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Writer's pictureBelle Farmer

RE: RICOCHETEERS POST MORTEM

You can play Re: Ricocheteers RIGHT NOW after downloading HERE!


What went right?

Historically at DigiPen, I have made almost exclusively very outlandish games without a normal goal or feeling and they have almost never worked. The Demonic Conlang Game became a button-clicking simulator. The previous Ricocheteers was an incomprehensible mess. This game—informally called Re:Ricocheteers is a remake of the Ricocheteers game from my Sophomore year and is a reaction to all my previous work: It is just a normal hack-n-slash in which you also talk to people, no fancy bells nor whistles. This was largely an attempt to keep my scope small but also important for making my design comprehensible and grounded, rather than experimental and Avant Garde.


This succeeded.


Re:Ricocheteers is a pure hack-n-slash game with one minor twist—when you hit an enemy, there is a lot of knock back and if they hit another enemy or a spike shortly after you hit them, they take additional damage. Once I got the melee attack to feel passable, this was something that players enjoyed. I have spent the last 11 months trying to get a decent melee attack into a game and I think I finally have a passable one. It does not compare to Hades or Diablo III, but it is passable. It is certainly better than Little Burned Maiden, which released earlier this August. Not only is there one melee attack, but three that combo together if you swing in succession. This is a very basic thing that I should have tried to learn how to do much sooner in my DigiPen career, but at least I have done it now.


My second primary goal for this project was to create a simple, effective, linear narrative. My ideal in games is to make branching, reactive, and systematic narrative that feels like it is built mostly from the player’s choices—but in order to do this, one needs to have made a solid linear experience to demonstrate one’s understanding of the cutscene, stakes, and linear narrative. On the whole, I am relatively proud of my cutscenes for Re:Ricocheteers. They are not the most heartwrenching creations—they would not fly in the face of a solid catharsis-based narrative—but they hit the over-the-top, anime-based tone they are intended to hit. They are choreographed decently, the dialogue isn’t bogged down, the characters have differing voices, and the facial expressions that accompany each line are a new innovation for me. I wasn’t able to get in voice acting, but I consider it a success that I recognized that was beyond my scope early and cut it instead of stubbornly pursuing it to the detriment of everything else.


My tight focus on these two aspects saved me from my typical biggest flaw: Overscoping and underdelivering. While short, this game actually has UX consideration, the story communicates clearly even if it isn’t even nearing Oscar bait, and it even has a nice hand-animated introduction that sets the melancholic but still action-oriented tone. While you might not feel the intended emotions while playing this experience, you can at least tell what emotions are intended to be communicated—and that is a great step in the many iterations of game it will take to be a good narrative designer.



What went wrong?

Honestly, even at the end, the melee attack was still mediocre. While I consider it a success of scope to keep it small, the simplicity of the single melee attack came back to bite me halfway through. While I was able to throw in the combo system as a bandaid over the problem, I am not convinced it completely solves the issue.


Another thing that went wrong is I underestimated the number of weeks we had in the semester and spent the last four weeks of the project spinning my wheels doing nearly nothing. While I worked diligently every week, some weeks, I simply did not have enough to do. I did not want to start on “the next big feature” in case it broke everything. If I had planned better, I could have likely polished up the cutscenes more, improved the ending by giving that its own animation (like the introduction), and maybe even gotten that voice acting into the experience.


Lastly, I jumped into this project and determined it so early, before the semester even started, and did not fully consider my options. I could have spent time reworking my Demonic Conlang game or my adoption horror game, but instead, I just jumped on the Ricocheteers bandwagon and never got off. Not that I disliked working in the Ricocheteers universe more, but exploring my options might have been smarter because I could have made something that was mediocre into something brilliant rather than making something solidly passable. At the end of the day, Ricocheteers is a goofy, anime-game and because it isn’t very weighty, it might not necessarily bring the clout I could have gotten if I had really taken the time to focus on, say, making that Conlang game really sing. Seeing the products my other friends have made based on their past projects have given me this regret.



How will you approach future games as a result of this experience?

As a result of both the good and the bad, remaking Ricocheteers has taught me to stop trying to make melee combat the central focuses of my games. I am not very good at it and it does not foster the kind of relationships I want between my characters. Games, for me, are more of an intellectual pursuit than an action-based one and so the game I make will likely be better if I pursue what I like. For my next game, I want to focus on another gameplay feature so I stop trying to make something I know very little about OR I will need to steal someone else’s pre-built melee attack from an asset store or some such.


Speaking of “stealing”, before I begin my next game, I want to do more research and pre-production. The constraints of school mean this isn’t always possible BUT for my own personal projects, I want to do more research and consider my options more carefully. Making a game takes a lot of time and energy out of one’s life—so I want to be sure that the idea to which I dedicate my time and attention is something that will be meaningful to me at the end of the project.

Due to the success of keeping the scope small, however, my next game will need to be smaller than initially would expect. Every time I make a game, I learn more about my processes and how much time things take—as well as find faster ways of doing things. While having a fixed launch point for this project means I spent more time doing polishing and relaxing than improving, if I make games on my own time, keeping the scope small is always encouraging because it is more likely you will finish the project and succeed at what you want to do with it.



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