Big Game Project; Week 5
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For this week I will try to discuss the alpha testing and how it went. The goals for alpha was that we should have: – A playable map and some fights that could go on. – Harakat mode should be functional and the magic casting and combinations should be available. – A menu should be implemented. All in all the level will be whiteboxed and tested to see if it follows a progression. The build should be in a stage where the game features and gameplay are testable. Now talking about the alpha session; First off something went wrong with the build, the enemies did not work as intended, the boss did not spawn, but the level was there. The level was a rough build so we did not have too much props on there, except of our target dummies for the tutorial. As for fights the player could shoot a fireball, cast the spell fireflies then combine it by shooting a fireball at it to activate the spell fire rain. All off the spells had placeholders and would serve as an example of how the mechanic worked. The spells was cased with the help of the analog movements. Harakat mode was present but only as slowing down time and did not have the proper function with combining spells and giving feedback to the player. We did not have a menu or GUI, we decided to prioritize the main features instead as we were running out of time. To summarize We did not come as far as we intended with the alpha, the biggest reason for this was that the team members are constantly learning and in search of new ways to learn how to make our features work, most of the time things don’t work for us. The AI started to crash days before we needed to present the alpha. During the alpha testing we had two guys from the industry trying our game out, we had to pitch our concept to them before letting them play. They liked the narrative of the concept and where hopeful of seeing it. During the testing we received a lot of feedback in which we wrote down. We needed to put a GUI that would make the player understand what’s going on, and also a way to indicate the start of the game and to quickly being able to restart. They really wanted us to make use of the narrative we have and implement it in the game as it was an attractive feature, we should implement it by either doing a small comic or cut scenes (but they told us that we would not have the time to do that and we agreed). As the alpha took place on Wednesday we had the rest of the time to try to fix our misses. The lead artist sat down and started to work on the GUI, and the lead designer started working on the logotype that would later on be used for the menu and the game overall. We made a quick rescheduling of what we needed and started to concentrate on doing a good tutorial at the start and work our way through the game. We are running out of time and we may need to scrap a lot of things if we want to have a game that works, but hopefully next week will look better and we manage to reach the goal of our concept. The designer The first layout of the controller didn’t seem difficult according to the testers, sadly we didn’t have enough for them to test them on except for one enemy. So far we have planned the mapping for all of the spells and should have them available at the start of next week, after that it would be easier to test how they work and if they feel natural. The GUI should not take too long to get done, if we get that out of the way then we can concentrate on everything else, like animations, effects, textures etc. In the upcoming week we have our pre-beta, and after that only two weeks before we have to have the game ready to play. Hopefully this week would be the one that brings us ahead of the game so that we can make it feel whole and complete, leaving more time for polishing the game and getting rid of bugs etc. We have started a Facebook site for our game, and it is under construction, later on you will find in-game footage and information about the GGC event. Visit the site here: Naar Facebok You can find each team members blogs below: William Mayer, Lead Artst: https://urkenblogg.wordpress.com/ Marcus svensson, 3D Artist: https://sirfishy.wordpress.com/ Andreas Calmius, Level designer: https://calmius.wordpress.com/ Ladbon Monjezizadeh, AI Programmer: https://ladbon.wordpress.com/ Herman Båtelsson, Programmer: https://hermanbatelsson.wordpress.com/ Oscar Eriksson, Lead Programmer: https://orrexon.wordpress.com Wish us luck as we will need it a lot!!! |
