News & Dev | November 25, 2022 (2:27 AM EST)
More Clowns, Less Frowns
Hello fellow sheep enthusiasts, and welcome to the very first publication of the official FawaStudios blog. This will be a periodic report of my progress on all things FawaStudios, including work on the website, game projects, and anything not covered by those specific categories.
I look forward to using these as a way to express my thoughts and provide more information on what I'm currently working on, and I hope that those who choose to read will do so with ample enjoyment.
New Direction
With that brief introduction out of the way, today's blog is all about clowns - but not just any clowns, SPECIAL clowns. Given the very catchy and enticing blog title that I myself came up with, this shouldn't come as too big of a surprise.
If you're an active member of the Discord community (your support is appreciated!) then you're probably aware that about a week back I made the bold decision to exchange my plans of multi-ability common clowns in favor of more direct and recognizable variants. Although this still isn't 100%, it has a high chance to make it through the cruel and unmerciful hellscape that is game design.
This was a decision I made after a lot of consideration, some of these key motivations include recognizability - if someone can see a special variant and think, "Clown Clear", that improves the game's identity in the long run; consistency - it's overall just more effective than the alternative solution; and, well, motivation itself. Coming up with concepts and working on these variants increase my personal enjoyment for the project significantly.
What Makes a Good Clown?
Now I think it's important to go over the steps that I have to consider when designing a new clown variant. As much as I'd like to say, "Armored clown, breathes fire, riding a unicycle, I call it 'The Rad n' Clad'", I have to make sure it fits within the lore, remains balanced when presented alongside the other variants, and can provide something unique for the gameplay.
First, keeping the design realistic (as far as mutant clowns go) and lore-friendly is vital to its existence in the universe. Having 500 of the same type of clown canonically have metal arms is difficult to explain and wouldn't really make sense for a virus to cause, on the other hand, an 8-foot tall (or 96 inch) clown that has the ability to fling props really hard can be more easily justified. Obviously there's not a horribly fine line here, realistically a virus probably couldn't turn scrawny Uncle Joe into a 6 ton car wielding behemoth, but it's still something to consider.
Secondly, balance is quite possibly the most important part of designing an enemy, in fact it's actually one of the most important things in general when working on a game. Picture this - you're playing a singleplayer game which has been relatively easy thus far, you turn a corner and suddenly 50 machine-gun turrets begin firing at you at once, no matter how many times you restart you can't proceed without getting a face-full of bullets. Unless you were an extremely experienced player this would likely be a big enough issue to quit the game entirely, designing the enemies in Clown Clear is no different. I need to make sure each variant is the right level of powerful, works well in a team, and doesn't contain gamebreaking issues with spawning.
Finally, I need to make sure these are actually fun and intriguing to encounter, if all of them are the same thing with slight differences the game can get boring quickly. This was one of the main problems with my previous plan for the clowns, as they'd mostly be the same aside from some minor visual and statistical differences (speed, health, weight, etc.). People play games for entertainment, and I believe it's pretty clear how these two concepts coincide.
As of now, I've developed around 9 clown concepts (some pretty good, some not so much), whether or not these will make it into the game will depend on further evaluation and soon prototyping. Despite my desire to show these off, I'm trying to refrain for at least the time being, and at most until the game's launch - feedback is extremely important but I also need to make sure I don't go too in depth about everything before anyone actually gets to play the game.
Wrapping Up
With all that said, I look forward to continuing the process of clown-creation and I can't wait to share more information on the game in general. I would also like to sincerely thank those of you who have reached the bottom of this very long block of text, this took me a while to write and I appreciate the notion that someone would care enough to read it. Stay tuned!
If you haven't already, you can join the official FawaStudios Discord server with this link: https://discord.com/invite/BGg7pRxaUe, I'm trying to grow it :)