In preparation for soft opening we spent most of our time polishing down one small piece of the experience. While we had big dreams of expanding our focus to include additional rides, more types of slime, more islands, we took the time to explore a number of the challenges that were keeping our game play from feeling smooth.
One of the largest challenges was tuning how the player could interact with the slime creatures. While there wasn’t always a great solution for every one of our problems, we did work on resolving some of the major concerns. We reviewed how characters were picked up or grab It was challenging to get a grab that felt accurate as well as one that worked the majority of the time.
Another significant problem was the NavMesh. It continued to cause the creatures to move erratically, to twitch, and sometimes die after certain collisions. These were fixes that took a lot of trial and error. One piece of the project would be solved and we would turn around and find other functionality behaving strangely. It took the better part of the week to resolve our issues with the nav mesh.
We continued to polish our one-island experience, focusing on the tutorial, the look of each model on the island, and the feedback the world provided. When Wednesday, the day of softs, rolled around we had a good baseline model to playtest with. We made some excellent discovers.
First we learned that we still needed to add more clarity to our tutorial phase. We began with minimal direction and the more we playtested, the more we discovered how much specificity we needed to provide during this experience.
Another request we heard a lot was that creatures themselves need to seem more slimy and interactive. While we do have a soft body effect on them, it currently does not do too much. One of our goals for the week is to see if we can ramp up the feedback on this effect.
The biggest ask from the client was for more toys. We have a trampoline in our current world, which is very fun to play with. They suggested that we create more objects that felt as fun and toy-like as the temploine. We are currently working to ad 2-3 additional rides to the world to meet that request.
One additional change that we implemented directly after softs was color-changing. We discovered that fluid color could be changed and that that color can be mapped to the resulting slime. We were excited to add this into the experience and it has been fun to see this new side of our slimes.