Buster versus Shovel a Battle of Core mechanic study

Core mechanics

The core mechanics of the study focused around how they're dealt with; your buster is expanded upon in Megaman by getting more tools while in Shovel Knight your given more synergy based tools.

Synergy focused

Synergy focused gameplay makes it where the other tools you use with your weapon combine together. This changes the game loop where you're focused on chaining your main tool with the side tools for synergy of play.

Have a shovel? Make the player dig! You need the player to travel from point A to point B as a challenge? Pull a Mario and go for a jump focused style gameplay or instead; do the smart thing and focus around that tool.

Have a Knuckle Duster? How are you going to make it combo with the shovel?

This system you can't go too in-depth with the shovel, otherwise the support mechanics become useless.

Core focused

Core focused is where the gameplay loop is brought back to how you loop the gameplay to your core mechanic into itself; ice shot? It better be from the buster it's shot from! Rockets? It be better be shot from your main tool!

This kind of method you can have multiple core mechanics, however not a lot of support synergy mechanics.

Can you do both?

Er, yes and no; you can have multiple core mechanics, however you then have to waste a lot of time and money on seeing how each different mechanic has synergy with the main mechanics or main mechanic for the number of depth of interactions.

It's not even just about bug fixes but about how they're going to intermingle with one another.

Dead Cells does do this three core design approach and to this day 5 years later still make changes. It doesn't help the fact the studio doesn't have much experience in this area but still my point remains the same; you're increasing your work load by a ton with this approach.

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