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This week I have focused a lot on QA (Quality Assurance) to figure out balancing issues and overall small adjustments to the game that we can fine tune after the Beta deadline hits. So, everything from the feel and flow of the game to the monster’s attack speed. As you can imagine there is a lot you can finetune even in a small game.
This also goes hand in hand with the other task I have this week. Update our level/map to the gameplay we have right now, and make sure it fits with the theme and what aesthetics we want to project to the player. Up until now we have had a pretty small and confined map design that lets the player navigate in something that more or less looks like a river or a corridor rather than a sea. And that isn’t something that really fits with the idea we have of our game. But it has worked great up until now to make sure you get a nice feel for turning and navigating and that you constantly have action happening, this give us fast feedback from the beginning when you start testing.
In the early stages of the game you were able to see all the rocks at all times, then it was no problem navigating through the narrow spaces as the level looked then. But making them only visible when you have your spotlight shines on them makes it way to hard both navigating and seeing enemies at the same time to have these small narrow corridors looking level. In the end it will look more like an open sea (but still with boundaries).
 
As you can see in this picture, we started out with this narrow path and then it gradually gets more open and this is the feel I want in the start of the game as well, an easy start where the focus is learning the games mechanics and finding your way through how the game works.
For example, learning how to navigate through the fog. That you have to activate the ‘guiderocks’ to make the compass show you what direction you will be going in. And in later stages of the game make it narrower and more dangerous when also the enemy spawn rate will increase.
We have a really easy way to create the level, with all the rocks being prefabs you can just paint them out in Unity and quickly test them out right there, which makes my job much more streamlined and fast.
About Tim Wergeni Johansson
2017 Game Design
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