Blog Post #5
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Hello, For my last blog post I’ll be talking about the Beta presentation we held a week ago. The presentation itself went fairly well and we got some really good feedback from the teachers. For the Beta release of our game we focused a lot on instructional feedback for the players to guide them through the game. Players getting lost or not knowing what to do was a major problem for our game during both previous playtestings, so for the last couple of weeks we worked hard to make our game’s feedback much clearer. To solve this issue we made a lot of small changes and additions to the game. First of all, we reworked our HUD completely. Our game’s main objective is to find your lost moth children who are spread around the map. Previously, our HUD only showed how many children that were lost at that point in the game, but our new one shows each moth child and their current state (if they’re yet to be found, already found, safe, in danger or even dead). Secondly, we added flowers to help the player keep track of what part of the map he/she’s currently in. When you pass by these flowers they bloom and emit particles, so that if you pass by that specific area again you will know you’ve been there before. The flowers also tell you what you can expect from that area. If the flower is red it means there’s danger nearby and if it’s blue it means there is a moth child somewhere near. Thirdly, we tweaked the sonar the player can send out every now and then so that it shows the direction of nearby children. Previously it only provided the player with some extra light, but now it actually guides you towards your main goal. Lastly, we added some pop up windows to explain the controls of the game. For example, when you pick up a light berry you can either drop it on the ground or throw it forward. To explain the controls for these actions to the players we added text and icons for the respective inputs. This worked really well and thankfully it didn’t interfere with the aesthetics of the game. That was it for this week, thank you for reading.
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