The Legend´s End

[PiotrMi]

Hello,
I liked to show of my game project The Legend´s End: The game will take place in a fantasy world and is much inspired by Shadow of the Colossous, Zelda and Sword and Sworcery.
The hero has to kill ten guardians and absorb their power to free the world from a horrible curse. I´m not very far in development now, so feedback would be great. The whole game is made with the UDK and Blender.
Plans: - The hero will learn magical skills in the later game which will be necessary to defeat all guardians
- Antic puzzles who can be solved only by the legendary hero

You will notice that the game still includes the default character but I found a few people who will help me making a custom character

Official Page of The Legend´s End:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-legends-end/

Direct link to gameplay video:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-legends-end/videos




If you like to stay up to date look on the Official Page of The Legend´s End or follow me on Twitter @MikoPiotr http://twitter.com/MikoPiotr

[Black_Stormy]

You'd be better off getting a bit more done before posting about your project, at the moment it looks like you've had a bit of a tinker with kismet and the map editor. The puzzle premise of that video is pretty unintuitive, but I assume that will change once you get some custom assets done. What you have here is an internal prototype, which never gets much attention. All I'll say is that so far the game looks neither bad nor good. Keep working on it.

[PiotrMi]

I agree that I should use more custom assets. But also I made much by myself (for example the ground and the arena are modular assets made by me). You say that it´s unintuitive. An idea how I could improve that?

[Black_Stormy]

Well as far as I could see there was no real indication of how to activate anything. Did you shoot that ball which then launched into the particle bonanza? Then there was a big break in gameplay where that orb was going nuts. My guess is that the player is supposed to watch the animation, but anything that goes on for more than one second is almost immediately ignored by the player, they'll assume that the new animation is now the idle animation, which is what I did. After that the little purple orbs started spawning and it looks like you had to shoot them and they would drop a second identical orb which you then collected? For starters, where was the indication that you had to shoot the orbs? Then since they dropped an orb that was identical, how were you supposed to know when to stop shooting? And how were you supposed to know that you should pick it up? Then you warped to a platform in the sky and there was a bunch of other orbs which you walked on but nothing happened and there was a wierd forcefeild thing that kept spawning on you. Then you warped back to the ground and got a sword. This whole time the big ball in the center of the slab was spazzing out with all kinds of particle effects. I assumed that since you were avoiding them they would hurt you, but a player would not have known that, since the particle effects were unrecognizable. In all the video made no sense.
I know it's an early prototype and that you are a small (one man?) team. It looks like you haven't viewed your gameplay from a players perspective. The player needs indications of what to do. This is usually provided in the form of custom assets (monster models and subsequent pickup models), tutorials and in-game indications (like a big arrow and the text "SHOOT HERE", or a more subtle variation). Most of your problems could be solved with some custom assets, or some better chosen stock ones. Then the player needs feedback that they are doing well. The orbs did nothing when shot and then you couldn't pick them up. To me that means the orbs are uninteractable and I would have stopped trying to shoot them straight away, and therefore been stuck. These are literally the two absolute basics of gameplay design, indication and feedback. So basic they are never discussed. I don't want to totally pay out on your game, but I would suggest you don't have this video as an indication of gameplay since it's pretty bad. At least your blog and your updates show that you are somewhat dedicated to the game so just plug away at it quietly and when you have something that is nice you'll get more followers.

[PiotrMi]

Thanks! This will help me very much. I think one of the biggest mistakes is that for now there was no custom character. The real game will be a fantasy game where the player will not have a rifle but just a sword. So I know why you say that it looks like that the player collects the orbs. Really thanks man!