![]() While a deep background narrative is by no means necessary for this kind of game, it still would have been nice to have just the littlest bit of explanation as to why I'm doing what I'm doing. ![]() I started as the primary janitor character, but after that the game wished me good luck (I think) and sent me on my merry way. Fortunately it's clear that a lot of work went into making the controls smooth enough to make the difficulty acceptable, as a game like this would crash hard without solid mechanics. However, beyond the mechanical successes Dustforce does have several annoying quirks.įirst, there is no exposition whatsoever. Getting an S-Rank requires a lot of practice and skill. While completing the initial levels is easy enough, opening the later ones requires getting an S-Ranking (a near perfect run) in earlier levels, making mastery of the game a requirement for progression. One simply can't breeze through this game on the first try. That feeling is about all that's effortless in Dustforce, as the game is often brutal-but in a good way.ĭustforce is hard. It feels much like a 2D version of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (which is ironic since Prince of Persia itself began life as a 2D platformer) and conveys a delightful sense of effortless athleticism. The ninjanitors control very smoothly, and dashing up walls while smiting massive dust bunnies can be performed with ease. WTF Why are level endpoints so inconspicuous?Ī time trial-based platformer following a cadre of ninja janitors that fight dirt monsters by hitting them with brooms… It sounds like a great idea, right? Dustforce, the first effort from developer Hitbox Team, attempts to fill this gap in gaming with their slick 2D platformer, and for the most part it does this successfully.ĭustforce entails running through a given level, sweeping up dust on the floors, and dealing with any monsters the dust may have spawned. We wanted to make the game more accessible without lowering the skill ceiling - rather we are just smoothing out the beginning of the difficulty curve.HIGH Flying through platforms without stopping and getting every dust piece. Hopefully these changes will ease players into Dustforce more gradually than before. This means the player can spend a bit more time working on each technique. In addition to this, we've broken up the tutorial into 3 separate maps. We noticed that even the easy levels were quite hard for new players, so we made a new tier of easier levels that unlock the old easy levels. Lastly, we've added 16 new levels to the game. This helps in two ways: it keeps new players away from levels they aren't ready for yet, and it serves as a teaching tool for more advanced techniques that are required in the tougher levels. The hardest doors have even tougher entry requirements. We gated off the medium and hard doors by making them reachable only by a difficult jump or technique. To reinforce this, we made it harder to reach the tougher levels. How do you get up there? Once you figure it out, you will be ready for the levels up there. In the following graph, you can see what percentage of players have completed a certain number of levels. We gathered some data over the past two years from the Dustforce leaderboards. However, we've finally found some time, and now we've made some changes that will hopefully make the game friendlier to new players. We've always wanted to redesign the structure of the game to ease new players into the harder levels, but we've been too busy working on our next game, Spire, to make it happen. The learning curve to the game is quite steep - you're given a tutorial, then thrown into the deep end. Ideally, we should be converting normal players into hardcore players. We realized we were just filtering out all but the most hardcore players. However, as we watched more new players pick up the game, it was sad to see them get stuck early on and give up. We're still constantly in amazement when we see top players pull off amazing runs. It was our intention from the beginning to push the skill ceiling sky high, so we can see just how much players push themselves to be masters at the game. A friendlier start to sweepingĭustforce is a tough game. The final big update is that we have made the game a bit more accessible to new players.
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