levels.

I’m making this game in my spare time for fun and learning! While developing the game over the last couple of years I’ve shown and playtested it to a bunch of people, but I thought the next logical step would be to put a demo out and see what feedback I get from a broader range of people!

So give the demo game a go, let me know what you think and if you like the game give it a wishlist!

Cheers,
James