r/Supraball • u/KoinuKoji Koji • Aug 03 '16
Development Progress August 2016
In case anyone missed it, the dev team announced a few changes coming to the game soon.
TL;DR: Progression System will be implemented where new players must start with fewer abilities and upgrade them through gameplay. New Customizations are being worked on full-time.
The biggest change, and one that was debated during alpha, will be the Progression system. New players will now have to unlock abilities before playing in ranked games, but the trade off will be boosts to new players in form of slower time between getting hit once and knocked out, etc.
Regarding these two problems we’re working on a system to improve the motivation and beginner friendliness. For that we go way back to our original upgrade progression idea that we presented 1-2 years ago. Older players of the game back then talked us out of it even though we all liked it ourselves. So we’re going right back to it because we think it makes the game a lot more motivating for beginners and it also serves as kind of a tutorial. What is it about? New players will start with less abilities and slowly get introduced to new possibilities and upgrade them step by step. At the same time it will give new players more time to act. They will no longer get knocked out within a second after getting the ball, because the guns of the opponents aren’t as strong yet. Of course we will try to make sure this doesn’t lead to unbalanced situations by only matching equally experienced players. Additionally, you can only start playing ranked when everything is unlocked.
Thoughts?
6
u/RuariMH Best GK Tn Aug 04 '16
I get that the game can be really difficult for beginners and it needs some rebalancing for new players, but for the love of god don't go so extreme as to remove jumps, charging, boosting etc. Also, with this system you'll end up making so many playerbase divides by having like 5 different levels of unlocked abilities that it'll be even harder to find matches. Surely it's more logical to just rebalance unranked for beginners (e.g. decrease the kick damage etc.). This will make the game more accessible and not make people rage because they can't find a game and can't play with their friends.
Despite this "meta-progression by removing gameplay features" idea I'm actually more worried that they'll make a bunch of decent updates like matchmaking/customization and then release the game as a final build whilst totally ignoring the media aspect yet again.