BGP (Scrap Pirates) – Week 5
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It is the fifth week of the project, and it has been a week of feedback, reflection and discussion. We have continued to scope down the game and discussed it in general this week, since we got a lot of good feedback from the open playtesting last week and the alpha testing that was this week. We are going to continue doing that at the beginning of the next week, and because we are changing the game a bit at the moment I do not have anything concrete to say about the game design at the moment. We are thinking of having some kind of collectibles in the game or similar to make the gameplay a bit more interesting since we probably will not be able to implement the upgrade system and upgrades/weapons in general (and therefore the players are only collecting scrap metal for score) but we are going to have to discuss that more. So I will talk a bit more about the level design work this week. Just as with the game in general we have changed a lot of things when it comes to the level design. During the Alpha playtest, we remembered a problem that we had thought about in the beginning of the project, which was what would happen if a player decides to bring a magnetic box with them instead of leaving it in the area where it was used and needed. One of the playtesters insisted on dragging a box with them and it caused a lot of problems for them and made it impossible for both players to continue in most cases. An example of that can be seen in the screenshots below (which are taken from an older version of the Alpha level):
There is no problem going on in this image, the player is in the same (and at the moment, closed) area where the box is supposed to be and they will use the box to get to the switch on the ledge to open up the doors to the next area. Then the players are supposed to leave the boxes in the area and then continue forward, but what happens if a player takes a box with them? This is what happened during the alpha playtest:
We had had this problem early on in the project but solved it by making it so that the force between the inactive- and the active magnetic objects were weaker, which enabled the player to take back the boxes if they got stuck. However, we had changed a lot of things regarding the magnetic forces since then and we forgot fixing this before the Alpha, so the force was stronger than intended. Even though we had a solution to this problem, we realized the importance of adding some sort of barrier to the game which would prevent the players from bringing the boxes with them. They can “break” the game in the way that they can make puzzles a lot easier to clear or enable the players to get around them altogether, and it makes it a lot more difficult for us to plan the levels and obstacles if we have to think about the possibility that the players bring boxes with them to the different areas. So one of the programmers created a barrier that prevents the boxes to pass through while the players can. At the moment I do not have any images of it, but it is basically the shape and size of the placeholder door that we have in the game (which can be seen in the screenshots above). We have not decided at the moment whether it will look like some kind of energy barrier or be some sort of sign which says “no boxes allowed/do not steal the boxes”. We have been thinking about it being some kind of magnetic barrier, but since that can be a bit risky and cause more problems, we are not that sure if it will work out well or not. One advantage of having it being a magnetic barrier/field is that the players will be able to walk past it without having the magnetism activated while the boxes will not since they will be affected by the field, but the problem is to come up with a barrier that includes both polarities since we have two different kinds of boxes. It is one thing that we will have to discuss this upcoming week. – – – We have also begun to work a bit differently when it comes to the level design. I mentioned earlier that I focused on level planning (drawing and planning on a grid) while the other level designer Jenny focused on working in Unity and building the levels and test levels, but we realized this week that it was a much better idea that we just sit down together and build the level areas in Unity and iterate as much as possible. Our prior work method allowed us to work a bit independently from each other, but the result was that our work became rather separated, with ideas that were difficult to combine. It was also very difficult for me when planning the level to get an idea of the scale of things and how it would look in Unity, so planning and building them up directly in Unity has worked a lot better. It also allows us to discuss the level a lot more, and we have already been able to come up with some good ideas for the design and solutions to problems. We did drop the version of the level that we had for the open playtest and the Alpha since we were not satisfied with it and we realized that we needed to teach the players the mechanics and gameplay a lot better through the level design. I do not have any screenshots of the new level at the moment since we are building it on Jenny’s computer and I had some problems with Unity and Sourcetree this week and could not update my version of the game, but what we have done so far is that we have created a sort of mini in-game tutorial at the start of the level. The players get to learn the basic player mechanics and how the magnetism work by facing simple obstacles, before moving on to more difficult ones. – – – Another change that we have done this week is that the second player character, which originally was going to have a red outfit, got a yellow outfit instead since we had gotten comments that it was confusing and that some thought the character was connected to the red magnetic polarity somehow. We had a long discussion about the new colour during the week, since the team members had very different opinions when it came to certain colour choices, and I did some quick recolours for the team to get some inspiration:
– – – This upcoming week I will continue with the level design and playtesting the game as usual. It feels like the player mechanics and gameplay are starting to get pretty well-balanced, so the playtesting will probably regard the level design more than the mechanics this week. The team will also begin to work on the GGC material this week so I will probably help out on that as well.  |
