Servo: Designing by Playing

Bruce sat down to put together the team blog for this week in which he talks about the design process on Servo.

By Bruce Shelley  

We playtest Servo several times a week, if not daily, with our entire team. A major goal for these tests is usually to gather first feedback on changes made in the last 24 hours or so. Although we follow a more formal process for many systems and features that includes a rough specification (or straw man) that is passed around for discussion before any implementation, a lot of things are changed or inserted overnight and informally.

For each test session we are usually given a list of what is new, what maps to use, and what parts of the game to pay particular attention to and be prepared to comment on. Following the playtest, we debrief as a group discussing what we liked and did not like, especially in reference to recent changes. Out of the debrief will come a list of things to adjust, change, add, or delete in the next build of the game.

This process of testing, discussing, iterating, retesting is how we learned to make games over the years when many of us worked together at other studios. As a process it is difficult to predict how long it will go on, but our experience tells us it will lead to an engaging and challenging game.

Here is a partial list of the pre-test notes for a new build from about a month ago as a sample of what we are doing every day as we build Servo. I have inserted some comments for clarification or about how that feature has fared since.

=== Notes ===

General Build

Servos re-spawn sequentially. Let’s see what that does for the endgame.
(Bruce: how it works now; rank up your Nexus to unlock Servos; previously you started with three available at the start.)
Control Player is ALWAYS blue now. (If you switch players in debugging a lot, watch out for that.)
Rank 4 and 5 bonuses on the Heads. Very big bonuses.
(Bruce: Rank 5 has since been removed and mostly subsumed into Rank 4.)
In FTUE, you get a CONTINUE button when you are taken to the Factory post-game.
Creeps get red outline when they are angry.
(Bruce: Beware brother, beware.)
Creeps no longer sprawl (come attack you w/o you getting close to them).
(Bruce: players were getting wiped by creeps rather than their opponent.)
Less creeps.
Faster combat.
PVP003 shields and dropship hit point changes work again. Dropship VERY weak once shields are down.
(Bruce: PvP map #3 has some separate buildings that provide Dropship shields; take those down first to make the enemy Dropship very vulnerable.)
Right fist beam works.
Re-hooked up tweaked attack state FX.
General terrain polish.
Fixed Juggernaut’s version of Orb Strike. Again.
Orb Strike less uber, not interruptible, and has standard cooldown.
(Bruce: Was very powerful but difficult to get off, thus frustrating; now less powerful but always goes off.)
RMB to set a Bunker Rally Point works again. Even makes a crappy sound.
(Bruce: click the right mouse button to set this rally point.)
Move commands when Servo is rooted fail, with a sound.