Balancing the Game
Technical Summary:
At the start of Gold Standard, I made a bold change to the overall game that would completely change the player experience significantly. In both Alpha and Beta, the player could purchase a Lockpick and Screen for a higher price than picking up the individual components, and also removed the whole need for the player to move around the map, sneaking past Redcoats to find resources, when they could just start with a Key Item and rush through a large portion of the game, which can be seen through the Beta Gameplay more significantly. What made the previous versions worse, was that by this point, we had 4/5 methods, and three of those required the use of the Lockpick, which if the player could simply pick up at the start of the game and purchase an invisibility drink, would make them undetectable and breeze through the game at an insane speed.
So to implement these changes, I removed the buttons of the key items and used Photoshop to shorten the 2D asset to fit the remaining crafting items. I also felt like it would be worthwhile to increase the prices of each item, so the player could buy a majority of the items they would need, but still not the total amount, so they would be forced to explore the map and risk being captured even more. This does increase the time it takes to test out items for ourselves, but for the overall play of the game works in our favour.
Reflection:
This was a huge beneficial change to the game, it completely reworks the whole experience and fully forces the player to make the decision of if they can successfully find an item and not get caught or chased by the Redcoats as a consequence. It works so well at forcing the player to explore and find the items they need, which when we have a level as large and populated as we do, allowing the player to completely skip over the efforts and the main gameplay aspect of the level makes the game less interesting and something you could easily skip through. As seen in the above videos, there is a clear different in time between Beta and Gold with these changes.