Beat Them Robots 2 Development Blog

In this blog, I'll discuss how my game "Beat Them Robots" changed from an only Beat em' Up game into a hybrid genres of both Beat em' Up and Roguelike in 3 weeks. Keep in mind that I am mentioning Roguelike instead of Roguelite as because when you die in the game, you will have to start over instead of having a checkpoint. 

Same as the previous devlog for Beat em' Up, adding Roguelike elements into this game is difficult as well. This is due to the limitations of Stencyl as well as my skill as a programmer is not that good. So it is hard for me to add in things that are VERY necessary for Rougelike, such as Power-ups and Skill Upgrades. 

Week 5: 

This week I wanted to add in some basic elements that you would see in a Roguelike game, such as Stages being generated randomly, or stage entrance after you defeated all of the enemies. Which I added to this build. The Level Generator works by me creating many different stages with the same layout but different situations happening in the game. Such as the number of different enemies that will spawn, the healing/resting zone, and the number of enemies you have to defeat to open the entrance. 

Because there is a resting/healing zone, I also have to add HP Items for the players so they can heal up and continue to the next stage, although they would have to hope that they can get into the healing stage. 

For this build, I did some A/B testing on the healing/resting zone to see whether health items are necessary or not since the game is short and players would just have to beat 5 stages to win the game. Turns out, the player that are testing the build without the healing items would struggle and would get the game over. So, I decided to keep the healing/resting zone instead of removing it. 

Lastly is the sound effects, the only sound effects I'd added is the entrance sound effect that will play when the player defeats the required amount of enemies on the stage. 

Week 6:

After getting some feedback in the playtest, one of the major issues I faced was the enemies' spawn rate. They spawn in very slow, and because of this the player would have to wait for a bit only to beat the enemies for some actions and repeat. This frustrates players as it could be boring and players would want more action going on in a Beat em' Up game. So I decided to make the enemies' spawn rates faster so that the players can keep beating up many enemies and move to the next stage.

I also added more variety of stages by adding a new enemy that is much easier to beat as it only has 1 HP, meaning more randomization for the game and more new things for the player to find out. Not only that, I also added a progression bar for the players to keep track on their progress throughout the entire game. So that the players would know when the game will ends. However, my concern was that this will know give the player the end surprise. Since I want the player to go "oh! the game ended" when they finish the game without the progress bar. So this was placed in my A/B testing.

Lastly for the music, it was not in loop in the previous build. So I made it loop and fixed this small issue.

Week 7:

Since the previous build was already good based on the feedback I'd receive during the playtest. I figured not to add much features anymore into the game. So the only thing that I added was the "Sign", this will spawn alongside with the entrance as because another thing happened during the playtest was some players doesn't know where to go after defeating the enemies. So the Sign will help and signal the players that they are able to move to the next stage by going into the entrance and continue beating up enemies. 

As for the A/B testing for Week 6, the players that have progression bar doesn't seem surprised or have any type of reactions as because of te progression bar. Since it already tells the player when will the game end, making them no surprised at all when the game ended. As of the players that plays without the progression bar, it was quite the opposite as I could see some players have the reaction that I wanted. Because of that, I had to remove the progression bar. Making this the final build for the hybrid genre of beat em' up and roguelike game.