Why did we remove the power-ups from the main party mode of Ultimate Sheep Raccoon?

In case you don’t know about the game, Ultimate Sheep Raccoon is a bike racing party game where players build the track and add obstacles before racing through. One of the core features of the game was that every third round players would be able to choose a power-up which would change the way their bike feels, by adding a jetpack, umbrella, or boost. We moved that feature into its own game mode called Power-Ups, and removed them from the main Party mode, which is the game mode we expect most players to play, especially new players.

Why? I’ll explain each of these points in detail.

Players find the game too hard to pick up and play
Power-Ups make it harder to reach a level of mastery
Power-Ups reduce the perceived impact of placing blocks in the level

Players find the game too hard to pick up and play

One of the biggest challenges we had with this game as compared to our first game, Ultimate Chicken Horse, is that this one is harder to pick up and play. This was always going to be the case because the characters are riding bikes instead of simply platforming. In a platformer, when you stop touching the controller, the character stops moving. In a game with vehicles, when you stop touching the controller, the character keeps moving and you still have to deal with timing challenges.

Our goal has always been and will always be that anyone can pick up this game and have fun with it, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves gamers or have any experience playing video games at all. That means that the player skill range that the game is accessible to needs to reach the low end of the spectrum.

In the image below, I show how a game like Tic Tac Toe It has an extremely low bottom end of skill range, but it doesn’t have a lot of room for mastery because once you understand it, you can always win (or tie). A game like Ultimate Chicken Horse has a low barrier to entry but also a high skill ceiling because the platforming mechanics are very tight. A game like Dark Souls has a very high barrier to entry and you need to be really good at video games to even start playing it, so it has less of a wide skill range.

Our goal with these (and future) Ultimate Sheep Raccoon improvements is to widen the skill range to make it both easier to pick up and also increase the skill ceiling (the maximum level of mastery you can achieve).

In order to do that, we’ve tweaked the character control in many ways (that could be a whole separate blog post), and we will eventually do a full overhaul, making it more reliable and allowing players to truly master the physics.

What does this have to do with power-ups?

The most important part of learning how to play a video game is understanding the rules of the game. By rules, I mean how the character moves when you move the joystick on the controller, how high the character jumps, how quickly they rotate in the air, etc. In your head, you make what’s called a mental model, and it helps you understand the things that you can do in the game. If you understand how high the character jumps, it means you can understand how large of a gap you can clear while moving at a certain speed. Every time you play a game—any game—you improve your mental model and become better at the game.

In Ultimate Sheep Raccoon, every time you receive a power-up, it completely reworks your mental model. It breaks all of the rules you may have created in your mind about things like the character jump height or character speed. This can be very fun and lead to chaotic moments, but for the average player (especially the average beginner who’s struggling to pick up and play the game) it makes it much more difficult for them to feel like they have a stable mental model that they can continue to improve on.

Players need to feel like every time they play the game, they get significantly better at the game. This is definitely the case in Ultimate Chicken Horse, and we think that power-ups make this much harder to achieve. They’re still fun though! Fun in the way Super Smash Bros is fun if you turn on only Pokeballs, high item count, and play in a Pokemon level. So we kept them in their own game mode.

Power-ups make it harder to reach a level of mastery

As I mentioned, the player’s ability to develop their mental model based on what they learn from the physics gets thrown off every time power-ups are added. With a lot of experience, someone could become really good at using all of the various power-ups as long as they have a mental model of every combination of power-up that they can use in the game.

This is fine, and it does allow for a high level of mastery, but at that point people with that much experience will surely discover the best combination of power-ups and only use that combination. We would have to balance carefully for that, which is both challenging and takes away from the core of the game. We will have spent years developing a character controller that is really tight and it will have enough precision that people should be able to become absolute experts in it. We won’t actually be able to do that for every combination of every powerup, and that wouldn’t actually make the game better even if we could.

Power-Ups reduce the perceived impact of placing blocks in the level

One of the common complaints we received was that it feels useless to place blocks in the level if someone is going to just take a jetpack and fly over the block that we just placed. To deal with this we made sure to balance the power ups so that none of them were too overpowered and we also added blocks like the firework shooter which is meant to be a sort of anti-air defense against people using a jetpack (to fly up) and an umbrella (to float over things). This is just one example though, and most power-ups would be able to “get around” placed items in a way that makes it feel less impactful to place the items.

At the core of the game is the placement of items to build the level and encourage players to take certain paths or discourage them from taking others. This element needs to be both as fun as possible and also feel as impactful as possible so that it feels as meaningful as driving through the level.

—

So there’s a not-so-brief explanation on why we changed power-ups from being in the main game, to being their own game mode. We’re not closed to making more power-ups in the future, but this should help make the game experience better for most players, especially new ones. Have fun!