BGP (Scrap Pirates) – Week 6
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It’s the week before the Beta, and even though it’s getting more and more stressful everyday it feels okay. Since we scoped down the game, we have had it easier to focus on what it is that needs to be done and it feels like we are on the right track. I spent most of the week working on the level design with Jenny and since we are creating the level on her computer and I don’t have the project folder on mine, I won’t show any images this time. We had a lot of playtesting done this week and we got a lot of good feedback from the open playtesting that was on Friday. We realized that we should teach the players the magnetism mechanic a lot better, because there were many that didn’t understand that they had the magnetic powers at the beginning and it was also difficult to remember which button triggered what colour. The players who pressed and checked all the buttons at the start to see what happened did good, but the ones that where a lot more careful and didn’t try them out as much in the beginning had it a bit harder getting to know the controls. So we need to introduce the magnetism controls better to the player, and also try and have them represented on the screen somehow so that the players will be able to see which button is which colour and see when it is activated. We are thinking of having some indicators next to the player icons on the screen, but we haven’t decided for anything yet. Another thing was that we noticed was that the yellow colour that we had chosen for the 2nd player character was a bit too close to the orange player character, because some of the playtesters got confused about which character they were. We began thinking about adding a “choose character colour”-feature into the game since the team was very divided when it came to colour choices, and we have gotten comments before from playtesters that they would like to choose the character colour, so it would be a good solution if we are able to do that. Otherwise there were some things here that need fixing and tweaking. We had added some things such as the shoot animation just before the playtesting and we hadn’t had time to fix them. For the upcoming week and Beta, I will continue working on the level with Jenny. The one we made for this week’s playtest took about 5 minutes for her and me to speedrun, while it took about 10-15 minutes for the playtesters, so we will continue to build on that and polish it. I will also help out with things for GGC and eventually HUD or menu graphics.  |