Preparing for the End of the Alpha Phase
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This week marked the end of the alpha phase of the project. As a result, I haven’t been focusing on any single design task, but more on designing a level that demonstrates our work on the project so far and I’ve also been helping out with implementing assets. On Monday there was a playtest session, where every team could show their game and let other teams play them and give feedback. This was really helpful, because it turned out that no one really found use for the combat mechanic. While this was partly due to the current enemies not feeling dangerous, since they quite easily fell behind and never caught up with the player, it was also due to there not being a real incentive to spend time trying to kill the enemies. Another reason was that because of the player being chased by an unkillable mob, slowing down would increase the risk of getting caught and killed by the mob so the logical choice was to just try and avoid everything and always be on the move. This caused me and my team a lot of concern, since just avoiding everything and constantly escaping wasn’t what we had envisioned our game to be about. We eventually came to a potential solution, based on the feedback we got as well as some suggestions, but since we haven’t been able to playtest that solution yet only time will tell if it actually works.  On Wednesday we were just going to implement some new assets, in preparation for the end of alpha presentation on Thursday. I made a demonstration level, after which I started helping with adding the last assets. Adding these assets took longer than we anticipated, but we were making progress so I started changing the placeholder assets of the main menu into the more polished ones. Due to several incompatibility issues, and most likely the increasing fatigue, I ended up spending several hours on trying to fix the menu. In the end I ended up with having to “dry code” the positions of the menu buttons, meaning I had to code the exact positions where the buttons would be created, and as such they are only aligned on one screen resolution. This won’t really be a problem in the long run, as the programmers will most likely come up with a way to solve this issue so that the menu won’t be resolution dependent.   |