Winter 2014 Week 9

We conducted our final playtest session this Thursday and got our last batch of feedback from our playtesters. With the addition of our second blocked out level (which was redone from the diagram that Alex put together last week) people were able to see more of what we were going for with the nonlinear and puzzle components of our gameplay. Even with the placeholder programmer art, feedback was much more positive in for our game designers.

The programmers also made some serious nice progress this week, polishing off a lot of the physics for the character controller to make it feel a lot better. There were still a couple issues with a glitch that allows players to hug and jump from walls, similar to Mega Man X games. Although unintentional, people seemed to enjoy this "feature," but we don't have any plans to make this a legitimate mechanic. They'll be moving forward with some ideas they came up with to make the timer component more interesting that will also solve the problems we have with the "darkness" mask. More details on that soon.

UI, sound, and particles are the next focuses for our designers and artists. We still have things to concept for level two as we start to address the concept of enemies, but for the remainder of our winter quarter we are adding in some more of the "post-production" stuff that makes it a more polished, complete experienced. Brice and Jeff have been working on putting together the sprites and layouts necessary to construct our UI screens and AJ, one of our programmers, will be adding in any scripts we need to make them functional, particularly with the pause screen. Dantrell is working on some particle effects to show when the player has gotten their power-up boost from the memory shards. Tian is developing a method to make the memory shards stand out more so the player notices them.

The one thing we've been missing is a way of teaching the player how to play and what they're supposed to be doing. Alex has been working on tutorial level to show a completely linear way of introducing them to the memory shards and what they do. If all goes well, we'll be putting that into the build this week as well.