The Indie Game Magazine June 2015 | Issue 50 | Page 16

cooldowns for their attacks, and the relic still heals them, but willing to see the problems with your game and adapt. We were
your health is only affected by enemies or environmental traps. on the fence about this for so long (I don’t remember how many
months...) but now that we’ve made our decision and moved on,
IGM: What made you decide to make those changes? Specifically,
everything seems to be coming together more naturally. Rather
in regards to the health and combat systems.
than always going back to this potential issue that was holding
Laskey: Despite it being hard to balance, the nail in the coffin was us back, we can focus on fleshing out the rest of what the game
actually that the mechanic discouraged desired player behavior. We has to offer.
want players to attack enemies, we want players to experiment and
IGM: Are you planning an Early Access build of Tetrapulse? Or
try engaging other parts of the environment and use their attacks.
would you prefer to release it when it’s finished?
When the player’s health was tied to their ammo, they were being
punished for playing the game. Any time they missed an attack it Laskey: We don’t have any official Early Access plans yet, though
was technically better for them to have not attacked at all. When we’ve talked about it a lot as a team. We love the potential conyou were under attack fighting back made you lose health, so it was nection it allows us to have with our players, but we’re still looking
often better to just run away instead of fight back immediately. We into the logistics of how it would affect our development, and if it’s
couldn’t do anything interesting with the relic being temporarily necessarily right for our game. If we were to do Early Access, we
disabled or inaccessible, because players would die immediately. wouldn’t want to just throw early builds up every now and then
It was hard for us to let it go, but we had spent such a long time until we were done. We’d want to make sure it was a planned,
trying to make it work and couldn’t find a way to make it ‘fun.’ The community-driven experience.
idea was interesting, but almost everyone who played the version
IGM: I know the art style is something you guys have been refinwhere health was ammo versus the current version has expressed
ing over the past couple of years. How has the look of Tetrapulse
how much more they now enjoy combat. In the end, regardless of
changed, and what made you decide on the current aesthetic?
how much you love a concept, if it’s the thing holding your game
back you have to be willing to swallow your pride and move on. Laskey: There was a lot of iteration with the art style of the game,
Maybe it’s something we’ll explore again in another game, but particularly with the UI and environment. The UI is still going
with how Tetrapulse has evolved it doesn’t seem to fit as well as through iterations, but we’re getting closer to finding what works
it once did in a much simpler, shorter experience.
through playtesting. We tend to try and use more diegetic elements
if possible to keep the information feeling more organic, but most
IGM: The initial idea of trading health for ammo and needing
recently adding things such as a minimap proved to be invaluable
the relic to recharge a character was a rather unique gameplay
to the player when figuring out where to go.
mechanic. Was there any concern that making a drastic change to
the gamepla y would upset previous backers of the original vision? For a while we only had the health bars on the characters and that
was it, which we thought was great because it didn’t overwhelm the
Laskey: Yes, but ultimately the game is better for it. You have to be
players with extra information that we didn’t think they needed.
This proved to be an issue, and we’ve been trying to keep our
ears open more to what information players seem to be lacking.
Feedback is everything in games, and when you have four players
sharing a screen and so much going on, it’s crucial to be as clear
as possible about what is happening and what they need to do.
As far as the environment, we started out with a temple atop a
mountain and then moved to dark floating rock labyrinths once

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The Indie Game Magazine