FLaiL Q/A, etc - Eo Community

Quick FLaiL Q/A

TaylorTech: What is FLaiL about?

At its core, FLaiL is a platformer in the vein of Jumper Two. In my opinion, however, FLaiL blows Jumper Two out of the water in every respect. The story of FLaiL is incredibly minimalistic... so much so that you may not even notice it.

UltimateAgent: Roughly how many levels do you expect?

There are 80 levels in the game, not including sample editor stages.

UltimateAgent: Will there be an editor?

Yep. Originally the plan was to allow GML code to be inputted into stage files, but unfortunately this feature had to be cut for security reasons. However, the editor is still a powerful tool which allows you to create fun and challenging FLaiL stages and my alpha testers have all spent hours with it experimenting with the different game pieces.

Minmay: Will there be a "disable blood" option?

There is no blood in the game. The closest thing to gore is the player exploding into pieces (sans blood) when caught in the radius of a bomb, but you can disable this by turning off particles in the options menu.

Zecks: Is the game based on timetrialing?

Yes. You are awarded points for your speed in completing each level (and of course there are pickups along the way which add time to the clock). The game takes the sum of all your top scores for every stage, and this is called your Total Score. To unlock more stages, you need to increase your Total Score past certain milestones. During gameplay you are often presented with the choice: revisit previous stages and improve your score, or complete new stages?

That said, "time trialing" (ie: replaying stages over and over to improve your time by a couple seconds) is inaccurate. The score requirements are lenient enough that you will never need to worry about a few extra seconds on the clock unless you're going for the world record. A couple seconds would only make a difference of 100 or 200 points. The main focus is on big time disparities, mostly caused by not grabbing all the pickups along the way as you beat a stage.

To explain better: Most stages have a right way and a wrong way to beat them. The right way will get you close to the maximum score on the stage (maybe about 300 points lower due to small time-wasters like jumping where you could have falllen, etc) and the wrong way will get you about half the possible points (still no small amount, in the big picture of unlocking new stages). So the gap between easy and hard is way bigger than the gap between hard and super elite millisecond-shaving time-trialer.

(Some questions slightly modified for reader coherence)

Reducing Frustration

In designing FLaiL, one of my main goals was to reduce frustration. Anyone who has played any game in the Jumper series can tell you that frustration is the single biggest reason why people stop playing them. Here's some things I've done to attempt to bring the frustration level down, while still preserving the hardcore platforming gameplay style:

Smoother Difficulty Curve:
This one is a no-brainer. Jumper Two's 5th level had people giving up. FLaiL is still a tough game, overall, but it becomes difficult in a much more gradual way.

Non-linearity:
In Jumper one of the biggest causes of frustration is the fact that if you don't complete the level you are stuck on, the only other real option is to quit. In FLaiL, the player unlocks stages 10 at a time (or in "Zones"), and then can attempt them in any order they want.

Point System:
It isn't what stages you've beaten, it's how you beat them. Each stage awards you points based on your completion speed and pickups gathered along the way (always placed in difficult areas). An unskilled player can first beat the stage slowly and with no pickups, then later return for the better score, giving them more "milestones" of achievement and removing that feeling of standing still when you're stuck. This is essentially dynamic difficulty adjustment and serves two direct purposes: to reduce frustration for new users by making some tricky parts of stages optional and to increase the score gap between the skilled and unskilled players, giving more of a reward for improving at the game.

An indirect effect of this is that it gives the player choice. For example if the player needs 2000 more points to unlock the next zone, they can either try to beat an unbeaten stage for the 2000 or return to two completed stages and try to raise their score by 1000 in each of them. This way, if you're stuck, there is always another way to success.

Completely Configurable Controls and Gamepad Support:
When the game forced a key configuration on the player, I heard a lot of my alpha testers blaming the keyboard when they failed, and they felt cheated. It became apparent that this feature was necessary, and now a lot of my testers won't even use the keyboard anymore if there isn't a gamepad around.

Near-Instant Respawn Time:
After dieing, there is exactly one second where you can't respawn, after that just tap the jump button for another go at it, and in two-player there is no need to wait for your partner to die before trying again, just go when you're ready. A side-effect of this: you don't spawn immediately when a new stage loads. You can sit back and examine the stage before starting, which seems small but removes that "Hurry! Hurry!" feeling of Jumper like you were always wasting time.

Funny Deaths:
Die in mid-flight, and your player's corpse will flail madly as it continues on the trajectory through the air, bouncing off walls with a hilarious thud. Die in such a way that your corpse hits a spring on its fall and the cheery "boing!" as your lifeless body bounces off across the stage should generate at least a smile. This is an attempt to turn the failure of death into a small reward.

Two Player Co-Op:
I guess the best explanation here is misery loves company. Something about being stuck with a friend trying to achieve the same thing makes being stuck a lot more fun. Also, seeing your friend's superior highscore when a stage loads is infinitely more motivation to improve your own best than any amount of unlockables could ever be.

Mouse Bomb Mode:
A third player can enter the game at any time as the mouse cursor, and lay down "Mouse Bombs" anywhere in the stage (but only 1 at a time) in an attempt to explode the other players. Players who otherwise hate this kind of game love playing as the mouse cursor because it removes all the pressure of needing to reach a goal (if they miss with the bomb it's no big deal, it's still exciting to watch it count down while the players scramble away from it), making it one of those multiplayer modes that you can actually get non-gamers to try.

Relaxing Settings:
This is sort of a joke. Part of the concept of FLaiL has always been to have these hardcore platforming challenges juxtaposed with serene, calming settings. In one zone, you maneuver around spike-filled docks with a sunset over the ocean behind you. I plan to compose the music to match the visual mood, and maybe it will calm you down just a bit if the rest of my measures fail to fight off the frustration.

FLaiL Mechanics

I'm afraid I may have made FLaiL sound a bit too much like an indirect sequel to Jumper. This is not true. The goal is similar (hardcore platformer), but it really is its own game. As you can see from the above, the game is designed quite differently - less as an endurance test and more as a relaxing platformer distraction - and now I'll quickly go over the player's moveset during gameplay.

Jumping:
No surprise, you can jump. Unlike with Ogmo, here the player can tap the jump button for a short hop or hold it for a tall leap.

Ledge Grabbing:
Just position yourself beside a ledge as you are falling and tap the direction toward it to grab it. From there you can jump, climb, or fall. Pretty self-explanatory but very useful.

Flying:
Here's your main ability. Think Fox's Up+B from Super Smash Bros. Hold the fly button to charge up. While charging hold a direction on the dpad, then when charging finishes you'll be shot in that direction.

Like with all my games, I've tried to take a simple concept and expand it with clever level design. That said, FLaiL also feels very different from my previous projects, and has assumed an identity all its own.

Well, that's all on FLaiL for now. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you guys when I finally release the thing!

-Matt