I did me an update

A few days back I finally got my arse into gear and finished off a very tiny update to Squid Harder. It’s available to download from Bagfull Of Wrong and ModDB although I’d hardly call it an essential upgrade for most people who already have the game.

“So, why update the game then if it’s only a small update?”, I hear you cry.

Aha, sez I. Because I broke the game entirely for a segment of my target audience, that’s why.

Let’s roll back a few months here, I’m quite close to finishing off the game and I’m doing my usual run of playtesting which pretty much consists of testing the game whilst playing it, it’s a technical process but it works y’know? I’m trying out different techniques to see if I can spot any exploits and sure enough, there’s one there. Right there. On the stair, and it’s got big fuck off clogs on and it’s banging about like a twat.

Whilst I was going about my business and trying to tweak the collisions so that they’re incredibly in favour of the player I’d failed to take into account that given the small collision box, it’d actually be entirely possible to hug the edge and continually circle around it and never die. The beta is still up on the ModDB page, try it. It works. You simply cannot die at all this way – nothing can shoot you, nothing can hit you, nothing can hurt you.

Now, whilst I happily offer the chance to play the game and never die – at least you can still sort of play the game properly and do it and not be a complete boring twat. If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from gamers it’s that there’s a subset of people who will be that boring twat and will either a) moan at you for leaving something in that lets them do the boring twat thing or b) proudly run around the edges being a boring twat just so they can say they beat the game easily. Huzzah. People are brilliant.

I remedied this by adding in the chasers at the edges. They zip around and if you try and use that exploit, they’ll smack up your face bad. In short, they’re there to stop you being that guy. Yes, the boring twat.

All well and good? Well, no. What I’d failed to take into consideration whilst throwing this stuff in at the last minute was that if you’re a one switch user then it doesn’t stop you from being a boring twat, it stops you from being able to play the game because at some point, you’ll naturally hug the edge due to the nature of the controls. And that’s a bit crap isn’t it? Well, it is if you’re actively trying to enable people to be able to play more frantic arcade games with as little unfair punishment as possible.

So I’ve dropped in an option to be able to turn the chasers off. Which, of course, returns the problem of the exploit rearing its head again. Now, I could tweak the enemy patterns a bit, redesign a few things or try and be really clever about it but why bother? If someone wants to be a complete tool whilst playing the game, I’d rather that than stop a segment of the people I actively wanted playing the game from being able to play the game. The exploit remaining is far and away the better of the options I have. I don’t want to change the game, I’m happy with it. I want people to be able to play the game. It stays. It’s not really my problem if people choose not to play it how I intended or how I designed it. That’s their choice and I’d sooner more people were able to play it than not.

There you go then. Squid Harder. Now with potential exploit once more and all the better for it.