The Final Stretch

Our deadline is right around the corner! And we have updates!

Remember that post about considering noobs in our design process?
Well, we realized at some point that our game is actually really hard.  We’ve had a clear vision of the ideal gameplay experience for Lifted since the beginning - mostly thanks to Thomas’ mad prototyping skills. The challenge has been delivering that experience in an accessible package.
Super-charged trampolines are really freaking cool... but no one knows what to do with them.  They take some figuring out, and some people get frustrated before they start having fun.


Introducing: Free Mode

“What?! Another mode?! Aren’t you supposed to be cutting features?”
(More on that later)

Free Mode is essentially a playground.  It’s a massive platform, littered with jungle-gym-esque toys and structures - all of them begging to be climbed on.  The point of this mode is to provide new players with a friendly sandbox, where they can experiment without getting frustrated.  

- There are hazards scattered throughout, but you’ll have the option to turn them off in the menu, and even control how frequently they appear.

 

- Rather than having scientists tell you what to do, Free Mode lacks any explicit goal structure.  However, there are hoops to find and jump through, structures to climb, and an obvious peak to the level - which should be a challenging goal for players of any skill level.

Kongregate Release
In addition to developing our third and final gameplay mode, we just posted Pro Mode on Kongregate.com!  

Kongregate is a portal site for Unity and Flash games, where players can find a virtually endless supply of indie games to enjoy.  To prepare Lifted for this release, we finished implementing the Timer and Seed mechanics in Pro Mode.  You can now input a specific seed and record how long it takes to get to the top (try entering your name).  Then you can share the seed, level height, and time with your friends - see who can get to the top fastest!


Creepy Features

The introduction of unnecessary new features is a common occurrence in game design, and  has been lovingly called “Feature Creep” by developers for years.

Feature creep is dangerous because it can add significant strain on the developers, who are tasked with actually making the features.  This becomes more and more true the further a team gets into production, as new features can often cause collateral damage - bugs in other features,  balancing issues in gameplay, etc.  Which is why Creative Crates actively sought to avoid creepy features...

M.A.K.S. were first designed in response to a problem we found early in development: It doesn’t make sense that a game about climbing would ask players to look down as frequently as Lifted does.  We hoped that being able to place helpful implements around the world above would encourage players to look up.

However, we recently had a few realizations.  M.A.K.S. added a layer of complexity to the gameplay that was unnecessary, and in many ways distracting - players tended to either forget about them altogether, or use them just as much as they were using Lifts.  M.A.K.S. also added some bizarre complications to the process of designing levels for Lifted, which Spencer spent a lot of time wrestling with.  
We eventually decided that having another mechanic - which competed with our core mechanic, and added very little real value to the gameplay experience - wasn’t what Lifted needed.
So we cut it.

The main lesson for us was that not all “problems” are really problems.  When you spend months working on the same project, it’s easy to accumulate a huge list of imperfections that you wish you could fix.  But in reality, not every problem can be fixed... and of all the possible fixes, very few are worth the time they’d take.  The goal then isn’t making the game “perfect” - a mirage which many developers get stuck chasing endlessly. It’s finding the fixes that are worth making.
(Our friend and fellow developer Sash Mackinnon has some valuable thoughts on this topic, which you can read on his blog)

We need playtesters for Free Mode! And we always need feedback for Lifted as a whole.
So check it out, join the mailing list, and send us your thoughts at creativecrates@gmail.com!