Indie Deep Dive: V-Hunter Puzzler DX ToddMitchell, September 13, 2024September 15, 2024 RAWRLAB Games regrets some failures with V-Hunter Puzzler DX, but the team got a few things very right. First and foremost, this is not a review of V-Hunter Puzzler DX. The team provided me with a key and I rolled credits on Casual Mode. I also played through about 30 levels on Hard Mode. But I’m a game developer too. I target the same players, so I have no business grading it or telling potential players not to buy it. I’ll aim to speak freely because the developers have mentioned some regrets on social media–despite being proud of the project. They should be! Let me stress that these are my own opinions, guided by my own experience designing for players and software users. The team may disagree with some or all of what I say here. They will have no doubt given these things more thought than I could hope to here. I do, however, want to run through the project and highlight some things I enjoy about the game. I also want to look at some of the challenges the developers faced as a design exercise. Hopefully this also helps get the word out and benefits a team that has clearly worked very hard. Details on V-Hunter Puzzler DX Title: V-Hunter Puzzler DXPlayed On: Nintendo SwitchAlso Available On: SteamDeveloped By: Yatch StudiosPublished By: RAWRLAB GamesPorted: September 5, 2024 (Switch)First Released: May 15, 2023 (Steam) Concept If I was pitching V-Hunter Puzzler DX in an elevator, I’d say, “It’s Rogue meets Chess with a sense of humor.” The team bills the game as a dynamic turn-based grid puzzler. I will hand it to them, the pitch was strong enough to get me to reach out for a key. In its puzzles, players take on the role of the Van Helsing-esque vampire hunter (V-Hunter, see?). They move square by square around wide-open dungeon grids slaying monsters. Enemies leave behind residue (goop on the Switch and…unnavigable blood on Steam?). This blocks the square they stood on making the level change and the action unfold a little different each time. I don’t particularly care about vampire stuff either way, but I love Van Helsing. This is a puzzle all its own. V-Hunter Puzzler DX’s Gameplay Let’s talk about how the cool concept behind V-Hunter Puzzler DX translated to the Nintendo Switch. Solving the game’s dynamic puzzles requires the player not to find one solution, but to develop a plan for how to exploit a given enemy’s turn timing and movement pattern and (usually) to execute the plan on a grid full of other active enemies. Enemy types are assigned a health amount, a number of player turns between its own movements, a pattern to move in, and a striking distance. This experience starts nice and easy and opens up into a real “aha” moment at level 10 where enemies take off in all directions from the start, and it’s up to you to determine safe paths between them and the best moments to attack. The game features a Casual Mode in which players can freely undo turns and take unlimited time to make decisions and Hard Mode in which they have two seconds to make each turn and can only undo a turn if they die. The game explains this well, but for some reason I still didn’t make good use of the Undo feature for the first half of my playthrough, so it took me a bit longer than it could have to complete the game. I still finished it in one charge of my Nintendo Switch with plenty of battery left to revisit details while I write. Like any proper Roguelike, V-Hunter Puzzler DX features items to pick up that change gameplay. Health potions, for example, allow the player to take a hit without dying. This is put to clever use in puzzles where the player needs to cross over a boundary that would normally take them to zero health to get to a goal. Other items make perfect gameplay sense but aren’t quite logically consistent when placed together. Holy water gives the player strong attacks against vampires and lasts from the moment it’s picked up until the end of the level. Swords give one strong attack against any enemy and then break. Several levels have multiple swords. Again, I see why and how this makes gameplay interesting, but it’s maybe a bit odd for the player to have to remember “sword temporary, water forever.” This marketing screenshot shows smart item placement design on display. The player needs both health potions to get across the rat barrier to get the holy water that can defeat the vampire. Nice. Let’s talk theory for a moment. The joy for the player here comes from being guided through a series of small lessons and challenges in which they learn about a large collection of enemies, all with their own timing and movement patterns, and how to beat them. New enemies are continuously introduced right through the end of the game. In a few ways, busy levels capture every bit of the thrill of emerging victorious in a close chess match. In my opinion, that’s what has to guide every aspect of the design and development of a game like this. Add everything you can that serves it. Eliminate everything that doesn’t. For this reason, I think I’d personally try to introduce every type of enemy possible sooner, allow the player a short time to master the strategies needed to beat them, and make the endgame more about testing those strategies in changing circumstances through interesting use of items and the barriers that form as enemies are eliminated. I also think it’s only fair to add a button feature to overlay possible movement and striking patterns for enemies on the fly to remind the player what they can expect during play. There are several unmapped buttons available for this. I don’t think it should be considered part of the challenge to have to track all the enemies from memory right up through the end of the game. It’s a particularly dangerous barrier for re-entry as players move on and (hopefully) come back in the future. It’s a relatively low-cost way to help the player strategize, which should be our goal. This brings us to the biggest difference between how I would design a game like this and the decision the team made. In the game, every move to a new square on the grid, every item use, and every attack is considered a turn. Turns are important because they make enemy timers count down and, ultimately, determine when they next move or attack. Total turns are also counted, however, and the player is presented with how many turns they spent solving the puzzle if and when they do. The only place this turn total is used, unless I missed something during a full playthrough, is that a certain number of turns taken will unlock an outfit the player can equip (it does not modify gameplay). I personally think this is a big missed opportunity, and the biggest impacted area is replayability. In Casual Mode, we want players to be able to take their time, recover from mistakes, and, with some persistence, emerge victorious. I don’t think turn count should necessarily impact Casual Mode. It could have drastically altered Hard Mode and, in my estimation, the team could have offered better replayability and challenge with less work. In Hard Mode, the player has a free opportunity to look at the enemy layout and decide on a first move. Once they make a move, a two-second, real-time timer determines how long they have to make each additional move before the level proceeds a turn without them. The player is only offered an undo upon death, and plenty often, this won’t take you back far enough to avoid restarting the level (this part is tough, but I’m okay with it). The timer, however, breaks up the gameplay in a way that’s difficult to overlook in a game where the natural rhythm of play is actually extremely important. In the time I tried this mode, I frequently found myself mis-moving or letting the timer continuously run out any time I wanted to wait-in-place so I could look ahead. This greatly changes the feel of the game. It naturally rushes the player, and again, I would argue it detracts from what we want them to do: use their head. The silver lining here is that we already had the solution implemented: the turn counter. As a player, I desperately wanted to test myself on how few turns I could take to solve a puzzle, and I was never given the opportunity. This could have been a huge draw for players to come revisit the game, challenge one another on social media, developers to put out challenges, and more. It was also nearly free to do it. I do think the dynamic portal appearance would have to change in this scenario, so the enemies would need to safely spawn and move around it. It would be worth the effort! Overall, the gameplay itself is fun! The concept plants a seed that could have grown nearly anything the developers wanted, and I’d love to see them push this further and improve quality-of-life for players in a future update or new installment in the series. Audio Design I have no real audio complaints. The tracks and effects in V-Hunter Puzzler DX are pleasant and appropriate, and that can be difficult in a small project where some sounds have to be created and others have to be found. Making everything agree is usually a challenge, and both I and player reviewers seem to think it was a job well done. I would love to hear a bit more fanfare at the beginning of the game as I’m getting ready to play. Visual Design I’d like to explore the art side starting with my most practical findings and get increasingly wishlist-y, if you’ll pardon the term. First, I’d like to say that V-Hunter Puzzler DX’s art is largely very cool. I don’t know how they landed on the muppet-like style for the characters, but it agrees well with the humorous attitude the game aims for, and people seemed to respond well to it (remember, the game has been out for a bit on Steam). I like the retro pixel style used in-game, and I wish the whole project had leaned harder in this direction. That, of course, is strictly a matter of taste. A grid over level maps is sorely missed in this game. Dungeons are large rectangles with different patterns on the floor. Tiles often make large rectangular shapes or rings that occasionally make strategizing too difficult, especially once long diagonal movements come into play. Again, I don’t think eyeballing where the squares are should be considered a part of the challenge for the player. I think we should freely give them that information to work with, and let their strategic minds be the hero. A play grid could help players easily track their position in relation to long-reaching diagonal attacks. Another side-effect of no grid is that the playable area itself is surrounded by black on the screen, and dark outer rings on dungeon floors made me occasionally overlook playable space on the edges in situations where they could have been of great value in escaping a pursuing enemy or skirting around a puddle of ooze. I would call this an unintended obstacle and one that’s accidentally a bit unfair. Again, a grid is next to free and I think it could greatly improve the experience. To be fair: It’s possible that the developers made a conscious decision that they weren’t going to offer this, and indeed, maybe they wanted this to be a part of the challenge. It would also be reasonable to point out that many Roguelikes don’t offer a grid–1-Bit Rogue for iOS is a good example. To that I would point out that those games also tend to be heavier-handed with walls, corridors, and other means of enclosing the player as they move around. Usable space is usually obvious in these games and distance is easy to estimate. I’d be quicker to take influence from Chess and Checkers where the grid is abundantly clear. Information is a must in a puzzle game like this, and how that information is presented visually is critical. This is never more apparent in V-Hunter Puzzler DX than when enemies land in the same square next to you. Once enemies are introduced that follow you each turn instead of patrolling in a pattern or at random, this starts to occur often. While it’s nice that character movements seem to be slightly staggered, it can be nearly impossible to tell what two enemy types are stacked up on a square and when each is going to move. I gave this one some thought, because I’m sure I’m not the first to notice the issue, and the question is what to do about it. While I think there are ways to scooch them around a bit that might help, ultimately I think I’d just rotate through them on short intervals. Show each for maybe half a second, then show the next. You could even add a little animation to flip through them like playing cards. It’s a bit more work, but I would consider it necessary, as this one hides necessary information from the player and greatly hinders effective play. Lastly, we talked about the cool character portraits, and we talked about retro pixel art. I have to point out that they occasionally clash when a pixel character is scaled up to use as a portrait. This does not work. I’m sure there was a situation where the team needed a large portrait of a character they designed and simply couldn’t get it in the style they needed for whatever reason. I’m sympathetic–most of us as devs have been there–but it’s a problem I feel needs to be solved prior to publishing. While a full portrait may be difficult to get, simply scaling up the pixel version of the main character to use in the pre-level dialogue scenes would be preferred over one scaled-up pixel creature talking to one high-res illustration. The pixel art is cool. The illustrations are cool. They don’t always blend well. But again, I personally would have been a bigger fan if every menu, effect, and character was created using pixel art. Others may feel the opposite. Writing V-Hunter Puzzler DX Simple games require simple stories, right? Yes and no. V-Hunter Puzzler DX tells the tale of the vampire hunter tailing the mighty vampire across sets of levels, each with their own theme and mini-boss (Sorry V-Hunter, but our Alric is in another castle). The player reads the main character’s thoughts when new enemies are introduced, a bit of humorous banter somewhere in the middle of a world, and unwavering smack talk when a boss fight is imminent. I think that last point is a symptom of an issue I would personally have handled differently. I personally believe that any game that makes an effort to have characters in the first place must also do some real storytelling. This will sound nitpicky. I feel that if the main character is never in any doubt that he is the superior combatant, then he (and, by extension, the player) are simply going through the motions and waiting for the game to end. We as players tend to long for a degree of uncertainty. There’s an old adage in screen and fiction writing: in act 1, we send the hero up a tree. In Act 2, we throw rocks at him. In Act 3, we bring him back down. Generalized for almost any multimedia thing we experience: the hero starts with an attitude much like V-Hunter’s, then we put him in an unfamiliar world and continue to raise the stakes and the obstacles until we’re genuinely no longer entirely sure which direction this thing is going to go. Finally, he takes just the right action to live happily ever after. Or he fails to! Now, there’s a very reasonable argument here: we’re just trying to entertain the player as he goes through the game. Yes, but I think the story should eventually change that gameplay a little. If I was personally writing the story for V-Hunter Puzzler DX, I might have made V-Hunter a lovable goof who thinks he’s invincible, but actually has a lot to learn. This would fit the gradual progression of the game’s enemies and puzzles very well. But that’s not the only way it could have been done! I think using slightly different storytelling, this very serious and very ambitious hunter could have whooped each and every level until he was suddenly cursed by the antagonist at some point in Act 2. Maybe he went through a few levels where he could no longer pick up an item until he found a crucifix or reached a priestlike character. Maybe he was injured in an early confrontation with Alric and could only move every two turns for a time as he watched the bad guys literally close in around him (“bad guys close in” is a phrase they throw around in screenwriting). In video games, we’re as interested to know when we’re ready to face the bad guy as we are in knowing when our player character is ready. Introduce some uncertainty and have some fun with this! A few enemy explanations could be reworded slightly to be more specific and prevent confusion. These dialogue lines carry undue burden because they’re the only place you learn about these enemies without trial and error. With the overlay refresher feature I mentioned in the Gameplay section, there would be a bit more room for error in the cutscenes. The rat cannot attack diagonally. Other enemy’s can. You won’t be sure until you stand in the right spot. This is the kind of heavy lifting the dialogue has to do without an overlay or review screen. Finally, I feel like the characters wanted to be serious and silly at the same time. I would kind of like to see one or the other, and I’d personally choose silly. There was room for a lot more jokes and gags in the game, and I think players would have enjoyed them! Polish I mentioned how I’d like to see either all pixel-art, or much more hi-res illustration, but I don’t think they can be smashed together the way V-Hunter Puzzler DX does it, particularly when an illustrated character on one side of the screen is talking to a giant pixel character on the other. Similarly, I think the actual gameplay elements have to do one or the other. The round particles and smooth monster transformation graphics tend to pull from our suspension of disbelief that we’re playing a good-ol’ retro game here, and that’s a shame because neither would be difficult to do with believable pixel art. The lifetime stat tracking in V-Hunter Puzzler DX is a nice touch, and it’s neat that there are unlockable costumes tied to it. This is exactly the kind of extra a project like this needs to help set it apart from lower-effort titles. I would have loved to see more challenges and achievements to return to. These really don’t take anything but time to think up and a bit of effort to implement and test. This one is a much loftier goal, but some form of couch co-op could have been fun on the Switch. It would be a big change, but I believe the concept of the game would support it, and good couch co-op always finds an audience. The team lamented on Twitter that puzzle games like V-Hunter Puzzler DX don’t get a fair shake, and I think that’s largely true, but more focus on polish, playability, and re-playability can close this gap. The Business Strategy for V-Hunter Puzzler DX Make no mistake, it is abundantly clear that the team spent significant time on this game, and probably more money than it had hoped. That’s why I think it deserved a bit of a deeper business strategy. In my opinion, the actual names of the game, the characters, and even the studios involved are all tragically forgettable here. “V-Hunter” is even a bit risky. One Steam user pointed out that “V-Hunter” evokes something mildly porn-related. This can be seen in the Steam indie category with awkward frequency, so the risk is real. I would have loved to see an original but memorable name for the main character and the game itself. As for the full title, “V-Hunter Puzzler DX” only vaguely communicates that it’s a puzzle game and not much else. And that’s if you know that puzzle games are sometimes called puzzlers. Even if the game was called “Kill Alric the Vampire” I could have recalled the name when I was discussing what I was playing. I could not remember the real title to save my life. Unfortunately, it’s a game that takes three hours of play to beat and four days of play to remember. Publisher RAWRLAB has a neat name. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to search in Google, and it’s too close to Rarlab, now that I think of it. For days I thought the game was originally developed by Yacht Studios. Then, I noticed it was “Yatch.” Google assumes this is a misspelling of yacht, so that’s even more difficult to look up. It’s difficult to promote an indie puzzle game. That’s true. It’s even more difficult if every single avenue for brand recognition is blocked. V-Hunter Puzzler DX is an interesting case study. The game was out for just shy of a year and a half on Steam before its Nintendo Switch port. I don’t know what the playtesting cycle was like (if there was one), but it’s important to point out here that the game has a small handful of reviews on Steam, 90% of which are positive and very supportive. Those reviews often contained very good advice from some seasoned gamers. It looks like some of those issues were addressed before the Switch port. I think the team should have leaned even harder into this feedback. Timer issues, pixel art mixed with full-res illustrations, and flow problems were all raised before this release, creating an opportunity to win players back and establish the team as developers for the people. Nintendo releases are notoriously difficult, time-intensive, and usually costly. There’s no point in shooting for anything less than the moon. This section has been harsh. But I do think it’s worth providing some tough love here because I actually love this model for small indies. This game would be great on mobile, but the experience would be a lot different for everyone involved. There would be pressure to make it free-to-play. This means players would watch ads and developers would wait long-term to make back their time and financial investments. Every indie wants to be on the Switch, and players know what to expect when they buy a Switch game (at least no ads and usually high quality). We say we want smaller, cheaper, shorter games. The Switch is the place to do it. Unfortunately, not a lot of this actually seems to happen on Switch. Players may not know to look for it. Special note: RAWRLAB deserves much praise for its free Godot Engine port for Nintendo Switch. This is a big development for Godot users. Conclusion I hope this team keeps up their efforts. Readers should go take a good look at V-Hunter Puzzler DX (it’s cheap!). It takes a lot of work to put out even a remotely playable game on Steam, and it’s only more difficult on Nintendo Switch. I hope these dev warriors tap further into the joy of their craft and chase that next level of quality. This is how little-known indies bring home a win. Share this:FacebookXLike this:Like Loading... Game Development Gaming game designgamingIndieDevnintendo switchporting
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