[Devlog]Production Sprint 2 Week 3

The last week of the second production sprint is over and with its end we put a feature freeze on our project and switch our main focus to bring more polish to our game.We managed to implement the features that were yet pending and managed to fit in a couple of them too!Having such a momentum already, we were constantly getting new ideas and ways to implement more stuff but we decided on focusing on what we already have so that we can get a more polished result.

We also made some progress in the Art department and spent our last week of this sprint on a lot of exciting new things such as animations for our snake and octopus, sound effects and more visual effects. Thanks to the great feedback of a co-student, we also decided to rethink our beloved 80’s grid. After some discussions, we decided to implement a platform to play on, consisting of modular sci-fi panelled meshes that will disappear at certain intervals and might take some unlucky octopus with them!

Apart from that, we started actively thinking about a simple tutorial to help players get into the game. It was our goal to make the game easy to learn and hard to master, so now we want to make sure players instantly know what to do when the battle starts. As we already came up with a few fast-paced game mechanics, we’re aware that this will be quite a feat!

For this week’s topics the first one that came up was

1)Are the 4 grab/throw buttons offering much to the gameplay or not?

After various playtesting sessions with the group we found out that we don’t use more than two of the grab nodes let alone all four of them.Adding to that the 4 grab nodes added more clutter to the ui interface.With the game being so fast paced it was hard in this frenetic action to keep track of how many balls you were carrying and you would usually use them almost immediately.In the end we decided to scrap two of the grab nodes and keep only two.

2)How can we make the hamster balls and the bombs more visible in the level?

We also noticed that  the size of the hamsterball were a bit small and sometimes indistinguishable from the rest.To alleviate this we made changes to the materials and increased their size a bit.We still need to playtest and find the right values that fit the gameplay but also make them more distinguishable.

3)How can we make the game more accessible for newcomers?

After the addition of most of our features , we had to add some kind of tutorial which would introduce the main goal of the game to new players but also show them the main features of the game.Since making a tutorial area proved to be out of the question due to time constraints we resorted to having two splash tutorial screens just before the players enter the game.We also added the controls mapping in our pause scene so that the players can reference them whenever they need.

4)How many sound effects do we need to give the players enough feedback for their actions but also make it fit well to the overall feel of the game?

Aside from all the other features we also added our first sound effects and we saw that sometimes even though they add more to the feel of the game and also aid the players,they can be a bit too much.Adjustment of volume and better sound clip choices help alleviate this problem.

Polish Sprint week 1 plans

Our main focus will me squashing any bugs we have left, lots of playtesting and improving our gameplay. Adding better sound effects but also making as many quality of life changes as we can.We’re also very busy with our UI, tweaking and improving as we go.