This week on my game Freerunners I’ve been working on the usual stuff: a mix of polish, bug fixing, balancing, but also something fun I’ve been wanting to do for a while but haven’t got around to, More Fails!

MORE FAILS!

One thing that has come up a bunch when people play the game is that they like it when the player and the bad guys get hurt. So this week I took the demo and looked for places I could fit new interesting ways for the player to get hurt (fail state in the game). I have to admit I was chuckling along as I was implementing some of them.

I also added some more audio polish to the fail stuff, giving it a bit more juice. I implemented new bone-cracking sounds and per-material sounds for the object you hit. For example, if you hit a metal dumpster you will make a metal doinnnggg sound, but if you hit the concrete you will make a hard concrete hit sound!

Below is a video of some of the fails I’ve added to the demo so far!

EXTRA POLISH

Thinking about the audio polish for the fail-states, got me thinking about some other non-fail state related polish things I could add to the game. They are only small things but I think they add to the overall vibe of the game. In the video below you can see:

• Kicking a physics football
• Dog and owner looking, with barking at you as you go past
• A person spinning and slowing down on a roundabout in a park and a guy smoking in the background

BALANCING CHANGES

Even with my recent balancing/flow changes I still felt something was off with the beginning of the game. Originally I wanted the player to feel more noob-y so that as they got new skills by playing through the game, they would be able to feel the contrast. However, as good as this sounds in theory, I think it just wasn’t working in reality. You just felt a bit start - stoppy and didn’t get the flow feeling that parkour should be giving.

So I found a middle ground. I decided to give the player more speed and stamina from the start of the game. You still have less than the first speed and stamina skills give you, but you are a lot closer to that than before. I tested it…. and I think it’s much better, I get a better feeling and representation of what the rest of the game is like from doing this, so I kept this change!

This has been a fun weeks worth of work which I think made the game more fun and interesting to play. I’m going to keep incorporate more fails into the levels as I go through polishing them, I think the really add to the vibe of the game. I pushed all these new changes into an updated Demo build on Steam, so you can go play them right now!

PLAY THE FREE STEAM DEMO HERE

Let me know what you think and give the game a wishlist if you like it!