Almost one year of development & Leveling up system

Man… It has been what.. a year since the last post in this blog?

In other words, the time frame between Move or Die hitting Early Access on Steam and almost being released (will announce release date sometime soon).

As we approach the end of 2015, we get to look back on what happened during this year. It was more or less a crazy roller coaster ride, here are some highlights:

• The team has fluctuated quite a few times between 2 and 4 members.

• We showcased the game at events in: Boston-US, Kyoto-Japan, Amsterdam-Holland, Koln-Germany and Birmingham-UK.

• Move or Die was picked up by Giant Bomb and Northernlion

• I had several talks about the game feel in Move or Die at CEGC Vienna, GDC Europe, Casual Connect Amsterdam and several cities across Romania

• We got a new musician

• We wanted to team up with a publisher but sadly didn’t do it in the end

• Ran out of money…

• We released several updates, some inspired by the community, and even met some of you guys at events!

• Postponed the release date 2 or 3 times (ugh….)

Now we are getting closer to the release date and we are still thinking about pushing a big update before that.

The last update was 3 months ago, and we managed to add quite a few things in the past 3 months of development. I figured it would be a good idea to update the dev blog with a post about the latest features added.

Leveling up system

So let’s talk about the leveling up system and the item unlocks recently added in Move or Die.

It looks like this:

This little information panel is everywhere in the menu and it shows you how many rounds you have played, how many of them you won, your current level number, bar and Steam avatar.

The number of rounds played are a statistic stored on Steam’s servers, while the XP is a value stored on our servers.

You only gain XP by playing online matches with other people. Local games or online games against AI do not count.

The experience you gain gets added at the end of the match with this satisfying little sound effect I recorded myself.

Item Unlocks

Once you gain enough XP to level up,you unlock either a character or a game mode. It looks like this:

After making sure the XP you gained is legit, the game pings our server and kindly asks for an unlock. Based on the rarity of each item (Common < Uncommon < Rare < Legendary), the server randomly assigns you an unlock which is instantly sent to your Steam inventory.

Steam Integration

This is my favorite part of the entire XP system. Each item, be it a character, game mode or anything else we add in the future, is a trade-able item in your Steam inventory.

When you play the game, it constantly checks your Steam inventory to make sure you have that certain character or game mode unlocked. This means that you can send a character you own to your friend in exchange of that sweet sweet new game mode that just came out.

Or alternatively, you could sell them on the Steam Marketplace which creates an awesome ecosystem!

The Collection

All the items you unlock will be displayed in “The collection”, a dedicated screen that keeps track of your unlocks and shows you what is left to collect.

Something interesting might or might not happen if you manage to unlock everything…

The Design

This system also fixes the problem of over saturation. When you look at Move or Die’s formula, it’s basically made out of multiple mini-games that play one after another. Seeing that we keep adding new game modes with each update, a few months down the line when a new player would try the game, he would be presented with a few tens of game modes, which can be quite difficult to pick from.

With the XP system, there is a set number of unlocked-by-default game modes that you can play online, and the rest you unlock by leveling up. If any player in your lobby has a certain game mode unlocked, everybody on that server can play that game mode (and this will be explained better in a future post when we get to talk about the new Public Mode Voting feature).

That only happens online, in a local game, all the game modes are unlocked. I can’t begin to express my anger towards party games that make you unlock content when you play locally.

And just like characters, game modes have rarity values, which means that you might just end up on the same server with a player who has a Legendary game mode… we didn’t get around to actually make one yet though.

One last thing to mention, leveling up is exponential up to level 6, after that, it takes the same number of xp points to level up, so it does not take more and more XP to unlock items overtime. Also, there is no cap on leveling up right now.

That was the Leveling Up system, just one of the many features added in the past 3 months coming soon with the next update. More about the other ones in the following posts.

(Also, comments are re-enabled on the blog, let’s talk about leveling up and items)

~ Nick (Xelu)