Philosophy Behind the Game, and Adjusting to Feedback

Our original design philosophy when approaching this game was to go for more of a punishing approach. We wanted to make the enemies faster than the player, do more damage, and overwhelm the player completely so that each soul collection felt like a milestone.

What we found out while doing this was that it made people more hesitant to play the game, and decreased overall enjoyment. We noticed that people would just give up because it took so much time for their upgrades to scale and be equal to that of the enemies.

This caused us to look back at our original design philosophy and make some adjustments. We began work on making the enemies far easier to kill and on making the moment-to-moment gameplay as satisfying as possible. In the final iteration, it only took 2-3 runs to become incredibly powerful and shrine rooms spawned more often.

We noticed this was a very positive change when testing it and having other people playtest it. It was really fun to see the reactions people had to fully maximizing the fire rate stat and pairing it with a spreadshot or crossbow upgrade, or fulling maximizing the speed/health stat and hunting for a flamethrower upgrade.

In the end, we realized that our greatest strength in this game was giving the player options to kill enemies in the way they wanted to, and making every option feel satisfying and fun. We did a complete 180 from what we had originally envisioned, but the whole team agrees that this was for the best.