#wyvrn

Marathoning .. take finish for artfight.

Please do not use/trace/reference of/repost my art without my permission.

I made a final trailer for my SteamVR game, WyVRn! I'm hoping this one captured not just the changes to the final aesthetic, but also better captures the humor in the game, and the different gameplay aspects.

You can find the game on Steam Early Access at this link, or by searching for "WyVRn" on the Steam storefront.

If you're the sort who wants a presskit, you can find that here.

Progression and 'Teaching' the player

You can see here the objectives for WyVRn's 'Musou' mode--stuff you'll have to overcome in order to build up to the 'boss'. On the left, you have a simple spawner. It makes enemy units that fight your units. If you kill it, it starts making your units instead. It scales up to the second from the right, which has a personal shield, a laser, and grants invulnerability to other objectives. (The rightmost one is just an example of that shielding.)

No Skipping to the End

The middle one and the one to its right were actually the designs I started out with. When you put someone on a dragon and give them really strong magic, you get this situation where a player can just fly over everything, go to the end, and snipe it from afar, which is optimal, and also boring. Having boring options is fine, but the optimal gameplay should also be the most fun gameplay.

The laser keeps players from advancing without their army backing them up. If the player just goes up and starts spamming AOE stuff, they'll get fried. To rule out sniping as the default option, I gave the spawners a small barrier. I didn't want it to be totally ruled out, so I made it small, and attached to the laser. This lets the player 'distract' the shield with their own spawned units (like in Dota or LoL), so sniping can still be done, but only if the player's army has progressed until that point.

Teaching the mechanics

So this, combined with gates that were protected by shield projectors, I had a way of keeping the player from just jumping to the end. This let me impart a semblance of gameplay flow to a level in a game that otherwise gives astonishing freedom of movement. But stepping back, it was obvious that was a lot to take in at once. So introducing the player to stripped-down mechanics was key.

First the player gets to see the bare spawner, protected only by the units it produces. Then they see the laser, and gets to associate the antenna design with pain (and likely their first failed mission, if the red line isn't enough of a hint). After that, they see the shield dish, and learn to associate the dish shape and yellow color with barriers. This helps the player realize what the shield projector is when they see the double-dish with a line pointing to another barrier.

First things first! That song I made a few months ago is now in use (in a slightly tweaked and shortened form) as the BGM for a trailer for my game, WyVRn! Check it out, then keep reading after the break: