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05/10/2016

WarpBall Update (13/09/2016): Balancing and Streams

Legends of Gaming Live was just as informative as Insomnia58 in terms of feedback. It was a blast again to exhibition the game and we want to thank everyone who played. Now onto the nitty-gritty dev stuff!

We’ve been working a lot on balancing since we noticed a lot of over powered strategies used during our demos. The most common one, which we like to call the “Spicy Technique”, was to pass the ball and tackle to prevent other players from tackling the ball off of you. Tackling now does not let you catch up to the ball after passing meaning the “Spicy Technique” is no more!

Snapback tended to be an underpowered special ability causing people to use it less frequently, more commonly favouring phase of warp tackle. We extended the length of time that the sapback lasts so that it is a more powerful ability to take onto the field.

At kick-off, abilities no longer need to be charged before use. This is so that we can get a better understanding of which abilities are more powerful and why, allowing us to better balance the game.

As we said in the previous post, a common problem was that people found it hard to differentiate between their player and their teammate. Last time we added names over players to help but it still wasn’t enough. We’ve now introduced different shades of a teams colour so that its is far easier to identify your player.

Our lead designer, Nathan, has now started to stream during some of his development. In his most recent stream (a highlight of which can be found here), Nathan introduced a new player model and did some fine-tuning of the lighting. Don’t worry if you missed it, there are plenty more to come and you can make sure you catch them all by following his Twitch channel here: https://www.twitch.tv/vethan

We’re also planning on having a brief hiatus over the next week or so too. Do not worry at all about anything though. As soon as we’re back it’s all engines ahead for us on more things we want to improve/implement.