When you set out to make a game, a lot of things that you thought were good at the start might not exactly be good as you continue to develop them. This is natural in early game development, and it is important to identify these structural issues as soon as possible. For us, it was our design philosophy concerning spells.
When we set out to make Whimsical Wizardry, one of the main things we talked about and brainstormed were the spells that you use in the game. Originally, we thought that it would be a fun gameplay feature to have 2 versions of spells, good ones, and bad ones. The good ones would function as offensive weapons, while the bad ones would function like a backfire mechanic, where using them would instead inflict the spell effect on the user. Early on in brainstorming and planning however, we identified this as a potential pain point and decided to only do spells that benefit you in some way. We classified these as offensive spells and defensive spells.
As development progressed and we added more and more spells, we introduced two defensive spells, blink and webshoot. Blink would make the user completely invulnerable, with the tradeoff being that while invulnerable they would be unable to use any spells or actions other than moving around and jumping, flickering on and off, during which they would disappear from view completely. Webshoot would make a web on the floor that would greatly slow any players inside it. When we began playtesting, immediately we were informed that these spells felt as if they did nothing or were completely useless. We thought that this would be a non issue once the game had more ways to die added, however as we did more and more playtesting we realized that these spells just were not as fun to use as the offensive ones.
When we were discussing with the team on how to approach the problem, we came to a conclusion that made sense pretty quickly: Why not just make all of our spells have some offensive upside? With this in mind, we set immediately to brainstorming different ways of changing our defensive spells to have new offensive purpose, while maintaining their identity as somewhat defensive, with the exception of blink.
With blink, its issues were more in how it was presented. In that, we decided that rather than be completely invisible, the user would instead have their player model made translucent to convey that they haven’t disappeared but instead have become invincible. With webshoot however, we decided to implement a change where instead of merely slowing your targets, you outright stop them from moving at all, webbing them up like spiderman does to bad guys.
In conclusion, the ideas you have from the start may be good in theory, but until you have actually tested them out in the field, don’t assume they will be good in practice as well. Kind of a ramble, kind of a story, hopefully provided some insight into our development. Either way, thank you for reading.