White Nights St.Petersburg 2016: Game design mistakes in Punch Club

Nikita Kulaga, co-programmer, game designer and script writer of Punch Club, at White Nights St.Petersburg 2016 shared what mistakes the team made when creating the game. And how she corrected them.

At the beginning, the game designer told what the project concept looked like. The title was supposed to be called VHS Story – after the name of the format of video cassettes from the 90s. The team was inspired by the movie hits of this period. “We wanted to put all the coolest stuff in one game,” Kulaga shared.

Inspiration was not only movies, but also games of the 90s. Such as Fallout, for example. This determined the format of the project: the game had to have a minimum plot and a lot of non-linear quests with references to movies. Plus, the player had to rock the hall to move forward, hang posters with Rimbaud on the wall and be inspired by them.

The plan did not work out. During the development process, the focus shifted to the plot and leveling of the hero.

The history of the creation of the project has identified some game design errors, Kulaga believes. He noted that the Lazy Bear Games team learned a lot about the shortcomings of the project from reviews in stores. The most useful were user reviews on Steam. Moreover, according to the game designer, negative reviews are the most useful, because if a person does not like something, he will go through all the negative points in detail. Of course, a lot of people just splash out in negative reviews. But you can still learn something sensible. “From the first two lines it is clear whether the review is useful or not,” Kulaga shared.

From the comments it turned out that the game has several problems.

Users were annoyed by the loss of characteristics at the end of the day, unpredictable randomness, the victory of people with lower characteristics, and the fact that too many grinds appeared by the end of the game. And finally, the plot freezes.

Kulaga explained where the errors came from. The loss of characteristics at the end of the day is a legacy of the original idea about a lot of non-linear quests and complex choices. It was necessary to make the player’s life difficult. So that the user has a moral choice, temptations and difficulties. “Nothing worked out, except difficulties,” Kulaga shared.

We tried to solve this point by reducing the drop in characteristics. Then they returned this feature back. And then we introduced a progressive pumping scale and added a perk that accelerates pumping.

The problem has not been solved 100%, but the discontent of the players has decreased.

Another mistake mentioned by the game designer is unpredictable randomness. The opponent for the player was chosen by a completely random method. However, for users, such a random turned out to be “not random enough”, especially in case of loss. Kulaga noted that the problem could be solved by giving players a “look under the hood” of the game – to explain how the opponent’s choice happens.

The third mistake is a large amount of grind by the end of the game. Here again, the alteration of the original concept played a role. After numerous changes, the team did not have time to conduct a long play-test. What they regret now.

To avoid this mistake, it is necessary not to relax in the last month before the launch of the project,” Kulaga summed up.

In conclusion, the game designer noted that 95% of the errors that were found were fixed by the team. This led to the fact that after the release of the DLC, the number of negative reviews for the game decreased significantly.