I've heard from some of you that are anxious for an update. Needless to say it's always more fun to wait until we have some exciting news to share, or big announcements to make. Still, maybe it's worth just giving you a heads up so you can know this train is still chugging forward. We have been waist deep in debugging and porting and optimizing the game. This work is generally not that exciting but one nice side effect of having to spend time on this is that it gives us additional time to spot ways we can polish the game. Many times little observations we have from playing the game can make the game a much better play experience.
Here are a couple of examples just from this week... When you played the original TJ&E game if a player died they could request an extra life from the other player. This was great until the other player only had one life left - then you had to wait until they got another life. Booooring. Or how about this situation... one player falls down 4 levels because of rocket skates and you have to just wait until they can get alllll the way back up. Of course you could leap down too and help them out but... nah. "I'd rather just wait here in the this nice safe elevator and not waste my presents". Now imagine a 3 or 4 player game where this happens a lot. We've been noticing things like this as we play-test and have been coming up with creative solutions to make the game more fun. For example, now when you die you become a ghost and you can scare Earthlings away by going "OOooohhhhh". You can teleport between the other players as a ghost, and also bump presents and food on the ground. This week we added in an additional ghost ability that allows you to make hidden presents pop out of bushes by "ooooohhhing" near a bush or tree, and special conversations between ghosts and players. Now players can have fun just being dead, and might even choose to stay a ghost for awhile longer.
from GoNintendo
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