Blog Post #4
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HeyGuys (Twitch reference for anyone wondering), For this week I’m going to write about one of the things I mentioned during the Alpha presentation that my team decided to work some more on, since we weren’t satisfied with the previous outcome. We were not happy with the map/level layout for the Alpha deadline. It was clear after the first playtesting that this issue brought up a lot of confusion and annoyance for our playtesters and we realized this was a critical problem that needed to be fixed as soon as possible. Our game consists of a big, square-shaped ”free-roam” level with big branches ”limiting” the players game space quite a bit. The branches were supposed to in a way limit the level into smaller areas where we placed enemies and the moth children (our main objective). We put way too little effort into designing these branches and we realized they weren’t healthy for the gameplay. This issue lead to many players getting lost and not knowing where to go and it also left a lot of huge empty spaces around the level which made no sense what so ever. We now reworked the branches completely. Instead of designing 4-5 huge branches that we randomly placed into the scene hoping the game-space would be balanced and well working we now created smaller pieces of branches that we can puzzle together in a way that suits the game better. It’s now much easier to customize the game-space as we want it by adding, removing or changing the branches. We can now get much more creative with our design. By implementing the new branches we also managed to get control of a huge issue which most playtesters complained about. We received a lot of criticism for the hitboxes for the branches. No matter how we tried to change or adapt them players kept getting stuck or locked into smaller places. It was horrible. Now, with the new design we can prevent those types of situations since we can combine the branch-assets how ever we’d like it. If something doesn’t work we don’t need to change the collision or design of the whole branch, but rather just the part of the branch that isn’t working. In addition to this, we’re trying to divide the level into (visually) different areas. By using different colors and environmental objects we’re trying to make it easier for the players to locate themselves to prevent them from getting lost constantly. Another small addition we made was to implement different colored flowers that bloom and emit some particles as you pass by. This way, if you re-enter an area you’ve already been to you can tell much easier by just looking at the flowers. Our goal is to implement more mechanics like this, which guides the player without breaking our aesthetic goals and the feeling of the game. This is hard, but it’s very good design practice.
That was all,
bye.
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