Week 6 – Tamarrion – The Pre-Beta
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Pre-Beta This week, we had our first of two pre-beta play testing sessions (Which is great for my thesis, as I’m basing my thesis on the feedback to design decision process). We’ve worked all week to implement as much as possible into the game. A Beta version of a game means that all FEATURES has to be implemented, and I’m happy to say that they are, and we also managed to get a lot of new assets into the the actual scene. We’ve also improved several Gameplay aspects, such as new Dash ability (removed Jump), added health orbs in the alcoves for players who choose to play without healing abilities (players who wants to heal in general I suppose). Another thing we’ve worked hard with during this period is to add any and all feedback we could think of to create in a short amount of time. We’ve added everything from simple spell animations, to new UI/HUD components that alerts the player. All in all, the game is starting to shape up. Take a look at the picture below and take into consideration the huge leap from the previous weeks (look below).
My work I’ve been put stationary on Game testing, balancing and tweaking the game. I spent on average 4-5 hours a day just playing the game, finding bugs, trying to abuse the game systems and working on new solutions to game play issues. We’ve completely finished two out of the five God Powers (one of which was crazily overpowered), which was testable in the pre-beta version. After testing the game over and over again, we’ve found most of the kinks and straightened them out. As mentioned above, we’ve finally put the alcoves to use by adding health orbs inside of them (randomly spawns in one of them), and are working on creating additional use of the game space. We’ve got a internal document that entails all bugs, patch-fixes and wishes (From me, the designer) as well as proposed solutions to the issues as we encounter them. The basic mechanics of the boss is now finished, and I’m about the run into the finish line with the last tweaking; but we’re about to add difficulty levels, which the boss has been designed around to be modifiable. That’s about it; as I mentioned, most of my job has been the good old game development grind of “Implementing, Testing, Iterating”, which takes an insane amount of time. I’ll leave you with our Main Menu theme and a picture of the game, in-engine:
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