The wonders of User Experience

As per usual, my life updates and devlogs are less frequent as I'd like them to be. But hey, with this devlog you can actually try a prototype of our game!

A big change in the visual sense is the perspective from which you "see" the game. A major problem that we encountered while trying out Split Decision (and especially giving other people to test it) was that you could never really understand that you are one of three equal judges. First-person perspective that we thought would be cool turned out to be confusing and the explanation process behind every playtest was way longer than what it should be. Showing the fight ring from a low-point perspective also didn't help, because it only looked like it was just a stylized fight ring. Understandable.

That is why we decided to show all three judges in an equal sitting line, including you, the fighter among them. Even if we had to compromise our wish of never showing the main character, this turned out to be much closer to the idea of our game.

Another big change is the UI itself, which we simplified to the MAX. Showing realistic boxing point system was also pretty nice for us, but it just showed too much unnecessary numbers on the screen that was already loaded with information. That is why we decided to put a simple 3x1-0 system that would always show you the sum on the screen, and you would always have to choose between the left (red) or right (blue) fighter. For this we had to let go of a possibility of a 'draw', but that is also just one of those realistic things that you need to let go to make the gameplay make more sense.

That's pretty much the biggest changes of the game that you can see while playing! There are a lot more finesses in the background, but this is what is most obvious. Next up (for me, the artist) is to rework the fighter sprites to better show the flow of the fight. They are actually on their 3rd version now, but as a person who never drew so much fighting scenes until last year, I learn a lot by each new fighting scene I draw.