Ball Roll Suggestions

[Nanirourou]

/applause for Exaskrys and BanjoThreeie
Nothing to add there. Perfectly stated.

I don't see how scaling those slopes are anywhere comparable to picking up grapes with boxing gloves. Did it take you several hours to complete that task? Or was it merely several minutes of frustration? I don't want an easy game. I want to struggle!

[All Meshed Up]

The ball roll is suppose to be difficult to control; it's a trade-off for the increase in speed. The intention is to eliminate the problem that every one simply used the Talon Trot all the time in Banjo Kazooie because there's effectively no downside to it. Yooka Laylee is seeking to be much more balanced than Banjo-Kazooie, and this is an example of that.

[Lyfae]

[Punksthetic]

[BanjoThreeie]

[dotEXE]

My only problem with the ball move is that you can't turn on a dime when at a standstill. That is to say, even when you're not moving, if you try to turn around you have a HUGE turn radius.

[GeneralWalnut]

Giving players limited options and having them solve otherwise simple problems is a pretty big staple of puzzle games at this point. I don't think there's anything more inherently wrong with limiting a character's move-set than there would be with, say, putting a wall in front of an item you collect.

I think the reptile roll could be a little more precise without the trade-off being entirely lost, especially if it depletes the power meter in the final game. Being able to glide out of the roll would also be appreciated, and having you roll down a hill if you come to a stop might off-set any added precision.

[Nanirourou]

[Punksthetic]

I was working up a response to BanjoThreeie up there, had it all typed out, but it got deleted through a bad connection on my end when I pressed "preview"... But it's probably for the best, because we're arguing on a fundamentally different planes of perspective here, and it was getting a bit too volatile.

Some of us are wanna-be speedrunners who take joy in having a game as challenging and difficult as possible, and that's fine. Then there are some of us just want to have fun with an intermediate and challenging experience without going crazy in every objective.

I'm obviously the latter, but just to resolve things on a positive note, I'm just going to say that I have faith in the Playtonic team, and I know they're going to balance the move and the rest of the game in the final version. I'm sure that there will be a handful of very challenging objectives, and that's fine. What platformer would be complete without a few Canary Mary's? That said, I just want the game to be fun and rewarding. That's all.

[BanjoThreeie]

[GWoolly]

[dotEXE]

Just wanted to quickly parrot the idea that the ball shouldn't squeak while you're in the air, too.

[BlackKoromon]

I don't really mind how difficult the game is, the question is more what sort of difficulty. Canary Mary, for example, while often toted as the height of challenge, involves no skill beyond pressing a button really fast. No precision, no timing, no thought, just button bashing.

Likewise, the mountain in the demo is not something hard to scale. It's simply hard to scale in ball form because of the resulting controls. How much of an issue that is, however, I have absolutely no idea because everything is insanely hard on keyboard anyway. The game was not designed with the PC in mind.

[Nanirourou]

[Christoffer113]

The rolling in Yooka Laylee is very fun, but its missing a few things. In Banjo you were able to go immediately out of talon trot into an air stall, and I found myself missing that here a lot, as it is stopped by an "unrolling" animation of sorts. However I do understand why, with a bit of a running start you could jump half the map easily with the right timing. So my suggestion for a solution to this would be an extra move for a roll glide, which would continue your momentum and keep you in your roll, but you wouldn't glide for very long. This would keep the flow of the roll and if Im right about it being for balance reasons it would be easy to rebalance it to be better. Also, there absolutely needs to be a stopped/idle roll animation. As of now both yooka and laylee are just frozen in time while you're stopped.

[Rikkukun]

[Devscar23]