I finally understood: players never play the way developers expect
Hey everyone, back with another embarrassing gamedev facepalm. Hopefully you get a laugh out of my pain, and maybe avoid doing this yourself.
So, I added a lock-on system to my horror game to make the combat sections a bit more manageable. Turns out, literally nobody uses it. Every Let's Play I've watched, players just panic and start blasting immediately. I guess when a monster is rushing you, reading text tutorials goes right out the window.
For a while, I didn't even think it was an issue. I actually convinced myself that the frantic, non-locked-on combat made the game feel more intense and immersive.
Then I watched this run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ri0T11XNwck&t=2962s
This poor M&K (mouse and keyboard) player spent a painful amount of time just mag-dumping straight into the final boss’s head.
The kicker? I forgot to put a hitbox on the head.
Throw in a phase 2 model change, and the whole fight turned into an absolute clusterfuck. Watching it was a rollercoaster of laughing out loud and wanting to crawl into a hole and die of embarrassment. Honestly, massive respect to that YouTuber for not rage-quitting and actually finishing the game.
The stupidest part is exactly why this bug made it to release. I had scaled the boss up by 1.4x late in development. But because of my own dev tunnel vision, I never noticed the missing hitbox. Why? Because I always test with a controller, I always use my own lock-on mechanic, and it naturally aims for center mass instead of the head.
