Week 5 – Tamarrion – The Alpha
|
Time for Alpha! So, we’ve just finished our Alpha, and had our game analyzed by a jury of Game Designers for well known companies. I’m in charge of taking the feedback from anyone giving us feedback. This means that I’ve got to take down any and all feedback given to us, convert that to Data and cipher what it entails, and how it is relevant to the continuation of our development. So, let’s talk a bit about the feedback we’ve been given and how we’re going to continue building our game based on the data gathered: Feedback The feedback is written into a document on the groups google drive. So far, we’ve had a total of 4 sessions of testing. And one of the largest issues you’ll see during these is that we’ve got A LOT of work to do with the in-game visual/audio feedback. This comes around to the fact that we’re lacking a lot of Animations/Shaders/Textures/Effects – which means that we’ve got to start looking at how we educate the player, how we point out important events and how the animations marries the game design (Let’s talk a bit more about this). So, this week we had 60 minutes dedicated to animations in the MoCap studio. That’s an AMAZING opportunity, so we instantly hopped on. 
MoCap! We’ve changed the way the player strikes; the players movement is locked into place and moved forward for a small amount as the animation is being played. This is to make sure that each hit has impact and that walking around a boss becomes a gimicky way of killing the boss; i.e. you can’t abuse the bosses turn radius. So, each strike has to be made so that each attack becomes a combination. This is what I was talking about; marrying the game design with the animations. Animations has to make concessions to the game design, and the design has to make concessions with the Animation. This was great, because that’s exactly what the jury talked about as they came in and tested our game. The following is the notes taken from the ” Alpha Jury”.
We’ve got GREAT looking inventories, but the jury did pose a very good question: do we really need them for our show floor submission? I don’t know. I still believe it gives the player a feeling of completion – as if the game has more to offer for the interested. We might streamline it even further for GGC, but we’ll have to see. They also spoke about the good old “throw shit at the wall and see what sticks” mentality – we can’t be afraid of scaling away ANYTHING that does not feel or look good. I already have notes on what will be cut. We’ve also got to scale the fight depending on the player – most likely we’ll make a Easy -> Normal -> Hard selection for certain parameters (turn radius, HP etc) so that the player testing the game may choose to play the game as he or she wish. But, it all boils down to polish now – it has to look ab-so-lutley great, as well as the feedback has to be on point and fit the game – a sword swing has to feel like a sword swing. So that’s about it for now! |
