Norman
Published: 2023-11-07 16:09:56

If you played Norman, then you'll know that the balance is pretty wack. If you get past the difficulty spike on level 5, then there's a good chance by the end you will have performed most of the rituals. You'll have more souls than you can spend. There's no longer any need to aim. Occasionally click vaguely on the right side of the screen and enemies will have a hard time making it past the barrage of particles that fill the viewport.

Many games designed around synergies have combinations which are powerful enough to be considered "broken" but it's important that these occurrences are rare enough that they stay novel, otherwise they become boring. Unfortunately that's what happened with Norman.

Let's quickly talk about the basic progression mechanics to understand what went wrong here. When villagers die (either from spells or skeletons) Norman earns a fixed number of souls (based on the enemy type). At the end of each level, Norman can spend those souls to perform rituals which serve as the game's only upgrade system.

The problem is that it's too easy to earn souls, and by the end of a playthrough you have generally earned so many souls that you can have performed all the rituals you've been offered. There's a tricky line to walk for something like a game jam, people are only likely to play your game for a few minutes, and I wanted them to see the variety in the game play.

I tried a few different strategies for balancing rituals. First, separating them into rare and common tiers, and ensuring that the rare rituals cost more, and can be offered once per level. The other approach to balancing I tried was to make enemies that punish the player for not playing tactically.

The simplest example is the big shelled knights that spend half their time inside their shells, invulnerable. Most spells are wasted (unless they inflict a status effect like bleed) at this phase. However, this turned out not to be punishing enough if the player just keeps on spamming, so I created an angry red knight who had a "bleeding" state which reflects damage back to Norman. This wasn't intuitive and he ended up getting nerfed down to simply healing if he is damaged whilst "enraged". The final iteration of this design ended up being the King's Guards, a late game enemy, who use their shields to reflect projectiles back at Norman.



These guys used to reflect Norman's own projectiles back at him, until I inflicted bleed on myself during a playthrough and realised there was no cure.

Generally, I think that little games are better off being interesting and easy, than boring and hard, but I do wish I'd landed on a better balance. Ideally, players could have enjoyed working their way to the end of the game across a few runs, rather than it being possible to completely steamroll the entire thing on their first try.
2. Resurrection Mechanics 
For a game about necromancy, the resurrection mechanic should have been a primary focus and strategy, but instead it took a bit of a backseat to the overpowered, colourful spellcasting. There's very little guidance explaining the resurrections and it's quite possible to beat the game without using it once.

When villagers meet their demise, they have a fixed chance to drop a skull onto the ground. One of Norman's talents is the power to bring each of those corpses back to defend him, as a skeletal thrall, marching against the villagers.

I designed quite a few of the rituals around this ability, ultimately it just wasn't as fun as bouncing lightning off the ceiling. The closest I got to a satisfying mechanic here was the "Riders" ritual, which summoned a bone chariot after each resurrection.



Sadly, I couldn't justify the enormous sprite for a relatively small mechanic, and this ritual ended up getting replaced by "Allegiance".

In retrospect, I think that I should have worked harder to weave resurrections deeper into the other core mechanics. One idea that I'd like to have tried would be making resurrections the only way to earn souls.