As workdays go, today hasn’t felt all too productive for us designers. We have done plenty of playtesting, but I feel like the process has slowed down now that we are finalizing most of the variables.
Nevertheless, most of my time today has been spent on testing the life gain of the player. I did this due to the player feeling a bit too unkillable when it comes to health at the moment. We also don’t want to increase the enemies damage too much, as it could get out of control in too big crowds.
When it came to how I tested it, I set the health the player gains from killing the basic enemies to zero. I did this because I felt like it was unnecessary when we already had a system for gaining health on each hit. However, I did keep the health-gain on a kill on the variant enemies we have. This choice was made due to there being fewer of them as well as them being more powerful than the other enemies.
I set the health gained per hit to five percent of the damage dealt to the enemy by the player. The starting-value of the health gain was ten percent, but that felt like it was too much as the player could easily clear floor without any real thought. My testing with these values are not yet finished, but so far they have felt more fair.
We also did plenty of bug-hunting throughout the day, and I found a part of a wall that was missing a collider. As such, the player could just walk through and fall into oblivion. Thankfully it was an easy fix, but something that’s good to take note of for future testing.
Emil "The Pagan's" Gamedev-blog 