It's been a week since Drillbird launched. Thanks everyone who's given the game a go :) 

Yesterday, I uploaded a small patch to adress some issues found in the release build. I also added a new feature that I've been mulling over for the past week called Second wind. More on that below - but first here are the patch notes: 

Game tweaks: 

• Added a SECOND WIND feature - when Birdy is about to die - if there's any fuel left - it is consumed and birdy is given one final health. 
• Slight Level Design tweaks to teach indirect enemy murder better
• Grabbing flowers now refills Birdys jumps
  
• Added control info to PAUSE menu 
  

Bugfixes: 

• Fixed borders behaving weirdly when camera moves 
• Added a missing graphical variation to spikes
• Fixed issue where an additional day was always counted
• Tweaked fallblocks to rely less on raycasts, hopefully they won't be as eager to break blocks when spawning.

"Second Wind" design breakdown

As you can see I added a "Second Wind" feature to the game in this patch. Let's take a moment to break this feature down, starting with the problem that I wanted to address, and my attempt at solving it.

Second wind in action

The problem: 

Drillbird is designed to gently nudge players to optimize their days. I like this since it adds an optional layer of depth to the game for experienced players. However - I noticed that when one has a lot of fuel left but very little health, it is painful to go to bed since one could technically go explore more as long as one does not take damage. So players would continue exploring, then inevitably take one hit, die, and miss out on visiting the shop. This loop sometimes repeats, until players have a ridiculous amount of unspent XP - forcing them to go to bed with resources left which feels bad. 

Potential solutions:    

Solution A - Go to shop after dying: 

One way to go about this is to just pop the player into the shop after dying! Then you won't accumulate a lot of XP over time. I think this is a valid solution, but then the cost of dying is really quite low - since the punishment of losing one day of time is lost. I could maybe have two days pass when one dies instead - telling the player they needed to rest for an extra day. 

The major disadvantage of this solution is that it requires fiddling with the UI to make sure the player understands what's going on - and the idea of fiddling with the death -> wakeup UI didn't seem very fun 😅 It also does not solve the feelbad that the best strategic choice for the player is to go to bed with a lot of fuel still remaining. Gut said no! 

Solution B - Spend all fuel to get one last health:

What I came up with instead was to simply empty the player's fuel before killing them completely. So if the player has any fuel left when taking their final hit - all fuel is spent and the player is given one bonus health. This leaves the player in darkness  and makes the ghost spawn. So the player is sternly told by the game to stop digging and it creates an exciting chase to the surface. 

I love that this creates more ghost chases, and solves the issue of players having more fuel than health. My main worry was how to explain this chain of events to the player without additional tutorials and prompts. Ultimately I ended up testing a pretty barebones version of this - and it came out feeling much more intuitive I predicted - so I added it and left it there. For now I am feeling quite pleased with this solve. 

Did this solution work for you? Do you agree with the problem? :) 

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Thanks for taking the time to read this deep-dive into this issue. I will be posting more about Drillbirds development in the coming weeks - diving into the design, planning and art of the game! 

/Seb