Thursday 11 February 2010

Week 15: Mini play-test and more tweaking

In this week I was supposed to be doing the full play-test of the game. However, I had to go away for a good portion of the week to visit a University for a possible masters course. It was all very last minute and threw my schedule for the week into chaos.

Thankfully, due to planning some contingency time within my schedule I was able to move it to next week. This has actually worked out really well as I had a mountain of things I still wanted to address and add in. Before going through the list of changes and additions. I also met with my tutor this week who advised me to make the characters stand out a bit more. To make them stand out I can add a thick stroke (black outline). This I'll have to do next week, time permitting, as it means remaking all the sprite sheet animations.

This is what the latest version of the game looks like, see below for detailed changes and fixes:



I have managed to play test the game this week somewhat informally. I was testing the game on a 360 and asked my flatmate if he wanted to play it. After briefly explaining him the rules we began playing.

This was the first time that I had actually played the game against another person, it was amazing to see what I've spent so much time on come to life. However, there were a lot of issues that became immediately clear to me when we started playing against each other.

1. The level's platforms needed to be bigger, we kept falling off the level when trying to chase each other down and one player could easily sit at the top most single tile and win the game because the other would keep falling down trying to hop onto this tiny platform.

2. The players bounding box needed to be bigger. I had made the players combat bound quite small because I didn't want people hitting each other unless they were directly in-front of them. However, due to the fast paced nature of the game, a lot of the combat is in mid air and so the bound needs to be much larger if anyone is going to hit each other at all.

3. We were only using one attack, the best one (that randomly positions the enemy) because it was the most effective and there wasn't a big punishment for using it. The other two weren't being use at all not to mention the combo system was too unforgiving as you lose it all the time.

4. There's a bug that occasionally resets the players charge to 0 when they become fully charged, this is a hugely game breaking bug!

5. There still wasn't enough telling you what was going on in the game. The HUD needs to be less vital as players should be told things about game mechanics near their point of focus, their character.

Bugs

  • FIXED: Players were occasionally losing their fully charge state when they reached 100 charge. Instead of counting down the time to 0 charge points it just set them to the value thus cancelling out their power up state.

Changes

  • Replaced logo screen with red to blue logo
  • Added main menu graphics
  • Removed warning text on player selection
  • Removed spectator joining option
  • Added sound on press start in logo phase
  • Added how to screen (place-holders) + input
  • Added back button icon in top left corner during team select to indicate return to menu
  • Added combo gain icon above player
  • Added combo loss icon above player
  • Added test mode for toggling between keyboard controlled and pad controlled players
  • Added plus icon appearing on scoring a positive point
  • Added minus icon appearing on scoring a negative point
  • Added an arrow animation indicating to the player that they can travel up it
  • Added full reset of game from team select to main menu
  • Added disconnected controller message on game-pad d/c of an active player
  • Changed score colours to a lighter shade
  • Added left thumb-stick navigation for menus
  • Added particle effect for when player is fully charged
  • Changed team select 'Press start' message to only appear when a game is possible
  • Changed trigger point for falling smoke effect to be further below level
  • Increased size of all particle effects
  • Added music volume function to pause menu
  • Added static charge stun loop sound
  • Added charge burner focus loop sound
  • Added fully charged loop sound
  • Added padlock icon to appear above player when player cannot attack
  • Changed level design to include more long platforms and less short ones
  • Increased the dimensions of players combat bounding box
  • Removed combo loss on charge burner hit
  • Increased the charge gain and loss for all level zones
  • Increased the cool-down durations of the mid and high attacks
  • Increased the cost of all attacks
  • Increase the reward of all successful attacks

As you may have noticed, I have yet to create the how to screens, this is because I've made such drastic changes to the game in the past two weeks that it's been hard to finalise the game-play. After the play test, I'll have the necessary data to make the final changes and only then will I be able to create the guide.

So, tomorrow (late post!) I'll be play testing the game with 3- 4 people. I have a feedback questionnaire that I made at the begging of the project but I think I'll be asking their opinions and issues and then making note of what's said instead. This seems to be a much better approach as it allows people to really say what they do or don't like.

No comments:

Post a Comment