Practice Mode (for speedrun practice and learning a new phase)#34

I’ve seen that you all are opposed to difficulty settings (as am I, for the record), but I still think that having players replay beginning phases when they have no experience in the later phases is a bit cruel, and creates unnecessary frustration for the player (emphasis on unnecessary; I believe frustration is part of the experience).

In-Game Pause Menu Option: Practice Mode
Locks the fight in its current phase. If the player dies OR the boss dies OR the quick reset functionality is used, the fight does not proceed (either to the next phase or to the “you win” screen), but instead respawns both the player and the boss, where the player has the same powerups they had when the phase originally began and the boss is in the same phase; effectively a full game-state reset.
Note that a natural consequence of this is that the player will not be able to complete the fight, and therefore will not be eligible for saving replays or obtaining any achievements associated with completing the fight. Practice mode can only be disabled by restarting the fight from the pause menu, at which point it is automatically turned off.

Benefits

1. Players won’t spend 3-5 minutes getting to a phase to be clobbered within a few seconds.
2. Players that are attempting to break time records can repeatedly practice sections of the fight with the same set of powerups. I expect this will be a more common application, and should cause the world records to become more optimized very quickly.

hmm i’m not necessarily opposed to a practice mode like this (and it’s kinda similar to hijacking a replay for practice, though more convenient), but i think there are more important things to add to the game first.

and i think this could be replicated pretty well with workshop levels… cut out the early form(s) of a boss, and spawn a bunch of free powerups at the beginning of the form to be practiced, so the player can pick whatever powerups they want. so you could check the workshop for “Goliath - 2nd Form Practice” and download that level