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	<title>What Target Audience? &#187; Game Design</title>
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		<title>RPG Combat Prototype: Character Abilities</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/rpg-combat-prototype-character-abilities/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/rpg-combat-prototype-character-abilities/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 11 May 2018 00:33:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=47</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As promised, we're going to dig into each of the playable characters today. To keep things simple for the demo, we'll just have four of them. Each will have just a few options in their toolkit: a weapon or two, a couple types of consumable items, one skill, and a few magical abilities each. This will keep things simple enough that the player isn't overwhelmed with choices, but still has enough options to adapt to different tactical situations. For right now I'm not going to crunch any numbers; we still need to get the concepts ironed out. Let's get into it: Slayer Role: Offense Resource: Souls (Each spell costs 1, regain 1 on landing the killing blow on an enemy.) Weapons: Straightsword: Medium speed, deals moderate laceration damage, high durability. Pistol: Very fast, deals moderate penetration damage, but has to be reloaded after every shot. When firing silver bullets, the...]]></description>
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		<title>RPG Combat Prototype: Demo Structure</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/rpg-combat-prototype/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/rpg-combat-prototype/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 03 May 2018 02:39:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=42</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This will be a bit unusual, as I'm going to be doing some design work for a game which is already in large part implemented, but bear with me. The bones of the RPG combat prototype are complete, but it's not exactly playable yet; it needs to be filled with playable characters, enemies, items, abilities, and other content so it provides a (hopefully) engaging experience for the player. In addition, the scenario needs to be designed in such a way as to provide a good opportunity to introduce the player to the game's core mechanics and test out how well they can learn how things work and overcome challenges in a satisfying way. Hence, we need to design a demo. I'm planning on splitting up the demo into three steps: A very simple, easy fight where the player can play around with each character's abilities enough to see how everything works...]]></description>
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		<title>Minimalist Metroidvania: Level Design</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-level-design/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-level-design/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2017 19:05:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=38</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When planning out the level, we want to make sure that the player experiences a sense of progression. That is to say, the challenges they face should start out simple to ease them into the game and then become progressively more difficult. There should be some fluctuation, of course - without moments of low tension as well as high tension, the pacing won’t be satisfying. But overall, the player should start off dealing with relatively simple problems and steadily progress to tougher ones. In addition, the game should present new elements, abilities, and obstacles to the player one at a time so they have sufficient opportunity to learn each one in isolation before having to handle all of them at once. And even when they are handling multiple things at the same time, dealing with a pair of familiar concepts should come before having to manage a group of three...]]></description>
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		<title>Minimalist Metroidvania: Concept</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-concept/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-concept/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 May 2017 03:00:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=34</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[So now that we’ve figured out the building blocks of the gameplay, it’s time to bring it all together and start planning from a top-down perspective. That includes not only a big picture view of the game experience, but also an eye towards the fluffier side of game design: what it’s about narratively, and what it’s going to look like. It will also answer the question, “Why are all the enemies skeletons?” Thrilling stuff. To decide these things, I looked through what I’d done so far and realized there was a bit of a conundrum caused due to the player having both a ranged attack and a melee attack: in most cases, the melee attack had to be more powerful. This ordinarily could be resolved with a little creativity, such as by saying “the main character can just throw rocks or something - that’ll handle it,” but I had a...]]></description>
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		<title>Minimalist Metroidvania: Enemies</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-enemies/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-enemies/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 08 May 2017 16:00:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=29</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[If you’re wondering why this wasn’t posted on Saturday, that’s because I decided retroactively that these “daily” posts would be more manageable if they were only on weekdays. I’ll see about upgrading to every day once I’ve got the regular update schedule thing down. Today’s topic is enemies. This is an area where it can be easy to go overboard with large amounts of content. To maximize the economy of development, we want to aim for only a small number of enemies that each provide a distinct, interesting challenge to the player, ideally ones that don’t require a large amount of unique graphics for each one. This small list of enemies can then be combined in different groups, layouts, etc. for specific enemy placements to mix up the moment-to-moment gameplay. To get the most bang for our bang, we need to identify the core function for each enemy type, of...]]></description>
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		<title>Minimalist Metroidvania: Weapons</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-weapons/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/minimalist-metroidvania-weapons/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 May 2017 04:21:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=27</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Continuing from yesterday’s minimalist Metroidvania, we’re going to dive into the meat and potatoes of the core gameplay: the combat! Since we want to keep the scope small, there needs to be just enough variation to keep things interesting, and no more than that. First we’ll start with the player’s weapons. Similar to Gather, one of my design goals here is to give the player both a ranged and a melee attack so that they have some short-term tactical options. To properly incentivize switching, though, I’d like to make a couple changes: Melee attack is a vertical slash instead of a horizontal strike. This makes it much easier to hit enemies, especially multiple enemies at once, which is sort of the point of melee combat. Melee attack should push (small) enemies back on hit. This gives the player just enough crowd control to manage mobile enemies that like to get...]]></description>
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		<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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		<title>Minimalist Metroidvania: Basics</title>
		<link>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/daily-game-design-minimalist-metroidvania/</link>
		<comments>http://www.whattargetaudience.com/daily-game-design-minimalist-metroidvania/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 May 2017 04:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>rmtsukuru</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Game Design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brainstorming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game design]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[game development]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.whattargetaudience.com/?p=24</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[For all 2 of you that are reading this and wondering what “Daily Game Design” is, let me briefly explain. Basically, I feel like I’ve had less motivation for game development lately, and a not-insignificant cause of this issue is that I haven’t been thinking about ideas for games in my spare time. To help get back into this habit and make it more reliable and consistent, I’d like to start writing short posts on game design everyday to get those creative juices flowing. They won’t be very long and they probably won’t be particularly great, but they should at least be interesting. Plus, it’ll finally get some regular content up on this sorry excuse for a blog. Anyway, let’s dive into it. Today’s Topic: Minimalist Metroidvania Gameplay The Metroidvania genre generally consists of games with large, sprawling world that are packed to the gills with different areas, enemies, bosses,...]]></description>
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