MageLoop
Summary
MageLoop was a mildly successful game made for the GMTK Game Jam 2025. If you want to know how that went, read the retrospective about it! This document will go over the future plans for the game based on the feedback I received.
Jam feedback
Difficulty
Many players agreed that the difficulty was too high. This was somewhat intentional, because I wanted it to be a score-building challenge, but the difficulty likely ramped up far too quickly.
- More enemy variety. Early enemies could be simpler, slower, easier to deal with, less health, etc.
- Giving the player an idea of where off-screen enemies would be could help warn the player when enemies are spawning.
- “From Space” had this issue, I should look into how that designed around it.
- Making the arena more friendly for avoiding enemies might help
- Making enemies path to something other than the player might help
Projectile accuracy
Even when the player successfully targeted an enemy, this didn’t guarantee a hit. That can be frustrating for faster moving enemies.
- Projectiles could be sped up
- Projectiles could be hitscan
- This would work well with the cowboy idea and rename of “Quickdraw”
- Enemies could be slower
- Projectiles could home in on enemies
- This would work well with the mage theme
Lag
When too many enemies spawned in, the game had a horrible performance drop. This was a known issue at the time and one I didn’t spend any time trying to resolve, but I’ve got something in mind
- Replace enemy pathing with vector fields
- This only really works if there’s only one target though…. unless I set up multiple fields.
Drawing the loop
Some players mentioned drawing the loop while moving was difficult. I think this is only an issue if you’re trying to be accurate with the loop, which isn’t really intended. The reason a player may want to be accurate is because it breaks when hitting enemies, which was also a complaint by many players.
I want the player to scribble circles as fast as possible and feel a sense of power throwing out attacks.
- Making the camera fixed could make drawing easier
- This would require an arena that fills the entire screen and nothing more, which might solve some difficulty issue as well.
- Making the loop only destroyed by telegraphed enemy attacks would be clearer
- Making the hitbox of both enemies and the loop would help the player know how to draw the loop without breaking it
Personal thoughts
Art
Because I used pre-existing assets for the game, it feels a bit generic to me and I’d like to move away from that. I’d like to give the game an overhaul that gives some meaning to the gameplay. I need to answer some questions about gameplay, that will hopefully lead to a more concrete understanding about what I want to do with the game.
- Who is the player?
- What is the goal?
- What kind of enemies do I want to have?
- What attacks do they need to have?
- How do they spawn in?
- Why are they a threat to the player?
- What is the arena?
- Why is the player here?
- Why are the enemies here?
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