Behind The Scenes of V1.2: The Big Heccin' Update

Hey all!

I have come out of the development chamber once again to tell you things about what it's like to develop Cricket: Jae's Really Peculiar Game! There was no time travel involved, just a lot of sneaky tasks and pain. Jimmy from the past did leave me a note to write about scope creep. It's also wet with what I can only assume is sweat.

Let's talk about the latest update for Cricket! Dubbed V1.2, also known as: "The Big Heccin' Update", this update includes:

New Features

- Optional hard mode: get the button timing for moves right or suffer huge consequences.

- Options menu has an enemy scale slider to make the game easier / harder.

New Content

- New weapons have been added: 3 for each character.

- New armor has been added: 3 for each character.

- New enemies: more robots, sock puppets, and sharks.

- Some enemies have new attacks.

- Enemies are tuned to be more difficult by default.

- Fewer enemy encounters, and time between respawns has been increased.

- More interactables, as in, more things to bump into!

- Some side characters now appear in town after their story sections are complete.

- Cutscene before final fight has additional dialogue and some fun other stuff ;)

- As you clear the game, check the Voicemail section of the Blokia menu every once in a while, you'll see.

More stuff to find!

Gameplay Changes

- Treasure has been moved around and is more interesting, more character tokens have been placed around the map.

- Character tokens boost stats, find as many as you can!

- More abilities have status effects, and status effects are more incorporated into the game strategy overall.

Seriously, more stuff to find!

Misc.

- Player attack descriptions are more helpful.

- Friendship levels are capped at 10 to reduce confusion.

Definitely was a weird feeling to realize that the move descriptions before weren't helpful. Adding more text was a localization nightmare, though.

What inspired this update? To be honest, it started as an attempt by me to increase the amount of equipment in the game. I wanted to give the player more reasons to explore the world, as a consistent point of feedback in reviews was that exploration and rewards were the weakest elements of the game overall. Many correctly pointed out that Cricket appeared to start out as a much more ambitious game, and was scaled back to meet deadlines. That last thing really didn't sit well with me, while I thought the game was good, I too saw how the game could be even better.

Once the new equipment was made, I needed to place them in the world, which required me to make some new treasure chests. While I was making new treasure chests, I had a thought to go over the existing treasure chests to see if I could make better rewards, and I noticed that I had overused Dwix Bars as a drop, like, WAY too much. With this in mind, I chose to remix what each chest in the game contained. In a way, it started to feel like I was making a mod of my own game.

As I rearranged the treasure chest contents, I realized that there weren't enough useful items in the game, which led to me re-balancing the items of the game. The Token drops in particular needed revisiting. In earlier versions of the game, Tokens served their usefulness way too early, where they enabled characters to learn moves sooner than they normally would by leveling up. I figured a simple thing I could do was have Tokens increase a character's stats, so that's what we did. A new problem arose though: the game that was designed to be easy became EVEN EASIER. This was a point of contention with our players, where many thought combat in the late game became boring due to the lack of difficulty, when our target audience has always been children.

In an effort to not alienate our target audience, while simultaneously making things more interesting for a new audience, I re-balanced all the enemies in the game, along with the experience points they gave out. To add variety, I also made new versions of some existing enemies, with new attacks, and also gave some existing enemies new attacks. This was done without creating any new art, as a testament to our engine.

Along with enemy re-balancing, we felt like the game didn't make enough use of the status effect system, so we made more attacks have status attacks, so that players can strategize around them a lot more. In general, the player having more choices in combat is not a bad thing. Player moves were also re-balanced to account for the increased use of status effects.

Since the game was made to be a bit more difficult as a result of all of these combat changes, I made it so that players can scale enemy stats from the options menu, to make the game easier (or even harder). If that option didn't make the game hard enough, I also created "Hard Mode", where in order to do damage, or heal, or avoid one hit KO damage (from enemies), the player has to hit the easy or hard timing for all attacks. This means that EVEN HEALING CAN FAIL! To be honest, it gives the game a very refreshing feeling.

The overall number of enemy encounters was also reduced, to make each fight feel more significant.

You wanted a tougher game? YOU GOT IT!

Another complaint about the game was about the ending scenes, and while we couldn't change TOO much without a massive refactor, Kiri and I had the thought to improve what we could and extend cutscenes wherever we could. We worked pretty tirelessly to add more to the ending to make it feel less "rushed" and closer to the quality bar of the rest of the game.

On top of all of this, we had to then coordinate any and all localization changes with Smilegate to make sure the Korean version isn't far behind, along with making patches for each console to meet certification requirements.

All this was started by a desire to add more equipment. This can happen with games, where seemingly small tasks leave bait to take on even more "small" bits of work. In the games industry, this phenomenon is referred to as "scope creep", and it's insidious. If you're not careful, it can sneak up on you and burn you out. Learn from my mistakes here.

Am I proud of the update? Absolutely! It's the best version of Cricket by a long shot! Am I tired? Also yes!

I sincerely hope you enough The Big Heccin' Update, and thanks for reading this blog, playing the game, and supporting in the various ways you already have. For now, I'll take a break from development to get back to the marketing circuit, and to focus on new projects.

Jimmy