Why player feedback is important. Tiny story of Stolen Colors

On Ludum Dare 56 among others appeared a game called Stolen Colors about tiny creatures that try to return, well, stolen colors from angry predators and make the world colorful once again.

For those who forgor or didn’t played yet: in this game, you need to draw runes (similar to the pattern lock screen on smartphones), which summon and upgrade the little creatures that the player helps on their adventure. They fight off waves of enemies and gradually bring colors back to the world by collecting orbs at the end of each level.

Drawing phase

Battle phase

While most of the players liked the concept, there was a lot of fair critique in its address.

UniOwl here, Stolen Colors’ game designer and technical artist. Today I’ll tell you, how did we improve our game, why we did some of the decisions, and what we have now.

In-game tutorial

Tutorial often is a big problem not only games that we do with our team, but of a jam games that we see. There’s little time for development, and to succeed in gameplay, make a pretty graphics, some of the things must be thrown out, and tutorial is usually got rid of in the first place.

Despite that you can add tutorial on game page, usually players try to play first, and only after that they read everything trying to understand why they can’t do anything. And that’s very bad, because lack of tutorial and unintuitive gameplay frustrates the player and make its perception of the game worse (remember, no one likes to feel stupid while playing). We handled that, added short hints on how to play the game:

Difficulty

The second most mentioned thing was game’s difficulty. Its fix is a lot harder as it requires a lot of hard work fine tuning various parameters.

And while it technically completeable (one of our artist made it to the very end!), it is quite a challenge, and most of the players didn’t see colorfullness of the world.

Balance

First on our table was balance of the creatures. We understood how to fix that from the very beginning, but as for the tutorial we just didn’t have time for that. We remade base characters stats and their progression over time.

Now one enemy is stronger than one ally (after all, predators are bigger and scarier than our tinies), and you have to counter every enemy with two or three allies.

Warriors beat tanks

Tanks beat mages

Mages beat warriors

Boss atacks were also changed. I accidentally made a mistake, where bosses had powerful attack that dealed a lot of damage to all allies. And if the player is unlucky, boss could use this attack three times in a row and destroy every possible squad. Now it is fixed.

Oh hell nah 💀

Fair random

One of the comments lead us to a thought that too much random in runes cast must be reworked as player’s success should not depend on luck. While we tried to avoid random in game (this is why you see the same exact enemies every try), it is difficult to do something with runes. So we tried to make it in such a way that if one of the runes don’t spawn now, its spawn chance is raised (as described very well here https://www.charliecleveland.com/types-of-randomness-part-2/).

Chance for comeback

As we initially planned, after losing a wave, player is thrown back, which reminds a bit of tug-of-war game. And if enemies managed to capture all the castles or player is defeated in boss battle, level restarts. Instead, in jam version, player get sent to the main menu (uh-oh), and enemy capture raises the error, after what player gets stuck.

All of that were fixed, and now player also has two castles intead of one, which allows him to make a comeback on the beginning.

Feel of progression and available information

В оригинальной версии игрок видит на экране доску для рисования и поле, где спавнятся и сражаются существа. И всё! А чего ему ожидать от волны? И насколько вообще полезны бонусы на урон или здоровье?

Все эти вопросы оставались без ответа... до этих пор! Теперь игрок видит, как именно выбранные бонусы влияют на его существ и какие примерно враги будут на уровне. При этом игра не раскрывает перед ним все карты. Игрок не знает, какие подкрепления противников его ожидают, и насколько сильных противников он встретит.

Now player sees better the consequences of his actions and what await him next

Drawing phase

At first, player is given with some time to draw the runes. There’s very big drawback: player’s success depends not only his strategic and conscious decisions but on how fast can he draw.

Fun fact: our another, somewhat similar game, Circle of Life, suffers from the same flaw. Why I didn’t fix this issue right away is a mystery to me.

We removed the timer entirely. Now, instead of being rushed, the player is given a set number of drawings they need to complete before each wave.

Narrative and Visuals

Even the narrative got a small but interesting change. The game’s page tells a short story about how evil predators stole all the colors, leaving the world dim black and white. At the end of each of the three levels, the player returns one of the colors to the world.

To better illustrate the conflict between the creatures and the game feel, we decided to make the predators and the boss always colorful. They didn’t just steal the colors — they kept them for themselves, refusing to share with others (how mean of them!). We wanted to implement this idea during the game jam, but modifying the effect for this turned out to be technically challenging (Unity works in quite a peculiar way sometimes). It took a lot of time after the jam, so we probably wouldn’t have been able to finish this feature within the short three days anyway.

Predators that stole the red color are now always red themselves

Mages now actually fire their projectiles, as you saw earlier. And we replaced the locks with crosses so that players wouldn’t mistake them with something unlockable. Additionally, we played around with the bonus colors to make them more distinguishable.

Technical Challenges

All this didn’t come without technical difficulties. We were told that in one browser the game wouldn’t launch at all. Also, there were some bugs in the original version (luckily, no one seems to have noticed yet, or at least no one’s mentioned them), and we fixed those.

A lot of time went into refining the effects (and our genuine confusion about why the game behaves differently across platforms), as well as dealing with the jam site, which refused to play the music for some reason.

However, now all those issues are behind us, and you can try out the new version on the jam site or on itch. We’re very happy with the result and hope to delight you with more interesting games in the future! We’d love to hear your thoughts on what we’ve created.

Game on ldjam: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/stolen-colors

Game on itch: https://thespinningsofa.itch.io/stolen-colors